Do you know how to tell that Barry is not actually serious about passing his health care bill? Because he uses it as a tool to fight for abortion.
Unbelievable. All the Democrats had to do is get the framwork of national control of health care in place – and there are votes in both houses to do it – and then every future Congressional race could be held on their terms. Do we cover X procedure? But instead they simply can’t help themselves. They must have it all at once.
Why any insurance policy would cover abortion is beyond me. Even if you buy into the pro-abortion agenda 100% – you think a fetus is a clump of cells with no more value than a wart, and that a woman should be able to get rid of that clump of cells at any time up to the moment of delivery – we pretty much know who has abortions. Insurance is premised on spreading the risk, making those who don’t have a misfortune pay for the problems of those who do. But an unintended pregnancy is a condition whose causes are known and, with precious few exceptions, preventable at no financial cost.
Even if some insurance policies should cover abortion, though, the notion of having a government-run insurance company pay for abortions should be anathema to most Americans. Majority-rule must pay some heed to the minority. Just as we don’t draft the Amish, we shouldn’t use the government to confiscate money from the 50% or so of Americans who call themselves “pro-life” to pay for the abortions of a small minority.
But the administration is simply too full of itself and its “historic moment” to stop anywhere short of imposing 100% of the liberal agenda on the country, regardless of what the country wants. Obama believes that he must have it all, and he must have it now. No need to bother with formalities or persuasion. I think there’s a word for that; it may need to be redefined come November.
To put this in context, Lieberman was invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill’s failure that much more. And if there’s a policy rationale here, it’s not apparent to me, or to others who’ve interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.
Personally, I oppose socialized medicine because I love the sound of the uninsured wailing and gnashing their teeth. Their lamentations help me relax.
So I guess it’s a bad thing that Joe Lieberman is committing genocide just to annoy Ezra Klein. But compared to me, his motives seem almost noble.
Apollo posted this at 12:07 PM HKT on Monday, December 14th, 2009 as Health Care, Journalism
This video from The Center for Freedom and Progress does a great job of explaining the fallacy of the current health care “reform” packages helping to lower budget deficits:
Look, if liberals want to make the case that we have a moral obligation to provide health care to as much of the population as possible I’m willing to hear them out. However, to claim that these bills will improve our fiscal health when it hinges on accurate predictions from the CBO and promises from politicians not to overspend you are being disingenuous at best.
Jamie posted this at 2:41 PM HKT on Friday, November 13th, 2009 as Health Care
Megan echoes my exact thoughts on the latest Democrat/Obama bit of chicago style thuggery:
Threatening to strip their anti-trust exemption as a quid-pro-quo is the kind of thing that sounds cute until someone thinks up a way to do it to people on your side. Would it be okay for a Republican administration to threaten Democratic groups that say unpleasing things by promising to pass laws–however sound–that would decimate the fortunes of George Soros and other big backers? Or openly declare that if unions didn’t stop issuing reports in favor of a higher minimum wage, the administration would have to revisit Taft-Hartley?
I was often criticized by members of the right for my opposition to Bush policies like the USA PATRIOT Act and warrantless wire-tapping. The argument always boiled down to “Well I trust Bush to keep us safe.” Such feelings and arguments are easy to understand, until one points out that 50 years from now a president we don’t like could use those same policies against mere political enemies (see: this).
. . . but it seems hard to describe this in better terms. Tying a somewhat unpopular bill to the single least popular policy proposal of the last decade doesn’t seem like a sound political move. Since the president flopped in his big speech last week, I’ve presumed that ObamaCare was dead. Now I’m sure of it.
Some of us warned during the 2008 primaries that Obama was nothing more than a creature of the far left, and while his speeches might leave a few feeling week in the knees, he would ultimately be unable to persuade the masses to follow him. In the circles he’s used to traveling in, the fact that a health care proposal won’t cover illegal immigrants is a bad thing. He doesn’t understand the country well enough to know that the rambling leftism that passed for discourse in Hyde Park doesn’t help him nationally.
Part of Mr. Obama’s problem is his language. His speech contained little new information and his tone was unpresidential. Instead of binding Americans to his cause, he called legitimate concerns “misinformation,” “false,” “demagoguery,” “distortion” or “tall tales.” Earlier in the week he declared them “lies.” This was like calling people with concerns stupid, and it’s not the way to win them over.
Take the issue of illegal aliens. The president’s assertion that his reform “would not apply to those who are here illegally” drew an angry eruption from a GOP House backbencher. Then late Friday night, the White House quietly announced that proof of citizenship would be required to enroll in the president’s health plan. This closed the loophole that provoked Rep. Joe Wilson. Had Mr. Obama acknowledged the concern and offered a solution in his speech, he would have come across as reasonable.
I think he’s incorrect that this should be described as a “language” issue. Instead, it’s a credibility issue. Obama says that his critics are just flat out lying, and instead of showing people why the criticisms are not correct, he just asserts it. This way, Obama simply makes it a matter of how much we blindly trust him. Rove correctly points out that it doesn’t have to be that way. Admitting that there are some imperfections in the bill, making a big show of accomodating critics – these things would go an awful long way in showing that Obama is serious about getting something done.
An Illinois man getting chemotherapy was dropped from his insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn’t known about.
“They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it,” the president said in the nationally televised address.
In fact, the man, Otto S. Raddatz, didn’t die because the insurance company rescinded his coverage once he became ill, an act known as recission. The efforts of his sister and the office of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan got Mr. Raddatz’s policy reinstated within three weeks of his April 2005 rescission and secured a life-extending stem-cell transplant for him. Mr. Raddatz died this year, nearly four years after the insurance showdown.
Obama aides say the president got the essence of the story correct. Mr. Raddatz was dropped from his insurance plan weeks before a scheduled stem-cell transplant.
Getting the “essence” correct? When you’re advocating a radical policy change and you turn the debate into little more than a “who you gonna believe?” competition, getting the “essence” correct isn’t good enough. The story goes on to note that Raddatz being dropped by his insurance company probably had nothing to do with his death, which means that the president didn’t even get the “essence” correct: the essence is that this guy got dropped, some pressure was applied and the company reinstated his coverage, he got the treatment he needed, and he lived as long as that treatment would allow. If we were to draw a lesson from the “essence” of that story, it would be that we should make a few minor changes to insurance laws to prevent companies from dropping coverage, or courts should get more aggressive in enforcing insurance contracts in favor of the insured.
But instead Obama told got the facts wrong and drew a completely different conclusion. That’s what happens when you change the facts of a story – the lesson changes as well.
So who you gonna believe: People opposing ObamaCare, or the guy who can’t be bothered to fact check his stories before speaking to a joint session of Congress in a speech largely designed to call his critics liars? Even if people don’t fully trust critics, Obama’s made it quite clear that he can’t be trusted at all.
I know that he’s not a Real Conservative (c) 2009 Mark Levin, Dan Riehl, et al. But this piece by David Brooks makes more sense on health care than many I have read in a long time.
Jamie posted this at 12:53 PM HKT on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 as Health Care
Jonathan Cohn, on why we should control health care costs: “But the money spent on medicine is money not spent elsewhere–it’s government dollars that didn’t go into schools or public housing;”
As Mickey Kaus points out, the idea that we need to spend more money on public housing – pretty much the definition of a failed government program – is laughable.
But it’s the bit about education spending that gets me. I can’t remember a Democrat ever, even once, saying that we spend too much money on education. We’re up around $10,000 per student per year now for public eduction, and this increased spending has basically done squat to help improve results. Yet every single year, in every budget fight – state or federal – we’re subjected to cries from Democrats that we need to spend more on education.
But when we start talking health care, Democrats are suddenly telling us that we’re obviously spending too much money, and that this spending constitutes a crisis.
I don’t get it. It seems to me that if you’re going to complain about overspending, it makes more sense to complain about education overspending.
The vast majority of education spending comes from the government, so there is very little competitive market pressure on schools to control costs; that’s not the case for healthcare, where private entities exchange good for services and try to turn a profit off of it by being more efficient than their competitors.
Education is based on the relationships between teachers and students, and convincing students to perform their best; it seems that there would be an objectively optimal level of spending, anything above that would just be used to hire more layers of administration. Modern health care requires that vast sums be spent on research and equipment, and while there’s certainly a point of diminishing returns, additional money spent on health care seems more likely to be put to good use than additional money spent on education. Another secretary for the deputy assistant superintendent, or another CT machine?
It doesn’t bother me one bit that it costs more to save lives than to educate kids. That it seems to bother Democrats should be telling, but I’m not sure of what.
Apollo posted this at 12:21 PM HKT on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 as Edjamacation, Health Care
This problem was exacerbated because since the early 1990s Maine has required insurers to adhere to community rating and guaranteed issue, which requires that insurers cover anyone who applies, regardless of their health condition and at a uniform premium. These rules—which are in the Obama plan—have relentlessly driven up insurance costs in Maine, especially for healthy people.
The Maine Heritage Policy Center, which has tracked the plan closely, points out that largely because of these insurance rules, a healthy male in Maine who is 30 and single pays a monthly premium of $762 in the individual market; next door in New Hampshire he pays $222 a month. The Granite State doesn’t have community rating and guaranteed issue.
Crikey! For some reason, none of the websites that offer online health insurance quotes will offer quotes from Maine, so I can’t compare what my price would be. New Hampshire, though, is no bargain, with rates for me being a time and a half what they are in Texas.
For all the talk of RomenyCare in Massachusetts, it sounds like the Maine system is more analogous to ObamaCare.
Apollo posted this at 9:12 PM HKT on Friday, August 28th, 2009 as Health Care
This is an atrocious article for several reasons: its poor argumentation, pathetic attempt use of strawmen, its shameless exploitation of Ted Kennedy’s recently-departed ghost, etc. All of that pales, however, in comparison to this quote:
Kennedy knew – as his friend Congressman Barney Frank says – that Government is nothing more than the name we give to the things we choose to do together.
My astronomy club is not government. My outdoors club is not government. My trade-association employer is not government. This group blog is not government. Nor are whatever other private associations or relationships I choose to make outside of a very limited set of institutions.
From the depths of my libertarian soul, screw you and all you stand for, Robert Creamer.
[T]here are no frickin’ death panels of disembodied voices in metallic rooms eager to pronounce Trig Palin ‘not worthy’ so the Cylon Centurions can drag him off. There’s a hint of truth to the whole thing in that some kind of government imposed rationing is likely, but it’s still a dishonest, fear mongering claim.
I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive.
The death panels will not be anything so monstrous as what Tom described. But under Obamacare, there will be well meaning government bureaucrats who will be forced to allocate scarce resources to those under their control, and they will make those decisions based on considerations like quality of life, length of life lived, and liklihood of recovery. These decisions, abstractly speaking, will be completely rational. Indeed, if any of us were put in the same positions as those well-meaning bureaucrats, we’d probably make the same decisions.
Hannah Arrendt, writing about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, marveled at the “banality of evil” under a modern regime. Most of the decisions that brought about the Final Solution were made by men in offices who never personally killed a Jew. Many, if not most of them, were well-meaning bureaucrats. They pushed papers and allocated scarce resources to those under their control. They did their jobs, earned their salaries, and went home to their wives and children at night without a drop of blood on their hands. It’s a strange definition of “monster” that includes them.
Given the state of rhetoric on this matter, I think it’s incumbent upon me to point out now that the evil of Obamacare will in no meaningful way approach the evil of the Final Solution. But we may use the past as a guide to the future in this regard: that life and death decisions are made in a banal manner by well-meaning bureaucrats in suits does not in any way alter the life and death results of those decisions. If you only define “death panel” in the caricatured way that Tom does, then I suppose there probably aren’t death panels in Obamacare. But if you’re willing to define “death panel” as meaning “a group of well-meaning bureaucrats who will decided whether or not your life is worth saving,” then death panels are at the heart of the plan.*
*Let me say here that there has been much equivocation between health insurance companies denying coverage and Obamacare bureaucrats denying coverage. There’s some equivalence there, but the nature of their calculations is completely different. An insurance company will weigh the cost of a treatment versus its chance of success. So far as I can tell, they don’t weigh in things like your quality of life; particularly, Medicare certainly does not factor in quality of life. Under Obamacare, a treatment may not cost a lot, and it may have a pretty high chance of success, but if you’re not worth saving, you wont’ get it. Just ask the lady with the 105 year-old mother who had a pacemaker put in when she was 100, and Obama said it would have been better to just give her some pain killers. Watch that video, please. Note that he doesn’t say pills – which might possibly have described something that could have helped her. He said “pain killers.” He just said that we should have eased her mother’s death. That he said so in a casual, banal manner does not change by one whit what he said: an Obamacare death panel would have decided she wasn’t worth saving.
Came from a Texas Demcrat over the weekend. Asked whether House Democrats could support a health care plan without a “public option,” she said:
It would be very, very difficult, because without the public option, we’ll have the same number of people uninsured. If the insurance companies wanted to insure these people now, they’d be insured. The only way that we can be sure that very low-income people and persons who work for companies that don’t offer insurance can have access to it is through an option that would give the private insurance companies a little competition. The private insurance companies have been in charge so long that I think they feel that nobody else ought to be able to do it.
I heard this on Rush yesterday, and it’s been rolling around in my head since then. I’m trying to think of a better example of someone being utterly clueless about what she’s talking about, and I’m having a hard time. The best I can do is to say that this statement is to health care economics what the statement “When Brian Boitano built the pyramids, he beat up Kulbai Khan” is to historical accuracy.*
As Rush pointed out, the second sentence is like saying “If General Motors wanted everyone to have a car, we’d all have cars.” Why on earth do people think that economic statements that are laughably stupid in any other context are not laughably stupid when it comes to health care?
The “only way” to insure poor people is through a government-run plan? Off the top of my head, I can think of four other ways, and I’m not a very creative person. 1. Government pays for private insurance for poor people. 2. Government requires employers to pay for health insurance for poor people. 3. Government requires insurers to offer rates based on income and requires people to sign up. 4. Government simply pays bills for poor people without starting an insurance plan to compete with private insurers (i.e. Medicaid). Whatever the merits of these other ways, they don’t compete with private insurers, and they’re dramatically simpler than setting up a government-run health insurance plan.
The notion that private insurers need “competition” is the result of some Marxist hallucination, where the the evil “private insurance companies” act as one.It is, though, a highly competitive industry; go here and check out how many companies you can get quotes from. I got 125 quotes from 8 different companies (it’s also educational to enter different zip codes and see how much rates varies by state**).
Of course, if the real problem is a lack of competition in the insurance market, the obvious response would be to lessen regulation and allow more firms to compete. This did not appear to cross the Congresswoman’s mind.
Between the threat of their customers going elsewhere, and the threat of state or federal governments wiping them out of existence, “private insurance companies” aren’t in charge of crap.
“They feel that nobody else ought to be able to do it.” If any company that doesn’t presently sell health insurance (e.g. Jiffy Lube) were to start selling health insurance, then it too would become a “private insurance company.” So by definition, no one except a private insurance company can sell insurance. I guess if the federal government offered insurance, it wouldn’t be a “private insurance company,” but it doesn’t seem right to list the federal government – i.e. the largest entity in the world – under the “nobody else” category. Again, to the degree that there’s not enough competition in the health insurance market, that’s the fault of government regulation, not some nefarious scheme by “private insurance companies.”
**For example, here in Texas I can get a hospital-only plan for $40/month, or more thorough insurance plans for $80-100/month (the plan I actually have is around $90). If I enter in Springfield, Mass., the lowest premium it offers is $220; using Massachusetts state-run website to find a plan yields a price range between $186 and $485. For Texas, I can only find one policy above $287. Do people in Massachusetts really get that much more out of their health insurance than I do?
Ann Althouse has a fantastic post on how to attack and defend proposed legislation, and why Sarah Palin’s “death panels” shtick was perfectly in bounds:
When a big bill is dumped on us, we are challenged to read and understand the text. Usually we don’t, but the text is there, and there’s nothing scurrilous about trying to read it, calling attention to worrisome language, and putting our arguments in vivid words. A candidate, on the other hand, is not a text to be read, but there are facts about him that we may want to know. If someone asserts a fact about a candidate and says, for example, that Obama is a Muslim or Obama was born in Kenya, then the candidate, if he doesn’t choose to ignore the assertion or simply make his own flat assertion of denial, is forced to come up with some evidence, which may be difficult and may lead to a new phase of the controversy in which the evidence is challenged.
This is completely different from a controversy about a written text that people are trying to read. If the text doesn’t mean what its opponents are saying, it should be easy for the authors of the text to show how it means something good or to amend the text and make its goodness obvious. The authors of the text should trounce their opponents. If they can’t, we should fear and mistrust them.
That’s how things work in a boisterous democracy like ours, and long may it be so.
Prof. Althouse concludes by looking at the situation now that sentors have announced the end-of-life “counseling” provision is being pulled: “[W]hy didn’t Democrats argue their side? Why did they back down? I suspect it’s because they really did hope to save money by substituting painkillers for curative treatments for the old and disabled.”
I think it’s difficult to listen to all the talk of “curve-bending,” to hear Obama wax philosophic about the waste involved in replacing his granny’s hip, to see the end-of-life “counseling” language in a bill that’s supposedly designed to cut healthcare costs, and then conclude that Althouse is wrong. Whatever they said publicly, and whatever outs they may have tried to leave themselves in the bill, those who drafted it were looking to save money by not providing treatment to people who are supposedly near the end of their lives.
