Ten Cents on the Dollar

RealClearPolitics - The Case for High-Deductible Health Insurance

Essentially, we all want to live forever. This makes health care a very desirable good. At the same time, the normal restraints imposed by price are frequently lacking. Today, of every dollar spent on health care in this country, just 13 cents is paid for by the person actually consuming the goods or services. Roughly half is paid for by government, and the remainder is covered by private insurance. And, as long as someone else is paying, consumers have every reason to consume as much health care as is available.

How likely is it that people will make smart purchasing decisions when they are only paying 13 cents on every dollar being spent for a good? What would happen if food bills were covered that way? Bar tabs? Women's clothing? I think we all realize that prices in all those areas would rise rapidly.

So what would make sense for health care? It would seem pretty obvious that an INCREASE in the deductibles, and instituting some form of mandatory health savings accounts would be a superb idea. So what do BO and company want to do? Well, the opposite of course! They are out to make the situation WORSE!

The president actually denounced high-deductible insurance and greater consumer cost sharing as "not real insurance." Both the House and Senate versions of health reform reduce co-payments and all but eliminate policies with high-deductibles. No co-payments at all are allowed for a wide variety of broadly-defined "preventive" services. The consumer share of health spending will actually decline to just ten cents of every dollar by 2019.

This all but guarantees that health care costs and spending will continue their unsustainable path. And that is a path leading to more debt, higher taxes, fewer jobs and a reduced standard of living for all Americans.

Health care reform cannot just be about giving more stuff to more people. It should be about actually "reforming" the system. That means scrapping the current bills, and crafting the type of reform that makes consumers responsible for their health care decisions.

Never Illusioned

RealClearPolitics - Why the Health Care Bill is a Failure

I love Charles summation: "Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned."

It is the part of conservatism that is actually quite sad, the only antidote that I have ever found is religious faith and hope for a better life to come beyond the grave. Sad because at it's core, conservatism is acceptance that the "human condition" is permanent, and not significantly perfectible. We are terminal, and in even the quite short run in terms of even well understood human history, attempts at improvement are at best mildly palliative, and more commonly disastrous to the point of mass killing (see communism and fascism, final chapters still being written on socialism / liberalism).

Democrat programs are the kind of program that sound a far happier note, with the exception of one small item. As Charles puts it, "the disagreeable  fact of no free lunch". Well, yes, sort of like death, taxes, and too many calories, the "Party of having a party", that agreeable jackass, seems to always forget about the hangover.

Don't read me, go read Charles, he is much better.

Gun Insanity

Supreme Court to address limits of gun control - CNN.com

One definition of insanity is not being in touch with reality.

Chicago passed its ban on handguns in 1982, one of the most restrictive in the U.S. It is that law that is being challenged in the Supreme Court.

A study last year by economist Carl Moody of William & Mary College found that after the ban was imposed, city crime rates rose significantly, almost immediately. The city is more dangerous now than it was before the ban, the study concluded, relative to the 24 largest American cities.

Chicago passed a ban in '82 and crime rates ROSE. GUNS ARE BANNED IN CHICAGO!!!! When guns are banned, criminals have MORE reason to use a gun, it gives them greater leverage. What part of this is hard to understand?

This 53-year-old mother of eight says the city has to do something to stop the fear and pain of the violence. "We have enough guns in our communities already, you know, that we're afraid of, and now we've got to worry about everybody living next door to each other with guns and more guns" if the ban is repealed. "Our children are traumatized by the violence, and it's mostly gun violence."

So, here we have a woman who knows the situation today with guns banned is WORSE than in communities where they are not banned. She knows that there are plenty of guns in Chicago, because if you are a criminal, you do crime -- a "ban" doesn't apply to you, it applies to law abiding citizens. So the criminals have guns and the law abiding citizens do not, unsurprisingly, the criminals increasingly make use of that advantage.

BUT, she believes that removing a ban which made crime worse is going to make crime worse yet again. What will make it better? She doesn't know. Insanity?

BTW, if there is a question on the constitution applying to states, then what about abortion? Roe V Wade at the Federal level ought to have only applied to DC.

First Do No Harm

RealClearPolitics - Living with Partisanship

Dionne of course writes it to make it seem like Republicans are just heartless lovers of the rich, but he comes to this conclusion that is at least on the path to the truth:

Obama concluded: "We can debate whether or not we can afford to help them, but we shouldn't pretend somehow that they don't need help."

As neatly as anything I have seen, this exchange captured the philosophical and emotional difference between the two parties.

The point is not that Republicans are heartless and Democrats are compassionate. It's that Democrats on the whole believe in using government to correct the inequities and inefficiencies the market creates, while Republicans on the whole think market outcomes are almost always better than anything government can produce.

That's not cheap partisanship. It's a fundamental divide. The paradox is that our understanding of politics would be more realistic if we were less cynical and came to see the battle for what it really is.

The big missing thing in EJ's analysis is that Democrats (and many big government Republicans) assume that any condition CAN be dealt with on this earth -- it is just a matter of "money, smarts, technology, leadership, laws, growth, etc". They disagree with Jesus who said "the poor will always be with us".

I like to trot out death as an example of something that we can't fix, nor would we know what to do if we did--overpopulation of the starving diseased undead would make us pray fervently for death to return. Death is the big obvious item, the list is never ending -- the common cold, fat, rainy days, baldness--take them away (if we could) and we would almost certainly find that we were mistaken in our quest. The ASSUMPTION that all it takes is "government" or "markets" or whatever human construction that we can come up with to fix it is false, expensive, and often the "cure" is far worse than the "disease".

No, the BIG difference between Dionne and a great many of Republicans that are far closer to him than I or many of the truly conservative is that they believe in the ultimate perfectibility of man, and conservatives don't. What is more, Dionne, and most like him would say "at least you have to try"!!!

That is like me trying to do surgery on someone with appendicitis -- actually, worse than that. I realize it IS very possible to do such surgery, it is just that I don't know how to do it. For many of the problems that EJ and his band of do-gooders take on, they have no concept of the cost of the methods nor the llikelihood of a positive outlook (if any). They are more often than not attempting to mandate the mass butchery of one sort of thing or another by government, and feeling smug because they aren't like those evil Republicans who would try to let people decide if they wanted to be butchered, but would also try to convince them they did and make a profit off the butchery. EJ thinks he is a saint because he removes both the choice and the profit from the equation and calls butchery "a good try"!!!

The prime directive of conservatism is just like medicine; FIRST, do no harm!!!

Civility In Politics

Op-Ed Columnist - The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged - NYTimes.com

Frank Rich of course writes for a far left blood soaked idiot of an outlet that nobody but a completely out to lunch leftist would give the time of day, so I know I ought not pay attention. (The New York Times).

"Obsessed and Deranged" seems like a very valid title, but before one starts pulling it out, it is often good to take a really good look close to home.

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.

So Stack, McVeigh, Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin are all "connected". The Republican party has "no constituency" (who won in Virginia, NJ and MA recently? Hmm). What we have is a dangerous fringe movement that is bent on violence and the overthrow of the BO Kingdom. Many of these unwashed have failed to bow to King BO with the appropriate subservience, why many of them are not even aware that we live in a Monarchy, and King BO holds ultimate power. Oh wait ... is that true??  I know Frank is brilliant, it MUST be true!

The NYT would never be wrong.

Gore Not So Popular, Even at Apple

Al Gore a lightning rod at Apple shareholder meeting | Circuit Breaker - CNET News

I'm sure when they put the Inventor of the Internet on the board, it seemed like a great idea -- Nobel Price, Oscar, 100' Houseboat -- great guy. But suddenly, the "climate of climate" has soured. Snow piled up everywhere, things freezing in Florida, leaked e-mails on fraud, numbers that don't add up.

Hard to think of anyone more worthy of a bit of a reality check!

Blame the Elites

Op-Ed Columnist - The Making of a Euromess - NYTimes.com

There is no way that the fundamental idea of the European socialist nanny state could have any flaws (at least that is what Krugman thinks) -- therefore, there must be a scapegoat other than promising people safety from cradle to grave and taxing them like there is no tomorrow, especially if they ever make more money than some fixed percentage of the average. Oh, thank goodness, there IS a scapegoat! Iis "the arrogance of the elites"! Wow, what a relief, I can't think of any of those over here, and I'm sure that neither Paul nor BO could either! This must be the first time in world history that "the elites" got out of hand.

No, the real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.

Common Ground?

Samuel J. Palmisano: Fix the Bridges But Don't Forget Broadband - WSJ.com

I'm not much of a believer in government, but I know that Democrats are. How about trying an experiment. If government "investment" is good, how about investing in something that the vast majority of us might like, is generally environmentally friendly (more than roads at least) and gives us a significant chance of serendipitous positive leverage for the future?

How about 100Mbit broadband to every home and 4G cellular across the entire nation? This would seem to be MUCH simpler than taking on medical care, but if it could be pulled off successfully, maybe THEN we could start doing some federal (or even state) nibbling at the massive health care behemoth.

How? I'd be open to a number of options, but I'd say we essentially make 100Mbit of broadband "a right" -- since it is going into every home, there ought to be some economies of scale, so it ought to be pretty cheap to pay for. With that much bandwidth, only one pipe is needed -- phone, TV, internet. We can decide if we have the technology so Satellite services can play or not.

I believe in "flat" so something like $50 a month in today's dollars for your wired digital services per month, and maybe another $30 for cellular? I'm sure there is plenty of room for massive fights about the particulars, but that is OK -- fighting over something that many of us at least more or less understand is much better than fighting over something that very very few have any clue on.

Patriot Act More Than Remembered

Power Line - Patriot Act Extended

Remember the horror of the Patriot Act? Guess it is just fine now that BO is in power.

Being Stupid

Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ - CNN.com

As a Conservative Christian, no doubt my IQ is too low to measure, but I can only admire the brilliance of liberal atheists. My lack of intelligence makes it seem miraculous to me that human intelligence can be so easily reduced to a single number, but I guess it is so -- beauty would seem hard to measure on the surface, yet I hear other smarter guys saying a woman is a "10" or a "7.5" all the time.

Being as smart as they are, they must have proven that all races and sexes measure identically on the IQ test by now -- correcting for things like religious beliefs and political leanings of course. I wonder if the effects of having backward religious or political views are identical across races and sexes as well? Like is a conservative black christian female any smarter than a conservative white christian male? I'd think so, it sounds like having less of some group usually means they are smarter -- prone to being "elite" and such.

I guess I'm just too stupid to feel really bad about this.

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Op-Ed Columnist - What We Learned From the Health Care Summit - NYTimes.com

Krugman is far more "honest" (in the lefty sense) than most, giving insight into "how in the world do they think as they do"??  I'll translate.

If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.

Translation: The left has the right to ignore all rules -- the Constitution, rules of the Senate, rules of debate and propriety. (why say "we disagree", when you can label the other side "liars") We are all "lucky" if they shove a bill that is very likely unconstitutional through the Senate, ignoring the explicit mandate of the chamber to allow the minority to apply braking to partisan railroading, even after what many would assume would be the instructive loss of their 60th seat in the chamber.

It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”

Wow. I guess you could say that he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate Democrats’ plan does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But it also makes it clear that this would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.

Translation: When the left predicts the future, it is holy writ passed from Olympus, when others predict the future, it is a "lie". The left's positions are not only inherently correct, the opposition has positions that are "unreasonable".

In fact, nobody knows the future, even with a Nobel prize. There is a lot of evidence that getting the government involved raises costs (see Medicare and health care cost). Some might validly believe that a bunch of new mandates for insurance companies would raise prices. It did in Massachusetts, now the highest insurance cost state in the nation, and it was one of the main reasons that the formerly all blue state elected Scott Brown. No matter, Krugman has spoken his decree for the future, to disagree is a "lie". 

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.

Translation: The Democrats could not agree on health care with a 60-vote Senate majority, even with measures like buying the votes of some of their own party with hundreds of millions of kickbacks and voting on Christmas Eve. Now they lost that 60 vote majority due to a vote by the people in the bluest of blue states, but the RIGHT thing for them to do is to ignore that fact and shove the bill through anyway. It is however Republicans that are "arrogant". Whatever Republicans believe about the future is "a lie", what Paul and his cronies believe is the golden truth, pure in purpose and outcome.

To which one might say. Why can't we all just get along?

As the Worm Turns

This would be funny if it were not so sick. The Democrats in '05 were EXPANDING the use of the filibuster to judicial nominees that they didn't like, but any thought that they ought not be able to use that expanded power was a "crisis".

Now they want to remove the power of the filibuster for a minority in the Senate fighting to prevent legislation from passing that the majority of Americans do not want to pass! But wait, now their views are completely opposite, even though in '05, they were on the side of EXPANSION of the filibuster, now they seek to essentially remove it, since any "important legislation" could just be "reconciled".

They give mendacity a bad name.

Explaining BOnomics

A clunker that travels 12,000 miles a year at 15 mpg uses 800 gallons of gas a year.

A vehicle that travels 12,000 miles a year at 25 mpg uses 480 gallons a year.

So, the average Cash for Clunkers transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by  320 gallons per year. 

They claim 700,000 vehicles so that's 224 million gallons saved per year.

That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil.

5 million barrels is about 5 hours worth of US consumption.

More importantly, 5 million barrels of oil at $70 per barrel costs about $350 million dollars

So, the government paid $3 billion of our tax dollars to save $350 million.

We spent $8.57 for every dollar we saved.

I'm pretty sure they will do a great job with our health care, though.

Canadian Labrador Premier Chooses US Healthcare

The Canadian Press: 'My heart, my choice,' Williams says, defending decision for U.S. heart surgery

I live in Rochester MN, it isn't uncommon to see a Canadian license plate around the clinic. As I'll say over and over again, National Health is only popular with the healthy. Much like if it "positively, absolutely has to get there overnight", it isn't USPS that you send it with, when it is your heart, it is much better to go with the best if you can at all afford it.

Don't expect the Democrats supporting National Health to actually use it if they need it. Consistency is NOT an issue!!!!

BOcare at Ramming Speed

President Obama and Health Care - WSJ.com

If any Republican president was trying to do anything 20% this undemocratic, the MSM would be screeching at the top of their lungs 24x7!

"The President's Proposal," as the 11-page White House document is headlined, is in one sense a notable achievement: It manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive. It includes more taxes, more subsidies and even less cost control than the Senate bill. And it purports to fix the special-interest favors in the Senate bill not by eliminating them—but by expanding them to everyone.

How does anyone take the thought of a "bipartisan summit" seriously at all when the threat of ramming BOcare through via "reconciliation" is being trumpeted more and more loudly even before the supposed fig leaf of bipartisanship is proffered.