Michio Kaku has identified something that would be a greater disaster for humanity than ObamaCare. Fortunately, the risk of it happening is much lower than the probability that ObamaCare will strike us.
Jan 062010
Health care reform
Dec 232009
Democrats are in a mad rush to enact a health care plan that people don’t want. The more people learn about it, the less they like it, and the harder the Democrats work to get an even worse one enacted, even if it means violating the peace and harmony of the Christmas season.
I don’t quite understand that behavior. Yes, I understand that they want to subjugate the American people. That’s a natural and common human behavior, albeit an unlovely one. But I don’t understand the self-destructive mania by which they redouble their efforts.
Unfortunately, the only parallel I could think of is one involving Nazis and extermination camps. That seems a little extreme, even for what the Democrats are doing. Even to mention it is likely to draw reactions like “How dare you compare health care with the holocaust!” instead of leading to a dispassionate analysis of the features that the two instances do and don’t have in common. But that’s all I had, so here is the way I explained it on a political e-mailing list:
I have a little different take on it, but I need to invoke St. Godwin to explain it. Well, I can’t really explain it, but I can think of an analogy that might help us look for an explanation.
The Democrats are like the Nazis in the closing days of WWII. The Nazis were in retreat and knew they were losing. Yet instead of rethinking their ideology and trying to reform their ways before having to face the victors, they only increased the ferocity and rate at which they sent Jews to the gas chambers. Similarly, the Democrats know they are losing, but this only increases the ferocity of their attacks on the health of the American people. They have no time to lose!
I have never understood the psychology by which the Nazis did what they did, but it’s interesting that it seems not to have been a one-off phenomenon.
But then one of the other members of the list came to my rescue and gave us another example. It turns out that what we’re seeing in Congress may not be quite such a rare human phenomenon, after all.
When one of our daughters was about 2 years old, we were looking for her one day, and saw a lump underneath one of the curtains in the kitchen. We could see crumbs on the floor beneath her, and knew she was eating cookies that she had nabbed and sneaked off with. When we lifted the curtain, and she knew she was discovered, what did she do? She upshifted, and started cramming cookies into her mouth twice as fast.
Incidentally, though I am as wary of St. Godwin’s law as anyone else, I think it should be repealed. We all have the same DNA and the same temptations as the Nazis. They are an extreme example of how bad people can be, but they were not outside the human species. Bringing them into a discussion should be the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.
Dec 212009
As a former Nebraskan, I figured it was my duty to send a contribution to GiveBenTheBoot.com. It’s bad enough that Reid’s bill is majorly counterproductive, but then to start the corruption right off the bat by striking a special deal for Nebraska at the expense of other states… Ben Nelson needs to go, so I sent a contribution to help make it happen.
At least Nebraska’s Governor Heineman has some principles other than the almighty dollar. AP story here.
Dec 182009
If ever there was any doubt that those who are trying to impose nationalized health care on us care about something other than peoples’ health care…
This is not Ann Coulter’s or Jonah Goldberg’s explanation of the goals of the left. This is how they explain themselves to each other. There was a contest at a web site called Public Option, Please, and this is the poster that won.
Makes one long for the good old days when the worst we had to fear from the left was Stalinism.
H/T to Joshua Claybourn at In The Agora. My favorite comment at that site: “Can we get bypass surgery?”
Dec 142009
Once upon a time ecologists tried to explain the complexities of ecosystems in a similar fashion, while pointing to the dangers of trying to replace them with monocultures. Don Boudreaux explains it so well this time that I’m quoting and linking it here for future reference.
Our world is full of complexities that defy human engineering. Can Congress engineer winter snow away from Minnesota or summer hurricanes away from the Gulf Coast? Of course not, and any attempts Congress might make to do so would be seen immediately to be hubris of the highest and most hazardous sort.
Attempts to consciously re-design the health-care industry are equally hubristic and hazardous. That industry is one of billions of unique, often personal, relationships, each of which is part of countless long chains of efforts to transform raw materials and human effort into life-improving and life-saving drugs and treatments. Like weather, these long chains of human relationships weren’t designed by anyone. Like weather, they change and evolve. And like weather, their all-important details are beyond the comprehension of would-be re-designers. These long chains of human relationships cannot be undone and reassembled at will by politicians and ‘experts’ without risking enormous unintended catastrophe.
Want proof? Look no further than your own lament that the very ‘engineers’ – the members of Congress – who are now attempting to redesign the details of the health-care industry cannot as much as read and grasp all of the words on the bill that they’re debating.
Nov 302009
Good! Very good! I see a bright future for Google in the world of advertising. It could sell bottled sewage, for example, by making the disclaimer: “Drinking bottled sewage is unlikely to decrease cholera incidence. It will probably cut cholera cases worldwide by less than ten percent.”
That’s for another time, though. For now it tried to sell something different:
Google news headline for a Washington Post article: “In health-care reform, no deficit cure.” Google news summary: “Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid’s health-care legislation is projected to cut less than 10 percent from federal deficits over a decade.”
In defense of the Washington Post, it should be pointed out that its article is not nearly as misleading as Google’s summary.
Nov 062009
Here is a letter I sent to Rep. Mark Schauer this morning.
Rep. Schauer,
Please vote against the Pelosi health plan. Please save your vote for health care reform, instead.
In past generations many of our young soldiers gave their lives to keep our country from going down the road where the Pelosi plan will take us.
Don’t let our country become a hellhole like the UK with a surveillance camera on every corner and anti social-behaviour ordinances that overturn the rule of law, but which are necessary to deal with the social pathologies that result when one’s personal decisions are of little consequence.
There is much the government can do to improve our country’s health care. Congress can remove the extreme injustice by which the self-employed, the unemployed, and and others do not enjoy the same tax advantages in purchasing insurance that those of us who work for large corporate entities have. Congress can empower people to make meaningful choices to manage health risks. These are dangerous and terrifying choices, but denying us the ability to make these choices, as the Pelosi plan will do when it takes its natural course, will make us less than human.
And Congress can help those whose pre-existing conditions preclude the purchase of health insurance. Forcing insurers to become something other than insurers, as the Pelosi plan does, is the absolute wrong thing to do about it.
I suspect that if we were allowed to see what else is hidden in the Pelosi plan before Congress gets a chance to vote on it, we’d find many other things wrong with it, too. Otherwise, why is it necessary to use deceit and secrecy to get a bill passed without our knowing all the details of what’s in it?
Oct 282009
President Obama says he will not rush the decision to send more soldiers into harm’s way. I believe him. This time he has made a promise he will keep.
We can believe this promise, even though everything else he wants (e.g. stimulus funding, health care takeover) is an urgent necessity that requires immediate action to avert catastrophe. Now is not the time to debate whether we are sending health care into harm’s way. Now is not the time for delay on that front. But now is the time to consider, very carefully and slowly, what we should do with Afghanistan.
And we can believe this promise even though his delays are putting those soldiers who are already in harm’s way in the way of even greater harm.
I can appreciate his quandry. There is no good solution. Not that that is going to stop him from invading and conquering our health care system.
Oct 172009
This is what I posted as a comment to the WSJ editorial: “Cash for Oldsters : A $250 bribe to help the ObamaCare medicine go down.”
If there ever was any doubt that the Obama administration is capable of instituting death panels for senior citizens, or the moral equivalent thereof, it has been removed by this $250 ploy.
It shows his utter contempt for old people that he would think he could throw them a $250 bone and get them to wag their tails and lick his hand for it. It shows he thinks they’re too stupid to see past their next meal. Somebody who is that cynical, who has that little respect for people, is not a person to trust anywhere near the people who prescribe medications and tend hospital beds.
He may get his way, though. Here’s my recommendation. Let’s make public heroes out of all the oldsters who take their $250 payment, or any significant portion of it, and donate it to organizations that will work to unelect the people who enacted it.
Another comment in response to somebody’s discussion of AARP:
I’m 61 but have never joined AARP. It’s because of it being a left-wing activist organization. I have long been prepared to make a big fuss if I stay at a hotel and can’t get the senior/AARP discount, on account of it being wrong to give discounts based on support for a partisan political organization. However, I’ve never been refused the discount.
Sep 302009
A Leviathan Ankle-Biter award to these health care workers in New York:
New York is the first state in the country to mandate flu vaccinations for its health care workers. The first doses of swine flu vaccine will be available beginning next week. Much of it is reserved for state health care workers, but there is growing opposition to required innoculations.
Health care workers in Hauppauge screamed “No forced shots!” as they rallied Tuesday against the state regulation requiring them to roll up their sleeves.