For the NHS crowd, like K-Belle and the Obamanation on health care...

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Why do Americans spend more than anyone else on health care?

BECAUSE THEY CAN!

Between 1875 and 1995, the share of family income spent on food, clothing, and shelter declined from 87 percent to just 30 percent, despite the fact that we eat more food, own more clothes, and have better and larger homes today than we had in 1875," Fogel wrote.

If we limit the basics to these three items, that means spending on non-basic items rose from 13 percent of income in 1875 to 70 percent in 1995.

That is a fivefold increase.

Some of it went to entertainment, some of it went to government (taxes are much higher), and the rest went to other things, including health care.

So we have had more money to spend on health care.

The second reason we spend more is because spending more money on health care works.

"It is important to emphasize that medical interventions have not only contributed to the decline in prevalence rates of chronic conditions but also to the reduction in their severity," Fogel wrote.

"Advances in both surgical and drug therapies have significantly reduced the rate at which chronic conditions turn into disabilities that severely impair functioning.

"Such interventions have been especially effective in genitourinary, circulatory, digestive, and musculoskeletal conditions.

"However, many of the surgical procedures are quite expensive, and the cost of the new and more effective drugs is increasing sharply, mainly because of the large investments in developing these drugs."

The United States, overall, has both the most expensive and the best health care in the world.

The socialist argument that somehow spending more on health care makes our health system inferior is absurd.

This argument is based on life expectancy tables.

But life expectancy has many factors, including average weight, homicide rates, suicide rates, genetics and traffic fatalities.

The emphasis in America is on saving lives, not money.

In every socialist country, the opposite is true. The only way to save money on health care is to ration it.

When socialists toss around a number such as 18,000 people die because they lack health insurance, I remember that 14,802 people died in France in August 2003 because of the French health system.

There was a heat wave, and instead of calling doctors back from their month-long vacations to tend those people, the French government decided to save money.

Adjusted for population, that would be like 70,000 deaths in America, or roughly 35 Hurricane Katrinas.

In England, the Taxpayers Alliance estimated that an extra 17,000 people die each year because of the quality of the National Health Service.

That is no big deal to many British people.

"An extra 17,000 deaths might seem high, but that figure needed to be set against annual mortality, which was between 750,000 and one million deaths every year," the liberal London Guardian reported.

"The countries with which the UK was being compared spent more of their GDP on healthcare."

The extra deaths are OK to liberals because, hey, look at all the money the government is saving.

Also, witness abortion, the liberals hold life for others cheaper because as Ezekiel Emmanuel points out, they consider the health of the group
paramount to the wishes of the individual.



http://www.dailymail.com/Opinion/DonSurber/200909090307

 

[Ishmael]

Obamas plan is to move all of that spending into the government coffers. Healthcare will be no cheaper, or better, you'll just have a single payer with zero competition.

I love how he's planning on saving billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse by making the program even bigger than it is today.

"Hey Barry, why don't you start by actually saving all those billions in waste, fraud, and abuse just to show us that the government can actually do it with the current program? Build a little credibility first."

Ishmael

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

He Can't!!!

If we got a sense that government might have some excess in cash, we might demand some CHANGE!







__________
"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
CS Lewis

 

[RightField]

Obama's Rhetoric vs. Common Sense
By Thomas Sowell

"Hubris-laden charlatans" was the way a recent e-mail from a reader characterized the Obama administration. That phrase seems especially appropriate for the Charlatan-in-Chief, Barack Obama, whose speech to a joint session of Congress was both a masterpiece of rhetoric and a shameless fraud.

To tell us, with a straight face, that he can insure millions more people without adding to the already skyrocketing deficit, is world-class chutzpa and an insult to anyone's intelligence. To do so after an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office has already showed this to be impossible reveals the depths of moral bankruptcy behind the glittering words.

Did we really need CBO experts to tell us that there is no free lunch? Some people probably did and the true believers in the Obama cult may still believe the President, instead of believing either common sense or budget experts.

Even those who can believe that Obama can conjure up the money through eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse" should ask themselves where he is going to conjure up the additional doctors, nurses, and hospitals needed to take care of millions more patients.

If he can't pull off that miracle, then government-run medical care in the United States can be expected to produce what government-run medical care in Canada, Britain, and other countries has produced-- delays of weeks or months to get many treatments, not to mention arbitrary rationing decisions by bureaucrats.

Obama can deny it in words but what matters are deeds-- and no one's words have been more repeatedly the direct opposite of his deeds-- whether talking about how his election campaign would be financed, how he would not rush legislation through Congress, or how his administration was not going to go after CIA agents for their past efforts to extract information from captured terrorists.

President Obama has also declared emphatically that he will not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations-- while telling the Israelis where they can and cannot build settlements and telling the Hondurans whom they should and should not choose to be their president.

One of the secrets of being a glib talker is not getting hung up over whether what you are saying is true, and instead giving your full attention to what is required by the audience and the circumstances of the moment, without letting facts get in your way and cramp your style. Obama has mastered that art.

Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe. No message has been more welcomed by the gullible, in countries around the world, than the promise of something for nothing. That is the core of Barack Obama's medical care plan.

President Obama tells us that he will impose various mandates on insurance companies but will not interfere with our free choice between being insured by these companies or by the government. But if he can drive up the cost of private insurance with mandates and subsidize government insurance with the taxpayers' money, how long do you think it will be before we have the "single payer" system has he has advocated in the past?

Mandates by politicians are what have driven up the cost of insurance already. Politicians love to play Santa Claus and leave it to others to raise prices to cover the inevitable costs.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Thomas WHO?

 

[RightField]

Thomas WHO?

He's that media guy who hasn't been brainwashed by the liberal media. There's one or two others also.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

We are, President Obama informs us, in need of health care reform. Congress may be deadlocked on the issue. Obama seems to speak as if congressional inaction on improving healthcare means no federal action on improving healthcare. He needs to read the Constitution and, even more, he needs to review all the powers which Congress and federal courts have given to the Presidency. President Obama could take action to improve our nation's healthcare system right now.

Consider the savings which President Obama intends to get from reducing fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. Three months ago, on June 13, he identified $313 Billion that could be saved this way. The Executive Branch, not Congress, executes the laws and regulations of the nation. If there are such massive savings by better and more honest execution of the laws, programs, and regulations of Executive Branch agencies, then Barack Obama should make that a priority right now, without waiting for Congress to act. In fact, fighting this fraud and waste is purely an Executive Branch function.

It is almost as if Obama is telling Congress "If you pass my giant, almost incomprehensible healthcare reform, I will start to do my job by reducing waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid, and that will produce savings which will help pay for the reforms you pass." This is the same sort of silliness that President Bush suggested when he was pushing immigration reform "If Congress passes my immigration reform bill, I will start enforcing existing laws regarding immigration." In both these examples, the duty of the president is to execute the laws and run the executive departments faithfully. That includes stopping fraud, criminality, and waste -- regardless of what Congress does.

America had a healthcare crisis almost fifty years ago. JFK, soon after he became president, took note of the inactivity and obesity of American children. He built upon a program that Eisenhower had started to encourage exercise, particularly in public schools. John Kennedy did not ask Congress to pass massive reforms. Instead, Kennedy acted. Bud Wilkinson, the very successful and well respected coach of the Oklahoma Sooners football team (and also a Republican), was selected by JFK to improve physical fitness in schools and other places.

Why doesn't Obama do that? JFK did not even have a United States Department of Education to help implement a major improvement in physical education in public schools. Obama could pick someone -- ideally, a Republican like Joe Paterno or Lance Armstrong -- who is very well respected and who can communicate the value of physical education in schools. Doubtless the Department of Education could find ways to strongly encourage public schools which did not have mandatory physical education to re-introduce it into the curriculum.

Speaking of Lance Armstrong, I wonder how HE feels about our substandard health care system?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/how_obama_can_make_healthcare.html

But that assumes that President Obama actually wants to improve healthcare in America. In fact, all the countless speeches, all the vastly complex congressional bills, all the relentless insistence that America is in crisis, are all intended to accomplish just one thing: Obama was to gain giant chunks of power and authority for the federal government at the expenses of individual Americans. It is not a reform of our healthcare he seeks; it is a reform of the balance between personal liberty and government control.

__________________
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
Frederic Bastiat

 

[Oliver Clozoff]

What's ironic is that delaying reform is slowly nationalizing healthcare already. A decade ago 64% of Americans had employer-based health insurance. Now about 58% do. Over the same time period, Medicaid rolls have continued to expand.

Personal spending on healthcare is now more than for housing or food - and it's continuing to rise year after year.

For you opponents of reform - is your income going up as fast as your premiums?


http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c233/Oliverclozoff/20080504_INSURE_GRAPH.jpg

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

What's ironic is that delaying reform is slowly nationalizing healthcare already. A decade ago 64% of Americans had employer-based health insurance. Now about 58% do. Over the same time period, Medicaid rolls have continued to expand.

Personal spending on healthcare is now more than for housing or food - and it's continuing to rise year after year.

For you opponents of reform - is your income going up as fast as your premiums?


http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c233/Oliverclozoff/20080504_INSURE_GRAPH.jpg

You pick up an apple and DEMAND we compare it to an orange. Wages aren't going up because Congress is simply destroying our ability to compete via regulation and raising the cost of business.

OTHERWISE, and similarly, health care costs are rising for much the same reason...

It was a natural reaction to government increasing the supply of money to medicare and medicaid allowing the rolls to be expanded, the same thing has happened in the exploding cost of education, despite what President Obama believes, government competition options always raise the cost of goods and services because it has to loot the private sector in order to give to the public sector.

Give the employers and employees their money back and costs will drop in the face of true competition. Let Flo at Progressive hand you a pricing gun and YOU design your health care coverage based on what YOU want to pay...

Some will choose to pay nothing; they should not be being used to inflate the numbers to promote the scare.

Less people watched the Obama speech than what he claims are in desperate peril. One would think they would have a vested interest...

__________________
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
Frederic Bastiat

 

[Ishmael]

What's ironic is that delaying reform is slowly nationalizing healthcare already. A decade ago 64% of Americans had employer-based health insurance. Now about 58% do. Over the same time period, Medicaid rolls have continued to expand.

Personal spending on healthcare is now more than for housing or food - and it's continuing to rise year after year.

For you opponents of reform - is your income going up as fast as your premiums?


http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c233/Oliverclozoff/20080504_INSURE_GRAPH.jpg

So what Ollie? You throw out bullshit in response to very real questions and observations. And you you just posted IS bullshit and so what?

No one is saying, to my knowledge, that healthcare reform isn't needed. But the wholesale take over of healthcare by the government is NOT reform. It is the government subsuming 16% of the national economy, reducing choices, taking away freedoms, criminalizing honest citizens, and deciding who is going to live or die.

Liberals are quite good at identifying problems, hell, they can find a problem everywhere they look. They just suck at solutions.

Ishmael

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Yeah, their solution always involves theft!








__________________
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
Frederic Bastiat

 

[tactful]

If and when it passes, Healthcare, will be like an iceberg, it will be just waiting for the good Ship Economy to pick up speed, and when it does (that would be in a few years, 2011 or 2013), it will hit the floating mass, so, make sure you have a bucket, to help bail it out, don't want anybody to get thrown in that cold water, now, do we.
And everyone will bail, well, except the well to do, their butler will tend to them.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

This is true tactful.

Why Obama will not hit the reset button on healthcare...

All who oppose full-blown entitlement healthcare ought to be happy that President Obama decided to show his hand so early into his presidency -- by "jamming through" a thousand pages of unread "stimulus" law behind closed doors. Without taking a breath or blinking an eye, it was onward to cap and trade and healthcare overhaul. Frankly, I don't think Obama can help himself. The combination of inexperience, radical ideology and a messianic complex is exposing the real Barack Obama. He might be able to keep his college grades (and many other documents from his past) concealed, but he cannot seem to conceal his intention to radically (and instantly) remake the country at all costs.

The inexperience of Candidate Obama, of which the double-minded Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton forewarned, together with inexhaustible media fawning, is producing the current phenomenon. The staunch radicalism of Obama might have otherwise been tempered, but Obama was made to feel as though he were invincible. Thankfully, his first project was not government-controlled healthcare. If it had been, a still-mesmerized public may have awakened to a hard-to-swallow healthcare prescription.

The ‘Obama Code'

University of California, Berkeley, linguistics professor, George Lakoff, helps us to understand why Obama would press on full steam ahead with healthcare remaking in the midst of an economic recession. In his piece, The Obama Code, Lakoff explained back in February that people were missing the "sea change that Obama is bringing about" because they hadn't perceived his "moral vision."

President Obama "tends to express his moral vision indirectly," says Lakoff, and he does so via his moral and linguistic code. The conservative-leaning country would not have accepted Obama's moral vision if it had been communicated directly. Thus, moral relativism allows Obama to say one thing while believing and doing the opposite. That's why Obama could say, "I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn't, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch," with a straight face, in his Sept. 9 address to Congress.

The otherwise insane idea of proposing more entitlement in the face of multi-trillion dollar deficits makes perfect sense once one understands the Obama code. Lakoff notes:

The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.

Did you catch the key phrase? President Obama's "economic program is tied to his moral system." Obama's entire moral system was summed up inadvertently and succinctly on the 2008 campaign trail. The Joe the Plumber encounter was one of the rare moments in which Obama came off script and spoke directly. Obama blurted out his infamous line about "spreading the wealth around," and his explanation to Joe Wurzelbacher was framed in simplistic terms of Marxist morality: "It's good for everybody." Similarly, Lakoff adds:

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues--education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government's moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

There you have it. Regardless of the debt and destruction Obama inflicts upon the country the idealistic president believes he is doing the right thing.

At this point, I believe the Obama code has been cracked. But come hell or high water he will press on. Only the upcoming congressional and presidential elections will ultimately stop Obama from imposing his moral system on the country.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/why_obama_wont_hit_the_reset_b.html

 

[Oliver Clozoff]

So what Ollie? You throw out bullshit in response to very real questions and observations. And you you just posted IS bullshit and so what?

No one is saying, to my knowledge, that healthcare reform isn't needed. But the wholesale take over of healthcare by the government is NOT reform. It is the government subsuming 16% of the national economy, reducing choices, taking away freedoms, criminalizing honest citizens, and deciding who is going to live or die.

Liberals are quite good at identifying problems, hell, they can find a problem everywhere they look. They just suck at solutions.

Ishmael

Government is already subsuming health care little-by-little, year-by-year.

The status quo is creating a stealth nationalization right under your nose.

Many countries around the world with health care quality similar or better than ours have higher rates of private health-insurance than we do - and far more cheaply. Read a little about the German system - people stay on their employer-offered plans until they die.

What doesn't compute about your post is how Obama's reform stands to drive the private sector out of the market. What evidence do you have?

Hmmmmmm? [/Ishmael]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

And Germans have been accepting socialism and a lesser quality of health care since the 1880's.

Did you even read the OP?



Lower standard of living too...

What was the rate in East Germany?

 

[Ishmael]

Government is already subsuming health care little-by-little, year-by-year.

The status quo is creating a stealth nationalization right under your nose.

Many countries around the world with health care quality similar or better than ours have higher rates of private health-insurance than we do. Read a little about the German system - people stay on their employer-offered plans until they die.

What doesn't compute about your post is how Obama's reform stands to drive the private sector out of the market. What evidence do you have?

Hmmmmmm? [/Ishmael]

You speak as if I haven't a track record, going back 7 fucking years, of posting on the subject. Save your pedantry for others.

Further, are you saying that because government has already made an expensive fucking mess out of healthcare we should just shut up and let them destroy it completely?

Ishmael

 

[Oliver Clozoff]

You speak as if I haven't a track record, going back 7 fucking years, of posting on the subject. Save your pedantry for others.

Further, are you saying that because government has already made an expensive fucking mess out of healthcare we should just shut up and let them destroy it completely?

Humor me, Ish.

What's the evidence?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

In 1964, President Johnson won a landslide victory—quite similar to mine. His election also brought liberals into Congress. The next year, they created the first government-run health care plan: Medicare.

They meant well, but unfortunately, this was the height of fiscal irresponsibility. I know Medicare is popular with the elderly. Of course it is. Everyone likes getting free things. But it is unsustainable.

Retirees believe that their Medicare bills are paid from a "trust fund" that was created with deductions from their paychecks. But this is a politician's lie.

In truth, our predecessors spent every penny of those contributions immediately. They spent them on wars and pork that helped them get re-elected. The money for current retirees' health care is taken from today's workers.

This Ponzi scheme worked for a while. But then more people had the nerve to live longer. The average life span increased from 71 to 78 years. When Medicare began, there were five workers for every Medicare recipient. Now there are only four. And by 2030, the Board of Medicare Trustees expects there to be just 2.4. Unless millions of new young workers suddenly arrive from some other planet, there is no way that there will be enough workers to pay the Medicare benefits that we politicians have promised. Medicare's unfunded liability is $37 trillion—yes, trillion. It's a scam. We politicians should be ashamed of what we promised our constituents.

We locked up Bernie Madoff for less.

John Stossel
What Obama Should Have Said to Congress
http://reason.com/news/show/135987.html
__________________
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
Frederic Bastiat

 

[Oliver Clozoff]

John Stossel
What Obama Should Have Said to Congress
http://reason.com/news/show/135987.html
__________________
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
Frederic Bastiat

Howdy, 'seed.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Yes, semen?




Fannie Mae went belly up after Democrats assured us nothing of the sort was remotely possible and that the Bush whistleblowers were racists...

 

[Ishmael]

Humor me, Ish.

What's the evidence?

Which evidence Ollie? My posts over the past 7 years, or that government has already made a mess of things?

Ishmael

 

[unregistered]

 

[hogjack]

My posts over the past 7 years

Ishmael

You promised to a handy, online reference guide for those of us who seek immediate access to the wisdom & insight on a variety of topics. Where is it??

Secondly, please self-publish a hardcopy "Best of Ishmael"-type tome before the Christmas shopping season.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Why Obama will not hit the reset button on healthcare...



http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/why_obama_wont_hit_the_reset_b.html

AJ let American Thinker do his thinkin' for him.
Why?
Because Thinkin's HARD!

 

[hogjack]

John Stossel
What Obama Should Have Said to Congress
http://reason.com/news/show/135987.html

Mr. Stossel should run for public office. But he's kind of a woosie and thin-skinned so it would never happen.