The New Clarion

Talk radio host and Detroit News columnist Frank Beckmann had an oped on Wed. 3/24 “Dem’s health care claims lack real proof” which testifies to the kind of education they received. While Mr. Beckmann makes his point well, my point is that they don’t need proof, at least not empirical proof. (more…)

This is the “public option” that statists and those in government want you to see:

This is the “public option” as it really is:

I keep thinking about the doctors. What must they be thinking? I spent 10 years of education and interning — so I can work for the government? I’ll be part of a vast bureaucracy, forced to follow a shelf full of regulations meant to substitute for my independent judgment.

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann lay out how it happened. Obama bought off special interests. Their piece could serve as an appendix to Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, a real life example of how money goes to special interests to the detriment of the general good. Their list also reminds me of Bastiat’s aphorism, “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”

(more…)

For about 80 yrs now the government has been trying to be everything to everyone, trying to provide everyone with their daily bread and failing miserably. Why?
Because the government has nothing to offer. All it has is its monopoly on physical force. All it can do is stand over the productive members of society with the club of physical force and compel obedience. Case in point: An editorial in today’s New York Times champions the new House health care bill saying in part:

“The bill requires employers, except for small businesses, to offer health coverage to their workers and pay a substantial share of the premiums or face a big penalty. That would be a useful prod to make insurance more available and affordable to employees.” (bold mine)

No Senator, Congressman, judge or member of the executive branch is going to insure anyone. All they can do is point a gun at the insurance companies, doctors and other health care professionals and decree ‘sacrifice or else.’ Then point another gun at the heads of citizens and decree ‘accept these sacrificial offerings or else.’

It is really sad to see an establishment of professional intellectuals like the Times advocating the government initiate force against citizens. It’s even sadder that professional organizations like the AMA and the ANA (American Nurses Assoc.) are willing to go along with the sacrifice of its members. But as long as people think sacrifice itself, for any reason, is virtuous, the destruction of medicine and our society will continue. It is trade not sacrifice that is virtuous. Trade represents voluntary relationships. Sacrifice requires force because it is contrary to human nature. Sacrifice is not the giving up of a value for some desired result. The loss of the value is the desired result.

Two points, to start.

1. My father’s heart arrhythmias have settled, and his sodium levels have been managed through intravenous fluids and fluid intake restriction.  Though he could barely walk, he was deemed strong enough, to no longer be eligible for a hospital bed.  Indeed, if he chose to stay, three doors from my mother, he would be charged $750 per day!

2. Now, my mother’s TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) levels are unusually high, due to a benign pituitary tumor, causing her thyroid to be dysfunctional.  As a result, she has sudden blackouts due to rapid blood pressure drops (syncope), and must stay in bed.  Her dramatic collapses to the floor —unconscious, eyes open & staring— are terribly distressing.  So far, her falls have been caught every time but one, which fortunately only caused minor bruising.   According to her condition, she can still stay in a hospital bed, for ‘free‘.

Notice how the above bolded portions indicate the rules of socialized medicine that determine the care of the patient.  Sure, Dad could stay in hospital, but the cost is obscene, and the price is clearly set so as to drive patients out.  Only under altruism would such ‘logic’, such treatment, be seen as appropriate, because it serves others in the system.  In a private system the same choice would not be so starkly enforced,  Patients in a free market would have a multitude of choices that are not available in the government system.

(more…)

In response to my post, My Father and Socialized Medicine, comments made by Greg Paulhus deserve a full post in response.  They are typical of arguments for socialized medicine, that in final analysis do not stand.

My Dad’s situation may not be entirely ‘routine’, as Paulhus suggests, but his inappropriate care, is no less disgusting for being so readily accepted, and is no less a function of  ‘the system’.  There are many other such occurrences.  Paulhus’s uncle’s experience may be a ‘majority’ example, but that kind of success can be found in any large scale operation.

That is, “Lemon” cars exist, but smart shoppers still look for the vehicle make and model that is least likely to result in their buying a lemon.  By his ‘majority’ argument Paulhus (unthinkingly) presumes it is okay to sacrifice My father to the system, since His uncle is doing fine.  Would he care to  have them switch places, and give his uncle the ‘lemon’… it is, after all, the same “fantastic” system?

(more…)

The American people have spoken. A large portion of them do not want bigger government, specifically socialized medicine.

So what do the statists conclude from from the mass demonstrations and the town hell meetings? Simple: the problem is that the people found out what they were doing. If only the people had been kept ignorant, there would have been no problem!

Thus the philosopher-kings in Washington, DC, our benevolent masters, are now working on ways to increase government without the people’s understanding of what is going on. They are intent on taking over the lives of all those idiotic American people for their own good. The trail to collectivism must be blazed in darkness and ignorance.

(more…)

Justin Ruben of MoveOn.org says this:

August was a real wake-up call for progressives when health care reform was endangered by an angry mob organized by an alliance of insurance companies, oil companies and right-wing fear-mongers.

He’s continuing the leftist strategy of characterizing citizens concerned about big government taking over health care as an angry mob controlled by dark forces with ignoble motives. Those people who showed up at town halls represent over half of America.

Does he believe it? Probably. It follows from their premise that Americans are corrupted by capitalist greed. That same idea is behind Obama’s statements about doctors being corrupted by greed so that they would perform unnecessary amputations or tonsilectomies to make money (and therefore we need the impartial philosopher-kings of the state to control medicine for the doctors’ own good).

Whether leftists believe it or not, they will repeat statements such as the above quote until it becomes conventional wisdom. Their beliefs and their premises will continue to be at odds with reality. And leftists never, ever think twice about their “narrative”; when they do, they become neocons.

I see Obama is still insisting on his original Obama care legislation instead of some watered down compromise. I think this is a last ditch effort to put a socialized medicine over on the American people. My response to that is a few more lyrics added to a recent post which I repost in part below. (more…)

Once more, a comment of mine takes on a life of its own and demands its own post.  This one is in response to a comment left by Greg Paulhus, one of the remaining Canadians who have yet to be disillusioned by the ongoing collapse of their socialized medical system.

In it, Paulhus attempts to claim that the stories of misery in Canada are emanating primarily from Alberta and Ontario, where there are smidgeons of private health care being permitted for the moment — so therefore, those little smidgeons of private health care must be the root of the problems there!

While Mr. Paulhus catches up on his basic logic skills, the rest of us can dig into the facts he’s evading.

But first, let us give him some credit: by trying to tell us that Ontario and Alberta don’t count anymore, he nonethless admits thereby that things really aren’t all candy-stripers and balloons in the Great White North.  Instead of telling us how nice the system is in Canada, now it’s all about how great things are in Saskatchewan!

As I am familiar with this playing field, this moving of the goalposts by Paulhus will avail him no good.  The facts on the ground must be pretty bad in Alberta and Ontario for the Canadian socialists to be chewing their own legs off in the trap like that.  Of course, what Paulhus fails to note for our non-Canadian audience is that Ontario and Alberta together contain half or so of the population.  Those are big legs.

The stories like this that I know of through personal connections and direct experience all predate the advent of that smidgeon of private medicine that is currently permitted in Ontario.  This privatization was undoubtedly prompted by the Chaoulli case in Quebec that I noted earlier; that case is only binding in Quebec at present, and yet Ontario and Alberta have since found it necessary to permit that smidgeon to order to alleviate the ongoing slow collapse (and likely Chaoulli-inspired legal consequences) of the system. This failure has been long in coming, and was thoroughly manifest long before the privatization; the latter is obviously  a *response* to the crisis, not its cause.

(I’d be interested in knowing more about what is going on in Quebec, where Chaoulli has legal force. That Paulhus fails to mention it makes it a good bet that Quebec also breaks his narrative to some extent.)

But wait, there’s more! (with apologies to Billy Mays, RIP): the “transfer payment” subsidy.

These payments are part of an interprovincial welfare program, which the federal government uses to redistribute tax wealth from the “have” provinces to the “have-not” ones. You can bet that Alberta (oil) and Ontario (manufacturing base) are “have” provinces… while Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Canadian socialism, has long been a “have-not”.

The extent to which things are medically “better” in Saskatchewan is the extent to which their system is subsidized — by Alberta and Ontario. Paulhus and his ilk are no better than those Easterners in the early ’80′s who crowed about the National Energy Program and the low gas prices it brought about… while carefully failing to look too deeply into what that cheap gas was costing Albertans.

UPDATE: well, I’d almost have lost that bet; Saskatchewan has been a relatively small net recipient of transfer payments of late, and won’t even qualify for any in 2009-2010.  Ontario and Alberta, however, remain the net losers in this deal.

Yes, he is in the twilight of life, but he is my father.  More importantly, for 61 years he has been my mother’s lifelong love.  They went through WW2, they immigrated to a Canadian farm from S. England.  Dad pursued several means of employment to provide a comfortable living while raising three boys.

On Monday, Aug 17th, he stumbled, fell, and broke his elbow.  An ambulance took him to the local hospital.  There the emergency doctor told Dad they could NOT set his arm.  He would have to be taken to a larger hospital (a half-hour’s drive), when there was an opening in the Orthopaedic Surgeon’s schedule.

Dad was to wait, in the local hospital’s bed, numb with morphine.  Imagine —uncertain days of pain, medicated fog and dysfunction, imposed upon you because Universal Health Care could not ‘fit you in’?  My mother lay awake, alone, for two nights, sharing his discomfort, and fearing his death, until that opening appeared on Wed Aug 19th.

An ambulance van drove Dad to the scheduled appointment with the Orthopod.   “We’re sorry, an emergency came up”.  The window of opportunity had closed.  At least Dad was now at the hospital where the Orthopod worked.

(more…)

Obama has unwisely outraged old people by trying to fund socialized medicine on their backs. The Republicans sense an opportunity for political gain, as well they should. But what do they conclude?

WASHINGTON — Republicans are targeting older Americans worried about President Barack Obama’s health overhaul plans with a “seniors’ health care bill of rights.”

The six principles outlined Monday by the Republican National Committee include protecting Medicare, prohibiting rationing of health care based on age and making sure government doesn’t get between seniors and their doctors.

(more…)

The Democrats have decided to continue demonizing the opposition to their health care bill, even though a majority of voters are against them. Harry Reid called town hall protesters evil-mongers, whatever that means. (They are stirring up evil? Calling forth demons?) James Clyburn, the third most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives, recalls the civil rights era:

“I have seen this kind of hate before. I have seen this discussion before,” he said. “I have seen snarling dogs going after people who were trying to peacefully assemble. I have seen the eyes of people who were being spat upon.”

“This is all about activity trying to deny the establishment of a civil right. And I do believe that health care for all is — a civil right,” the House Majority Whip argued. “And I think that is why you see this kind of activity. This is an attempt on the part of some to deny the establishment of a civil right.”

(more…)