Health care reform

Greene demonstrates the state of journalism in America

 Bash the Messenger, Health care reform  No Responses »
Sep 142009
 

The headline on Eric Greene’s Sunday article in the Battle Creek Enquirer says, “Outburst shows lunacy of reform opposition.” That is not true. If anything, Greene’s article and its headline show the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of mainstream journalism, as well as its professional incompetence.

Joe Wilson was guilty of bad manners. But even worse than bad manners is the failure to speak out against our President’s disinformation campaign.

Greene doesn’t use the word “unprecedented” to refer to Wilson’s heckling, which is good, because it isn’t unprecedented despite what the White House says. An investigative reporter (or anyone else) can go to YouTube to watch a replay of the loud heckling and booing that President Bush received during his 2005 State of the Union address. And I recall that back in the days when I used to watch these speeches myself, there was Tip O’Neill at the SOTU making fun of President Reagan behind his back while he spoke.

But Greene insinuates that this kind of opposition is something new when he says America’s discourse “has veered into the surreal these past few months” and “It’s time to shove this insanity back into the dark recesses where it belongs.” Greene doesn’t mention the celebrity lunatics who were hinting broadly that Bush should be assassinated, or the members of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi who encouraged disruptive dissent when it was directed against Bush.

And just because the Bush-hating left were out of their minds doesn’t mean every one of their criticisms of Bush’s war policies was wrong.

One can be suspicious that it isn’t really Wilson’s bad manners or the methods of public discourse that Greene is criticizing. It’s not just the headline writer who has a bigger agenda. Greene gives himself away when he writes:

Although Wilson quickly apologized for his outburst, I’m not convinced of his sincerity since he was ordered to do so by his Republican bosses and since he continued to call the president a liar afterward.

Nor do I think Wilson’s emotions erupted in a vacuum. Some Republicans throughout the speech made it obvious they were more interested in their cell phones or in the theatrics of holding up paper copies of GOP legislation. Many also defended Wilson’s charge while wagging their finger at his method of delivery.

In other words, not only is it bad manners for Wilson to interrupt the President, but it’s bad even to disagree with his statement.

Greene writes, “Journalists and researchers widely agree that Obama spoke truthfully in his speech.” But journalists are hardly objective observers. These are the same people who throw Obama the softest of softball questions during his press conferences. Their abdication of their professional duties is what makes it necessary for people like Joe Wilson to do something to draw attention to what they have ignored.

Since Wednesday night Senators Kent Conrad and Max Baucus have decided that the provisions about illegal immigration should be tightened up a bit anyway. In other words, there was a point that needed to be addressed, one which the media had failed to tell us about.

Not that it’s anything new for something like this to happen. We are used to political partisanship on the part of the mainstream media. But Greene is taking it to new extremes, using authoritarian language of a type that Russian thug Vladimir Putin uses to tell the opposition to shut up and get out of the way:

Some viewed these carnivals of cacophony as freedom of speech in healthy action. Others saw them the same way they do street performers: entertaining for a time, but ultimately just an obstacle on the sidewalk.

and

losing one’s cool in front of the guy who’ll ultimately sign the law that may change everything about health care is quite another.

In Russia one may need to write that way to avoid becoming one of the many journalists who have been gunned down or pushed out of an upper story window. But that kind of talk is not appropriate for a journalist in a democratic republic.

Another lost opportunity

 Health care reform  No Responses »
Sep 132009
 

Very perceptive of Steve Chapman to point it out: The Republicans once again have blown a chance to enact real health care reform.

The truth is Republicans just can’t muster an interest in the subject until a Democratic president comes along and offers legislation, which is their cue to wake up and scream in horror. They solemnly agree the existing system has a host of serious flaws. But they can never get excited about fixing them — only about making sure Democrats don’t get to. [URL]

The town hall protestors created an atmosphere in which Republicans could have made major steps toward providing health care reform that would keep human rights intact. But being stupid and lazy as usual, they sat on their thumbs. They can work up enough energy to criticize one of their own for calling the President on his lies, but they can’t rouse themselves to enact any of the good proposals that have been waved about half-heartedly over the past several years. So the Democrats will get their way sooner or later and take us a huge step closer to a totalitarian welfare-police state.

Borgess was better

 Health care reform, NOTVIPP  No Responses »
Sep 012009
 

Last week my wife was hospitalized overnight. She is home and fine, which is one good thing to report. Another is that I forgot about my campaign to eliminate television in public places until almost the end. That’s because for whatever reason, this time I did not encounter waiting rooms with television screens on every wall. No CNN idiots screaming at me whichever way I turned.

This time she was in the Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo instead of the Battle Creek Health System, which had an extreme version of televisionitis when she was there for outpatient surgery last March.

Maybe I’m comparing apples to oranges. Maybe if we went through Borgess’s outpatient system we’d find the same difficulty in escaping the televisions. I don’t know. All I can say is that my encounters with Borgess as a visitor were television free.  (In the evening I took along my computer so we could watch part of a Russian movie together as we do at home most evenings.)

On the downside, the last few days we ate in a some fast food places that had public televisions. They weren’t as extreme as some places I’ve seen, and the volume was turned down very low, but still. Maybe I need to make up some cards to leave with the managers to explain why we’re walking out of such places without buying any food.

And I need a better acronym. NOTVIPP is pronounceable, but not catchy enough.

Work on this

 Health care reform, Term limits  No Responses »
Sep 012009
 

This makes me wonder if we should have term limits for congressional staff members. Say four years for staffers in the House, and 12 for those in the Senate. That way you could keep on enough people to provide continuity from one member’s term to the next, but mitigate the corrupting influence of power.

We called Mr. Dodd’s committee office last week to ask why the bill isn’t posted, and a spokesman explained that it is still being “worked on.” Will it be ready by October? “Don’t count on it,” the staffer said. [WSJ editorial, “Health-Care Secrets: Chris Dodd keeps his Senate bill under wraps.” 29 August 2009]

Public Option = Veterinary Medicine

 Health care reform  No Responses »
Aug 282009
 

Excellent, pithy summary by William Anderson in The Weekly Standard. (“Who Owns Your Body? Under Obamacare, not you.”)

Does the government, in the last analysis, own your body, or do you? If your answer is the former, be aware that you have opted for veterinary medicine, for you are now accepting the moral status of a domestic animal. If your answer is the latter, you must accept responsibility to make mortal decisions for yourself, and pay for the care that you want with money that you have reason to see as your own.

Not that Anderson is the first to make that comparison. Here is another version.

BTW, is anyone else around here old enough remember the days when women demanded the right to control their own bodies?

Time to do something with the ball

 Health care reform  No Responses »
Aug 262009
 

There have been too many stories like this one lately:

“Republicans Have Obama Playing Defense: The GOP strategy of principled opposition is winning over independents” by Fred Barnes (WSJ, Aug 23)

It reminds me too much of the MSU Spartans football teams of a few years ago. The defense would make a great stop, after which there would be lots of dancing, chest-butting, and high-fiving instead of getting mentally prepared for the next play. Next thing you knew, the opposing team would run over them for huge gains.

On health care, the Republicans are now crediting themselves with a great sack and fumble-recovery, never mind that the other quarterback messed up and didn’t run the same play he had called. Yes, it was a great play, but now is not the time for high-fiving and dancing. Now is the time for the Republicans to push their own health-care plans, the ones that will actually do some good, the ones the Democrats have been blocking tenaciously for years.

True, the Republicans have only half-heartedly pushed for these plans in the past. Too many of them have had their heads planted firmly in the sand about the need for health care reform, and too many others have preferred the plans that provide opportunities for massive corruption, i.e. the same ones the Democrats prefer.

Here are some of the plays they need to be running now, while they have a better chance than ever to enact them. They can pretend that some of the Democrats actually mean it when they claim to be concerned about those who lack health care. Take them at their word and pressure them to act on it.

I don’t agree with everything in that 2nd article, and some things are missing from both of them. But the general principles should be less government control and more individual empowerment.

Math problem

 Health care reform  No Responses »
Aug 192009
 

Barney Frank says the cost of the war in Iraq would more than have paid for the Democrat health care reform. But the war in Iraq has cost only 2/3 of a trillion dollars so far, which is less than what the CBO predicts the health care plan would cost. And these governmental estimates tend to be way low, anyway, as they were in the case of Medicare. Of course, their estimates of the cost of war tend to be low, too.

In all the yelling it seems the town hall protesters aren’t challenging Frank on this simple point.

Government as referee and player

 Health care reform  No Responses »
Aug 192009
 

For some time now I’ve been harping on the fact that in the health care business, as in the auto business, we need the government as a referee. If government is a player, it can hardly be a good referee.

But someone else has explained it better than I have. James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” found an explanation and reproduced it from Mike Hanlon’s blog:

Currently, consumers enter into a health-care contract with an insurance company. This contract has an asymmetric payoff, in that the insurance company gains when a consumer stays healthy, and the consumer gains if they fall [sic] ill. If a consumer falls ill, the insurance company would like to renege on its obligation. Yet it cannot, because the contract is enforced by an unbiased referee. That referee is the United States government.

The fundamental problem with the Democrat’s [sic] health care proposal is that it will cause the the [sic] government to abandon its “referee” role in order to become my “contractual opponent.” Democrats suggest that government can play the role of both opponent and referee. Maybe I’m too competitive, but I prefer when my opponent and my referee are not the same person.

Opposition to “health care reform” is not so much philosophical as it is practical. Sarah Palin learned something at the University of Idaho that a lot of folks didn’t learn at Harvard: when contractual payoffs are asymmetric, you need a referee to ensure compliance. I want my referee, and the Democrats are trying to take it away from me. Doesn’t that justify a little anger?

It’s not as though such a mixture of roles has never been done, though. Last winter I was surprised to learn that the USSR had such a thing as insurance. The 1966 Eldar Ryazanov movie, Beregis Avtomobilya (Beware of the Car), features an insurance agent who does a little noble larceny on the side. (Kino Reticulator blog article here, YouTube link above.)

Well, OK, so a socialist welfare state had insurance. It was a government monopoly, much as health insurance will be in our country when Obama gets finished with it.

But surely the insurance salespeople didn’t work on commission, did they? But Alexander, who reads my blog from Ekaterinburg, says that yes, indeed, the sales people did work on a commission.

Last winter I found that there have been a few English-lanugage books and articles on the insurance system in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, mostly written by a Paul P. Rogers, who seems to have been studying this topic ever since he started his 1964 doctoral dissertation. In 1963 he wrote:

Insurance is closely related to the origins and growth of modern capitalist economy and the insurance contract has been identified as the springboard by which small-scale itinerant commerce of the early Middle Ages vaulted into large-scale enterprise of modern capitalism. How, then, can insurance be fitted into a non-capitalist framework and what role can it play?

The quote is from “A Survey of Insurance in the USSR”, in The Journal of Insurance, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun., 1963), pp. 273-279, published by the American Risk and Insurance Association.

So the government did sell insurance, and salespeople worked on a commission. But how about the settling of claims? How did that work when the government needed to referee itself?

That is a harder question to answer. I’ve read the article from which the above quote is taken, and don’t recall anything being said about it. Rogers’ 1986 book on the topic seems to devote about 17 of 214 pages to the topic of “Settlement of Loss”, according to this Table of Contents. Whether those pages have information that either supports or refutes the idea that it’s a bad idea for government to be both referee and player, I don’t know. But now I think I’d like to get Rogers’ book and read it.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries