An article from the Atlantic argues that the current system is broken, but broken in a way the “fix” doesn’t contemplate.
I’m a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America’s lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won’t do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.
As I’ve argued in the past, the health care system isn’t exclusively about health. It’s about who gets what under the current arrangements. The patients get something, but so do the lawyers and other actors which are at first blush, not obviously part of the system. The corollary of this is that “health care reform” gets to be shaped by the very same actors who not only want to preserve their slices of the pie, but expand their role. Maybe the best way to approach the health care debate is to start with the dramatis personae and design a system — not to deliver “health” — but to minimize the worst instincts of those whose fingers are gouging at the pie. Minimize the maximum damage and you maximize the minimum benefit.
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Yes, health care reform is about promoting government takeover of the 1/5th of the American economy that it still only owns half of.
Meanwhile, you have to wonder what the editorial staff at the Atlantic has been doing to allow such shoddy thinking to grace its pages. As I watch the budget of my state engulfed by the demands of the bottomless pit that the Mainecare “health safety net” has become, I find myself wondering about the origins of this long-term Democrat’s concern for the lack thereof.
And leaving aside the obvious falsehood that “only the government” can protect the poor etc., has he not gotten the memo about the end results of past government interventions? Is he/she too young to know about the devastation of the underclasses by the “Oh, Great!” Society? Or how about the current governmental enforcement of safety standards that has turned the Central Valley in CA into a dust bowl?
I used to think the Atlantic had class. Is it just that I’ve changed?
The Atlantic Monthly Magazine was bought a few years ago by some big bucks guy as a vanity purchase. Some rich guys but football teams, other, wineries. It was somewhat liberal before but had some rigor.
Today, it’s as bad as “Scientific American” but for non-geeks.
I would agree that we need lees insurance. The root of the problem with our current system is that the end user is not the payor. There is no incentive for the end user to shop around for better service and better prices.
Alas, it will never come to pass.
Obama has summed up what is ObamaCare will be if you like your US Postal Office service then the ObamaCare is for you.
“overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing”..
The entire government is a wealth transfer ponzi scheme with NO letup in sight….Ben Franklin saw it coming.
“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic”
Although found nowhere in the national archives or known writings of Benjamin Franklin, it is widely accepted that he once said “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
OK since we can’t find any known archieves on this (look in Sandy Burgers pants) we can’t really say BF said it. But it’s truth is crystal clear.
For those of you who do not know me (hard to believe, but surely there are some), I was my Mother’s full time caretaker the last 5 years of her life.
She was living independently, traveling, even to China, and generally having fun, when she was felled by a stroke which took all of her left side vision and awareness and leaving her with peripheral vision only on the right side. Physically she was as strong as an ox, mentally as sharp as ever. But the loss of vision meant she could not live alone anymore, so we sold her small retirement home and together bought a larger home where we could live together and have her grandson there too.
Here are my observations of problems in elder care. I don’t really have solutions, but these are the things that made her furious or affected me negatively as her caretaker.
First, because she was 90 when they took her to the hospital, it was automatically assumed she was incompetent and incoherent. She was neither and this treatment and dismissal of her infuriated her.
Second, the first course of action after the CAT scan and a couple of days in the ICU was to begin to drug her into oblivion, thereby proving to themselves that she really was incoherent and therefore incompetent.
Third, they tried like hell to run roughshod over me. I had all the required legal documents (my Mother was well prepared) and since my Mother was able to coherently tell me her day to day wishes, I was constantly trying to fight her battles for her and being stonewalled at every turn. When she begged me to “get me out of here before they kill me,” I took action to get her released from the hospital and they even tried to stop us with the police. To their credit, the police looked at my legal documents, then talked to my Mother and told the hospital to step back, she could leave if she wanted.
Fourth, once home, there is no avenue for reimbursement. I took over all the care the hospital was doing, provided lodging, food, clothes, transportation, daily business, and all her medical supply needs, but since she had retirement income, I could not claim her or her medical expenses on my taxes. In the meantime, I had left my own job, lost my own health insurance, and lost all the quarters I would have been paying into social security for my own retirement. In other words, there was a big penalty for taking her out from under Medicare paying high cost hospitalization. Not for my Mother necessarily, but certainly for me as the caretaker.
I have not recovered yet from those expenses and I’m still without health insurance. Also, when you leave the job market for five years and are well over 50, it is near impossible to come back in, even if you’d take almost anything, even at min. wage.
There are many elderly who are warehoused in nursing homes or under expensive hospital care who could be at home with full time help. We give incentives to families to become foster parents, why not incentives for those who are willing to give up their own lives to care for a parent they love and respect.
My Mother had Medicare plus Supplemental Blue Cross/Blue Shield and yet hardly any of the expense for her care, save a few doctor’s visits, were billed to either of these entities. I paid out of pocket since she preferred to live at home rather than be tied into a wheelchair, put in diapers, and drugged to keep her docile so a nursing home could rake in the Medicare bucks.
This whole debate will become impossible once we have in any way nationalized healthcare. Say you have a big problem with the situation of US healthcare and want to fine tune it then? Immeasurably more difficult once it has become a national institution. I have just had the most acrimonious debates with British friends who I am now finding out regard their NHS as a genuine national treasure, indeed they used precisely that term. These are good people, close friends, but they simply cannot think analytically about the state of their health care system now that it is unpatriotic even to criticize it. Hence, to Wretchard’s point, once a system become nationalized there another interest group, and much the largest, that makes clear transparent debate impossible: the general public that pours its legitimate love of nation and native culture into the national health system.
Ask an American about the US health care situation and he may have a strong opinion, but the idea that criticizing it is in any way un-American would seem ludicrous, even to the most libertarian minded of us. But a thoughtful, well educated Briton? You will find yourself suddenly in a bizarro-world where logic and rational argument are simply irrelevant, and emotion rules. Aint no way you gonna tear that security blanket off!
This is so sad for another bigger reason we can’t get into here, but since when did health care trump football, British rock, and the Queen as something worth fighting about? This suggests to me that nationalized healthcare has itself had a significant role in attenuating British culture. This most important argument is also the hardest to make in a rigorous fashion, but let’s not ignore it (although I’m sure nobody here would).
Mick, #6: This is so sad for another bigger reason we can’t get into here, but since when did health care trump football, British rock, and the Queen as something worth fighting about? This suggests to me that nationalized healthcare has itself had a significant role in attenuating British culture.
On this side of the Pond at least, it’s not just health care. Lately it has occurred to me that the political tribes we call “liberal” and “conservative” don’t necessarily have different degrees of patriotism, so much as that the former has a few more strings attached to their patriotism than the latter. To the former, an America that doesn’t embrace national health care, abortion rights, gay marriage, pacifism and such, and isn’t inclined to give any manner and number of special interests and fashionable causes a place at the public trough, isn’t recognizable as the country they thought they signed on to be patriotic toward.
One American doctor was the first to kill someone’s father many years ago, and the AMA stood firmly in his corner. Although it was an action that was likely warranted, and would be proper in many instances to come, the borderline cases would build and begin to stink, but the institution could or would not budge.
Eventually there was the first revenge killing. Or was it the first lawsuit? Even now it’s arguable which action would have served us better.
But never-mind that now — lawsuits became ever more the answer to a medical profession that was reluctant to pronounce one of its own negligent or worse.
One thing led to another. Insurance came in to protect against big law suits.
Medical cost increased to pay for the insurance.
Insurance grew to cover patients so they could pay for the increased costs.
Patients who had the bad luck to get sick before the costs escalated can’t get insurance without exclusions for their conditions.
And costs increase again.
Insurers, acting as negotiators, get reduced costs from medical companies not available to individuals, and the disparity increases.
Rather than cut the biggest costs — legal liabilities — the government responds to its biggest source of campaign funds — L A W Y E R S.
Meanwhile, insurance companies — regulated in line with “consumer protection” laws — make profits based upon a percentage of the costs, so while cutting legal costs would make sense for the consumer and society, the “protection laws” prevent them from being as profitable next year as this year if tort reform ever was passed by the government.
Ah yes Wretchard. “the health care system isn’t exclusively about health. It’s about who gets what under the current arrangements….
the lawyers and other actors which are at first blush, not obviously part of the system….
The corollary of this is that “health care reform” gets to be shaped by the very same actors who not only want to preserve their slices of the pie, but expand their role….”
Yes. Meanwhile the government tells us over the weekend taht they are abandoning the government option. To believe they are or are not going to expand their role — that is the question? Heroes Or Suckers?.
>
Once out of the closed door sessions in the House, once out of committee and into public view, Tea Parties and other demonstrations have indicated to the Obama administration that nationalized single payer Obamacare is dead. There are simply not enough Democrat votes in the Congress to pass it in its contemplated form. The Blue Dogs are running scared and the far left has vowed not to vote for anything if the Public Option is taken out. For this reason Obama has scaled back and is now pushing for insurance reform. It is not yet clear what this will entail, but if he signs a bill that removes pre-conditions and allows the market to set the fees, it will be a good first step toward realistic health care reform. And if he also miraculously defies the trial lawyers and gets tort reform, the country will be much the better for it. Tort reform looks like a non-starter for the Democrats, but even minimal insurance reform will be welcome, and Obama can trumpet it as a victory. But Obamacare is dead, possibly for all time, though that’s what Harry Truman thought when he buried the Henry Wallace Stalinist wing in 1948 only to see it rise from the ashes 20 years later in the person of George McGovern and take over the party.
I’m so relieved, the patient said
I thought they’d given me for dead
But now I see I’m kicking once again
I’m on my feet and feeling fine
I’m pleased to say that me and mine
Are once more in the land of laws not men
We raised ourselves in righteous wrath
We showed our congressmen the math
And said we would not take this lying down
At Tea Parties we let them know
That they no longer run the show
That we won’t sell free lives to DC town
And now Obamacare is done
And he no longer is the One
Who whistles and the pack does what he says
We knocked him down a peg or two
And let him know that you know who
Says take that stuff and stuff it in your fez
There is one quick fix for the insurance problem . Employers should stop paying premiums.
Instead give vouchers. The employee then shops for insurance on his or her own.
Insurers will have no choice then but to compete for business and prices will at least stabilize.
For some employers, costs could decline by as much as 60% (or so an initial read appears).
My company used to shell out $300 a month to give me 80% coverage. I could have gotten
the same thing (effectively) for $187. At age 63. This is illustrative of what cost benefits may be had.
In addition to which, the policies obtained via voucher are the same as those obtained via personal cash: They are fully portable
and eliminate the need for a separate COBRA arrangement.
What is the main problem with vouchers then?
The little problem is shortsighedness among CEOs and the like.
The big problem is that vouchers do nothing to jerk off the control freaks pusing Obamacare etc.
Richard, Could you explain what the health care system in Australia is? We hear many stories from Canada and the UK, Japan, Singapore, Germany, France and Switzerland — but nobody mentions Australia and New Zealand.
I do not believe our One Great Reader (or his writers) gives a rat’s ass about health care. Like the non-inadvertent so-called gaffe about Cambridge police “stupidly,” I suspect a huge red herring to absorb and enrage the conservative media, while the ants in the White House unobtrusively go about arranging the theft of the next election.
Sara (Pal2Pal), The Elephant’s Child:
The health care system in Australia is a public system supplemented by a private insurance scheme. The public system is paid for by taxes, and if you are a higher income person you get charged extra (the Medicare Levy). Many people (such as myself) have private health insurance, which in my case is paid out of pocket and for which I can get a small deduction in my taxes.
For ordinary aches and pains I think most people use the public system, but for high intervention conditions the public system is mostly left to the lower income people. If you’ve got cancer, want dental implants, or need a bypass you’re going to go to your private cover unless you’re a low income person. Treatment times and quality for people with serious diseases and private cover is comparable to the US system. Someone I know had an angina after lunch and was diagnosed by his cardiologist a couple of hours later and they did a stent that evening. Another person I know had breast cancer diagnosed on a Thursday and was operated on five days later, after a second opinion and all the necessary tests. I helped someone look through the survival rates for diseases and for that person’s disease (another cancer) Australia’s survival rates were an insignificantly lower number than the US one (which was the highest for that cancer) and much higher than Britain’s, which were horrible. So if you’ve got private health insurance then response times and quality are very good.
One other thing is that private health insurance works on a “gap coverage” system. It recognizes the fact that you’ve paid your taxes (if you’re a higher income person) and allows you to reclaim the equivalent expense of public health treatment. Your private insurance covers the difference up to a maximum. So let’s suppose a public procedure would have cost X dollars. I want an operation done by the best man in the country, and he charges 1.75X dollars. At billing time, the government will pay the X dollars and my insurance will pick up the balance. If you have got a good insurance plan, you may walk out of it with almost nothing out of pocket.
But the main thing about private is you get options and speedy service, plus generally good accomodations. The better private hospitals are pretty nice. Even the public hospitals, though darker and shabbier, aren’t horrors, just tattered.
That brings up a second point. The Australian public health care system is probably not as loaded up as the British one, because the people with private cover leave the public system to the low income folks. This means that even the public system has a pretty good performance. I think I speak for most when I say that most people want to keep their private insurance because it guarantees significantly faster and often better service than the public option and this actually works in favor of the poor, who get more resources to use.
The elderly get a pretty good deal in Oz, but it’s not clear how long that’s going to continue because of the declining birth rates. In many cases there is some assistance for people who want to live at home and I know a couple who have tended their quadraplegic son at home for a long time. One thing that helps Oz is the relative peacefulness and homogeneity of the population. Public housing is still relatively crime free, and the culture is still robust enough to discourage “youths”, so older people often help each other instead of cowering in fear in some kind of Robert Taylor Homes or Cabrini Green.
Things are pretty bad for the aborigines, who are (in large part due to left wing insistence) shut up in anthropological museums out in the middle of nowhere, literally a hundred miles from the nearest police station in places ruled by criminal gangs of “elders” and welfare people, and of course, the liquor store man. The aborigines would have been far better served, in my opinion, if they were simply treated as ordinary Australians. Then they would have become jet pilots, doctors and lawyers by now, there being absolutely nothing wrong with them that an escape from the reservation wouldn’t cure.
But I have to say that Oz is a completely different society from the US. It’s like a giant small town, with all that is good and bad about it, and therefore the culture makes certain things possible that you could never achieve in some large US cities.
Up on my soap box again:
I am all in favor of tort reform, severance of medical care insurance from employment, ability to purchase insurance across state lines, availability of catastrophic illness-only plans, and better ways of transmitting medical records while maintaining security. However, I do not think it possible to reduce the growth in costs of medical care while getting the quality of care we want for ourself and loved ones (including more time for the doctor to listen to our symptoms and advise us about his findings and recommendations) unless we reduce the increasing number of patients resulting from the increasing amount of illness (perhaps 30-40% of all medical care costs) caused by poor personal health care.
Since I do not want our daily lives to be monitored, I prefer making persons bear the financial responsibility of poor personal health care by increasing the cost of medical care insurance premiums for those whose behavior increases medical care costs–as life insurance premiums are increased for obesity and smoking.
Off my soap box. Be healthy.
Jim
12 Comments
1. maineman:
“Oh, Great!” Society? Or how about the current governmental enforcement of safety standards that has turned the Central Valley in CA into a dust bowl
……
sheesh. the court set aside the water alotment for a baitfish called the delta smelt
ABC: Judge Cuts Water to California Farmers to Save Endangered Fish
The result is that a swath of 200 miles or so of the central valley is now a dust bowl with a blue canal running through it.
The water feeds LA county and the delta smelt…leaving the farmers high and dry.
So the California sells out farmers so as to cater to the interests of illegal aliens and bait fish.
Nothing personal mind you.
Never mind that the farmers being shut down are actually substantial tax payers. The state doesn’t need the money.NOT.
Josh:
I refer to that as the Left’s “subjunctive patriotism.” They don’t love America so much as the possibilities pregnant within America. They love what she could become…if only…
Conservatives want to change a lot about the US, but the natural vice of conservatives here, their nostalgia for an America that in some ways probably never really existed, insulates them from loving “in the subjunctive” a vision that they will roll over the Constitution to realize. Conservatives’ likely delusion is focused on an America that they believe at least really existed and still survives as a substrate of the present day. Liberals love an America that has yet to be realized and beckons just beyond the horizon, if only they could just get there fast enough.
An excellent article, really – if you bother to read all 18 pages of it. My wife worked as a PA in a top hospital for 8 years and believes the author nailed it pretty good. It is not an article you’d expect to have come out of a liberal magazine at the same time their President is pushing for socialization.
The doctors killed both my parents.
My Mama when I was just a kid, my Daddy when I was thirty eight years old.
I never sued, grief and stupidity I guess.
I often wonder if I should have.
Papa Ray
West Texas
The Australian system seems very much similar to the Singapore one. No matter how I see it, a basic public system with a private tier to cater for those who can pay for it (either thru insurance or out-of-pocket) seems the optimal solution.
In fact, I would note that the same observations Wretchard made for healthcare apply very much to education as well. Allowing for more private education will result in less loading on the public sector and enable it to cater better to lower income families, like say, smaller class sizes and more teacher attention to unlock student potential.
Please–the whole thing about health care is distorted by warped expectations.
For most working people the plain fact is that they could afford medical insurance that would live up to their expectations, but it would mean they would have to cut back on their current lifestyle to afford it.
The poor, contrary to misrepresentations, do get health care. Its illegal to turn anyone away from an emergency room in the US, and an “emergency” is pretty much whatever the person coming into the ER claims it to be.
The national shame is that everyone expects “someone else” to have to pay for their health care. What the middle class doesn’t seem to get is that if there is any shift in the payment arrangement that creates jobs for a multitude of (oxymoron) federal workers, they are still going to be stuck with the bill, and it will probably be a lot higher than anything they have now.
Regarding the two tier AU system, no one in the US believes we’ll be allowed a workable two tier system. You’ll have private coverage for the ultra-rich and public for the rest of us.
You’ll see something like what we have today for schools. A major factor in where you buy your house is the quality of the local schools because private education is too expensive or religious. Hence home-schooling is more fashionable, as it may be cheaper to not work than pay for private.
They will rig the health system such that they are the only game in town.
In some ways, the Australian system is like a school voucher system for health. Read this definition of the school voucher system in Wikipedia. You can think of your Australian medicare card as a charge card into your “voucher” for a certain medical procedure. If the procedure is “bulk billed”, it is provided at the public rate and you walk out with zero costs apart from what you paid into the system via taxes. If you want a better than bulk-billed, either because it is not offered bulk-billed and you are unwilling to enter the indigent system where it is, or want immediate or what you think is better service, then you can choose another doctor. Then he charges the public system up to the voucher amount and you either top it up from your pocket or your private insurer. My insurance isn’t linked to employment, though it isn’t any good outside of Oz. So it’s portable throughout Australia.
Interestingly, I was at a public policy forum some time ago and listened to a speaker explain how the current government is trying to change the tertiary schooling system to a disguised voucher system because the Left won’t stand for a voucher, but since the current education minister is under pressure to produce, she’s hanging all kinds of fake mustaches and phony spectacles on it so that it looks like a government funded, leftist acceptable system but under the hood it has many voucher properties. I found that really interesting, because down deep people know what works. It isn’t rocket science. Getting past the politics is rocket science, so they have to jump through hoops to pussyfoot their way into an obvious solution.
The other interesting thing is that many services are actually provided by the States and the Commonwealth (the Oz Federal Government) really acts like a tax collector and money dispenser. It’s really the source of their power and the States hate it. Many Australian States would like to get the tax powers back so they can compete with other states, but it’s unlikely to happen. That opened my eyes to the fact that many government programs don’t actually “do” anything; they are money collection and disbursement schemes to people who actually “do” something.
“This is a big-stakes battle: If we cross this bridge, there’s no going back. Being “moderate” is not a good strategy. It risks delivering the nation to the usual reach-across-the-aisle compromise that will get Democrats far enough across the bridge that the Big Government ratchet effect will do the rest.”
Mark Steyn, who as a born Canadian doth knowe welle of whence he wax wrothen.
Amazing post, Pal2Pal (do you prefer “Sara?”)
I am in awe of people who can make that kind of commitment.
Meanwhile…
I don’t want to look to the UK for anything (and certainly not health care) until they wake from their narcoleptic surrender to the insane hard left and Militant Islamists. An article in the online Telegraph.co.uk dated 15 August, with the byline of Patrick Sawyer tells us that a number of public swimming pools in Britain have instituted rules requiring ALL visitors to wear bathing attire conforming to prevailing MUSLIM standards of modesty.
Britain
is
circling
the
drain.
It doesn’t take much of a diviner to predict blood running in the gutters before a few more winters have passed.
On this side of the pond, there is so much bovine bowel filler being bandied about by this crop of lying bastards, I wouldn’t be surprised if the demise of a certain high-profile song&dance person was actually part of a deliberate plan of mass distraction…
There are persistent unquenchable rumors, mind, that Norma Jean Baker was dispatched by a sedative injection to a hidden portion of her anatomy, to protect the reputations of the insatiable K brothers. (Wonder if Ted has any knowledge of that…)
Funny, Josef Stalin is widely reported to have murdered his wife Nadyezhda Aliluyeva. When that story kept coming up in various sources I was reading, it finally struck me that in some ways it’s less significant worrying about whether he did or didn’t murder her – GOD KNOWS, he murdered tens of millions of other folks without batting an eye. But it tells us encyclopedias of information to consider that everyone in Russia took it for granted that he did, but they still regarded him as their proper leader.
I’m afraid there is another obvious lesson in there, and I don’t even wanna say it.
That opened my eyes to the fact that many government programs don’t actually “do” anything; they are money collection and disbursement schemes to people who actually “do” something.
Yes–and they typically take a big cut of the expense for their services.
Many wail about how interest groups distort and corrupt things. I will not deny this at all. But why is it that so many people fail to see the people employed by the government as an interest group too? And why should they be judged less harshly than any other interest group?
At what point does the tail start wagging the dog?
tcobb, one advantage to facing the fact that most of the gov’t is itself a jobs program, is that the country could improve the economy tremendously just by paying most of the government not to work but to not work.
18. Mick:
Vacuous and simply riddle with sophistry.
I think we need the lawyers to keep the doctors on their feet and honest. (I hear the boos) They make enough mistakes cutting off the wrong leg and such as it is and if the cap were say 50k per incident with a good portion of that going to the lawyers there would not be much suing going on. Might save money but do you want Richard Pryor operating on you? (This is not a shot at blacks, just the only comedian I could think of who played an incompetent doctor)
A cap of 4 or 5 million might be in order, or some lesser but reasonable amount.
Adjusted for the coming inflation, of course.
Habu:
Pardon? Still puzzling your gnomic utterance.
I made a simple point about messianism on the left. For whatever vices we conservatives have, and we are as a group far from immune from certain tendencies, we do not suffer from an earthly messianism that gives us permission to commit whatever barbarity in the name of realizing utopia. Libertarians might argue that barbarities are committed in the name of security (I am not one such), but the all consuming “fierce urgency of now” to make immanent an earthly eschaton…that is not a typically conservative vice.
Objectionable? Maybe to some readers, but hardly an example of sophistry, as ordinarily understood.
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/12224-Monday-morning.html
bob, take a look at the campaign donation chart. mercy dats a lotta dough.
buddy @25:
“Being “moderate” is not a good strategy.” Exactly. So many of us see that the compromise is the aim.
After reading of the announced “pullback” on Saturday morning, it fired me up to write “Heroes Or Suckers?” that I linked at 9 above. In it I noted that the tactic here is social engineering with a simple 3-step orchestration, like a walt(z).
The charade we’re denouncing is so transparent to so many that it has provoked me to write another polemic I’ve not yet completed “The Progressive Sneer.”
Wretchard and Tcobb “At what point does the tail start wagging the dog?”
Why, that’s just before we enter the Post-Altruistic Era.
Buddy @28 “the country could improve the economy tremendously just by paying most of the government not to work but to not work.”
Channeling Reagan again, eh? ”
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
BTW: Here’s Reagan’s 1961 speech against socialized medicine.
Forgive me if it’s been posted before. Quite germane to the discussion so should not be missed. Especially given the likelihood of the RINOs waiting in the wings who claim awe of Reagan but are nevertheless ready to jump at “the compromise that will stave off ObamaCare!”
http://www.bing.com/search?q=1961+speech+by+Reagan+on+national+health+care&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox
Try a little Bing, Pascal!
(my fave RR)
“Government can’t solve the problem, government IS the problem!”
oops, edit tool is missing –PF is being answered, not challenged, in #35 above –it’s just that in the interim he found the speech and edited it in, and now i can’t edit out…oh hell i’m gointobed
Since RR has been brought into the discussion, I think a little TJ (Thomas Jefferson) is in order here:
-Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
-The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
-A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.
-It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.
-My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
-I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Buddy, yes, I did initially not have the Reagan Speech, but I found it before the 10 minute edit function expired.
How come the emails get sent out before the item is posted anyway?
Not that I’ve not had some fun with it. Last week, when I was discussing Pogo with Buddy, I had a quip in the text. Each time I edited the text I felt oddly compelled to alter the quip. Pogo fans would have gotten a chuckle from that if they could have seen the quips changing. As I was doing it, I remembered how the ones “painted on” Pogo’s swamp boat always changed frame to frame, and that only encouraged me until the time expired. (
As if with my OCD I need that kind of encouragement.)
Dick Morris believes that in a “follow the money” way, the whole debate is about cutting Medicare, to the tune of half a trillion, and using the money to pay for Illegal Immigrant health care.
That would be on a par with Obama’s stated goals, it IS about killing grandma, and using the money for young, illegal immigrants. Hence the anger of the elderly at the ObamaCare Town Halls.
Morris believes the Public Option is a distraction, not the real goal, but that it will simply be called “co-ops” and me made the same thing in Senate-House conference and rammed through in committee with a simple majority vote. But that, again, the real issue is to take money from Medicare (gut it, actually) and use the money to cover illegals.
I have to say, he’s right. Democrats have been at war with the Elderly (too White, too conservative) since Colorado’s Dick Lamm detailed their “Duty to Die” and make way for young people who had different colored skin. Presumably the “correct” shade, which certainly is not White. Privately, the Obama White House has assured Dems who are facing defeat in elections that they will be appointed to Federal positions or hired as lobbyists. It’s doubtful that many trust his word, Obama having gone back on it so many times, but there are always fools.
Morris of course has his own personal anti-Clinton axe to grind, but he seems correct on this on. Obama is picking a fight that would on the face of it net him little. Yet if you see it as a massive patronage operation, taking money from the Elderly in violation of the contract made with them decades ago, and also the middle aged, to give to young poor illegals who Obama belives (as do nearly all Dems) “deserve it more” by virtue of skin color and the illegals being, well not Americans, then it makes perfect sense. The elderly and middle aged know it too. Hence their rage.
I think what is needed for the elderly and middle aged is FEAR. Fear struck into the very heart of the political class. Lawsuits demanding minutes of private meetings with lobbyists. Lawsuits alleging fraud or conflict of interest violations against political class lobbyists, particularly friends of various Congressmen and Senators, and more. Digging into the private affairs to find any and every embarrassing secret of not only the Politicians, but their family, friends, and business associates — and publicizing it as was done to Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean. We ought to see more of Al Gore’s son, and his booking photos and substance abuse. We ought to see every embarrassing mis-step by the children of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and YES Barack Obama. There ought to be no limit, no stone unturned, and no measure not taken. Most importantly, no target to shoot back at. If one group uncovers unhealthy information about the family of Dick Durbin (to use a random example), another unconnected should look into the private life of Al Franken, his family, and friends. And punish them by disclosing any and every humiliating detail they could find.
This was certainly done to Palin, to Prejean, to Joe the Plumber. The latter two trivial private citizens who had almost no impact on public life.
It’s time for the “bosses” i.e. the political class AND their allies AND their families to feel the same pain back. The reply of the British of the Blitz with their own night-bombing.
In this way, through fear, and only through fear, deep and pervasive, can the “bosses” be brought to heel. Not just with fear of losing an election (they’ll simply go into lobbying) but fear of indictment, humiliation, pain, and destroyed family life. Swords have two edges and this one should be sent back onto it’s original wielders. It is the only weapon in any case seniors and middle aged people have.
Officeholders have already told the people they are the “boss” and in safe districts fear little, at worst they will simply become lobbyists. Time to change that game through total destruction. Obama and company CERTAINLY aim to kill the elderly. Make no mistake.
“‘health care reform’ gets to be shaped by the very same actors who not only want to preserve their slices of the pie, but expand their role.” –Wretchard
That makes too much sense and is not political correct.
Now, come on Wretchard, quit picking on the poor, vulnerable, and the weak!
Quit picking on the US Federal Government, the 0bama Administration, and the K Street Lobbyist.
In fact, if you don’t stop this “Tea Party Terrorism” and “Fear Mongering” I will have to Flag you and turn you over to White House. Now, let me find that website.
Damit! The website has been taken down!
…But, I think Axelrod has an email address for people like you…if I can just find it.
@6 Sara
“I took over all the care the hospital was doing, provided lodging, food, clothes, transportation, daily business, and all her medical supply needs, but since she had retirement income, I could not claim her or her medical expenses on my taxes.”
You need a good tax professional.
whiskey #39 “Not just with fear of losing an election (they’ll simply go into lobbying) but fear of indictment, humiliation, pain, and destroyed family life.”
In reality, how many politicians, leftist ones in particular, really give a damn about their family? For too many politicians, family members, like all human beings, are mere props. And with our easy divorce, they’ll simply start a new family if the current one is shattered, without another thought.
And politicians, since Mayor Curley and beyond, have been indicted, even incarcerated, and yet have come back to be in positions of power again.
I agree about the need to Palinize leftist politicians, but the smackdown needs to be of a more or less permanent nature, as in lifetime incarceration.
Well, whaddya know. Old Near Beer is about halfway right in his #39. He is right up there with Pat Buchanan who recently opined that elderly would be “losers” and minorities would be “winners”.
The first part is right. Medicare etc would be hamstrung and not just financially. (Military and veterans would also be hung out to dry.) But ethnic minorities would not get one damned thing that they do not have now.
The whole Obamaappeal is rooted in envy. Not the desire to help one another and/or to improve the lot of the (alleged) have-nots. But to punish and impoverish the (alleged) haves for their (alleged) misdeeds.
Now who was it that said Sarah Palin could no longer be effectual?
She said “Death Panels” and the Senate dropped those provisions like a hot potato. Shades of “Evil Empire”!
What we MAY get out of all this is competing Senate and House versions that have too many irreconcilable differences for a conference committee to get anything done. (Death Panels and public opiton might well be two of the sticking points.
(Hey Buddy! Ain’t ya plumb busting yer buttons at what yer heartthrob done? Speak up lad! Cat got your tongue, or sumpin?)
Three modern health-care outcomes: (i)Many, even top quality practitioners, abandon their specialities when the burden of litigation (and subsequently insurance premiums) become ridiculous; (ii) once government is in charge the scale of fees payable under their schemes is eroded to unviable levels, and (iii) at the same time the “administration” class becomes numerous, top heavy, meddling and inefficient.
Did Obama Try Too Much, Too Soon Well, Duh – Coop’s Corner – CBS News
“All the strained comparisons of Obama to Franklin Roosevelt were a tipoff that many were talking themselves into the idea that the 2008 election created an opportunity for a substantial, leftward shift in policy. Yet the election of 2008 was not like the 1932 contest. It wasn’t like 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1980, 1984, or even 1988, either. Obama’s election was narrower than all of these. FDR won 42 of 48 states. Eisenhower won 39, then 41. Johnson won 44 of 50. Nixon won 49. Reagan won 44, then 49. George H.W. Bush won 40. Obama won 28, three fewer than George W. Bush in his narrow 2004 reelection.”
You can’t argue with the numbers.
This is why I have been saying for a while now that campaign finance and electoral reform is THE challenge of our age. Until we can fix the incentives of the legislators, the legislation will never get done right. The legislators need to be focused 100% on what’s right for the electorate, and nothing else.
Whiskey, no mo uro;
You cannot shame a snake. These people only care about their power. If their power is threatened, they will fight. If you shame them they will ignore you. See Barney Frank.
They have to be removed from office.
WSJ has a good rendition of the Panel which will determine our fate. Sara would be placed in the position of pleading her mothers fate.
I have an aunt who is 103. She had surgery 8 years ago for an intestinal blockage. It was an encapsulated tumor. She’s had additional surgery since. Under this proposed system she would have been told to go home and die. Palin’s blunt reference to death panels is right and without nuance. This scheme is evil.
The problem with a ‘voucher’ system where money runs through government is the overhead of the government on the ‘voucher’ system. That is a non-zero cost and predicated on the ability of that part of government to work efficiently. Having been in the US Federal Government working in the costing of work hours and burdening, the money you get out of the system is the ‘burdened’ money that has overhead to it to run the system. Your money goes in ‘unburdened’ with only the overhead of the tax collection system to it (which is an added cost, on its own). To transfer money within any government requires accountability and, thus, less money gets through as the cost of oversight must be included in that transfer. That transfer cost can be mitigated, but I’ve had problems finding any less than 10% burden on intra-government transfers due to overhead of accounting and tracking.
I tracked down the efficiency numbes for government agencies while I was an active employee in the 90′s and found my agency to be considered in a ‘top tier’ of lowest overhead agencies. Our burden rate, indeed that of the category, was 35%. None of these agencies were in ‘human services’ or tax collection. Most of HHS ran to 55% burden…
So lets take a look at that dollar in taxes and see what it gets you in return. Now that original collection 35% is on spent money not collected, so your tax dollars, in theory, fly through the collections agency like a hot knife through butter. In fact some gets lost to accounting within the agency, but lets give that a wash and say it doesn’t happen. Next comes the transfer 10%, which for the dollar you put in means 90 cents gets to its destination. Using HHS and its 55% burden rate, gets you 40.5 cents for actual agency activities. The dollar you put in for that ‘voucher’ means that your portion of that ‘voucher’ is far less than you had when you put money into the system. Even worse is that the voucher system, itself, has bureaucratic tracking and controls to it that include private insurers who then must spend time PROCESSING those funds and accounting for them. Taking an industry standard efficiency rate (from the US, that is) of 20% burdened cost, you then apply that and get a real value of 32.4 cents. When government dictates prices below market prices for any procedure and it is lower than market rates, the end provider must absorb not only that lower rate but absorb the burdening of those funds to pay for the procedure and its accounting to the government.
Every time money shifts around inside government, each sub-unit is responsible for cost accounting and controls in EACH direction. Thus your money supports inflow and outgo at the taxation end, the receiving agency end intra-government, then in and out for the outside provider.
Each and every time Congress adds more ‘oversight’ via another layer of bureaucracy, you not only have the tracking loss but the internal loss that accrues to that sub-unit. And the laws handling each of these realms is different, so requires either a very high paid staff or duplicate staff to cover each area, and that is at the highest, agency level end, but must be replicated through the internal agency organs that finally deliver a ‘voucher’ to you.
As the HHS is already at its limits for personnel for SSN and other fine and lovely programs, getting ‘health care’ even if it is a ‘voucher’ system will require a large overhead of bureaucrats to run the thing. And as government has no need to make a profit, it has zero incentives to be efficient with your money. And every regulation, every ‘good thing’ that gets put into bills for government gains that overhead of personnel to track it as it is the law.
Too bad you can’t invest that money and have a hope of a decent return.
Or give it to charity to truly let the people who have an interst in cutting cost do so… but for that you need to stop subsidizing health care from government and wasting the taxpayers dollars for high overhead, low return systems from government. But then we are so used to the statist and corporate view that we forget that WE are supposed to be providing these things and are the ones responsible to our fellow man. Not government or corporations. Too bad no one wants to take personal responsibility for their health care dollars any more. We are all poorer for it.
IT’S ALL A DEATH PANEL: THE TRUTH ABOUT OBAMACARE
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on August 17, 200
Washington is all atwitter about “death panels”: President Obama derides the idea that his health-care reform calls for them; the Senate is stripping “end of life” counseling language from its bill — and last Friday the voice of the liberal establishment, The New York Times, ran a Page One story “rebutting” the rumor that ObamaCare would create such boards to decide when to pull the plug on elderly patients.
But all those protests miss the fundamental truth of the “death panel” charge.
Even without a federal board voting on whom to kill, ObamaCare will ration care extensively, leading to the same result. This follows inevitably from central features of the president’s plan.
Specifically, his decisions to (1) pay for reform with vast cuts in the Medicare budget and (2) grant insurance coverage to 50 million new people, vastly boosting demand without increasing the supply of doctors, nurses or other care providers.
Whether or not he admits it even to himself, Obama’s talk of cutting “inefficiencies” and reducing costs translates to less care, of lower quality, for the elderly. Every existing national health system finds ways to deny state-of-the-art medications and necessary surgical procedures to countless patients, and ObamaCare has the nascent mechanisms to do the same. With the limited options that Obama’s vision would leave them, many will find that “end of life counseling” necessary and even welcome.
“Reform” would cut care to the elderly in several ways:
* Slash hundreds of billions from Medicare spending, largely by lowering reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals for patient care.
If a hospital gets less money for each MRI, it will do fewer of them. If a surgeon gets paid less for a heart bypass on a Medicare patient, he’ll perform them more rarely. These facts of the marketplace are not only inevitable consequences of Obama’s cuts but are also its intended consequence. Without them, his savings will prove illusory.
* Expanding the patient load by extending full coverage to 50 million Americans (including such “Americans” as illegal immigrants) without boosting the supply of care will force rationing decisions on harried and overworked doctors and hospitals.
People with insurance use a lot more health-care resources — so today’s facilities and personnel will have to cope with the increased workload. Busy surgeons will have to decide who would benefit most from their treatment — de facto rationing. The elderly will, inevitably, be the losers.
* The Federal Health Board, established by this legislation, will be charged with collecting data on various forms of treatment for different conditions to assess which are the most effective and efficient. While the bills don’t force providers to obey the board’s “guidance,” its recommendations will still wind up setting the standards and protocols for care systemwide.
We’ve already seen Medicare and Medicaid lead a similar race to the bottom with their formularies and other regulations. With Washington dictating what every policy must cover and regulating all rates, insurers and providers will all have to follow the FHB’s advice on limiting care to the elderly — a de facto rationing system.
* In assessing whether to allow certain treatments to a given patient, medical professionals will be encouraged to apply the Quality-Adjusted Remaining Years system. Under QARY, decision-makers seek to “amortize” the cost of treatment over the remaining “quality years of life” likely for that patient.
Imagine a hip replacement costing $100,000 and the 75-year-old who needs it, a diabetic with a heart condition deemed to have just three “quality” years left. That works out to $33,333 a year — too steep! Surgery disallowed! (Unless of course, the patient has political connections . . . )
Younger, healthier patients would still get the surgery, of course. The QARY system simply aims to deny health care to the oldest and most infirm, “scientifically” condemning them to infirmity, pain and earlier death than would otherwise be their fate.
In short, ObamaCare doesn’t need to set up “death panels” to make retail decisions about ending the lives of individual patients. The whole “reform” scheme is one giant death panel in its own right.
Will Affirmative Action apply to these ‘death panels’? Will only the older whites be bumped off early?
Inquiring white minds want to know.
Agree with ledger @ 42 – Sara needed a better accountant/ tax professional / tax lawyer
Somewhat OT… But I think as the tax burden becomes increasingly weighty (Obamacare, cap and trade, [insert Big Gov't program], etc.), and the middle class continues to suffer from the current economic downturn, Americans will be gaming the tax system more than ever before.
Those in the tax business like to say that America’s real national pastime is tax avoidance. They ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The Depression and the increasing tax burden, along with the growing sense that punitive and confiscatory federal taxation is a form of tyranny, well, people are fed up. The IRS relies on voluntary truthful reporting to make the system work. When Americans lose faith in the institutions of government, it is easy to predict that Americans will resent paying taxes to further support those institutions. Result – possible system crash.
Friends – I urge you, consult tax professionals who can counsel you to fully claim the deductions and/or credits you are (arguably) entitled to. For those of you with significant assets and income, even consider hiring a tax attorney for advice. While I’m an advocate of tax code simplification, it’s pretty clear that isn’t an option right now, so do your best to keep more of money.
Here Lies Bobby Joe Blight
They Didn’t Treat Him Just Right
They Bumped Him Off Early
Though He Was Still Quite Burly
Cause His Skin Was A Milky Fine White
seen on a future tombstone
Being poor should be a painful experience. Matter of fact it should kill you if you don’t do something about it. And do it quickly. All of this molly coddling and half measure compromise policy crap is going to do nothing less than end any hope of humanity ever growing beyond the pitiful wretches we are now. Humans never do anything without incentive. The notion that government, any type of government beyond that specifically outlined in the constitution can be helpful is adolescent fantasy.
Time to grow up and grow a pair.
Knock it off Bob @55, &53 & ….
Every old timer here knows that just about forever I’ve been crusading against Malthusianism and Eugenics and Marxism every other form of misanthropy that usually starts from the top down.
Blacks were and have been the target of those programs from the earliest times, and will continue to be simply based upon momentum. The implementers had to start somewhere, and so chose those who they found it easiest could be led to their own destruction — by pretending to be their friends.
The “progressives” welfare state led to the demise of the black family and to black babies being the largest numbers aborted, to say nothing of what violence in the community does to itself.
But in this country, the demise of the middle class with all it’s whites has ALWAYS been the plum target of the idle rich who fund misanthropic groups.
Your repeated attempt to make it appear that only whites are the current target — that it is ONLY black payback — makes it look like you’re a Øbama troll wants to discredit this site and its participants by branding us with guilt by association — with you and your noxious quips.
Knock it off; if not you, then someone with authority, please do it for him.
Knock it off Bob @55, &53 & ….
Every old timer here knows that just about forever I’ve been crusading against Malthusianism and Eugenics and Marxism every other form of misanthropy that usually starts from the top down. (There are two links above, and another at my URL).
Blacks were and have been the target of those programs from the earliest times, and will continue to be simply based upon momentum. The implementers had to start somewhere, and so chose those whom they found it easiest could be led to their own destruction — by pretending to be their friends.
The “progressive” welfare state led to the demise of the black family and to black babies being the largest numbers aborted, to say nothing of what violence in that community has done to itself.
But in this country, the demise of the middle class with all it’s whites has ALWAYS been the plum target of the idle rich who fund misanthropic groups.
Your repeated attempt to make it appear that only whites are the current target — that it is ONLY black payback — makes it look like you’re an Øbama troll who wants to discredit this site and its participants by branding us with guilt by association — with you and your racialist quips.
Knock it off; if not you, then someone with authority, please do it for him.
======
Sorry for the double post. I thought I had killed the send the first time, and by the time I had located and added the links and completed the edits and refreshed the page, I found that the original had been sent and time had expired to erase it.
That’s the first time I’ve been called an Obama troll.
I think you read me wrong, and take me too seriously.
Your repeated attempt to make it appear that only whites are the current target
That’s not really what I meant at all.
But AA does target whites, and Whiskey is right, Obama doesn’t like whites.
Nevertheless, Bob, both your and whiskey’s language plays into the tyrant’s need to “provide that you don’t love each other” — Tocqueville.
Many in the black community ought to and will turn on Øbama but for their fear of a white racist uprising.
Dave/45; yah, she got me swoonin wit dat alright –adroit in every way, including how well she hid the ambush –dialing up the apoplexy where it was most visible to an increasingly enlightened (and disturbed) Joe & Jane Citizen.
JFS/56; right you are –and there’s a helluva sociological revolutionary statement in there waiting to be writ & proclaimed.
what government can do is establish a tax that charges everyone roughly equal percentages of income. This has to be as low as possible because income tax is a tax on productivity. Basic axiom!
What’s the number? 15% give or take a point or two either way. Flat Tax Now!
Bob’s your uncle… NOT. Cute bob, not in a funny way. Childish. But not funny. Lets just say bob is the new left…
Actually, the more I think about it, in this day and age, I believe I really might be able to imagine Affirmative Action demands at the end of life.
Here’s the New Leftist that I’m backing to take back our House seat from Walt Minnick, for what it’s worth.
ah, just google Vaughn Ward. Personable, nice looking, articulate young man, veteran too.
bob, sometimes your the windshield and sometimes your the bug.
Luddy, Flat tax is good. I believe the Fair Tax is best. NO TAX would be perfect. But then you have a situation where people wouldn’t pay their way…
JFSanders031,
If you use Twitter and you are into the Fair Tax http://twitter.com/FairTaxNancy
Stuart Varney’s foxbiznews show today featured a Coer D’Alene oncologist named Steve Iacoboni (sp?).
He said that a judicious, fair, non-destructive to care quality, tort reform eliminating the jackpot jury, brass ring grab, frivolous lawsuit and THREAT of same (“settle me and i’ll go away, you DO know our lawsuit will disrupt your life and your practice”) is adding at least 30% and likely 40% hard-dollar (that’s not to include the moral costs and the opportunity costs of steering vitally-needed high-functioning youngsters away from the profession) costs to the system.
I wonder, why couldn’t a doc or a private facility end-run this horrid rent-seek via offerring patients an optional no-fault contract which would lower fees by some large enough fraction to encourage not only the deal, but in the end a whole new patient-pays-directly movement?
Back to a two-party transaction, but not via the hopelessly impossible DC-centric top-down behemoth, but via grass-roots, bottom-up, according to what-works?
You know, a Gordian Knot kinda thing?
Classic theory holds that such a huge rent-seek in a transaction must open an opportunity in the negative space. So it’s already there, we just have to “see” it.
Obama ‘hates’ these sorts of localized transactions, becuz, as he’s said, “sometimes people do get hurt, and need to have recourse”.
Fine, so that’s that? “Here be Dragons”?
Specific truth in service to general lie. becuz there is tort, the tort bar must run wild. we all pay 40% more, because of a wrongdoing that cannot amount to more than a percent (and that’s a stretch) –dammit –use your head, people!
Luddy! ON THE MONEY! How jubilant I would be if the day came that Federal and State government was excised from the daily life of 99.5% of all citizens of this great country. If all you really had to concern yourself with on a daily basis was your local government. My euphoria would be without limit.
Insanity in jury awards in aircraft manufacturer product liability cases over several decades killed the US private aircraft manufacturing industry.
Not surprisingly, civil law doesn’t seem to require juries to meet some standard of sanity or logic. First one, then another, then a flood began returning judgments that found pilot error was 95 percent of the cause, a faulty 45-year-old part was 05 percent responsible for the accident, and we the generous and benevolent jury award damages in the amount of 100 million dollars payable by the part manufacturer to the pilot’s survivors. What the heck! The manufacturer can afford it, right?
Thanks tort lawyers, for all your help.
(Evidently, legislation in the 1990′s specific to civil aviation industry placed caps on liability awards that have encouraged Piper, Cessna, and others to re-open US facilities.)*
We all have to start running for Congress ourselves. Unlike many regular jobs, having a criminal record, or rumors of unwholesome associations with sheep, questionable associates, questionable finances, electronic ankle bracelet as a premanent fashion accessory… NONE of those things prevent you from holding high office. Seemingly they actually enhance your chance, judging from the current flock of filthies.
—
My brother has been applying his obsession for detail to the Health Care bill HR 3200, after tracking down a pdf file. One thing that he’s finding throughout is that there are numerous explicit passages which deny any possibility of appeal to any other authority whatsoever for the decisions handed down by the panels, bureaucrats, officials, clerks, commissioners, et cetera. This stinking hogwallow of a document creates a swarm of new bureaucracies not answerable to anyone in the public, with absolute powers to make life and death decisions on your health, and sets the whole thing up so that there is NO APPEAL.
Folks, we are faced with MORAL MONSTERS.
Ezekiel Emanuel is utterly unembarrassed to state openly that an elderly person affected by dementia is an inappropriate candidate for further medical treatment, just as are new-borns with conditions for which we presently have no hope of cure.
There is a simple name for this vicious attitude, which the Left never once refrained from applying to Bush, but now shriek when it is properly applied to proposed eugenic euthanasia by Emanuel and his planners.
And these people have been selected by, and continue to enjoy the support of, Barack Hussein Obama.
* Corrections welcome; this is my recollection from general reading five or six years back.
JFS/70; the first obstruction is in the freaking newSpeak –with this admin, you can almost always find a truth by reversing its words. the ‘community’ they speak of is not a geographical neighborhood at all, it’s a ‘community’ of skin color or an income or somesuch that only by accident might have formed a neighborhood. What they are doing to actual communities in the sense of neighborhoods is to create the conditions of every house becoming the enemy next door. Old vs young? Paying your mortgage vs not? Employed vs unemployed? On the take vs being taken?
Some ‘community organizing’.
what it is, is community DISorganizing –heading toward community shattering and community dissolution.
MF/71; for the “things that are so big you can’t see them” file:
Even decent people advocate democratic permanent rule ‘by any means necessary’ as the only way to repair a supply/demand imbalance in health care.
Via the simple chasing away of a large amount of what would otherwise be the supply (youngsters who would enter medicince except for the tort bar) the tort bar has created this imbalance.
The tort bar is more or less 98% democrat.
oops
Fiddler at 71:
Yes, there are Moral Monsters. But I’ve stopped short labeling E Emanuel thusly. Why? Because he has voiced what so many have denied and continue to deny.
Thus he has sounded a warning, no?
Friend or Foe: Who goes there?
See my dilemma?
Well, one thing is certain, he’s left the onus on us whether or not what he has written was deliberate policy and not bean-spilling.
This is why “The Progressive Sneer” is incomplete. I am uncertain who specifically is sneering even as I am without doubt that the movement is. Your moral monsters are indeed behind the mask that covers the face of evil,
buddy at 73 “Via the simple chasing away of a large amount of what would otherwise be the supply (youngsters who would enter medicine except for the tort bar) the tort bar has created this imbalance.”
Not entirely Buddy.
The monetary incentives reduction and increased risk and insurance necessity are squarely with the tort bar. But don’t forget the artificial shortage that existed long before. That was due to the AMA working as a guild to restrict their numbers and thus reduce competition.
And then remember too that once admitted to Med school, it is nearly impossible to flunk out. That protection continues long after one becomes a doctor. And so, we are back to the beginning of the cycle I laid out in comment number 9. Get rid of the bar’s influence, and the Leftist dominated AMA would simply rule alone.
Pascal, agree –a guild mentality pervades. but AMA has gotten a little scuffed up here lately –not as badly as the AARP but some. Maybe an insurgeoncy will in its ranks arise.
Buddy, contact me at my site. I have an idea I’d like to run by you.