Gordon Brown has apologized after an investigation showed that the British National Health Service-run Stafford Hospital was so abyssmally bad that patients drank water out of flowerpots and that too many died in squalor or agony as untrained and undermanned staff were forced to meet “targets” instead of providing the care they advertised. Brown claimed these were “isolated” incidents.
The commission’s report – revealed in yesterday’s Daily Mail – said at least 400 deaths could not be explained, although it is feared up to 1,200 patients may have died needlessly.
Speaking to MPs at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons, Mr Brown said: “We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford hospital.”
Some readers of the Daily Mail sent accounts of their own experience.
“My wife had treatment at this hospital and it was beyond belief. Staff tried to get my wife to believe she had already been given her tablets when they hadn’t; later admitting they ran out and did not want to call out the Pharmacy! People were screaming for the toilet as their requests for assistance went unheeded.”
Mick, Stafford“My mother in law died at a hospital where her ‘care’ was almost non-existant. She died screaming in pain because nobody could be found to replace her morphine pump.” Claire, Norfolk
“When my father was in hospital for months, he lay in a bed with dirty, torn blankets and grubby sheets. I asked to see the Hospital Manager and was walked through the most plush of offices. I was sickened and told her so.” Sammy, UK
“My sister recently qualified as a nurse. During her training a fellow student commented to a manager that a doctor hadn’t bothered to change his scrubs after undertaking a minor operation on a patient and wore the same ones for his next operation. She was warned any whistle blowing of that sort would result in her being kicked out.” Jo, Middlesex
Any system, whether public or private, is made up of people. The circumstance that it has to work; that it should work; or that it must work is irrlevant. It won’t work unless it is made to work. Just look at how well Dodd, Geithner and Obama have been managing the financial crisis. If they were doctors in charge of a patient’s life, how much better would they do?
Socialized Medicine: coming to a country near you.
I can hardly wait for our version.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Our health care costs are high because we get what we pay for. A system that serves 90% of the population well is not broken. Any tinkering with the system should be to deal with the issues of the 10% without INSURANCE (which is different than without care) instead of throwing the whole thing over. Jeez!
Also, for any fix, KISS
It is just sad to contemplate the true reality of socialized medicine.
Corrosion,corruption,capitulation, and decay; the inevitability is just hopeless. The moralizing, the blaming, the shaming, the vacuousness cannot motivate people to deliver care.
What we have is good and decent. So it’s not cheap, nothing good ever is. It isn’t perfect but it is really something special. We will miss it when it’s gone.
I have always had this to say about socialized medicine. Which of you will walk into a Medical School and point to the doctors that you want enslaved?
I’m sure jealous of our Brit cousins whose government pays for the sterling health-care provided by facilities such as that mentioned in Stafford. Can’t wait till our own system is upgraded to match theirs.
Now, back to the real world. Let’s not waste any crises, shall we?
I don’t think the problem is socialised medicine per se – it’s NuLabor’s obsession with targets, bureaucracy and appearances instead of focusing on the actual care. The UK justice system is falling apart for the same reasons.
Just look at how well Dodd, Geithner and Obama have been managing the financial crisis. If they were doctors in charge of a patient’s life, how much better would they do?
They’d be afraid of lawyers like John Edwards. Perhaps we should consider socializing the legal profession.
I’m jealous of our Brit cousins whose government pays for the outstanding health-care provided by facilities such as that mentioned in Stafford. Can’t wait till our own system is upgraded to match theirs. Maybe our legislators will lead the way with a socialized government medical pilot program just for them demonstrating the benefits to which we can look forward?
Now, back to the real world. Let’s not waste any crises, shall we?
Wretchard’s point about any system working or not working because of its people is valid. The difference between socialized medicine and what we have here is the question of incentive — what is the incentive for socialized medicine to work well? Not increased profit, as that’s built in. Not increased patient satisfaction as they can’t go anywhere else. Not job satisfaction, because civil service jobs are notoriously unrewarding and frequently staffed with people who cannot find employment elsewhere. This is the point that is continually obscured by the folks who tell us to think about the poor who can’t afford health care — the implied promise is that the increased distribution of health care will come without a price. And these, as Wretchard has also pointed out, are the same folks who tell us they know how to solve the financial crisis. Fat chance. F
I had thought my fear of dying alone in a pool of my own feces was paranoid, but it turns out it isn’t.
@2 Michael- spot on, why change the system for 100% of the people when it only needs to be changed for 10% or 15%? That is why Clinton failed, but I think Obama will have better luck, what with the economic chaos he’s causing.
James @ 7. James, please. It is EXACTLY a problem with socialized medicine. I grew up a third generation military dependent, that is, with socialized medicine. I can tell relate a personal experience to match almost any scenario. (Like the time, at age 14, I sat in the hall of a major facility for four hours with a broken collarbone, holding my shoulder in place (a dangerous thing) by myself, just waiting for triage)
Also, having jumped into the well, getting back out is very, very hard.
To quote the late Mr. Silver, be reasonably afraid, very reasonably afraid.
Public bathrooms, public schools, public health care.
Reasonably very afraid??? let’s call it a paraphrase rather than a quote.
Its pretty clear that ObamaCare is going to kill quite a few people, and result in reduced quality of life for many more.
I think the political message needs to be stark – ObamaCare Kills.
With near certainty, one can predict:
Care will be rationed by age. “Sorry, you are 57, too old for a new kidney. Please go away and die.”
Care will be rationed by waiting time and complexity. “Fill out these 7 forms, and get them approved by the Community Health Center, and then we can schedule your CAT scan. The waiting list is about 18 months.”
New drug development will be crippled.
The quality of people entering the medical profession will decline. Fewer people – and not the best people – will want to work in the DMV style health system. They will be de facto if not de jure government employees, and eventually unionized.
Premium care will still be available to the politically connected. Although even it won’t be as good as it would have been in a free market system.
“If they were doctors in charge of a patient’s life, how much better would they do?”
This report should be very encouraging to the Democratic party. What is ultimate power if you can not wield it to kill people for the sake of exercising it. This report of killing Proles will only encourage them. It’s never been about the children or our health.
Soon we can see psuedo-news stories filled with pictures of crying grandmothers unable to go to a child’s graduation as justification for a call for nationalized transportation. Stories filled with pictures of hungry children will be used to as justification for calls for a nationalized agriculture system. They already had nationalized education. They just effectively nationalized housing and finance. What else will be left?
The real solution to health care: graduate more doctors and stop stealing the talent from the 3rd world.
The NHS of Britain is overrun with Pakistani doctors who should’ve stayed at home to tend to her suffering population.
So what you have is both America and Britain brain-draining the life out of Bangladesh and Pakistan and Iraq and… so that those folks can die in a medical vacuum.
While white male medical student applications are rejected so as to better politically correct racial quotas…
Yet we have so few slots in our domestic institutions that we have to import 35% of our talent pool from the 3rd world…
And we educate another 25% in extra territorial medical schools in such places as Granada. ( Hence the med school amphibious rescue aka the Granada Invasion.)
The ONLY advanced profession for which America has a chronic production deficit is medical doctors.
In all other professions we export talent.
The doctor shortage has warped the way care is administered and the cost of a medical degree.
Of course, it’s a joke to think that the student pays for his/her education. The total life economics of a medical degree mean that the whole of society pays for it. We already have 100% socialized medical education, hence the shortfall.
Now think on THAT.
LOM. The hungry children story is itself a setup. Children includes those not yet reaching their 18th birthday. Hungry children tend to be over 16, runaways and self reporting. Likewise, most of the children without health INSURANCE are over 16 and some how or another not in their parents home, and are self reporting.
In LA for example, a liberated minor may be as young as 17, and can self liberate.
I remember some in 1972 or 1973 sitting in a University Library, being canvases to sign up for food stamps. It seems there was a loophole in income reporting that allowed a full time, parentally supported student over 18, self report poverty and get the benefit. The canvassers were young social workers telling us that we needed to sign up as many as possible to “prove” the program (and of course the jobs) were needed.
Is the heath care scheme any different? Not.
This labor market distortion is the underlying engine pumping the medical bubble.
One must note that all other wages in the medical economy are geared to the attending physician.
This feeds far and wide as adjunct economic functions: the insurance, legal, construction, supplies, and equipment manufacturers are also geared to such wages and the government money pump.
With so much medical spending coming directly from the Federal Government, the medical industry is a first tier beneficiary of inflation, and how! Year after year, medical inflation is way, way beyond all other indexes. BTW, my own medical insurance went up 65% from 2008 to 2009… in this hell bent economy!
This dynamic is what is driving the whole economy under: just ask the auto industry. We’ve got a run-away medical bubble that is even more destructive than the housing bubble.
Yet it is not perceived.
Look at the peril of the Syn-CDO. It’s still not even on the radar.
Breakout moves in Silver and Gold are dead ahead; thank Ben.
If you account for the percentage of Americans who are “uninsured” and then deduct for those who are either: a) illegal immigrants, or; b) those who can actually afford health insurance, but elect not to pay the premiums, then you are talking about a significantly smaller percentage of the population.
I’d say this new number is actually closer to 5%, not the 15% figure that the nationalized health care advocates throw about.
Now, what is the number for people who have absolutely no access to employer subsidized or gov’t health care and who aren’t covered by categories a) or b) above? This is the number that should be used as the basis for an honest discussion on nationalized health care.
Way way OT. Last night I went to a Smith Family Foundation debate on Afghanistan. The panel were as follows: Max Boot, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, Larry Goodson, Professor, U.S. Army War College, Jacob Hornberger, President, Future of Freedom Foundation, and Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, CATO Institute. That meant one pro-interventionist Boot, one pro-intervention big footprint traditionalist Goodson, one isolationist paleo-libertarian Hornberger, and one small footprint internationalist libertarian Preble. I found Hornberger’s sneers about Neocons borderline anti-Semitic and the fact that he refused to or was not qualified to discuss the strategic issues as opposed to chanting we killed their children so they hate us, depressing. After I talked with an Afghan architect who assured me that few people take the religion seriously as a reason for violence and who wants to build a museum in Bamiyan where the statues of Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban. Good luck to him. The libertarian expressions of concern for the suffering of foreigners was so patently false as to distasteful. Hornberger did get Boot to admit to being an imperialist. My subsequent letter to Goodson follows, a similar letter went to Boot who replied, “Thanks for coming last night and for raising a number of thoughtful points to which, alas, I have no good answer.”
As I am unemployed and uninsured my interest in this topic is not completely theoretical.
I am quoting another poster that I saw a while back but it is worth repeating;
“I have seen Public Housing, I will pass on Public Healthcare”
If the proponents of National Healthcare could show he ONE successful Federal social project I might have some glimmer of hope. The Government’s record looks decidedly like that of the Detroit Lions; still waiting for a win.
The New Deal, a bust
The Great Society, bust again
War on Poverty, yep, bust again
End of Welfare, moved them all into Social Security by redefining nearly every bad habit into a “disability” another bust and it is draining the SocSec system at a lightning pace.
Interesting thing I found out about British health care.
People who have a serious pre-existing condition of some kind are required to buy a special health insurance policy if they wnat to visit the USA.
The special insurance is good only during the trip itself and is based on twice the price of the airline ticket.
The reason for this is obvious. People in the UK were obviously getting tired of sitting around waiting on free health care. So they would take a trip to the US, “discover” a serious medical problem, and get the problem fixed while over here, paid for by the British government
Of course, you hear many stories of people crossing the border from Canada to go to US doctors as well.
I wonder where these people will go when Obamacare has been imposed on us at the point of a gun.
An old Cato Institute has a monograph entitled The Medical Monopoly: Protecting Consumers or Limiting Competition? which argues that the medical industry, as constituted, is a monopoly with large government subsidies. It concludes that:
Wikipedia notes that “Critics of the American Medical Association, including economist Milton Friedman, have asserted that the organization acts as a government-sanctioned guild and has attempted to increase physicians’ wages and fees limit by influencing limitations on the supply of physicians and non-physician competition.”
Although this analysis probably oversimplifies the problem, it’s hard to imagine why establishing an overt government monopoly on health care, even if it is in pseudo-rivalry with an existing and less-than-competitive private sector, will put the consumers of health care in a stronger position. Maybe a public system should complement the existing system and provide health care for those who can never, as a practical matter, have it, or where market failure is evident.
The debate over “health care” reform in the US has revolved around its insurance aspects. “Proponents of health care reforms involving expansion of government involvement to achieve universal health care argue that the need to provide profits to investors in a predominantly free market health system, and the additional administrative spending, tends to drive up costs, leading to more expensive health care provision” But that is begging the question and amounts to a claim that government provided services are more efficient than private ones and may ignore the returns that come from research and development. At any rate, creating another monopoly may not be the best course.
These issues ought to be debated and not reduced to an ideological issue. But in any event, public medicine is not a magic bullet.
People are responsible only to the point that they are held responsible. I imagine that some are born with the responsibility gene whereas most are not.
The key would be not to rely on the inate responsibility level of those in charge but to hold those in charge accountable for their responsibility.
This is where any type of govt. interference breaks down. Those that screw up in govt rarely are held accountable for their actions. I would imagine that this is exactly why most socialist programs flounder.
In short, people are innately lazy and greedy. Private enterprise/capitalism uses our own greed to overcome our laziness. Govt does not so we’re stuck with incompetance.
blert said:
“Breakout moves in Silver and Gold are dead ahead; thank Ben.”
What’s your opinion concerning Karl Denninger? Refer to:
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/
LOM. You are not uninsured. All, I repeat all, hospitals that recieve any federal dollars (90+ %) must treat you when you walk into an ER. You will, of course, go through triage, you will, of course wait and you will, of course, be asked for insurance. You may be discouraged from waiting. You may insist and you will be seen.
You will then have experienced socialized medicine.
Further, at least in Virginia, you can by a major medical plan for a family (catastropic coverage) for under $200 per month from BC/BS. If your unemployment is extensive the state will kick in via one of several programs.
My guess, however, is that when push comes to shove you can flip and Micky D’s and use their quite nice BC/BS plan while making $12/ hour or more as you move up from Flipper 1 to shift leader etc. (A good restaurant manager is good for 65K plus a decent benefits package)
Good luck and good hunting
If you wish a glimpse of what the Government considers “adequate” (BTW, who wants “adequate” health care?) health care visit a VA hospital sometime.
re 18,blert: More doctors will not solve any of our medical care problems. We have adequate numbers. The biggest problem is the high and rising costs that are pricing many out of the market. In fact, more doctors will raise the costs even higher. More doctors means more proceedures and tests, many not necessary. I am a medical lab director. Once I complained to a surgeon that 20% of our lab tests and xrays are unnecesary. His response was that 90% of what he ordered was not really necessary. He orders most tests as malpractice protection. I agree with 8– we need a socialized legal profession. Just kidding, the main thing we need is tort reform. But good luck on that considering the bribes paid to politicians by the tort bar.
The Guardian argues that the NHS is failing because it isn’t socialist enough.
In the Guardian article’s view, it is the existence of metrics that is at fault. It killed the “spirit” of the system. Serve the People. In Memory of Norman Bethune. I happen to think this is BS. But facts are no match for visions, or their near-cousins, hallucination. It concludes, “by reducing healthcare to a few measurable statistics, to create a target-driven culture, we have all but destroyed the essence of what was the NHS.” Right on Guardian: that’s what need to focus on, our bodily essences.
I am as old friends here know very much a veteran, neither bottle scarred nor battle scared.
anton,
The list of successful federal social programs:
1) nice murals and some other arts from the WPA
2) the Appalachian Trail from the CCC
3) who doesn’t like aviation museums?
wretchard,
No doubt medicine is a sort of guild.
Very few who have not experienced training to become a physician have any idea what it entails. Much more happens than the accumulation of a library’s worth of “facts.”
The reforms in medical education brought about early in the twentieth century, mainly by the efforts of Abraham Flexner*, were thorough and decisive. We have an expensive but highly effective system. Physicians’ wages are not excessive, and do not contribute in a major way to the high cost of medical care. You could open a thousand medical schools tomorrow but you would be hard-pressed to find students among our population who could successfully pass through them, let alone faculty to educate the students.
Primum non nocere.
Jamie Irons
A physician at the top of his game…
*The Flexner Report and the Standardization of American Medical Education
Andrew H. Beck
Brown Medical School, Providence, RI
JAMA. 2004;291:2139-2140.
If the sick are to reap the full benefit of recent progress in medicine, a more uniformly arduous and expensive medical education is demanded.—Abraham Flexner1
Medical education in the United States today is strikingly standardized and demanding. It was not always so. Prior to the widespread implementation of educational reforms, medical training was highly variable and frequently inadequate. It was not until the early decades of the 20th century that a “uniformly arduous and expensive” system of medical education was instituted nationally.
Read the whole thing…
“We the people…”
Right to life…when someone else decides my access to health care?
Right to Liberty…when I cannot choose the method of delivery of the care I want?
And the pursuit of Happiness…I am a much happier person when healthy, as defined by-ME.
ta
LOM, Aye, Aye. Just being rhetorical.
“…Und heilt er nicht, so tötet ihn!
‘Sist nur ein Arzt, ‘sist nur ein Arzt. ”
Franz kafka, Ein Landarzt
Sorry, Franz. Should of course be Kafka…
Jamie Irons
While the BRICK (Brazil,Russia,India,China,Korea) may DREAM of replacing the USD, tis but a dream.
ONLY a unified polity with a dominating navy has ever established international money.
If the USD is to be tripped off its pedestal then the only international money that can take its place: Gold.
You’ll probably see bimetallism with Silver shifting back into daly commerce.
It is absolutely critical that Ben reverse course and that Volker step in to replace Timmy.
Any fiat currency is based on hope and faith. Ben intends to wipe out his emotional design-margin.
When the currency is so publicly raped then you trigger a run-away spiral down.
It happened to Rome even as she had no peer competitors. AD 79 was a bitch.
At this time, anyone who can do so should establish physical possession of old circulating silver coins AND Canadian Maple Leaf Coins or such.
Such a buy is not made in anticipation of profit. Instead this is mad money… the only things that can be money in a world gone mad.
Generally Denninger is a step ahead of the curve.
I call again for the establishment of a Government sponsored Mortgage Resolution Bank so as to cash out the quasi-toxic RMBS that is forcing AIG to over-pledge collateral. Much of the AIG capital can and will be recovered as the underlying mortgages get paid off. We need to unwind the nightmare at retail. Wholesale paper hanging DOES NOT WORK.
blert, as you correctly state, it is a cash flow issue. Having said that, is not the recently announced Treasury purchase of mortgage backed securities (most probably those bundles most encumbered with sub prime paper) effectively the same as a Resolution Bank?
Also, key to the retail unwind is the elimination of second tier or higher derivitives. Mutual funds of stocks and bonds is a first tier. Funds of funds, CDS etc are ways of monitizing risk created by smoke and mirrors.
Ivy MBA’s manipulate Balance Sheets, not products which equals real goods and real cash.
Smoke and mirrors.
Has the Club suffered a reading comprehension collapse?
Just how is it that we are importing 60% of our physician labor force…
Something that is not true in any other profession.
As a DIRECT result we drain medical talent from the rest of the world…
If you don’t see a problem with destroying the medical climate all over the 3rd world causing more casualties than war…
What can I say?
You’re too close to the trees to see the forest.
BTW, the medical community is consistently among the absolute worst investors in the stock market. That’s a stock broker’s truism. Why? Economics is not taught in medical school, arrogance is.
This medical fiasco is but one of a hundred examples that leave me wondering why the Left wants so dearly to follow European examples in governing our country.
Show me a country on this golbe that works, when allowed to without government intervention, better than the USA? There are non, zero, nada. Having been on every continent, circumnavigated the glode I can personally attest to the fact that NO ONE comes close to doing it as good as we do it.
Our pols travel abroad and come back with what they , in their minds , are “better” solutions, ususally always socialist. It’s pure crap.
I hear things like we should use the soft marxist socialism of Sweden. Well is Sweden the apogee of civilization on this globe. No. You can’t name ONE country that in all facets beats the USA. That is why our freedoms are so important as a driver of innovation and discovery, not the frigg’in government edicts that we get from DC., predicated on how it’s done in France or Sweden or Belgium, etc.
If we aspire to be second class then yes, by all means lets follow all those second rate countries with the “better” ideas….I for one done have the stomach to dumb us down any further.
Michael @40…
Getting the pricing right is the reason that buying RMBS at wholesale is the wrong way to go.
It means that the market is certain to dump the losers onto the Fed/ USG/ US Taxpayers…
While hanging onto the good credits.
To parse the quality you must pound the ground and refund the good credits one by one at retail.
The ‘big-buy’ means you can say bye-bye to your scalp… That’s some haircut.
BTW China is dumping her long T-Bonds right and left. It’s game-over for Ben.
We are much, much closer to the brink than is easy to accept.
You have been put on notice.
Just how is it that we are importing 60% of our physician labor force…
This is an interesting phenomenon. Just a few thoughts on it. Practically every medical and nursing student in the Philippines, including the techs, effectively aspire to work overseas. Not just in the US, but the UK, Europe, Australia, Singapore, etc. About 10% of the entire workforce of the Philippines is expatriate. The situation in the medical industry is mirrored in the engineering fields as well.
To a large extent it represents a failure of the Philippine economy. Many patients can only afford to pay with chickens, eggs, vegetables and things of that sort. But there’s another factor. A friend of mine, who is one the Big Name doctors in the Philippines and earns a fortune because he and his wife have a lock on a particular type of procedure, once told me that he would gladly work in the US even if he had to earn less because there you were at the ‘cutting edge’ of things. He also said to me that he “couldn’t enjoy his money in the Philippines” because every time he left home in his chauffeur driven car he “felt bad” at seeing so many hungry people. In the US he didn’t get the guilts enjoying his money, even where he earned less.
Some Filipino politicians have tried to impose “service” requirements on the medical grads which compel them to work in some government hospital for a number of years before being “allowed” to go abroad. But the problem with this is that it prevents the medical graduate from realizing a return on his investment (the government doesn’t pay, except in a very few cases, for their education) and breaks the professional momentum. The government gives itself the authority to appropriate the fruits of a medical students investment in his education, even when they don’t pay for it.
I have no doubt that First World medical institutions have their problems, but a lot of the problems in the Third World are self-inflicted. At the very top of Philippine society, the really rich people go for specialist medical treatment to Mayo, Sloan Kettering, etc., so the Third World’s medical system implicitly contains a specialist referral system to the very top.
One reason why I think that socialized medicine will never become universal is because the elites — the finance and media moguls, the Presidents and the Senators, the Lords This and That — will always need a private clinic for their own needs. Neither Gordon Brown nor Barack Obama is ever going to Stafford. That hospital is for us.
Apropos of ObamaCare, it looks as if Dear Leader has no objection at all to capitalism when it comes to drug development:
On February 22, 2005, Barack Obama, a U.S. Senator at the time, placed a trade on a tiny biotechnology company out of Oregon. The biotech company’s name is AVI Biopharma.
Records show that Obama purchased tiny AVI Biopharma just above $2 a share.
AVI Biopharma is a biotech that’s been around for years. It develops drugs intended for the use to treat infectious diseases… some of which the Department of Homeland Security have deemed “bioterrorism” viruses like West Nile, Dengue fever, SARS and Ebola. 8 months after Obama bought the stock, the company was awarded a $28 million contract from the federal government to research treatments against biological warfare or a bioterrorism attack.
AVI Biopharma spiked in price… and days after the announcement, Obama sold his shares and booked a 73% profit.
http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2009/03/barack_obama_ca.html
Economics is not taught in medical school, arrogance is.
I know hundreds of physicians; I have encountered three or four whom I might characterize as arrogant. Probably a frequency distribution not much different from that found in any other profession.
Ignorant as I am about economics, I will (as I have before, as Buddy knows) offer Jamie Irons’ Three Ironclad Laws of the Medical Marketplace:
(1) Everybody wants everything, from cosmetic surgery to chemotherapy (when the latter is necessary), or let us say, from arthroscopy to freedom from zoonoses.
(2) Nobody wants to pay for anything or, (what amounts to the same thing), everybody wants somebody else to pay for everything.
(3) When you’re under thirty, and if you do not yet have a family, you are certain you are immortal and you’ll never need medical care.
Virtually every distortion in the medical marketplace, and virtually all our distorted thinking about same, derives from a lack of appreciation of these three simple “laws.”
Jamie Irons
blert said:
“BTW China is dumping her long T-Bonds right and left. It’s game-over for Ben. We are much, much closer to the brink than is easy to accept. You have been put on notice.”
That is also Karl Denninger’s message. If he is to be believed then our Cook is Goosed.
So I’ve been put on notice. How do I respond? I might add that Denninger said repeatedly that we will NOT go into hyperinflation (this indicates that buying gold is not a good option).
The Independent reports that the chief executive of the Stafford hospital was given a 45,000 pound pay raise “while the hospital was being investigated.”
While I don’t think it applies in every case, one way to understand some of these “bonuses” paid to failures is as hush money. It’s easier to fire a well-meaning, but inept manager than it is to fire a scoundrel. The former can simply be confronted with the facts and will leave. But the latter will have always known the facts and have hoarded them against the day when he can use them as protection. And they rise and rise in the system, because they’ve got the goods on somebody. Who was it who said that in certain corrupt cultures, no good deed goes unpunished?
At the risk of being repetitive, any “health care system” imposed by the plutocrats in DC, be, by definition, the EXACT system of health care provided by the Federal Government to members of the Legislative, Judicial and Executive branches of government. [Save the to the military!] Sauce for the goose…
Same process should apply to ‘public education’, no? As the saying goes, “eat your own dogfood…”
tom
tom
John Stossel had an interesting show on TV several months back, in which he described the dilemma of free health care by comparing it to buying food. Who would economize if food was free? Funny that people who advocate national free health care would shoot you if you said that also meant we had to have free national food care.
In that show Stossel had a little debate with Michael Moore. Moore said, incredibly “Of course the government can do good things effectively. They fought WWII, didn’t they?”
The US Government can ONLY do things FOR the government. WWII was fought BY the government FOR the government. It was a government responsibility and the government used the resources and population of the country for that purpose. It was fought “for the people” only in that it preserved the Federal Government, which had a better system than those of our adversaries.
As for the US military, I also have been a recipient of military health care for some decades. I have found it adequate but also rather spotty in quality, limited in nature, and frequently requiring a long waiting period. About 90% of the time I have just gone and paid for the care on my own from a civilian source.
More importantly, the military requires physical fitness standards, including yearly fitness tests and frequent monitoring of weight. Applying these same ideas to the general populace will be … interesting.
Yes, yes…
Totalitarian dieting controls may be the wave of the future.
Gut taxes seem the next sin tax.
We’re deflating right now yet the precious metals markets exploded upwards upon hearing little Ben’s press run target.
The Fed will very, very soon be the dominant buyer of long Treasuries.
Such a development would put the government totally on the credit card: the T-Bill market.
At the same time all other long paper would be hell to place.
SBA limits need to be lifted for the term of the emergency.
We’re getting an Affirmatively Afflicted economy.
RMN’s executive order has done us in. The 40 year fuse has expired.
blert said:
“We’re deflating right now yet the precious metals markets exploded upwards upon hearing little Ben’s press run target. The Fed will very, very soon be the dominant buyer of long Treasuries. Such a development would put the government totally on the credit card: the T-Bill market.”
I’ll preface by reminding everyone that I’m totally ignorant about finance.
What I see has happened is the Chinese, Saudis, Russians, etc. were holding too many T-bills and decided it was time to start cashing them in. This was causing the interest rates to go up which was precisely the wrong thing to happen when you’re in the middle of a deep recession. Bernanke responded by creating a trillion dollars in federal reserve notes (FRN) out of thin air and using this new money to buy up T-bills. By doing so he created an artificial floor for the T-bills and set a ceiling for the maximum allowed interest rate. However a logical consequence of Bernanke’s action is that eventually all of the T-bills out there will be bought by the US government thus converting the T-bills into inflated FRNs. Normally this would cause a collapse of the dollar with respect to other currencies (that might happen anyway). However the economies of other nations are dependent upon debt denominated in US dollars. If they allow the US dollar to drop then the debt they hold loses value. Consquently, the other national currencies out there will allow their relative values to remained fixed to the US dollar (we all sink together in phase). Where this gets weird is with the nations that sell primary products, e.g. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Australia, etc. Unless they jack up the cost of crude oil or iron ore, they’ll be compelled to accept green backed monopoly money for real tangible non-renewable commodities. Of course they could refuse to sell their commodities and their economies would instantly fail. Consequently what we have is a game of “chicken” between the US Federal government and the primary producers. In the mean time, Obama and the US Congress are trying to prop up the US economy with expensive Keynesian bailouts and socialist programs. Normally this would be funded by issuing T-bills. However now the only way they can continue the process is by debasing the currency and thereby adding insult-to-injury to the people already holding US dollars.
Please criticise this analysis if you see anything wrong with it.
You have the essence: the wealth drain will be upon the American economy and in particular those who produce and have liquid working capital.
We may yet see some effort to confiscate 401K capital.
The rationale will be, it has not been taxed and your government needs to correct that so as to stop a subsidy to the investor class at the expense of the truly needy, etc.
blert said:
“We may yet see some effort to confiscate 401K capital. The rationale will be, it has not been taxed and your government needs to correct that so as to stop a subsidy to the investor class at the expense of the truly needy, etc.”
One way they could tax my 401K would be to allow the US dollar to decline against the Swiss Franc or some other standard of wealth. If I saw my 401K in rapid decline, I’d cash it out, take the tax hit and deposit the money into a Swiss or Guernsey Island bank account.
I understand that lately the Swiss Franc hasn’t been doing all that well. If worse came to worse, I’d cash out the 401K, turn all the money into Krugerrands and bury it in the backyard. If gold was too dodgy (and it is dodgy right now) then my ultimate fall back would be to buy agricultural land in New Zealand.
Bottom line is I’d pull the money out of US economy.
Your logic is spot on.
That is why we are so close to the brink.
OUR economy needs volunteer capital managed by its private owner.
The Marxist vortex is the black hole.
Before all slides across the event-horizon it will be pulled apart at its connections.
Hunk by hunk, then, it will drop out of sight.
That was ever Marx’s vision.
I recently visited my Mom who was in hospital in Canada. I was generally pleased with the quality of care she got. In fact, as a 20+ year health professional working in America it appeared to me that the quality of care was similar. I have some further thoughts…
http://squarepegs.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/in-denial-and-on-life-support/
I’m not a British subject but I play one “on tele”, (so play along)
In Britain, the socialist government has always lived by the maxim that if it grows and prospers, it might be punishable by a stay in our National (Socialist) Health Service, or N( )HS, for short. One might ask those people and busineses what they did to deserve better in this country and yours, and just why people can or should seek good quality health care on their own when we can all of have it forced on us one and all and get processed like sausages for free?
And don’t think there haven’t been improvements, why just this year we’ve instituted our new “Wolf in Sheeps Clothing” therapy that helps patients get rid of a lot of old anger and resentments, and has gone along way to reducing the amount of complaints to, well, none as of this moment, down from last years all time high.
Eggplant,
This was causing the interest rates to go up which was precisely the wrong thing to happen when you’re in the middle of a deep recession.
As a political statement, this is true. As an economic statement, it is false. Therein lies the rub.
The Fed has pumped a tremendous amount of liquidity into the financial system, with the express aim of preventing deflation. This is a good strategy (deflationary spirals are devastating), but it takes time for that liquidity to reach the “real” economy (the one that delivers goods and services). Not a lot of time, but there is a lag.
The key is that once credit begins to flow, the impact of all this liquidity begins to be felt in the form of inflationary pressures. We’re already seeing this: oil, metals, and other commodities are starting to rise. This indicates re-awakening demand, and is a sign that we may have hit bottom (I commented on this a few days back). It is also a good sign.
Think of this as like water behind a dam. To get water to flow downstream, we increase the amount of water in the reservoir. As more and more water accumulates behind the dam; the pressure on the dam increases. Eventually, cracks start to form, and water begins to flow through the cracks. This lowers the pressure as the water level drops, so you keep adding water. There is a critical moment – before the cracks get too wide and the dam fails – when you must open the gates to the spillway and reduce the water level and the pressure. If you wait too long, the dam blows and the water comes rushing downriver.
The water is the money supply. The dam is the financial system. Liquidity has been increasing with now downstream flow, but cracks are starting to form and credit is flowing. The pressure is bond prices – by keeping bonds high, interest rates stay low. As credit starts to flow, interest rates must rise (i.e. bond prices must fall). SInce we want flow to increase, this is perceived as a bad thing. But we need to allow interest rates to rise a little bit at this time, or else the pressure will cause a flood of liquidity to the system (i.e. inflation).
The reason the flow quickly turns into a flood is simple. In times of inflation, you want to be a borrower; as prices rise, debt payments become easier to make (increasing profits driven by inflation vs. fixed debt payments). Once people really get convinced that inflation is coming, they run to the bank to borrow. This creates a surge of demand for debt, and banks have a higher confidence of being repaid, since debt service is easier for the borrower to cover. (Too much inflation is bad for a bank, but that’s a topic for another time.)
The check on this demand surge is rising interest rates. If interest rates rise in response to this demand, borrowers are more reluctant to borrow, and less liquidity is released downstream. This is the normal workings of supply and demand.
But if the Fed keeps rates artificially low, the money is loaned and inflation really kicks in. You then need to really ratchet rates up fast to get ahead of this; it’s kind of like trying to lower the water level after there is a dam failure. You can do it, but you have to do it really fast, and even then a lot of damage is already done.
Reacting like this requires an incredibly tight OODA loop. I hope Bernanke is up to it.
The problem, though, is that politicians don’t want to see interest rates rise as we’re coming out of a recession, especially when unemployment is still increasing. This is the political dimension, and it’s why recessions often end with inflation. My worry is that the Fed, under pressure from politicians, may keep interest rates too low too long.
Now, this lack of will on the part of the Fed also would put more pressure on the bond market. Seeing the inflation handwriting on the wall, bond holders will look to unload their paper at an increasing rate. The Fed will have to buy more and more bonds to keep rates low, but they can’t hold out forever. Eventually, they have to let rates rise. The question is when.
The best thing the Fed could do right now is nothing. Let rates rise a bit. This will take the steam out of any possible recovery, but that will be a small price to pay relative to triggering runaway inflation. Unemployment, while bad, is not nearly as bad if inflation is low – savings and unemployment checks go farther.
One final point: don’t get too torqued up about foreign bond holders. There is about $13T of public debt in the US, and only $2T of that is owned by foreigners. Most debt is owned by Americans, and American institutions like banks and money market funds.
Hope this makes sense. I’m fighting a cold, so I may have been a little confusing on some of this.
Cheers.
L3
wretchard wrote:
“Just look at how well Dodd, Geithner and Obama have been managing the financial crisis. If they were doctors in charge of a patient’s life, how much better would they do?”
We’d all be frakkin’ dead, is what.
Leo Linbeck III,
Thank you. Your response was exactly what I was looking for. Now I need to think about it and fully understand it.
On a slightly different topic: Do you think the scandal about the AIG executive bonuses was mere coincidence or a deliberate subterfuge to distract the MSM?
If it was indeed premeditated subterfuge, that would indicate the Obama administration having more sophistication than I originally gave it credit for. This maybe another one of those unanswerable questions such as whether the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was politically triggered.
You could open a thousand medical schools tomorrow but you would be hard-pressed to find students among our population who could successfully pass through them
This has a slight twang of arrogance and elitism. Medical school is a grind, no doubt, I watched my brother do it, but there are tens and tens of thousands like him who could do it. Getting the faculty together might be the harder problem.
LOM,
Not to nit-pick too much but the Appalachian Trail program is successful in large part because of volunteers- I know because I have participated through a local outdoor outfitter. Not that this is bad, it just means the government can only do so much, and should only do that much. Those things worth saving should be saved by the users and not by “big guvmint.” I enjoy the arts as much as the average American but art that can not stand on its own should die off. The Masters were subsidized by the rich and yes, by the realm in some cases, but not to spread feces on a canvas and call it art.
Apologies to all for straying off topic.
@Eggplant #63:
As to Lehman Brothers, I rather estimate that the idea was to transfer several organizations bad paper to a single organization that would then be taken out of business. In the S & L scandal days, this was done with Lincoln Savings in CA and Vernon Savings in TX (as memory serves me). Did Lehman volunteer for the role? More than likely it got conscripted.
With AIG, giving the bailout money to AIG itself, rather than paying the creditors directly, meant that certain employment contracts had to be honored. That Dodd Amendment was not really needed but got thrown in as some CYA. Subsequent “outrage”
then followed without being preplanned. More costly aspects of boondoggle would be more or less ignored anyway.
I would put these two estimates at 70% plus
probability each. Which in turn probably means that the Obamaroids are not as clever as you fear. Does not mean that they are not hazardous but it seems to me that opportunistic cunning is their forte, not coherent planning.
However, I too would like to hear from L3, the Larsenous One and others with financial backgrounds to go with my G2 one.
For the moment, proceed along the more optimistic course at 3/4 speed.
“Just look at how well Dodd, Geithner and Obama have been managing the financial crisis. If they were doctors in charge of a patient’s life, how much better would they do?” – Wretchard
[Casablanca cartoon with Dodd as the corrupt inspector]
Dodd: “I am shocked to find bonuses going on here!”
Waiter: “Your Winnings Senator Dodd.”
See: Michael Ramirez’s cartoon
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/assets_c/2009/03/toon032009.php
Doctor’s cost of doing business, the nightmare of trying to do business pay insurance costs, hospital affiliation costs, and keep withing the guidelines laid down by insurers, hospitals and by the government are enough to cause budding physicians to seek placement in a solid economics program, and forgo the hazing scenario of a modern medical internship. To folks from third world countries it is much much better and for some much less threatening to their life and limb, to pursue a practice in America. Soon you will be required to live in an urban zone large enough to sustain a hospital or clinic, or you will not be eligible to use the facilities. And no doctor will be foolish enough to extend an opinion to folks who do not conform to the zoning plan.
“Foundation status (efficiency experts and cost controls) at the expense of Patient care”, Hummm sounds like what the administration has planned for our economy, once all the “failed” policies are removed.
Viva La Revolucion’.
Che Chic
Eggplant,
Do you think the scandal about the AIG executive bonuses was mere coincidence or a deliberate subterfuge to distract the MSM?
If I had to guess (and it’s only a guess), I’d say that this was one of those situations where the story just kinda got away from the Obama Adminstration. Not deliberate subterfuge, just the natural result of rushing though complicated legislation without taking the time to think through the impact of every decision embedded in the bill.
WaPo has an interesting article on the view from inside:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/18/AR2009031804104.html?sid=ST2009031801503
From this article, I get the impression that this “bonus” situation was a classic retention situation. In distressed companies, the biggest worry of management is that all of your line employees – the people who actually know what’s going on in an organization, and how to get things done – will leave at the time you need them most. This risk is much greater in trading operation, where inside knowledge of trading positions can be a huge competitive advantage.
So, it looks like there were a bunch retention contacts put in place, and those employees stayed at AIG-FP to help unwind their trading book. It also sounds like they weren’t the ones who created the mess, and they’ve done their job. I happen to think these guys are overpaid, but once you cut the deal, you have to live with it, so long as they live up to their side of the bargain. I know this isn’t a popular position, but the road we’ve chosen is much, much more dangerous over the long run.
What the administration probably didn’t count on was a front-page story on the payout of these bonuses. This triggered a firestorm of protest. Perhaps they should have known this would happen, but they weren’t prepared. That made the story even bigger, and the circus began.
One way to look at this situation is that it is the fruits of the Democrats’ approach to the stimulus package. Rather than working with Republican lawmakers, they rammed the thing down their throat. This created a group of politicians who had a vested interest in attacking the stimulus. They could point to the bill and say “See, we told you that these guys didn’t know what they were doing, the bill passed too fast, there was lots of bad stuff in it, and that’s why we didn’t vote for it.” If they had compromised and developed a bill that garnered more widespread support, they might not have been as vulnerable to these attacks.
Frankly, the MSM reaction is predictably ignorant. There is no attempt to try to understand the underlying issues; it’s much easier to simply lambast the AIG-FP folks as greedy and incompetent. I watched on short segment on Fox, and it was reprehensible. They brought on two former Allstate insurance agents who had been fired when the company switched to an independent agent model. The storyline was “Liddy says he has to honor AIG employment contracts, but when he was at Allstate, he didn’t honor contracts, so he’s a hypocrite.” However, the plaintiffs said nothing of the kind; it was a complete joke, and the interviewer kept repeating the same storyline, even in the face of what the actual guys said. The whole thing smelled like a story pitched by their plaintiff’s lawyers to get publicity for their lawsuit. Appalling.
It seems that March Madness isn’t limited to just sports.
Still, I switched the channel to ESPN. At least that’s the real thing.
Cheers.
L3
Leo @61 makes a lot of sense to me. “Reacting like this requires an incredibly tight OODA loop. I hope Bernanke is up to it.” It seems to me that the water doesn’t get added directly to the reservoir but rather gets dropped from helicopters far, far up in the distant mountains. It takes a very long time to get to the reservoir and once it arrives may take a very long time to stop filling the reservoir even after the helicopters are back at base. Doesn’t this make the loop very difficult to manage?
Alvin,
I think you’re right. However, there is an even bigger challenge that must be managed.
The recovery does not happen uniformly across the nation. There are some areas – the South being the best example – where the recovery will kick in relatively quickly. These areas did not have the dramatic run-up in home values that enticed consumers to lever up. They are also relatively low-regulation, low-tax states where businesses can start and grow quickly. The overhang in these areas, therefore, will be be absorbed as job growth absorbs excess house inventory, and prices are reasonable.
Other areas – California, the Northeast, the industrial Midwest – will recover much more slowly. It so happens that these areas are “blue” states, and they control the Federal Government at this point in time.
So, as the recovery begins and demand starts to increase, these blue states will not feel its effects for some time. They will exert tremendous political pressure to keep interest rates low, and they will probably win the battle. But the growing states will therefore see a surge in inflation, as the money supply stays high and that money flows to the high-growth areas. That’s why I’m beginning to see high inflation as an inevitable outgrowth of the policies of the Obama Administration, a cruel irony as inflation disproportionately hurts the poor and wage earners.
But this is an incredibly difficult situation to manage, even without the political dimension. Buying 30Y bonds is a system-wide stimulant, and is almost certain to be inflationary (that’s why you’re seeing the dollar fall – why own dollars if they’re going to be worth less next year? – and a falling dollar also creates inflationary pressure).
The main lever for controlling this is the prime rate. Most folks think the prime rate is a single rate charged by all banks to their best customers; in reality, every bank sets its own prime rates. The Fed will need to push banks in high-growth areas to raise their prime rate to keep demand in check, while encouraging banks in low-growth areas to lower their prime rate to stimulate growth. Of course, this has a political dimension as well, as it could spark claims of unfairness in the high-growth areas.
It can be done, but there is no way that it can be successful if every decision requires 3 weeks of congressional hearings.
Good theater rarely makes good policy.
Cheers.
L3
Leo Linbeck III said:
“If I had to guess (and it’s only a guess), I’d say that this was one of those situations where the story just kinda got away from the Obama Administration. Not deliberate subterfuge, just the natural result of rushing though complicated legislation without taking the time to think through the impact of every decision embedded in the bill.”
This has a “ring of truth”, i.e. don’t attribute to deep cunning if it can be explained as simple incompetence.
Leo Linbeck III also said:
“So, it looks like there were a bunch retention contacts put in place, and those employees stayed at AIG-FP to help unwind their trading book. It also sounds like they weren’t the ones who created the mess, and they’ve done their job. I happen to think these guys are overpaid”
That’s also my impression that the remaining guys at AIG are simply the “clean up crew” and the idiots responsible were previously let go. I most definitely agree that these guys are way overpaid (by one or two orders-of-magnitude).
Leo Linbeck III said:
“One way to look at this situation is that it is the fruits of the Democrats’ approach to the stimulus package. Rather than working with Republican lawmakers, they rammed the thing down their throat.”
Obama really blew it. He should have appeared on prime time television surrounded by high ranking Democrat and Republican congressmen along with world recognized economic experts. He should have announced that due to the national emergency they were going to drop partisan differences and together work out a plan to salvage the economy and present it to the Congress. However Obama’s hard left political base would have seriously freaked if they saw him working in close collaboration with the Republicans or didn’t immediately pursue his socialist agenda. This is part of the dilemma that we are in, i.e. both economic and political processes are fouled up. I’m dreading what Obama’s reaction will be when the Iranians or al Qaeda test him.
He’s an angry autocratic ‘executive’…
Any event that is a PERSONAL affront is most likely to trigger a burning anger.
H is the kind of player who is especially prone to impulsive rage when his buttons are pressed.
His counter-reaction will be guided by the calm deliberative style of his wife and preacher.
It’s the OTHER guy who ought to be trembling.
I am reading Atlas Shrugged – again. I don’t think it can be read too many times. Each time I read it, the it seems the conditions that are developing in our world reveal the words poured out in Ayn Rand’s novel to be a frightening, evolving reality. God help us if we cannot, or refuse to, seize back our world from the grasp of the morons in control.
A tax revolt is surely underway.
Federal and State income tax receipts are plunging.
April 15th will be truly frightening in as much as it is Uncle Sam’s Christmas… but he’s getting a lump of coal in a sock.
In financial terms we’ve stalled the aircraft. Recovery requires a steady hand on the joystick. Yet H is whipping the controls through all degrees of freedom.
The normal outcome: a tumbling crash.
H spends more time flying/ partying than anything else. However, that may be a feature — not a bug.
“Federal and State income tax receipts are plunging.”
Wouldn’t surprise me… can you point me to your info source, blert?
California’s budget analyst announced plunging tax collections on all fronts: sales tax, income withholding.
It’s so bad that the budget gap opened up $ 8,000,000,000 from the prior pessimistic projection of $41,000,000,000 which caused a political mud fight.
http://tinyurl.com/d9356m
The above link is a great place to start. Everything that is true for the State goes triple for the Federal Government.
BTW California taxes capital gains as ordinary income. There will be practically no capital gains in 2009.
California needs to cut her outlays about 50% starting yesterday. She’s in a tax rate death spiral.
Unlimited illegal immigration did her in.
dave/66; per your request for a ‘larsenous one’s’ opinion, i took that to mean me (tho it is mean you who besmirches either or maybe both my name and/or the business of larceny) on that LEH speculation, after much much read & study, i think you’re right –i think a deal was made (it need not’ve involved but a handful of people) for LEH to fling itself off a cliff when it did, within a week or two either way. If that sounds implausible, then how about under a bus, or into the abyss, through the looking glass, into the vally of death (with)…the six hundred, or somewhere over the rainbow where birds must fly.
PS #80, right on cue (had to let a little time run, to see if it would die on its own, which it didn’t quite yet) barney frank will convene a ‘white collar crime hearing’ –possibly expanding findings into a sort of rabbit warren report full of paper and ink and verifiably 100% correct by volume, and zero percent by weight.
think, the Nuremberg Trials, but with Hermann Goering teh Judge, and the Allies teh defendents.
It’s simply a case of the shorts closing out their Fannie position and moving on to the next trailing member of the investment bank herd.
It also lines up with the inside-the-McCain-buzz that he was going to draw a line in the sand over Lehman based on his gut feel and campaign poling results. As you can imagine the poling showed overwhelming revulsion among all voter segments. So John thought he had a no-brainer — it sure was.
All of the voices demanding an end to the bailout simply do not realize the connections. And there is NO WAY Timmy and Ben can level with the public without leveling the markets.
Every time I read/ hear some gas bag talk about dumping the pain onto the foreigners I know he’s a fool. There is only one player that can pick up the pieces and that is us. No one has the kind of wallet and market credibility to take us to the shore.
Unfortunately, H is taking us on a vainglorious voyage to that Moby Dick of economics: the great righteous socialism. Taking America to the far horizon H is going to take us off the edge of the world. ( The economic world is two dimensional. )
Well Buddy, at least I caught my error in #66 before submitting it. It seems I had left out
a critical comma. Had I not caught it, the sentence would have read “L3 the larsenous one”. And he isn’t even a lawyer!
Baloney Frank as a hanging judge? No way, he wouldn’t raise a blemish upon Roy Bean’s posterior. Be a case of Alice in Blunderland. Sentence first, verdict later.
BTW does BF know the difference between “hanged” and “hung”???????????
dave –pleease –the mental images –if he has to share sentence space with sandwich materials, let’s make a potted meat –you know, a nice spread. Spread?! ahhh jeeez ….ok, sardines. No no. uhhh….
“Hi, I’m from the government, and you’re here to help me.”
The posts which accuse doctors and others of “arrogance” and “elitism” for acknowledging the difficulty of their education remind me of a dentist I know who, at least a couple of times a year, gets asked by a patient, “So dentistry is, what, a two year program”? Those who accuse the doctors of “arrogance” – simply for pointing out just how difficult succeeding in medical school really is – are not far off from that sort of ignorance.
Most people have a notion that medical school and further internship/residency training is difficult, but haven’t a clue as to just how hard it really is – not just in terms of the book learning, but in terms of the other sacrifices that must be made. I would suggest that you, Bob, even though you watched your brother go through it, seem to have an incorrect notion of the difficulty.
“Tens of thousands” could just step right in and complete medical training, at the level it is currently taught? Bullshit. When you consider that 5-15% of the people who are admitted now, people who are in the very top percentage of college grads, can’t hack the work and flunk out, you realize that the idea that swaths of students from even lower rungs of candidates would sail through med school belongs in the theater of the absurd. You’d prefer to have a tricky surgery done by one of the “tens of thousands”, than one of the doctors who have made the cut under the current system? Again, bullshit.
Blert’s comment regarding “arrogance” being taught in med school is similarly ignorant. Anybody familiar with any kind of medical training understands that it is humility, not arrogance, that is drilled into the students. New grads tend to be overly meek, not overly confident, in most fields, from techs on up to the physicians. Some do acquire arrogance over time, but the same could be said of any profession.
Commentary like Bob’s or Blert’s smacks of being uninformed, or deep resentment or envy. Most physicians are very, very smart, did work extemely hard to get where they are, and in practice work hard to stay up with current technology. The bulk of them are CONFIDENT, not arrogant. I couldn’t do it, but at least I admit it. I suspect a lot of those with resentment here couldn’t, either.
Good point Blert. I don’t know about the US but the reason we have a doctor shortage here is because the British medical association has always controlled the number of students getting into medicine. The are the doctor’s union & a very effectivunion they are, knowing that the best way to be indispensible is to keep a shortage of numbers. The basically got this power in the 1940s as a quid pro quo for not rocking the board when the governemt set up a national health service.
Exactly so Neil.
That’s the scheme used by the AMA in the States.
no mo uro is blinded by his perception filter.
Hence the self-defensive screed.
Again, for the slower comprehenders: America uses extra-territorial medical schools south of the border. These graduate the doctors that didn’t pass muster to attend at no mo uro’s medical school.
These extra-territorial institutions are dead nuts clones of our domestic ones and feature all classes in English, American MD’s as instructors and grant Medical Degrees accepted by the AMA. The classes are normally 100% white Americans. Any minority student with the brains to make the cut is going to be sucked up into a native institution and granted a scholarship: there aren’t enough to go around. As you might imagine the extra-territorial institutions do not have to play the Affirmative Action hustle.
This reality completely impeaches no mo uro’s thesis , period.
Even this is not enough talent to serve the market. So America accepts aliens en masse from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Britain… you name it. Most such doctors, what ever their talent, did not have the school quality of our extra-territorial medical schools — let alone Johns Hopkins or Mass General.
Yet we admit them to practice in the States in huge numbers, about 35% of our talent comes from this source. That’s astounding and immoral.
It’s immoral because we are free riding on third world intellectual capital at a critical node: life support. Look at the squalor in the 3rd world. Would it remain that way if the best and brightest were still in town? How successful can a society be if her best talent is constantly raided? How can her culture advance when her finest thinkers have gone to far shores? And not just a few… the many.
As for envy, resentment… give me a break.
I have so many astounding achievements to my credit if anything I have to guard against arrogance myself. If I were to list them all it would be vainglorious yet not probative. So I’ll spare you.
So there is no further point in rebuttal. Either you can do the math and reason — or not.
Did my last post make widdle Blert all angwy?
Wipe the foam off the keyboard and monitor of the computer and listen up, boy. It is not defense of self, but desire to maintain the best possible medical system, that motivates my comments here.
No rebuttal permitted? How very Stalinesque of you. Is this how you enter all your dealings in life? So much for open mindedness and intellect.
Here is the rebuttal (to which there will always be a point) of Blert’s angry, emotional, math-challenged, and narrow-minded post, not that his chippy attitude filter will allow him to comprehend it.
—”America uses extra-territorial medical schools south of the border. These graduate the doctors that didn’t pass muster to attend at no mo uro’s medical school.”
Amazing that someone who claims to be so very, very ‘astoundingly’ intelligent has such compromised reading comprehension. As I pointed out in my first post, I am not a physician and did not attend medical school. But I guess that you were so fired up at me for outing you regarding the anger and envy that, at least in part, motivates you, that you glossed that right over.
America ‘uses’? It appears to me that these people are choosing to enter our system – if they can – after graduating, not that the system is ‘using’ them. There is no central authority allocating funds, resources, or personnel. The AMA, as I understand it, is not a governing body but a private organization to which less than half of all doctors belong. Each state has its own board or committee that runs licensing and other regulations.
Interesting choice of terms, ‘uses’. Projection/paranoia on your part, perhaps? Are ‘those doctors’ out to get us all?
And I would point out that the idea that such “extraterritorial” schools exist was never questioned by me or anyone else. Their graduates also form and incredibly small percentage (currently less than 5%) of our physicians and an even smaller percentage of health care providers in general. 5% or less doesn’t even reach the level of scientific significance, statistically speaking. To suggest that because a small percentage of people can attend these schools and end up working in our health system in some capacity that ‘tens of thousands’ (your words) of lesser qualified people could enter the ranks of doctors without a diminution of quality is completely illogical. The first statement in no way is a proof of the second.
My original thesis? Unimpeached, unconvicted. So sorry. Better luck next time. For someone who claims to be a math genius, you certainly are lacking in the basics. Perhaps a few remedial courses in statistics and logic are necessary for you.
—”So America accepts aliens en masse from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Britain… you name it. Most such doctors, what ever their talent…”
That last phrase does you in, Blert. Your feeling is ‘So what if they’re awesomely talented physicians. Screw em. If they’re talented and vote with their feet, moving to America for a better life for themselves and their family (like pretty much every immigrant we’ve ever had), then too bad, they can’t come in and enhance both themselves and our nation.’
Does that sound right to anyone? I WANT talented people to immigrate here, it makes my nation better and stronger. But in Blert’s world, such attitudes are apparently forbidden.
And to your point about the U.S. “raiding” talent – how, exactly, can that verb be appropriate when those physicians (or people in any other field, for that matter) are voluntarily moving here? The problem is not the U.S. stealing talent. The problem is the rest of the world failing to make economies and political systems that are desirable for the most talented individuals. Of course the best and brightest want to come here. It’s the most logical thing for them to do. When the rest of the world fixes its little red wagon, this will cease to be a problem. And it’s up to them entirely to do so.
As to your boasts of an arm-long list of “astounding acheivements” that, like a poker player bluffing with ten high and a pair of nothing, you somehow cannot reveal in avoidance of vainglory – well, after picking myself up off the floor from several minutes of laughter after having read that statement, I would suggest that there are many competent psychiatrists – American trained, even – who can render you some assistance with your all-too-obvious life problems.
Take a step outside your mental comfort zone and read your comments on this thread, and ask youself if they are the writings of a rational grownup, or at minimum those of someone without some strong prejudice or a chip on their shoulder. If you’re being honest, you’d have to answer in the negative.
There are tons of problems with the health care system in the U.S. which need discussion and solutions. To engage in angry, negative, accusatory ad hominem generalizations about the personalities of physicians, and denigrations of their education and sacrifices early in their careers, even if it allow you to vent your own personal prejudices and makes you feel good, is unproductive and solves nothing.
Apologies for inappropriate italics.
I can’t help you then.
As if.
@ long post; non mo uro: “That last phrase does you in, Blert. Your feeling is ‘So what if they’re awesomely talented physicians [chemists]. Screw em.
Hey, non mo uro, Do you remember just who it was comprised the bulk of the “Doctors Plot” that planned to bring down 15 aircraft with women posing as mother’s with babies and the explosives in the plastic bottle’s of their “baby formula” ? (baby formula, nice touch)
Gee, I dunno, think it might’ve been doctors maybe? Or was the “Plot” just hatched in order to heep some more slander on doctors maybe? So’s John Edwards could sue.
Do a search and get back with the results of your “progress”.