More impudent thoughts on health care

• Pres. Obama is claiming to anyone who'll listen that the Democrat's health plan will squeeze hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and inefficiency out of the Medicare & Medicaid systems ("I've also proposed saving another $313 billion in Medicare and Medicaid spending in several other ways."). How about you start with that. Make those changes and only those changes. Once you've saved $300B (materially, not just as an accounting trick) maybe we can talk. Don't promise me you'll save that money *after* you spend it on something else -- that's just a great way for you to screw me twice.
• I need to do some research and some math, but everyone on the other side loves tossing numbers around that are refutable. Like 50M uninsured, and U.K has better health care because they have longer life expectancies. 20M of the 50M are illegal immigrants, let's start with that. Life expectencies are very close, about 1 year difference. Are homicides and car accidents health care failures? In the USA, we drive much farther on average than they do in the UK, you can get statistics on vehicle deaths per 1000 miles driven, and you can work out how many additional deaths per year are due simply to more fatal car accidents per capita due to more miles per capita. Similar math for homicides.
  

Impudent thoughts on health care

• Why not simply expand Medicaid to cover more of these "poor" people who can't afford health insurance?

• Why not build some hospitals, hire some doctors & nurses, then open the doors to anyone who wants "free" health care?
• Why are so many of the same people who are crying about our carbon footprints and how humans are killing the earth also trying to get health care for everyone? Wouldn't it be better if fewer people survived to continue to rape the planet?
  
• If health care is a basic human right, where was my right to an MRI fifty years ago?
• There's a name for forcing other people to provide for your wants and (so-called) needs...starts with an 's'...
• Why is there a plan to tax soda and other junk food, ostensibly to fight obesity and reduce health care costs when it's made with corn syrup, which we subsidize farmers to grow?
• Health care as we know it is a recent invention (see MRI above) and heavily dependent on technology. If a "fundamental human right" can attach to something that was invented last decade that we've decided is simply too important to live without, what's next? Public option iPhone?
• If it is a "fundamental human right" don't we have a duty, responsibility, obligation to render this to all humans? There's more than 6B people outside the US that we owe this to, too?
• If I can force others to provide me with health care, as is my "right", can I force others to pay for my arms--as in right to keep and bear? Please deliver my taxpayer funded M-16 and supply of ammunition.
• Everyone dies. It's folly to expend resources in a sky's-the-limit attempt to get each and every person a few more minutes, hours, days, months or even years.
• Presumably, a "fundamental human right" comes without limits, so my "free" health care will be all-I-can-eat. So maybe I'll be able to eat all-I-can-eat and smoke and drink all I can too, after all, the financial consequences of doing so will not be mine to bear. Once you admit to some limits, we're just arguing over degrees*.
  
• If technology someday soon provides a pill that will provide 100% cure for and prevatative against contracting cancer, HIV, hep, and a slew of other diseases but costs $500,000 each dose (say it's made from comet dust, just that it costs that much even with the manufacturer making zero profit), will it be covered? For everyone? What if the pill is only good for one year, and you need a booster every year at another $500k per?
• The phrase is "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"...
• If a) Congress's new plan will not force me to buy insurance and b) will forbid any insurance company from denying me coverage for a preexisting condition, why shouldn't I wait until I got sick or hurt before signing up and paying premiums?

* There's an old joke:
He: "Would have sex with me for $1 million?"
She: "Yes."
He: "Would have sex with me for $10?"
She: "No way! What do you think I am?"
He: "Oh, we've already established what you are, now we're just haggling over the price."

Democrat predictions were correct!

A post I am copying from a WSJ blog, with the original "author unknown" attribution:

(posted to an SKF board, author unknown)

Much as it pains me to say this, I have to admit it - my Democrat friends were right.

They told me if I voted for McCain, the nation's hope would deteriorate, and sure enough there has been a 20 point drop in the Consumer Confidence Index since the election, reaching a lower point than any time during the Bush administration.

They told me if I voted for McCain, the US would become more deeply embroiled in the Middle East, and now, tens of thousands of additional troops are scheduled to be deployed into Afghanistan .

My Democrat Party friends told me if I voted for McCain, that the economy would get worse and sure enough unemployment is approaching double digits and the new stimulus packages implemented recently have sent the stock market lower than at any time since the Islamic Terrorists attacks of 9-11.

They told me if I voted for McCain, we would see more "crooks" in high ranking positions in Federal government and sure enough, several recent cabinet nominees and Senate appointments revealed resumes of scandal, bribery and tax fraud.

They told me if I voted for McCain, we would see more "Pork at the trough" in Federal government and sure enough, 17,500 "Pork Bills" showed up in Congress since January 2009...

I was also told by my Democrat friends that if I voted for McCain, we would see more deficit spending in Washington D.C. , and sure enough, Obama has spent more in just 30 days than all other Presidents together - in the entire history of the good ole USA ...

Well I voted for McCain in November and my Democrat friends were right... all of their predictions have come true!

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Government health care, public housing?

If you ask someone if they want "free health care", they're likely to say yes.

Just like if you ask someone if they want a free home, they'll say yes. But not many people want to live in public housing.

Taxes:politicians as ?:?

Taxes are to politicians what crack is to an addict; they never can stop and too much is just right.

Joe Boccuzzi

link

Social Security vs 401k

This article is rife with questionable assumptions. The basic premise is that "Hah! Aren't you glad we didn't let Bush privatize your Social Security?" True, people heavily invested in securities had seen their investments decrease by one-third to 40%. But unless you were retiring in the next year or so, then you are still likely to be ahead of the game in your 401k vs. Social Sceurity.

First, the money in your 401k is yours. Unlike SS, which is nothing short of a Ponzi scheme, a 401k or IRA is always your own money (barring some sort of malfeasance on the part of your administrator). You have control over it, and you have resposibility to manage it. Social Security pays out by taking monies from current workers. The SS "trust fund" doesn't exist--rather, it is a pile of IOUs that the Government wrote to itself.

Second, under the Bush plan, only a very small part of your SS "contributions" would have been eligible for self-management. And one of the options for that sliver of money would have been US Treasuries, the only investment that SSA can "invest" their IOUs in--so you could have had the same return as SS, but would have owned the money rather than have it go to pay benifits to current SSA recipients.

Third, and finally, when SSA starts having to pay out more than they take in, they can simply invoke the power of the US Government to extract additional "returns" from taxpayers. So the so-called fragility of the market returns relative to SSA returns are apples and oranges, or rather honest men vs con artists. The 30 year ROI in the market is more than 11%. SSA's rate-of-return is a mere 1.23% by some measures, for the lowest income contributions. Higher-income contributors are less favored, since they pay in much higher contributions relative to what they can legally received. And minorty contributors are pretty much screwed with negative ROI, since they have life expectency that means their SS payout is far less than they were forced to pay into the system.

Socialism for class grades

Snopes.com says that the attributions in some versions of this viral email are wrong and there is no legitimate recorded instance of this actually happening. Nevertheless, this tale seems apropos:

An economics professor at a university said he had never failed a single student, but had once failed an entire class.

The students insisted that socialism worked since no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism."

"All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A."

After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who had studied hard were upset while the students who had studied very little were happy.

But, as the second test rolled around, the students who had studied little studied even less and the ones who had studied hard decided that since they couldn't make an A, they also studied less. The second Test average was a D.

No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average grade was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling, all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else.

To their great surprise all failed. The professor told them that socialism would ultimately fail because the harder people try to succeed the greater their reward (capitalism) but when a government takes all the reward away (socialism) no one will try or succeed.