We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I posted on the AMA's initial support of the Dem bill in the House, last week. I cannot imagine how a doc could support that thing if they care about their patients, their practices, and the huge advances American medicine has produced for the world over the past two generations. Not to mention the freedom factor which, for me, is right up there with high quality medicine in importance. Come to think of it, I hold freedom higher.
As I read it, the Dem's bill is a five-ten year plan to get the entire population on the government plan, which combines aspects of HMOs and of Medicaid - and to make docs essentially government agents. Treatments will need to be government-approved, and the whole thing will be cost-driven. (If you thought dealing with your HMO was bad, try dealing with 111 government agencies.) Furthermore, it contains the seeds (mainly punitive taxes) of destruction of medical innovation. Betsy McCaughey has some of the insidious details.
Support for Pelosi's reform bill is by no means unanimous in the medical community. On Friday, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) announced their opposition to the House bill.
“Overall," CNS President Dr. Gerald E. Rodts stated, in announcing the organization's opposition, "we believe this legislation will ultimately limit patient choice by putting the government between the doctor and the patient, which will interfere with vital patient care decisions. As it stands, this House bill could amount to a complete government takeover of healthcare.”
That's true. It will. The bill is cleverly back-loaded so that some of the positive things (like coverage of preexisting conditions) go into effect immediately, but the things people will hate go into effect after the next pres election. The Lefty Dems have always been long-distance runners on the road to Socialism and government control and planning. ("The deep swimmers of the Left," as I recall, was David Horowitz's term for it. I suspect that is what Obama and his team are.)
The hubris is astonishing. They want all of us working on their plantation - and they seem to believe that they are smarter than we, the people. Which they are definitely not.
As I have been saying, government is the most worrisome, powerful and dangerous special interest group in the country. In the end, all that we Conservatives have to offer voters is liberty. Many voters prefer their bowl of lentils (photo). It is a shame.
Update: AMA wimps out. Those docs sold their souls - and their patients' well-being - in exchange for protection of their paltry Medicare reimbursements. Pathetic.
There is a nagging fear among those who closely watch not only the economy but government policy that these nascent (recovery) economic forces might be murdered in their crib by the current administration.
Small-business men I met with this week tell me they are in a state of paralysis as they watch the debate over the health care "reform" bill wending its way through Congress. Lurking in its 1,502 pages (the Senate version) are provisions that will markedly raise their costs, and their personal taxes. So even as business gets better, they won't take on more staff because they can't figure out what it will cost them to do so.
Then there is the turmoil over all aspects of the financial services industries. The bonus brawl is the most widely publicized, with bankers somehow stunned that the public should resent their record takings after being bailed out by the government and, in cases such as Goldman Sachs, continuing to benefit from government guarantees of their debt.
More important, indecision on how to reform the financial sector continues to weigh on growth, as banks develop ever more stringent restrictions on credit availability while they wait to see who wins the battle between the Obama White House, which wants to give more power to the Fed, and the Congress, which wants to give the Treasury Department authority to close down any financial institution it deems unfit.
This is no small matter, as the at-least partly nonpolitical Fed is less likely than the completely political Treasury to move against an institution for purely partisan political reasons.
That is what I am hearing too. The government, in their infinite wisdom, is at war against economic growth. Ignorance, indifference, or by intent? They seem to focus on growth of the federal government, and little else.
I think I need a Bloody Bull with double vodka before I go out riding with She Who Must Be Obeyed now, to calm my nerves. The Lefties are finally getting to me.
Rahmed/rammed through. House narrowly and unilaterally passes government take-over of American medicine. If the Senate passes anything similar to this, our medical care will be in the hands of Washington politicians and the 111 bureaucracies the plan calls for. Damn scary - and so unnecessary.
In my view, it's like a move backwards to the 1930s. It's a throwback to the old, bloated, freedom-limiting social welfare statism that European nations are struggling to free themselves from today.
A NARROW SLIVER:
“One would think such an historic and noble action, as the Democrats
have styled it, would enjoy robust support from the full spectrum of
the House Democratic caucus. But in this case, only those who occupy
safe seats (or think they do) can be corralled. If Pelosi gets her 218
votes, it will be unprecedented. It is fair to say that never will a
piece of legislation this sweeping (and damaging) have been passed over
the opposition of so much of the electorate and on the votes of such a
narrow ideological slice of the governing class.”
Even Canadians must be worried today: they rely on America for their needed medical care.
The Dems who voted Nay did so with Pelosi permission once the votes were secured - to try to save their seats. Clever Dems. The bill contains payoffs, exemptions, and hand-outs to every Dem interest group that can be imagined, the least of which is that Federal employees including the politicians are exempt from the plan. Plus, of course, no malpractice reform.
There is nothing in the world like a USMC Drill Sargeant. The three guys here are great, but the third and final guy is the most musical. I could run all day listening to that.
The truth leaks out on health care. Powerline. Not only do the Dems want to cover abortions - a truly elective procedure - they want to cover sex change operations. On my nickel? Of course, boob jobs would be fine with me...
ROBERT REICH: Forget healthcare, focus on employment. “Obama’s focus on health care rather than jobs, when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits, could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused. While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration’s efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent.”
Problem is, the only way to make jobs would be to cut taxes and spending.
November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.
PTSD by Proxy? Plus the video of the Major in a minimart.
"In a fast-breaking development comes word that agents of the Attorney’s General office in Louisiana have raided ACORN’s offices in New Orleans. ACORN’s New Orleans was, for decades, the headquarters of the national community organizing association"
"This may be the toughest employment situation we've seen in the postwar era," Mark Gertler, an economics professor at New York University, said in an interview earlier this week.
Who would hire a new employee if you don't know how the Dems will screw you? How can you make a business plan?
Reporters who think coercive government control is generally good
and I, who thinks voluntary market forces are generally better, both have a point of view.
Big Al Gore, noted climate scientist, former VP of the USA, Nobel Laureate, budding Green Billionaire, owner of many large homes and SUVs, eater of meat, world-class carbon-emitter, and Man-Bear-Pig, clears CO2 of most of the blame.
Hmmm. What next? And blame for what? Life on earth would cease to exist without CO2.
'All men want is sex and for you to make them a sandwich.'
In that order. And a few cold Coronas, please, with lime.Some gratitude for the masculine attention and some snappy repartee are always welcome too.Don't forget the chips with the sandwich, and please turn on ESPN.
But he was right the first time about not being ready for the Oval Office. As president, he seems confused and a bit distant on the issues, leaving the details to congressional Democrats and an ever-growing number of “czars” while he golfs and launches attacks at Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
Thanksgiving dinner for 8 for $20. WalMart. Plus other great deals there. h/t, Carpe Diem
Global income inequality is down. I guess that's a good thing. Income is good. It provides choices. We want everybody to be as rich as they want to be.
Health Care was a loser in Tuesday's elections. It does make me wonder why a new Pres would want to start out with hugely divisive issues and a combative style instead of with more widely popular issues, more modest steps, and the kind of conciliatory approach he brings to Putin, Chavez, and Iran.
The Associated Press screwed the pooch*, in multiple ways, in its reporting of the release by the JFK Presidential Library of previously classified recordings of President Kennedy's meetings in 1963 with advisors about Vietnam.The discussions involve the unauthorized cable from the State Department lending support to a coup against South Vietnam’s President Diem.
1. The JFK Presidential Library, administered by the National Archives, expressly admonishes in its press release:“Members of the media are cautioned against making historical conclusions based on the sound clips and transcript alone.”
The AP’s report, instead, leads with, “Newly released White House tapes from the Vietnam War era portray President John F. Kennedy wrestling over the fate of South Vietnam's strongman in a situation that appears to mirror President Barack Obama's quandary today in dealing with Afghanistan's shaky government.” The AP’s headline: “Tapes show Kennedy was conflicted over Saigon coup” My local newspaper one-upped the AP by changing the headline to “Like Obama with Afghanistan, Kennedy had issues with an ally.” (Sorry, the website for the San Diego Union-Tribune is still down, but once up you can find the link there.)
2. The AP report concludes with a sheer ignorance by its reporter, Barry Schweid: “The battlefield situation gradually worsened for South Vietnam and the United States, and the conflict drew to a close under President Richard M. Nixon. All U.S. ground troops were gone by March 1973, and the United States evacuated Saigon in April 1975.”
In fact, the battlefield situation, after the governing and combat chaos spawned by the US backed 1963 coup against Diem, stabilized and, indeed, markedly improved after the almost total decimation of the Viet Cong during and after Tet ’68, then under President Nixon’s turning command over to General Abrams (see here) whose direction reduced the North Vietnamese forces to barely subsisting across the borders in sanctuaries, then with US logistics and airpower backing it up the South Vietnamese Army roundly defeating the North Vietnamese invasion of 1972.It was the post-Watergate abandonment of US pledges to supply airpower and arms to South Vietnam, perpetrated by the liberal majority that got control of the US Congress, that led to the downfall of South Vietnam to the massive invasion from North Vietnam in 1975.
3. In between, the AP doesn’t bother to mention that JFK’s Ambassador to Vietnam, Frederick Nolting, in the recordings released says, “my view is that there is no one that I know of who can – who has a reasonably good prospect of holding this fragmented, divided country together except Diem.”Many careful scholars of Vietnam have documented that Diem was falsely portrayed by some influentials in the media and within the US government’s advisors. The coup unleashed years of governmental instability and weakness within Vietnam, requiring heavier US commitment of troops to hold and reverse the unleashed downslide in South Vietnam’s defenses. (See, for example, here.)
4. President Kennedy, in the period in these tapes, is not in favor of the coup unleashed by his State Department.In effect, though, he at least ultimately acquiesced.
In no substantive way does the situation in Vietnam during the 1960’s parallel that in Afghanistan today, except in the muddled thinking within our White House and Congress, poor MSM reporting, and the American people’s declining confidence in and tolerance for unsuccessful half-way measures.
After my morning prayers, and thanks for Republican victories in yesterday’s elections that may help stop the ObamaCare obomination in its tracks, I picked up my morning newspaper and on page 3 read the article, “Move to put spiritual care in health bill.”(Sorry, my local newspaper’s website is down for overhaul, but here’sthe complete wire service dispatch.)
This is exactly one of the absurdities that argues against ObamaCare or most further government takeover of healthcare.Special interests intrude their mandates, and costs, on us all, even with little justification outside their mustered political power.
One of the battles in Congress is over a provision of the House ObamaCare bill that would require insurers to pay for prayer treatments as for other medical treatments.It was proposed by a Republican congressman, whose district includes PrincipiaCollege, a Christian Scientist school.
There’s some evidence that a patient’s morale affects their recovery.There’s some evidence that prayer can improve a patient’s morale.There’s, also, much more evidence that prayer will not cure most ailments and, indeed, there are sufficient studies that substituting prayer for proven scientific medicine can prolong or worsen serious ailments that otherwise could be alleviated or cured.
I, personally, like the saner holistic approach to medicine, to add proper diet, exercise, some vitamins, and yoga to one’s health regimen.And, I pray.But, to require that medical insurance cover these is insane, and costly, crowding out the core scientific medicine that is essential. Many who are uninsured are, thus, priced out of coverage due to the costs of mandates for usually lesser effective treatments, like chiropractry or acupuncture or massage, being added into insurance. Further, adding in very expensive in vitro fertilization, as desirable as it may be for those infertile to enjoy having children, is similarly counterproductive to our main concerns about improving health care.If they want children, pay for it, or accept your fate.There is not a legal nor moral obligation for taxpayers or others who buy insurance to buy children for them.
This argument in Congress over whether to include insurance coverage for prayer is an absurd but indicative example of what we can expect when special interest government runs health care.
Addendum: The above are just a few more examples of some of the points that The B made in his Insurance Freedom post this week. It is, indeed, insane. Furthermore, I never heard of paying for prayer. Prayer is one of the few things that remains free and untaxed.
Addendum: Christian Science practioners do charge. Other "clergy" may and will, as well, if they can get paid by insurance.
BTW, see my comment below about which "mandate" I'd like to have in my insurance!
We are disappointed that Hoffman lost in NY 23. Surprised, too. The "meaning" of these elections will be spun to death. Ace notes that the O managed one big win in Maine.
WSJ: Obama and the Liberal Paradigm. "The sheep are quite capable of looking out for themselves. Someone tell the Democrats."
We sheep would be even more capable if the gummint would leave us alone.
Health Care Bill postponed further. That's good. This bill is antiquated New Deal entitlement: government-heavy baloney. Regressive - not Progressive.
Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors' income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences.
I do not think this is a racial thing. I think it's an effect of urban one-party governmental cultures of corruption. A generation or two ago, it would have been Irish pols - but nobody expected integrity in pols then.
Politico terms it an "uncivil war." I think it's just what parties do to figure out what they are about. It's healthy. Parties should debate and contain conflict.
Powerline: "This video on health care, produced by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, features Eline van den Broek, founder of the European Independent Institute."
She makes the point that it is third party payments for medical care which have permitted the rise in cost of medical care in the US. I think that is part of the story, but the other part of the story is that our higher costs buy us access, choices, abundance, and quality.
I have suggested, in connection with President Obama's dealings with Russia, that to call him a fool is to give him the benefit of the doubt. For Obama's hat-in-hand approach to Russia assumes that the thuggish, autocratic, expansionist Russian regime is more sinned against than sinning in its relations with the U.S. If Obama believes this, he is anti-American; If he doesn't believe this but elects to act as if it were so, then he is a fool.
What they have in common is that they are two pieces of a giant puzzle. Put together, they place the government in the position to regulate or control almost every detail of our daily lives.
In democratic systems, the taking of freedom is always cloaked in a patronizing, slaveowner-style benevolence.
In the name of “the environment,” the state gets to regulate everything you do. The cap-and-trade bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, is a bold assault on property rights: in order to sell your home—whether built in 2006 or 1772—you would have to bring it into compliance with whimsical, eternally evolving national “energy ef?ciency” standards, starting with a 50 per cent reduction in energy use by 2018. Fail to do so and it would be illegal for you to enter into a private contract with a willing buyer.
MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen has warned: "'He who controls carbon controls life. It is a bureaucrat's dream to control carbon dioxide." Washington, D.C., and the U.N. are in a field of dreams right now as they envision one of the most massive expansions of controls on human individual freedom ever contemplated by governments.
As President Ronald Reagan said: “Since the American founding, we have been a people with a government, not the other way around.”
Now comes the Pelosi plan for a government takeover of health care. It is a freight train of runaway spending, bloated bureaucracy, mandates and higher taxes. If the liberals in Washington have their way, they will forever change the relationship between the government and “we the people.”
If the Pelosi plan for a government takeover of health care passes, we will each become dependent on the political class in Washington for the provision of services of the most urgent and personal nature.
Illness, our own, or more importantly the illness of a parent, or a spouse, or a child, has the capacity to suspend our priorities.
What was important before the crisis grows dim in the harsh light of disease affecting a loved one.
The Pelosi health care plan targets us when we are most vulnerable.
The Pelosi health care plan makes us dependent on the state at the most urgent moment in the life of our family.
Their hope: that little by little, we’ll yield our freedoms and our resources to the ever-growing appetite of the federal government.
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the loooord's consent. Yeah, yeah, Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent (na na na na) Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent (na na na na) Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent (na na na na) Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent...
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she's prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that's what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a "critical milestone," may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.
In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.
Re Bruce's post below, I'd like to point out that the government-designed medical insurance is not really insurance at all. It's just payment for medical services, at government-determined rates.
In fact, it's insurance only in the same sense that Social Security is insurance - you are forced to pay into it, and you are forced to take it.
I like to have freedom of choice in selecting my coverage, just as with my auto insurance. I have a relatively high-deductible ($10,000 over 2 years - 100% thereafter) Major Medical insurance. What I save in premiums with this comes close to my deductible - plus I have a Medical Savings Plan. It's all quite inexpensive. It does not cover aromatherapy, massage therapy, chiropractors, homeopathy, addiction treatment, experimental treatments, abortions and other elective procedures like sex-change operations, routine check-ups, and tons of other things that politicians, under pressure from interest groups, will squeeze into the government-designed plan.
The insurance I have today, which is designed to keep you out of financial catastrophe if you get really sick, would not be permitted under the Baucus plan.
Why the heck should anyone care about how health insurance agents will fare under ObamaCare?
Under the House bill, for example, the Small Business Administration will help businesses and individuals figure out how to obtain affordable coverage.(The bill provision is titled, “Assistance for Small Employers.”)Health insurance agents are not precluded from providing advice.But, the SBA will be allowed to bypass agents.
A health insurance agent is required to complete initial and regular formal training courses in the subject (including ethics), pass initial and periodic tests, and are screened by their state and by insurance companies for criminal or personal conduct (including declaring bankruptcy) that may negatively affect their reliability to be licensed to provide agent services.In addition, through professional associations, through insurer education programs, through self-study, and through competitive pressures, health agents stay current on the latest laws and offerings from various insurers.Furthermore, almost all health insurance agents are independent businesses or work for independent agencies, not beholden to the insurers but to their customers.Importantly, individuals, small and larger businesses have priorities more important and pressing than becoming experts in health insurance or its interactions with other laws or aspects of their primary concerns, and heavily depend upon qualified, trusted health insurance agents.Lastly, many health insurance agents have extensive credentials and experience.For example, I attained earned, tested, rigorous certifications – Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC), Registered Employee Benefits Concultant (REBC), Registered Health Underwriter (RHU), Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) – that, along with other experiences outside health insurance (I was a senior financial and business operations exec for Fortune 100 and small companies for 15-years before becoming a health insurance agent) and years of experience as a health insurance agent (I’ve been at it for two-decades). This delivers wide-ranging values to my clients and of the interactions of their health insurance with their broader business, regulatory and financial affairs.
Does anyone expect the staff hired or created by the SBA to have this independence, experience or training?If so, get real!
Surely, there are some health insurance agents who are lesser or incompetent, or who are crooked, or who steer some business toward favored insurers for added volume bonuses.However, the less competent exist in a highly competitive market, where they lose business to the more energetic and competent in delivering value to clients.The crooked or shady are winnowed out similarly plus by stiff regulations and prosecutions.
This is just another aspect of the losses that individuals and businesses will suffer under ObamaCare.
A leading expert and opponent of Obamacare, Grace-Marie Turner, writes in the New York Post:
The 1,990-page bill the House leadership unveiled Thursday would impose a dizzying barrage of new regulations on employers, and force them to either provide government-specified health insurance or pay a penalty of up to 8 percent of their payroll.
Even firms that now provide health benefits get slammed -- since that coverage may not meet the government's definition of "acceptable." …
The head of the National Federation of Independent Business, Dan Danner, said the reform bill's huge cost "will ultimately come out of small business owners' pockets and prohibit them from growing, investing in their business and hiring new employees." …
The pain continues: The bill would also subject businesses and employees to a bigger, hidden tax -- a shifting of costs from public to private payers.
The legislation would expand Medicaid -- the joint federal/state program designed to insure low-income Americans -- to cover another 15 million people. But Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals are well below market rates -- and often below their costs of providing care.
A study by the independent actuarial firm Milliman Inc. concluded that families with employer-based health insurance already pay $1,788 a year in hidden taxes to compensate for underpayments by government programs. That figure will plainly grow under the House bill.
For a final blow, the bill imposes surcharges on high-income individuals that will certainly hit many small business owners -- who pay business taxes through their personal-income tax forms.
For disclosure, I’m nearing retirement, and have shrunk my successful business.I am not going to directly suffer as a health insurance agent or small businessman, although I will as a taxpayer and as someone who cares about quality health care for myself and others if ObamaCare passes.
I posted on the AMA's initial support of the Dem bill in the House, last week. I cannot imagine how a doc could support that thing if they care about their patients, their practices, and the huge advances American medicine has produced for the world over the past two generations. Not to mention the freedom factor which, for me, is right up there with high quality medicine in importance. Come to think of it, I hold freedom higher.
The Right Wing Prof 
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Dem