Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist.
They are wrong:
it is character.
Albert Einstein
Image of the Day: The Unholy Trinity
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| Via the White House Propaganda Office Former ObamaCare Czar Sebelius, The One, the Wicked Witch of the Left Coast |
This is an original signature blog quote that I used extensively during the middle years of the blog. I won't say that I knew all the examples featured in the video, but some were obvious, even without the narrator saying a word--take Caroline Kennedy near the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office with The One; who isn't immediately reminded of John-John under the desk or Caroline and John-John in their Halloween garb in the Oval Office? To be honest, maybe imitation is a form of flattery, but other than maybe patterning my right-handed batting stance after my baseball hero Harmon Killebrew, I liked to chart my own path. I won't say I haven't had my inspirations (for example, I loved the way Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica starts out by listing the strongest arguments against his own position, and I was thrilled when I figured out how he resolved it) But when people spend most of their time hiding behind soundbites and phony gimmicks, I instantly recoil like I would from a shyster or a slick used-car salesman trying to offload his lemon as a "cream puff".
What Have Liberalized Economies Done For Us? (Mental Note: Pope Francis Needs To Listen to Caplan, Not the Likes of "Politics of Envy" Krugman or Piketty)
In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue
Every single American schoolchild probably knows this poem and a related song, sung to the melody of "The Farmer in the Dell". The Independent has the story of one of the most important archeological finds in American history. On his first voyage were La Pinta, La Nina, and the flagship Santa Maria. The Santa Maria ran into a reef off the coast of Haiti and had to be abandoned. Barry Clifford and his team believe that they have located the wreck...
Facebook Corner
(Reason). We have a new contender for most-telling-ever Obamacare quote this morning: “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.”
Huge false premise there: you did not have choice before.
I see the point the article is trying to make, but when you consider it you realize the article is inciting fear based on a fundamentally false premise.
The article would have you believe a consumer had a lot of choice *before* ACA, when in fact you had very very little.
If you had a large full time employer, you had a limited choice of the plans the corporation decided they would pay for. Within those plans, you had a limited choice of providers the insurance company decided to support. Their choice. Not yours. They control your providers, your treatment, your meds.
If you had a smaller employer, or were a independent contractor, you had a choice of having no insurance or having an outrageously expensive individual plan.
If you had pre-existing conditions, prior to 1996 you were essentially uninsurable. After 1996 you had a mandated option of an outrageously expensive individual plan.
Unfortunately, ACA is an insurance solution to a health care problem. It is better than what existed before for many people, but it still terribly flawed. People wonder what could possibly be worse than the government controlling health care. My answer is: what we have now and had BEFORE ACA: insurance companies controlling an individual's health care.
Staggering ignorance here. First, health has been traditionally regulated at the state level. Among other things, there are interstate barriers to marketing, risk-pooling, etc. And contary to your assertion otherwise, most states had established high risk pools, which is a form of implementing guaranteed issue. ACA was not set up to shore up existing state/regional pools, allow insurers to market their own state-regulated policies nationally (including true catastophic insurance), allow pooling beyond state lines and/or self-insure like corporations with multi-state operations, etc. Recognize a broad issue here? The prohibition of a free market to dysfunctional government policies.
Second, health insurance really isn't insurance but bundled health services. Principal reasons for that including corrupt special-interest groups trying to socialize costs through benefit mandates and dysfunctional tax policy providing tax-free benefits to employer-sponsored health insurance. In time, it was only natural that unions and/or employers would try to maximize preferred, discriminatory tax treatment to include ordinary vs. catastrophic expenses. Recall this was an FDR gimmick to pay lip service to his equally economically illiterate wage-and-price-controls. To this day, most economically illiterate "progressives" confuse compensation (wages and benefits) with wages. In other words, the government pretended that health benefits didn't count, hence so-called tax expenditures, an indirect subsidy for employer-sponsored insurance. This has an economically perverse effect by effectively reducing the market cost of healthcare, which exacerbates sector cost pressures (think supply and demand).
I could go on and on, but ACA perversely makes a bad situation even worse by trying to centralize healthcare (never mind the government continues to implement below-cost prices for government health program participants) and tries to expand Medicaid (with the idea of vesting a larger percentage of the population to government healthcare). Your crackpot conspiracy theories about private healthcare sector insurers is purely ideological nonsense. First, the industry has SMALL profit margins compared to, say, high tech companies. Second, state barriers to entry lowers the number of companies, not to mention the very high cost of government regulation, which helps drive industry consolidation.
The bottom line is the only REAL solution to the healthcare problem is NOT another failed government program, but restoration of a REAL free market.
She Said "Yes...."
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Steve Kelley and Townhall |
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| Courtesy of the original artist via IPI |
Dave Mason, "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" My favorite remake of all time; it barely broke Top 40.
