Jul 18 2009
Obama vs. Pelosi on the “public option”
President Obama insists that if you like the health care you have now, you can keep it under the nationalized health insurance system the Democrat Congress is pushing. What he isn’t admitting is that he’s talking to employers, not employees. He’s really saying that employers can keep the health plans they currently offer if they want to. He certainly is not saying that employees will be able to keep any healthcare plan that their employers don’t want to continue to fund. Now comes word that the Switch to Public Option attracts Pelosi-backed businesses
Three companies in which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her husband are heavily invested say they might switch their employees to a government-run Public Option plan if President Obama’s health care reform passes Congress.
The Public Option is a proposed government-run insurance company that Obama, Pelosi, and most Democrats want to create as part of health care reform. It would receive a large start-up investment from taxpayers and likely pay low Medicare rates to doctors and hospitals, allowing it to undercut private insurers with low premiums. A Lewin Group study found that as many as 131 million Americans would move or be shifted involuntarily into such a plan if it is offered, possibly killing off the private health insurance industry.
Obama has promised repeatedly that Americans will be able keep their present health insurance if they want to, and a Pew poll found that 89 percent of insured Americans are happy with their existing coverage. But most health insurance plans are selected by employers, not employees, so the latter will have very little say if Obama’s plan prompts employers to change it.
The Examiner contacted three businesses in which the Pelosis are heavily invested, according to her congressional disclosure forms. All three said that they would certainly consider switching employees to the Public Option plan, and in some cases would probably do so, provided that it is cheaper and offers roughly comparable coverage on paper.
Obama and Pelosi really need to talk more. He’s probably unhappy with her for letting the cat out of the bag before the closing seam is sewed shut.
Jul 17 2009
The Next Great Awakening, Part 8: Respecting our national origins
Is the USA a “Christian nation”? Depends on what you mean by that, I suppose. But its origin in Judeo-Christian principles is clear, based on founding documents, acts of congress and presidents, and the writings of the founders. The recognition and celebration of that heritage has been nearly universal among US national leaders until very recent times. You can decide if that was a good thing, or a bad thing, but you can’t pretend it is a non-thing.
Jul 16 2009
Hondurans standing for freedom *against* the USA?!? Yes.
It is bizarre that the official US position about Honduras’ current political situation is to condemn the people who resisted an illegal takeover of Honduras by a wanna-be dictator for life.
The way in which nearly all the world’s media portray the legal, Supreme Court-ordered ouster of President Manuel (Mel) Zelaya is one major reason for the universal opprobrium. Because military men took part in the deportation of the sitting president, it has been portrayed as a classic Latin American “military coup,” and who can support a military coup?
The lack of context in which this ouster took place has prevented the vast majority of the world’s news watchers and readers from understanding what has happened.
I wonder how many people who bother to read the news — as opposed to only listen to or watch news reports — know:
— Zelaya was plotting a long-term, possibly lifetime, takeover of the Honduran government through illegally changing the Honduran Constitution.
— Zelaya had personally led a mob attack on a military facility to steal phony “referendum” ballots that had been printed by the Venezuelan government.
— Weeks earlier, in an attempt to intimidate the Honduran attorney general — as reported by The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady, one of the only journalists in the world who regularly reports the whole story about Honduras — “some 100 agitators, wielding machetes, descended on the attorney general’s office. ‘We have come to defend this country’s second founding,’ the group’s leader reportedly said. ‘If we are denied it, we will resort to national insurrection.'”
— No member of the military has assumed a position of power as a result of the “military coup.”
— Zelaya’s own party, the Liberal Party, supported his removal from office and deportation from Honduras.
— The Liberal Party still governs Honduras.
So, Dennis Prager has asked you, did you know those things? If you didn’t, and you’ve been watching/reading the news, you’ll have to ask yourself why didn’t you know them. Hopefully you’ll come to the correct conclusion about the slant of US major media, which never saw a left-socialist South American dictator it didn’t like.
As we’ve commented here before, the actions of the Honduran military were legal, and supported by the Honduran Supreme Court AND by the political party of the Zelaya himself.
I have absolutely no idea what’s behind Obama’s support of Zelaya… except that maybe he recognizes a fellow traveler.
Jul 08 2009
The arbitrariness of anti-trust law
In a takedown of the Obama adminstration’s apparent attempt to use its legal howitzer, anti-trust chief Christine Varley, to prevent the airline industry from doing mergers that would save it, keep it out of bankruptcy, preserve jobs, and allow it to continue to provide service for consumers, Holman Jenkins asks the question, Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines? While describing the Justice Department’s move to block mergers that would save troubled corporations, in the guise of protecting the public from evil monopolies, he makes this trenchant comment:
Even now, she has turned her attention from airlines to the mobile-phone business on the theory that any industry that hasn’t collapsed into government receivership must be doing something wrong.
It’s all worth reading.
And for background in the sorry history of anti-trust law, you might want to read this. Just remember a simple principle: whenever the government gets involved, prices go up, supply goes down, and the only winners are the bureaucrats and successful lobbyists who wangle exceptions for their companies… all the while pretending that they’re protecting the free market and competition.
For now, let’s just say this. If you’re too successful and capture a larger share of the market than your competitors, look out; the feds are coming for you. If you’re struggling, and need to merge with some of your competitors in order to stay in business, create economies of scale that allow more efficient operation, and provide a service or product that the public will buy at a price you can sell it, look out. The feds are coming for you, too.
Basically, it’s simple. The feds would rather own you than see you succeed.
Clear?
They have the only monopoly that matters, and they intend to keep it.
Jul 05 2009
We’re in the Twilight Zone, Part 1
There is a Twilight Zone episode called “Button, Button “ in which an unhappy couple is given an unusual offer. Push a button on a box and someone they don’t know will die, but they will get $200,000.
Mr. and Mrs. Lewis are unhappy. Their car is broken. They live in a cramped one-bedroom apartment. They’re often bickering. One day, their doorbell rings but there’s nobody there. A package addressed to both of them was left by the door. Inside it is a wooden box with a plastic dome on the locked lid. A note on the bottom says a “Mr. Steward” will come that night. He comes on schedule and explains the offer to Mrs. Lewis. If she unlocks the lid and pushes the button under the dome, someone they don’t know will die and she’ll receive $200,000, tax-free. She tells the details to her husband and he’s adamantly against it. He opens up the bottom of the box and finds nothing inside. Cynical, he throws the box into a dumpster but she retrieves it after he’s asleep. They continue to argue about whether to push the button. Finally, Mrs. Lewis presses it. Mr. Steward appears and gives them their $200,000. They’re incredulous and wonder what will happen to the box. Steward explains that it will be reprogrammed and the same offer will be given to another couple, “somebody you won’t know…”
The story is based on a short story by Richard Matheson, with a slightly different ending, but the gist of the story is the same, namely the willingness of people to receive benefits that don’t belong to them, when the only risk — really, certain doom — is to strangers.
It seems to me that this is a perfect model for the desire of many people who want to have nationalized health insurance of some sort. Particularly if they are people who don’t now have health insurance, and want a national system to give it to them, they are perfect examples of the willingness to damage other people — all strangers, of course — for selfish gain.
Imagine a rewrite to the story. You are offered a button which, if you push it, guarantees that a stranger will not receive the health care they’ve always paid for, resulting in their likely death, but the reward for pushing it is that you have a minimal level of health coverage for life.
There seems to be a lot of people who are only too willing to push the button.
Of course, the entire class of people who stand to benefit the most from national healthcare — the Lefty political class that will claim it has done America a great service — will be the group that doesn’t have to live with the arrangement. Does anyone think that the political class will settle for the DMV standard of medical care to which the rest of us will be doomed?
Button, button, who’s got the button
Jun 26 2009
Quick, what’s scarier? Missing nukes, or missing bugs?
With three days left in spring cleaning season, a US army lab that works on the world’s deadliest pathogens has turned up uncatalogued vials of Ebola, anthrax, plague and other pathogens – 9220 of them to be precise.
The laboratory is the same one where anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins worked before he committed suicide last year. The US government suspects Ivins was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, and studies showed that the anthrax used in the attack was “directly related” to the batch stored at the lab.
The discovery of the uncatalogued vials raises questions about whether anyone would notice if some of the lab’s pathogens went missing.
“A small number would be a concern; 9200 … at an institution that has been the focus of intense scrutiny on this issue, that’s deeply worrisome. Unacceptable,” Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, told the Washington Post.
If you see some guys in white lab coats selling vials of “special fragrance” at the swap meet, I suggest you find someplace else to shop. I’m not sure if this is scarier than missing Russian suitcase nukes, but it’s at least competitive on the scare-o-meter. Does anybody think that the anthrax-spreading misanthrope is the only geek with a big brain and a tiny moral center?
There are days when I wonder if the human race is just too stupid to live. Then I’ll buck up a bit, and start feeling less pessimistic. But not long after that, I’ll hear a bunch of people, who should know better, waxing rhapsodic about the wonderfulness of government mananged healthcare for the future. It reminds me, as if I needed reminding, that the innumerate and the illiterate have no defenses against technocrats, their natural predators.
If the missing Russian nukes, the Iranian nukes, the North Korean nukes, or the pathogenic terrorists don’t get us, then it’ll be the nanotech that does it, when the first self-replicating machine (originally designed to “eat waste at toxic waste-dumps”) turns the entire Earth into a gigantic orbiting pile of staples — covered, incidentally, with Ebola spores.
I’m sure they’ll be very useful to someone (the staples, that is). I expect that the Intragalactic Council on Emerging Technology (ICE-T) will have a LOT of reports to fill out.
Jun 15 2009
Killing the golden goose of research and development
The history of the cancellation of the Apollo space program due to budget considerations is nicely summarized here and here.
The short story: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s budget for 1969 included $3.878 billion for NASA, “nearly 25 percent lower than the budget for the peak year, fiscal 1965.” When President Nixon took office, he cut it further. Neither presidents nor congress were in the mood to maintain NASA’s funding, resulting in cutting the last three planned Apollo missions, which would have cost only $20 million each, given the money already spent on Saturn V boosters and capsules.
No one will ever know what scientific discoveries might have been made on those missions.
No one will ever know how far we might have come by now in space capability had Congress continued to fund NASA at “moon-race levels,” but we would surely have a permanent colony on the moon by now, we would have been to Mars and back, and might have a fledgling presence there, and we’d know a lot more about the science of our solar system than we do now.
It is not well understood by the public that much of the USA’s dominance in technology came from so-called “spinoffs” from the “space race.” There is little reason to believe that trend would have changed. It’s likely that our national economy would have received a great boost from the spinoffs that never happened.
Congress, however, was busily moving into higher and higher levels of “great society” funding, including welfare (with its disastrous results on poor families and unwed birth rates) and medicare.
We can’t get back years of lost basic research and lost applied research, as well as discovery of unknowns in our solar system. We can duplicate what would have been done… but that time is lost permanently.
Call the entire sorry affair penny-wise, and pound foolish.
And now, for somewhat different reasons, Congress is considering what will end up as a federal takeover of health care. While the dynamics will be different, the result will be analogous to what happened to NASA, and space exploration. There will be a great cutback in basic research, and decades may be lost in what could have been a “genetic therapy race” to revolutionize (and probably significantly cheapen) health care. The “astronomically huge” medical progress of recent times is not any sort of given. It depends on particular circumstances of economy and society that encourage investment, basic research, and risk taking. In other words, the things that government does worst.
When your now-young children are dying of cancer in about 40 years, prematurely, how much will they thank us for having instituted a health care delivery system that killed much basic research that could have saved their lives?
Not much, I think.
Jun 14 2009
Medical Miracles are not a civil right
Most Americans have lost track, if they ever knew, of the real history of medical care in the last two centuries. Indeed, therapies and drugs now available would seem utterly miraculous to any person of the early 20th century. But this pace of progress is not a given. Will the new health care initiative being pushed by the Obama administration spell The End of Medical Miracles?
Americans have, at best, a love-hate relationship with the life-sciences industry—the term for the sector of the economy that produces pharmaceuticals, biologics (like vaccines), and medical devices. These days, the mere mention of a pharmaceutical manufacturer seems to elicit gut-level hostility. Journalists, operating from a bias against industry that goes as far back as the work of Upton Sinclair in the early years of the 20th century, treat companies from AstraZeneca to Wyeth as rapacious factories billowing forth nothing but profit. At the same time, Americans are adamant about the need for access to the newest cures and therapies and expect new cures and therapies to emerge for their every ailment—all of which result from work done primarily by these very same companies whose profits make possible the research that allows for such breakthroughs.
So begins an article by Tevi Troy, deputy secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services from 2007 to 2009. The last two paragraphs of the article:
We forget the power of the single-celled organism. For most of man’s existence on earth, the power of a single-celled animal to snuff out life was an accepted—and tragic—way of the world. Human beings could be wiped out in vast communicable plagues or simple through ingesting food or water. In the last century, the advent of the antibiotic has changed all that. For millennia, the only cure for an infection in humans was hope. Today, antibiotic use is so common that public health officials struggle to get people not to overuse antibiotics and thereby diminish their effectiveness.
Just as there is potential danger from the way in which Americans take the power of the antibiotic for granted, so, too, one of the greatest threats to our health and continued welfare is that Americans in the present day, and particularly their leaders, are taking for granted the power, potency, and progress flowing from life-saving medical innovations. And in so doing, they may unknowingly prevent the kind of advance that could contribute as vitally to the welfare of the 21st century as the discovery of the antibiotic altered the course of human history for the better in the century just concluded.
Tevi Troy’s complete article is must reading for anyone who would understand how we got where we are with pharmaceutical costs and the price of medical innovation.
At its most basic level, health care is not a civil right, any more than food, clothing, shelter, or for that matter, automobiles, cell phones, internet access, or lattes. Food and shelter are THE most basic human physical needs. We have a safety net for the poor, but we do not try to provide caviar and mansions, or even a balanced diet and permanent digs. What those on public assistance get is pretty basic (or it should be), and is normally a no frills operation (though disturbing numbers of them wear better clothes than I do). Similarly, it may be reasonable to have a safety net of very basic health care for the poor (though a very large percentage of the “uninsured” are not “poor,” and have simply chosen to spend their money other ways). That safety net should not include high cost drugs and medical procedures that were not even available to the richest people in the world 50 years ago. At the same time, the poor of today, being given a very basic standard of health care, would be getting the equivalent of medical miracles to the richest person on earth in the year 1930.
The simplest way to characterize this: medical miracles are not a civil right. Many of the most expensive health care developments of the last half-century qualify as “medical miracles.” Just as it’s unreasonable to provide a public guarantee that everyone will drive the same car, eat the same food, wear similar clothing, have similar vacations, and all the rest, it’s completely unreasonable to try to approach “egalitarian” health care. Quite simply, it has never worked anywhere. What makes us think it can work here?
For those who ARE interested in even more medical miracles, fair warning is given. The reason that about 90% of the medical miracles of the last half-century have been developed in the USA is because we have had largely private health care (admittedly with lots of government interference, most of which has not helped). If the USA goes the way of most European nations, or Canada, or Australia, we can kiss that entrepreneurial energy goodbye, as the article referenced above makes very clear.
The very sad thing: even if the modern “miracle” standard becomes the common standard for everyone, if progress in medicine is largely stifled, or simply greatly slowed, it is likely that a great many more people will die in the future of things that COULD have been prevented, if we’d continued at today’s pace of research and innovation.
And they won’t even know that the cause of their suffering or death could have been preventable.
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