Again and again, their effort has brought us into a land of paradoxes. Public skepticism is warranted when the President promises to cut costs while simultaneously providing coverage to nearly 50 million uninsured people. It is even more warranted when his congressional allies seek to raise taxes to pay for all the new spending that this cost-cutting entails. We aren't talking about short-term spending either; this isn't a trillion-dollar investment in a new system that will ultimately save money. The Congressional Budget Office says the leading health-care-reform proposals will increase health-care spending and make the budget harder to balance in the long run. Yet saving money is the President's principal stated rationale for reform.
Health-care reformers send out mixed messages on the uninsured as well. The moral imperative of improving their health care is what drives the passion of most liberal activists for reform. But when you read the liberal policy analysts, it quickly becomes clear that getting young and healthy people to pay more in premiums than they will spend on medical expenses is the point of forcing them to buy insurance. Which is it? In aggregate, are we trying to rescue the uninsured or bilk them? Is reform something we are doing for them or to them?
The reformers' speed belies their words as well. If health-care reform is so critically important, as they keep insisting, why not take the time to get it right? Hard as it is to believe, at one point Obama was urging the House and Senate to pass legislation by three weeks after they began debating it.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Obamacare's Fatal Flaw
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Liberal Death Watch Begins by Robert Bidinotto
The Liberal Death Watch Begins
After just a half year of radical leftist governance, voters are turning against liberal Democrats in droves. Now, so-called Democrat "moderates" -- "Blue Dog" Democrats, first-term freshmen, and Dems elected in "swing" districts -- are becoming scared witless about the upcoming 2010 congressional elections, fearful that they will lose their seats in a voter rebellion against the left.
Even at the time of the last election, I anticipated Obama would face this quick collapse in public support. My assessment was that Obama, like most liberals -- and most Democratic presidential candidates going back to Adlai Stevenson -- is a man of boundless arrogance. His self-image is that he's oh-so-much-smarter, better educated, and more sophisticated than the crude rubes who populate Flyover America. In this, he's cut of the same psychological cloth as McGovern, Kerry, Gore, Carter, and Dukakis: "progressive" technocrats with intellectual pretensions, whose intellectual great-granddaddy was progressive icon Woodrow Wilson. All ooze sanctimonious, self-righteous superiority from their every condescending pore.
But such politicians face a formidable challenge: America is, at core, the nation of individualism. Knowing this, "progressives" must try to camouflage their true nature and values while running for office, in order to fool voters into thinking that they, too, are Regular Guys who share the values of ordinary Americans. Most of them have been awkward in their masquerading, however, which is why they never got elected.
Barack Obama, though, is much more politically slick and savvy than his leftist predecessors. Knowing a radical agenda would never sell in America, he laid the groundwork for his ascendancy in careful steps. He sanitized his background by writing self-serving autobiographies, creating a Horatio Alger "narrative" for public consumption. As state legislator, he avoided taking tough stands that might later come back to haunt him. During his presidential run, he threw his past radical associates under the campaign bus. For years, he's polished and perfected a subdued, reasonable, moderate style and public image, using measured, vacuously noncontroversial language. He also played gently upon America's past racial guilt: A vote for Obama became a vote of racial penance and expiation of sins.
Still, Obama shares with his less-successful liberal forerunners the same smug arrogance that is ever their Achilles' Heel. Liberals think that they know, better than all of us mere mortals, how to run our lives for us. If only we would live according to their all-wise edicts and values, the world would become perfect. So, once in power, they simply cannot resist the temptation to overreach -- to push a radical agenda far, far outside the voters' political comfort zones.
So, I knew that Obama would have to overreach. However, the man's sheer grandiosity and power-lust astonished even me. He aimed at nothing less than to nationalize everything in sight -- overnight. Think of it: the banking and financial sectors of the economy; the auto industry; the housing industry; the entire energy industry; now, the entire health-care industry. Make no mistake; this is deliberate. Obama is a well-read ideologue who cut his teeth on Marx and Alinsky. He knows what he is doing. He aimed to impose his agenda in a rush, before the rest of us realized what he was doing or could organize to stop it.
It hasn't quite worked out as planned, though, precisely because he overreached. The "tea party" rebellion was unexpected. So was the huge influence of conservative talk radio, which has hammered him relentlessly. So was the public's realization that the "stimulus" was a fraud. His hidden values are revealing themselves in countless ways: in his apologies for America on foreign soil; in unscripted racist accusations against police; in befriending foreign enemies and betraying friends. In short, he's living down to every public expectation of what a radical leftist is. And as a result, Obama's poll numbers are tanking; the majority now disapprove of him and his agenda.
Which is why I think we're at the beginning of the liberal death watch.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
ObamaCare: The Wrong Prescription
As the debate over the pending health care bill rages on with Obama and his minions trying to ram through a massive bill that would essentially transform our health care system from a semi-free market to a government managed oligopoly, I want to share some key thoughts from various commenters. But before we get into that here is a flow chart the Republicans have posted that shows the Byzantine mess this bill would create.
As Drs. Tom Stossel and David Gratzer (both of whom are senior fellows of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research) say in their Boston Globe article “Improving our tangled healthcare mess”:
We need to reform American healthcare as we have the other five-sixths of the economy, by emphasizing choice and competition. Today, the system is a jumbled mess of government interventions: tax preferences for employee-based insurance that cost the treasury one-quarter of a trillion dollars a year; payment intermediaries and government-set reimbursements; regulations governing everything from physician ownership of hospitals to requirements in some states that second opinions about surgery be covered by the most basic insurance. The result is a lack of price transparency, limited choices, and a dearth of competition. Rather than attempting to cure this disease with more of the same, Congress should empower citizens to manage their own healthcare.
Gratzer, who worked as a physician in Canada and the U.S. and therefore has seen the difference between the two health care systems, makes a critical distinction in his Investors.com article, “Public Option Is A 'Trojan Horse' For Slow-Motion Socialized Care”.
But if there is a public plan, it will be a variation of Medicare, which single-payer advocates praise as an example of administrative efficiency. A dirty secret goes unmentioned in that tale: Medicare is a federal program, not an insurance plan. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
A public plan option can overwhelm even the best private insurers, partly thanks to the unfair advantage of federal status. How? Let me count the ways.
Private insurers must comply with state regulations, where Medicare coverage doesn't.
Medicare is a "pay as you go" entitlement, not an insurance plan.
Properly funded insurance plans must anticipate future costs; in contrast, a public plan option backed by the federal government can simply tax or borrow enough to cover costs from one year to the next to survive.
A Medicare-style plan will set prices with providers, not negotiate them, creating not simply a further competitive advantage, but burdening private plans with cost shifting (as Medicare presently does).
That's why entitlement programs around the world usually start with low fees and great benefits — and a public plan is almost certain to do exactly that — "to be competitive," of course.
Fast forward 10 years and the "affordable" public plan will have captured a huge market share. Obama will be in Illinois drafting his memoirs, but Congress will face stark choices as the plan's costs inevitably spike. The challenges will be eerily similar to the decisions made every day by legislators in countries with government-run health care systems.
When entitlement programs become too expensive, governments ration care, raise taxes, or both. Citizens seeking to leave the less attractive public system will face few alternatives, as private plans will have been blown out of the marketplace by Washington's taxpayer-financed, price-controlled head start.
At the Ludwig von Mises web site Why Obamacare Can't Work: The Calculation Argument, the author makes the following point.
Unfortunately, since Obama uses faulty logic to diagnose the problem, his solutions will only make matters worse faster. The correct framework within which to diagnose the problem is to admit that costs are out of control because they do not reflect prices created by the voluntary exchange between patients and providers, between customers and producers, like every well-functioning industry.
Instead, health costs reflect the distortions that government regulators have introduced through reimbursement mechanisms created by command-and-control bureaucracies at federal and state levels.
Simply put, Medicare, Medicaid, workers compensation, HMOs and even private health-insurance firms that follow Medicare rates, rely on cost reports submitted by providers. This cost data is then pushed through mathematical models and additional data generated by government, such as inflation and regional-labor-cost modifiers, to unilaterally (or in agreement with lobbyists and industry groups) determine what the prices for services should be.
But it is theoretically and practically impossible for a bureaucrat — no matter how accurate the cost data, how well intentioned and how sophisticated his computer program — to come up with the correct and just price. The just price of a health service can only be determined by the voluntary exchange of a patient with his hospital, physician, and pharmacist. The relationship between the patient and his private provider has been corrupted by the intrusion of government and its intermediaries (HMOs, for example) to such an extent that we can no longer speak of a relationship that can produce meaningful pricing information.
But it is theoretically and practically impossible for a bureaucrat — no matter how accurate the cost data, how well intentioned and how sophisticated his computer program — to come up with the correct and just price. The just price of a health service can only be determined by the voluntary exchange of a patient with his hospital, physician, and pharmacist. The relationship between the patient and his private provider has been corrupted by the intrusion of government and its intermediaries (HMOs, for example) to such an extent that we can no longer speak of a relationship that can produce meaningful pricing information.
As Yaron Brook says,
But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product--for which each individual must assume responsibility--had given way to a view of health care as a "right," an unearned "entitlement," to be provided at others' expense.
This entitlement mentality fueled the rise of our current third-party-payer system, a blend of government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, together with government-controlled employer-based health insurance (itself spawned by perverse tax incentives during the wage and price controls of World War II).
Today, what we have is not a system grounded in American individualism, but a collectivist system that aims to relieve the individual of the "burden" of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. For every dollar's worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out-of-pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14%.
And here is the key point in response to the Democrat’s mantra about healthcare being a right.
The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a "right" to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a "right" to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.
Finally, we get to the oft-repeated statistic about the millions of people without health insurance, the statistic that Democrats rely on to get us to buy into their plan. David Harsanyi addresses this in his Denver Post article.
It is true that the 46 million figure is based on unreliable Census Bureau data. But even the less unreliable Congressional Budget Office puts the number at around 31 million. And even that number, former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin claims, is an "incomplete and potentially misleading picture of the uninsured population."
For one reason, the uninsured figure counts every American (and illegal immigrant) who has been uninsured for any time frame during a year, even if they happen to be between jobs or changing insurance plans or on family visit to Guatemala.
According to the CBO, 45 percent of the uninsured are uninsured for four months or less, which seems like a pretty positive number to me.
Then, another portion of uninsured Americans already qualify for an existing government health insurance program — and government already controls 46 percent of spending on health care — for which they have not signed up.
The CBO estimates that as many as 15 percent of the chronically uninsured are already eligible for help. The Urban Institute (hardly advocates of free-market fundamentalism) found that 25 percent of the uninsured qualify for some program.
Surely, most citizens will concur that health care is too expensive (though most citizens would likely concur that everything is too expensive) and something should be done. So when Obama tells us that 46 million Americans are uninsured, he is implying that 46 million people can't afford health insurance. That, too, is absurd.
In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Is Health Insurance Affordable for the Uninsured?," Stanford economists say that "based on a plausible range of definitions and assumptions . . . health insurance is affordable for between one quarter and three quarters of adults who are not insured."
Turns out that 8.4 million uninsured Americans are making $50,000 to $74,999 and 9.1 million more are making more than $75,000. Health insurance is just incompatible with their lifestyles, I guess.
There are obviously inconveniences — children and mortgages, for instance — that can quickly make $50,000 seem like a pittance. Then again, 27 percent of all adults in their 20s (many, I presume, without offspring) choose not to have health insurance. Many of them surely have the means to purchase insurance, but after meticulously considering the tradeoffs (imbibing or insuring?) say no thanks.
So the bottom line is that, if passed, the bill would entirely revamp our health care system because 10% of the population doesn’t have health insurance. In other words the benefits enjoyed by the vast majority would be denied for the sake of a minority. You would think the geniuses behind all of this could come up with a less intrusive solution. Of course to me this relentless drive to socialize health care reveals a motivation that is driven more by a power grab to expand the government and encroach even more into what is left of our free market. I believe ultimately a visceral hatred of the self-interest inherent in the free market lurks behind the “noble” drive to shackle all of us to the same yoke of socialized medicine.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
The Effects of a Gangster Government
Friday, June 19, 2009
A Slobbering Love Affair: Book Review
I have to admit the title accomplishes its goal: makes a book stand out from its competition, like a brightly designed cereal box on a grocery store shelf. (The full title is A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media".) To be totally honest I did not buy the book, figuring I already knew what it was going to say. A friend loaned me her copy and insisted I read it.
While I was right in that the book just confirmed what I had knew about the media's strong leftist bias I was appalled at how flagrantly and shamelessly the media campaigned for Obama. In many cases there were no attempts to even pretend reporting was unbiased. A former CBS reporter and ten-time Emmy winner, Goldberg shares comments his peers said to him when he pointed out some of their blatant favoritism. At one point one colleague who was guilty of such favoritism says, "It is what it is." (!)
Goldberg also stitches together a nice timeline of the election, showing how the media favored Obama over his Democrat primary rivals such as Hilary Clinton. He also explains how the media at first was friendly to John McCain during the Republican primaries because McCain was the most liberal of the Republican candidates but then turned negative when he became the hurdle for Obama's ascendancy to God-hood, I mean the Presidency.
He doesn't spare the Republicans of blame, pointing out their prolifigate spending during the Bush era (or error as I've seen on bumper stickers). Goldberg also has no kind words for Bush's role in the Republican debacle of the 2008 election.
Goldberg does a nice job detailing their sins but, like other conservative critics of media bias, struggles for an explanation why. They are filled with a mixture of rage and confusion while yearning to return to the good old days where the truth and objectivity meant something. As a result his prescription amounts to a taking a teaspoon of common sense. The problem is that a teaspoon of common sense is no match for the erosion and undermining of objectivity. Such common sense didn’t prevent the current situation.
I believe we're seeing the natural consequence of decades of relativism – the belief that there is no objective truth -- as applied to journalism. Thanks in part to the effects of postmodernism where any attempt to defend objectivity was dismissed by merely representing white European, outdated thinking, collective truth has replaced objective truth. By collective truth I mean if enough people believe something and their motive is to "help people" then no criticism is necessary or allowed. And when challenged one’s rebuttal consists of “It is what it is": a proclamation that there is no debate. It’s deuces wild. You can do, or say, what you want with impunity and without shame, as long as it’s for a “good (i.e., liberal) cause.”
If Republicans and conservatives want to combat the media’s bias they’re going to need to better understand the philosophical issues that underlie this bias. Meanwhile the love affair continues unabated as Obama aggressively expands the role of government into even more sectors of the economy.
Monday, April 27, 2009
From the same star: reflections on our common roots
When I visited my mother recently she played an album, Vom selben Stern (From the same star), by a German group called Ich + Ich. While it has some catchy tunes, I especially like the title song for the thought behind it: that we’re all made from the same ashes of a former star, that we all share a common heritage going back much further than whether we evolved from apes. This idea has intrigued me for years. The chemicals that we are made of couldn’t have come from the cloud of gases that formed the Sun because the heavier elements like carbon, iron, oxygen, and etc. form only within stars that are much older. I’m sure I’m not doing this justice but stars go through cycles. Once they burn up most of their hydrogen the star collapses because the pressure exerted by the fusion reactions decreases, allowing the star’s gravity to temporarily win the battle. As the star collapses the pressure in the interior increases until it is high enough to start a self-sustaining fusion reaction of the heavier elements. This process continues until the star runs out of fuel. For smaller stars like ours it eventually turns into a cinder called a dwarf star. For a large star which generates larger gravitational pressure it can actually turn into a nova. The catastrophic increase in pressure tears the star asunder, spewing out the heavy elements that formed in its interior. Billions of years ago a star died, releasing it elements which were then captured by the Sun’s gravity to form the earth and the other planets. (See this entry on stellar evolution.)
This means we’re made of remnants of a star that died billions of years ago. In addition the earth is in a narrow band from the Sun in which the temperature is just right: much closer and the water would boil away, much further away and the water would freeze. (Some call this the Goldilocks Effect.)
I find this fascinating and amazing. Whether earth, life and consciousness are the result of design or of accidental clumping of chemicals the bottom line is the same: the staggering complexity of life and the formation of consciousness is a miracle.
I think if we kept this in mind we might look at life and our fellow humans a bit differently. I’m not saying that we’re a meaningless speck floating in the cosmos. On the contrary, we’re incredibly, marvelously complex creations with the capacity for self-reflection. I’m also not saying that we should accept people regardless of their beliefs and their actions. What I am saying is that we start with the premise that all of us are miracles and share this incredible history.