Republican in Obama administration threatens to cut off stimulus funds for Arizona because Arizona senator questioned the effectiveness of the funds. Aristocrats in action. It doesn't matter which party they belong to. Just ask Specter.
Conservatives outnumber liberals 2 to 1 in America but we're suffering under the most radical leftist presidency and probably Congress in history. This is the fault of George Bush, Republicans and the conservatives who keep voting these terrible Republican aristocrats back into office just because they're slightly less evil than Democrats. This is exactly the government you get when you consistently vote for the lesser of two evils. It will continue getting worse until conservatives stop voting for the lesser of two evils.
More evidence showing that the current American health care system is much closer to socialized medicine than a free market which is why health care is so expensive.
"In a 1992 study published by the Hoover Institution, entitled "Input and Output in Health Care," Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned and for-profit in 1910. After 60 years of subsidies for government-run hospitals, the number had fallen to about 10 percent. It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over almost the entire hospital industry. That small portion of the industry that remains for-profit is regulated in an extraordinarily heavy way by federal, state and local governments so that many (perhaps most) of the decisions made by hospital administrators have to do with regulatory compliance as opposed to patient/customer service in pursuit of profit. It is profit, of course, that is necessary for private-sector hospitals to have the wherewithal to pay for healthcare.If we get the government out of health care, we'll have improved quality of service (even though we already have the highest quality health care in the world, freeing the system from government will improve its quality even more) at tremendously lower prices. This is a great essay. I was tempted to quote the whole thing.
Friedman's key conclusion was that, as with all governmental bureaucratic systems, government-owned or -controlled healthcare created a situation whereby increased "inputs," such as expenditures on equipment, infrastructure, and the salaries of medical professionals, actually led to decreased "outputs" in terms of the quantity of medical care. For example, while medical expenditures rose by 224 percent from 1965–1989, the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population fell by 44 percent and the number of beds occupied declined by 15 percent. Also during this time of almost complete governmental domination of the hospital industry (1944–1989), costs per patient-day rose almost 24-fold after inflation is taken into account.
The more money that has been spent on government-run healthcare, the less healthcare we have gotten. This kind of result is generally true of all government bureaucracies because of the absence of any market feedback mechanism. Since there are no profits in an accounting sense, by definition, in government, there is no mechanism for rewarding good performance and penalizing bad performance. In fact, in all government enterprises, exactly the opposite is true: bad performance (failure to achieve ostensible goals, or satisfy "customers") is typically rewarded with larger budgets. Failure to educate children leads to more money for government schools. Failure to reduce poverty leads to larger budgets for welfare state bureaucracies. This is guaranteed to happen with healthcare socialism as well.
Costs always explode whenever the government gets involved, and governments always lie about it. In 1970 the government forecast that the hospital insurance (HI) portion of Medicare would be "only" $2.9 billion annually. Since the actual expenditures were $5.3 billion, this was a 79 percent underestimate of cost. In 1980 the government forecast $5.5 billion in HI expenditures; actual expenditures were more than four times that amount — $25.6 billion. This bureaucratic cost explosion led the government to enact 23 new taxes in the first 30 years of Medicare. (See Ron Hamoway, "The Genesis and Development of Medicare," in Roger Feldman, ed., American Health Care, Independent Institute, 2000, pp. 15-86). The Obama administration's claim that a government takeover of healthcare will somehow magically reduce costs is not to be taken seriously. Government never, ever, reduces the cost of doing anything."
Why when people are talking about obesity, why don't they explain that a third party payer health care system is a major cause of obesity? When people don't have to pay for their own health care, they don't bother with prevention. It's far easier to just have somebody else pay for the cure than it is to exercise and eat right. Our nearly socialized medicine system encourages us to be obese. Ending that system of subsidies, regulations and mandates will make people care about prevention again, and Americans will become healthier.
Sections of the House health care bill instruct the CBO not to count that spending when determining the cost of the bill. Democrats are not only hiding costs by pushing off on the states, health care providers and health insurance companies, but hiding them in the bill itself.
Everything is wrong with the health care bill.
10 questions I would like to hear Obama answer about his health care oppression plan.
House Judiciary Chairman Democrat Conyers says it's no use for congressmen to read the health care bill unless they have two lawyer interpreters.
"What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?"Smack!
Not to be outdone in the incompetency department, Republicans still haven't published an alternative health care bill. Democrats won back power by attacking only and never offering anything constructive. I'm not surprised Republicans will take the same tact. For the entire course of the Bush presidency, I railed against Democrats for vacating the field of ideas, creating a policy and power vacuum that Republicans raced to the left to fill, winning more policy victories for liberalism than Democrats ever won on their own. Now Republicans are doing the same thing, and Democrats are racing to the right to fill the power void as exemplified by the Democrat mutiny on health care. This is insane. Our government has devolved into a bunch of dumbasses in power proposing absurd, damaging laws and the dumbass minority party doing nothing useful except attacking them from an extremist position, then when power flips, the cycle reverses. But we're the stupidest people of all for continuing to empower these two destructive parties.
I have the best health care reform plan of all: Adopt the FairTax and knock down trade barriers to health insurance between the states. It's just that simple.
Sure, I write an essay about bringing Cuban health care to America (to be posted next week), and somebody one ups me by saying they're jealous of Rwanda's health care system.
Compilation video of Ben Bernanke from 2005 to 2007 shows that Bernanke is absolutely clueless about our economy in stark contrast to compilation video of Peter Schiff predicting the current economic crisis while being ridiculed. Bernanke is the guy people are trusting to get us out of the crisis he caused, but he still doesn't admit he caused, and that he never noticed and that he downplayed while it was occurring. This is guy calling for fiscal irresponsibility and unprecedented flooding of the market with dollars. But trust him, he won't let inflation harm us. This is the most powerful central planner in the world. It doesn't surprise me that Bernanke is a Harvard and MIT alum. The Ivy league takes smart economics students and brainwashes them into morons. I'm sure it does the same for all social science students. Mises scholar comments on the video.
Website to support Ron Paul's bill to audit the Fed. End the Fed website. Bernanke doesn't want to be accountable to Congress. His claim that he gives Congress all the information it wants is ridiculous. The Fed's meetings are secret. The Fed publishes no minutes. Bernanke refuses FOIA requests and Congress's requests for details on his balance sheet. The inspector general of the Fed doesn't even know. Bernanke is a dangerous megalomaniac, even more so than Greenspan it seems, and he's the most powerful central planner in the world. As Hayek explained, it's inevitable that the most dangerous person possible gains power in central planning schemes.
I didn't know we had slavery on the east coast.
Boortz publishes another catchy title: Entitlement Mobsters.
Iraqi forces raid Iranian exile camp.
Nice essay by John Hawkins identifies seven differences if McCain had become president. They're not all good by any means. For example, tax and trade would be law by now. As I wrote before the election, I'd rather have a Republican party united against Democrats and Obama than a Republican party divided and a Democrat party united in its agenda limited only by liberal John McCain's unreliable veto.
In 2004, Barack Obama criticized Bush and Republicans for pushing legislation quickly through Congress with no debate. Republicans are criticizing Obama and Democrats for the same thing. As soon as they get back in power, they'll do the same thing again. Then as soon as Democrats take back power, they'll do the same thing again. Our lives are just a game to these destructive aristocrats. They might as well be playing chess with us as pieces.
Speaking of protectionism, Barney Frank wants to force foreign banks to get certified by the Treasury Dept. or be excluded from doing business with the US.
Brett Favre says he's going to retire. No really. He's going to retire. This time it's for real. He's not going to be on the sports news every minute of every day trying to make sure he's the most important story in people's lives. Thank God.
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