Obama caretoons

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They're Coming For Your Tonsils

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Wednesday, July 29, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Health Costs: Lawyers are responsible for more unneeded procedures than "greedy" doctors. But instead of capping malpractice awards, bureaucrats will soon decide which treatments are OK and whether you're worth it.
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Comment: The Democrats in Congress have consistently blocked efforts to limit malpractice awards. The cost of malpractice insurance and the cost of providing health care designed to defend the health care provider against potential law suites is a factor in the high cost of health care. Your doctor may not be ordering that unnecessary test to pad the bill but to defend himself in case he is later sued. Part of an overhaul of health care should include tort reform.

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The Current Health Care System is not a Market

By Justin Williams, 07/29/2009, Reposted from Barstool Economist at Getliberty.org

While the two parties falsely stage a contrived debate on the “desirable” degree of socialized medicine in the market place and what should and shouldn’t be taxed, one myth that is not being discussed in the news must be busted:

The current health care system is not a market.

A competitive market consists of various buyers and sellers voluntarily exchanging goods and services within a price system, either with currency or other goods. While health care has many buyers, it has few sellers, and no price system.

The lack of prices in any industry throws market coordination off, which creates many of the problems America is facing today. In a pure competitive market-based system, buyers and sellers, working tandem, would not be faced with rising costs and lower coverage.

Simply put, if the prices were too high for buyers to afford, sellers would do everything in their power to lower their prices so that they would not go bankrupt.

Instead, under today’s non-competition price-fixing system, health care expenses keep going up causing insurance companies to up their rates. This is when the last remnants of a market kicks in and more costs taken out of employees checks translates into less people willing to pay.

But isn’t this a price? No, it is one fixed amount taken out of the employee’s check every month regardless of whether he or she goes to the doctor every day of the month, or not at all.

And for most private health insurance plans, when the person visits the doctor they only pay a fixed co-pay (usually $10 or $20) regardless of how many tests they did or did not have.

This would be like joining grocery store with a flat membership fee in which the person had to pay the same price whether they were buying a Thanksgiving feast or running in to grab a gallon of milk. For obvious reasons, no grocery store has ever set up their business model this way.

This is because customers would only buy the most expensive items. If the choice were between filet mignon and scrapple as your meat for dinner and cost was not an option, the choice would be fairly obvious.

In fact, since the cost is not associated with the item at all, there is only an incentive for the producers to raise the price on the grocer. This slowly trickles into higher membership rates, meaning less people will be members as expenditures will rise higher than consumer price index (see below). In the case of health care, this means fewer people being able to afford insurance, while those who do have it live with a false sense of security, blithely unaware that the roof will inevitably fall.

So we know why over the past 60 years, the third-party-payer system has perverted the health care market place. But the question remains, how did we get to this point?

After World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt worried that the transition of millions of soldiers back to the workforce would drive down current wages. So Roosevelt froze wages.

This put business owners in a position where they could not attract better skilled labor with more money. So, of course, they offered benefits, and third-party pay was born. After this, it would be near impossible for businesses to stop offering employees those benefits and go back to a true market price system.

Without prices, there is no market information. And with flat rates for everything, there is only one preference, which equals higher costs.

The Republicans have not offered any solutions and will lose the debate if they stick with the status quo argument. The status quo and the Democratic plan to socialize health care both lack the necessary price mechanism to make health care affordable and viable for everyone.

It’s simple, the constant increase in costs is due to the lack of a market price structure. And if the situation, whether the statue quo or the proposed plan, continues to lack market price competition then health care costs will continue to rise. And if businesses cannot reduce costs, they will be forced to reduce quality.

In short, the Obama health care scheme offers, the worst of both worlds: higher costs and lower quality. Not to mention euthanasia for those sentenced to the rationing rooms.

Justin Williams is the Senior Commentary Editor of ALG News Bureau and as always accepts any comments or questions for the Barstool Economist at justin@getliberty.org.

Comment: Great article! It is so obvious that we do not have a price system for health care. If someone else pays the bill, then no one cares what something cost. Those who are defending the status quo are on the losing end of this health care debate. We will move toward socialism or move toward markets. The status quo is not sustainable. Those who are defending the status quo and ignoring the problems with the American system of healthcare and pretending everything is OK are doing us a disservice.

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Most objectionable provisions of Healthcare bill removed.

This just in: The AP reported that a bipartisan group of Senate Finance Committee negotiators has decided to exclude a requirement many congressional Democrats seek that would require businesses to offer coverage to their workers, the so called "employer mandate." Also the provision for a government insurance option was removed.

This is good news. These were the two most objectionable provisions of the plan. I would prefer that the total plan be scraped and Congress go back to the drawing board and develop a plan based on a modified version of the Healthy Americans Act. Maybe that can now happen.

It is too early to know what the impact of the bill will be with these two provisions removed. They seemed to be the heart of the bill. I suspect that the more liberal members of Congress are not going to be happy. With these two provisions removed, the health care reform will probably do no irreparable harm should it pass. This development is a step back from socialized medicine. The bill still leaves us with higher taxes on upper-middle class people and small businesses, an individual mandate that will force all individuals to purchase insurance or pay an additional tax, federally financed abortions, and a massive increase in the federal deficit. I am not sure what it will accomplish.

While part of what is left of the bill still is objectionable, it appears that it will not be a disaster should it pass. It will not create entitlements and expectations that cannot be undone. This will not be the great overhaul of the American system of healthcare. I don't know what Republicans should do now. If Republicans will vote for it, Obama can take credit for passing a bi-partisan healthcare bill and a much worse bill will have been avoided. It may be time to accept that this is the least bad bill we can get and support it.

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Health Care Flow chart

Click here to see the chart in pdf format.

This is the flow chart that Democrats in Congress do not want you to see. It shows the maze of Government Bureaucracy that would be the consequence of passing President Obama's Government Health Care Plan. To really study the chart, open the pdf version.

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Boehner Blasts Censorship of Chart Detailing Democrats’ Government-Run Health Care Labyrinth

In a speech on the House floor this morning, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) blasted Democratic leaders efforts to censor a chart that illustrates the bureaucratic labyrinth of 53 new agencies, programs and commissions that would result for American health care with enactment of Washington Democrats proposed 1.6 trillion-dollar government takeover of health care. Democratic leaders have attempted to block Members of Congress from using the chart, produced by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) and the House Republican professional staff of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), in official communications with their constituents.

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Conyers: Why read the bill?

Congressman John Conyers (D-Naturally-MI) has finally told the truth about how he and his elitist colleagues really feel about actually reading the bills with which they saddle the country-bumpkin Americans in fly-over country. I for one would feel better if I thought our law makers actually knew what they were voting on. If you can't read it and understand it maybe you shouldn't vote for it.

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Where the Sidewalk Ends

Nashville builds sidewalks stupidly.

In the last few years Nashville has spend millions of dollars building and repairing sidewalks. I don’t think they got a lot of bang for the buck.

About five days a week I run, walk, or run and walk about three to four miles, depending on the route I take. I have observed the sidewalk program in my neighborhood up close.

A lot of Metro’s sidewalk budget was spend making the sidewalks comply with the American’s with Disability Act. Now, I don’t know what metro had to do and what they did that was beyond the requirement of the act. Anyway, they have rebuilt the sidewalks at almost every intersection in the city to make the sidewalks wheelchair accessible. I seldom see anyone in a wheel chair using the sidewalks but the new sidewalk curb cuts are great for riding bicycles. One can now zip along the sidewalks on a bicycle and cross streets with ease. Until someone stole my bicycle off my front porch last fall, I often rode by bicycle on the new sidewalks and enjoyed them.

One thing that I observed is that the same sidewalk curb cuts were often build, dug back up and rebuild again. At the intersection of 8th Avenue and Wedgewood the sidewalks at all four corners were rebuild. The construction company came out with jackhammers, backhoes, concrete trucks and a work crew of 8 to 12. They build the sidewalk and then about six weeks later they came back tore it all out and build it again. I can only guess that it was not build to specifications. I hope the second rebuilding was at the contractors expense and not the city’s.

Another thing I found interesting was that all of the construction was not done in one pass. Someone would come out and paint big “X’s” on the sidewalk segments to be replaced. By a segment, I am speaking of those squares of sidewalk concrete about 4 x 4. On my morning run I noticed that the X’ed section had cracks in them and were the worse segments. They weren’t really badly deteriorated but were defective. A few days after the sidewalk segments were marked, the crews with jackhammers and backhoes and trunks would come out and replace the identified segments.

What perplexed me was that a few weeks after the replacement segments were build, someone came along and marked new segments and the crews came back out and replaced more segments. Sometimes the new marked segments were right next to previously rebuild segments. I don’t know why they did not identify and replace all of the defective segments at one time.

Here are some other observations that I thought I could illustrate best with pictures. From my observations I have deduced some Metro Sidewalk Construction Principles.

Sidewalk Construction Principle #1: Just build it; Don’t worry about maintaining it.

This is one of the new sidewalks. It really is. The new sidewalk is beneath these tree samplings that overhang the sidewalk and beneath about four inches of dirt and gravel. The first picture is looking east on Wedgewood and the second, the same sections of sidewalk looking west. This is about 200 feet of new sidewalk. I would think that if you can’t do better than this there is no point in building it. How about getting some jail house inmates to cut these trees and shovel off the sidewalk?

Sidewalk Construction Principle #2:
Don’t fix all of it, save some work for another day.
I don’t know why this section of sidewalk on Wedgewood was not replaces. Some of the sections that were replaced only had minor cracks and yet this badly deteriorated segment was not.

Sidewalk Construction Principle #3: Make those curb cuts wheelchair accessible, don’t look what is beyond.
Look at this: The curb cut is wheelchair accessible, but then the trashcan and sign and light pole obstruct it. Not only could not a wheelchair negotiate this obstruction, you could not even squeeze a baby stroller past these obstructions. The second picture is the same block about 150 feet south, again it is not wheelchair accessible.

Sidewalk Construction Principle #3: If you can’t build for wheelchair use, then don’t let a pedestrian use it.
What you are looking at here is a planter island protruding out into the path of the sidewalk. The sidewalk abruptly ends at the planter but then resumes on the other side of the street. Sometimes geography will not allow the required slope and area of level sidewalk prior to the curb cut. I would think that it is better to build a sidewalk rather than block a sidewalk, even if a wheelchair cannot use it. But, what do I know, I'm just a pedestrian taxpayer.

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Rep. Cooper: Reluctant "NO" on House Health Care bill

Rep. Jim Cooper: “As Obama's campaign chairman in Tennessee, as a longtime instructor of health policy at the Owen Business School at Vanderbilt University, and as a veteran of the disappointing health-care debates of the early '90s, I am dismayed at the prospect of voting ‘no’."
“But the House bill, at least as I have closely reviewed the June 19th and later drafts, is not good enough to earn the support of Nashville-area voters.”
“Does passing a bad bill yield a good result? I don't think so.” (The Tennessean, 7/26/2009)

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN): “The Tax Increases On Small Businesses And Upper Income People Is Worrisome Because You Don't Want To Hurt Job Creation At A Time Like This." (ABC’s “World News,” 7/16/09)

Rep. Cooper: “It Still Looks Like A Budget Buster.” “‘It still looks like a budget buster,’ said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), who complained that despite the $1 trillion cost it would still fail to cover every American.” (Steven T. Dennis And Tory Newmyer, “House Health Bill Under Fire,” Roll Call, 7/16/09)

Rep. Cooper: “Pouring More Money Into A Broken System Isn’t A Really Good Idea.” “The bill proposed by the House would cost $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, and concerns about cost make Cooper apprehensive about the legislation. He says bringing in money from small business owners isn't necessary, since there is enough ‘waste’ in the current system to pay for the program. ‘Pouring more money into a broken system isn't a really good idea,’ Cooper said. ‘There's so much waste in the health care system that we don't really need to go outside the health care system.’” (“Unplugged: Moderate Dem Talks About Health Care,” CBS News, 7/15/09)

Rep. Cooper: “Why Would We Want New Taxes In The Middle Of A Recession?” “Cooper, one of the Blue Dog Coalition's experts on health-care reform, said the House bill ‘has good parts but also a lot of terrible parts.’ Among his objections, besides the bill's cost, is a proposed tax on families making more than $350,000 per year, which he said would hurt small businesses. The tax would generate $540 billion over 10 years. ‘Why would we want new taxes in the middle of a recession?’ Cooper said.” (Bill Theobald, “Health Bill Faces Fight From Tennessee Blue Dogs,” Tennessean, 7/19/09)

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President Obama's Health Care claims disputed.

I would hate to be so disrespectful as to accuse our President of intentionally misleading the public, so I will use the language of political correctness and say he is apparently severely truth-challenged.

The Washington Times ran a story yesterday that reported:

Even as President Obama delivered a prime-time sales pitch for his embattled health care reform plan Wednesday, basic facts about coverage, cost and who foots the bills remain in dispute and many of the president's favorite talking points are challenged not only by Republicans but also by independent fact-checkers. (read more)

The article reports on the work done by the independent non-partisan group Fact Check among others. Fact Check is one of my favorite sites. It is great at examining statements of politicians for truthfulness and rhetorical excess. To see the Fact Check analysis of Mr. Obama's Health Care speech, click here. The New York Times ran a similar story to the Washington Times story and reported a different set of disputed claims (link). Among the health care claims by Mr. Obama that are in dispute are these:

• People who are happy with their current health insurance can keep it.
• Mr. Obama's oft-stated promise to provide universal health care coverage.
• Mr. Obama stated opposition to requiring individuals to buy insurance or pay a fine.
• Mr. Obama pledge that the overhaul of health care would be "deficit neutral."
• The president's claim that the cost of treating uninsured people raises the cost of health care for the rest of Americans by $1,000 per family. It is closer to $200 per family per year.
• Mr. Obama claims that nearly 46 million people in the U.S. are uninsured. That number includes illegal aliens and people who could afford to purchase insurance but choose not to do so.
• Mr. Obama's claim that the reform will not reduce Medicare benefits.

The truth should matter. To believe President Obama, you have to believe that we will get more for less and no one will have to give up anything except a few rich people who will pay a little bit more in taxes. I accept that we need health care reform. The status quo is not acceptable. The current system is not sustainable. Getting reform right will not be easy but what is before us is taking us in wrong direction and will not solve the problem. It very well may make it worse.

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Behind Closed Doors

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind closed doors.

A Reuters news story today reports that President Obama's push for health care reform suffered a set back when Senate leaders announced a bill would not be passed before the month-long summer recess. That is by now old news. This is the part of the story that I found interesting:

The reform package under construction in both chambers of Congress has been besieged from all sides by criticism of its more than $1 trillion price tag and
its scope, with debates behind closed doors over how to pay for the program and
rein in healthcare costs.(link)

And then this:

In the Senate, a bipartisan group of Finance Committee members continued their
closed-door meetings to work through policy options on the bill.

I guess I have been under the impression that the people's business was to be conducted in public. I thought that only matters involving classified national security issues could be deliberated in secret. Apparently I was mistaken and that is not true.

I know in Tennessee that we have a very strict "Sunshine Law" and it not only applies to the State Legislature but all rule making bodies such as boards and commission and all units of local government. Two council members can not meet for lunch and discuss pending legislation. The press is vigilant in ensuring that the sunshine law is not violated. Years ago, when I first began serving in the Metro Council the Budget and Finance Committee would meet in secret to hammer out a budget every year. I did not approve of the process. I know it is easier to negotiate and horse trade without the public looking over your shoulder, but I think public business should be conducted in public. By the time I left the Council, the Council had abandoned the practice.

I know the presidential campaign, and before that the congressional campaign, was a long time ago but it seems I recall that candidate Obama and Democratic congressional candidates talked about changing the way things were done in Washington. It seems like I recall they said they would be more open and less secretive. Did they not say something about "transparency?" Nah, I must of dreamed that.

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An elderly man suffered a massive heart attack.

An elderly man suffered a massive heart attack.

The family drove wildly to get him to the emergency room. After what seemed like a very long wait, the ER Doctor appeared, wearing his scrubs and a long face. Sadly, he said, "I'm afraid he is brain-dead, but his heart is still beating."

"Oh, dear God," cried his wife, her hands clasped against her cheeks with shock! "We've never had a Democrat in the family before!"

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