I had written about the so-called doc-fix before, which is the problem of doctors being underpaid by the government for things like Medicare and Medicaid when they provide services to patients. Obama chose not to “fix” these low reimbursements in his health care bill, in order to hide the true costs of socializing medicine. But he has a plan now to fix the problem of government-run medicine not reimbursing doctors adequately.
Conservatives were outraged by the chicanery of separating physician payment increases from the health care reform (that’s three lies for the price of one) bill Congress recently rammed through. The “doc fix” was separate legislation so that physician payments could be increased without adding to the total cost of the main bill, so that Democrats could dishonestly claim the bill reduced the deficit. Now, however, we are seeing the real “doc fix.”
Some Idaho orthopedists grew weary of the low reimbursement rates the government gave them for caring for worker’s comp patients. So they got together and agreed not to treat those patients anymore. They hoped that their boycott would force the Idaho Industrial Commission to increase the fee schedule – their payments. While they were at it, they decided to stop working with Blue Cross of Idaho – also a notorious underpayer – until a better deal could be negotiated. Unions behave this way all the time, and it’s often very effective.
In a similar case in Colorado last February, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in and charged the doctors with price-fixing.
Those doctors lost, and if they want to continue to work as physicians, they will do so at the prices set by the government.
Now the Obama administration has stepped it up a notch. The FTC only deals with civil complaints. In order to deal with the Idaho orthopedists, Obama sent in Eric Holder and the Justice Department, which is at liberty to file criminal charges. You see, those Idaho orthopedists collectively agreeing that they had enough and weren’t going to take it anymore, were actually engaged in two antitrust conspiracies.
Read the rest. This is another first class post by Laura, and a great find by ECM. (Laura also sides with me on women taking responsibility for their own actions, which is why men like her)
So, it sounds like the Obama administration is heading towards Canada’s system where the private practice of medicine is a criminal offense. Doctors will not be able to set prices for their services. A patient giving money directly to a doctor, without government approval of the price (price controls), will become illegal. That’s the way that socialists roll.They love to fix prices.
And do you know what happens when doctors make less money than government clerks but have to work 80 hour weeks? That’s right – you have a shortage of doctors! Just like in Canada! And do you know what happens when there is a shortage of doctors? That’s right – you pay for the privilege of dying on a waiting list. (Unless you want an abortion, IVF or a sex change, I guess – because that’s politically correct in Canada)
This is why there are waiting lists in every country that has tried socialized medicine. Fewer doctors means fewer claims to the government – rationing. It’s the real way that government cuts costs. Well, that and euthanasia. Once government starts to regulate the practice of medicine, and to fix prices, you choke off the supply. And then you have to start killing people to avoid bankrupting the system, without or without their consent.
Who is to blame for this woman’s troubles? Well, I agree with Driscoll that her family, the church and other Christians were to blame for not telling her the truth about sex. On that we all agree. Christians do a lousy job of explaining sex to young people, because they don’t want to talk about “dirty” stuff, and they don’t want to use arguments and evidence, and they don’t want to go outside the Bible to give real reasons and evidence. But thumping the Bible is a poor response to peer pressure and pop culture.
But she and Mark Driscoll also seem to think the man is to blame. Is the man to blame?
Well, the man certainly did bad things, but I think that none of these bad things could have happened to this woman in particular if this woman had not first chosen this man from all the other men that she knew, and then given him the opportunity to do these bad things. Without her own free choices, she would never have been harmed. So her own bad choices played a part in her suffering but she didn’t mention her own choices at all. So, let me take a look at how she could have made better choices below.
Can women expect a non-Christian man to act like a Christian man?
Women need to be careful to realize that they should avoid being alone with non-Christian men, especially when they are not even old enough to be dating men at all. That’s what courting is designed to prevent, by the way – the man has to go through the father to get to the woman, and they need to be accompanied by a chaperone at all times. And in any case, a woman can get love without touching a man just by listening to the man’s words, reading his writings, letting him serve her, washing a car together, and accepting gifts from him.
Women: you don’t go to a deserted beach with a non-Christian man. Don’t take risks like that. Especially when you have probably already done a lot with the guy. And don’t drink alcohol, it impairs your judgment. The purpose of men is to marry them, not to have a good time with them. No alcohol is allowed!
Paul says that you cannot expect non-Christians to act like Christians, which is exactly what many Christian women do.
9I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—
10not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.
11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.
12What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?
13God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”
14Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
15What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?
16What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
Christians should not pursue non-Christians romantically – it’s disrespectful to God to leave him out of your romantic operations.
Women can stop a lot of the bad behavior of men just by choosing authentic Christian men by using rigorous objective criteria to evaluate men. If a woman chooses a non-Christian man, then she cannot complain if he acts like a non-Christian man. And there is more to a man being a Christian than just saying that he is, memorizing Bible verses and singing praise hymns in church. Christianity is a worldview. It has to be applied across the board. Christian women need to study to develop a Christian worldview of their own so they know how to evaluate the worldviews of candidate men.
What else can we learn from the video?
Here are a few more things that stood out to me in the video:
She should take more responsibility for their actions, instead of blaming others
She should study these things (not just the Bible!) on her own before she starts dating, to know why God puts these boundaries in place to protect her from harm
Her parents should have studied these things (not just the Bible!) more, and helped her more by being more convincing, to know why God puts these boundaries in place to protect her from harm
The church she grew up in should provide her with extra-biblical arguments and evidence from the objective external world so that she could resist ideologies like atheism, postmodernism, liberalism, feminism, etc. – she can’t act morally unless she believes that God exists and that morality is real
Women should also know that the decision to have sex before marriage with a man who isn’t a Christian doesn’t magically change him into a Christian. Sex isn’t magic. It doesn’t cause a man to like a woman, or to fall under her control.
Women go to school for 4 years to learn a trade and they need to put some effort into studying courtship rules so they can be wise about their own choices with men. Jumping into a car and trying to drive it without lessons is a good way to get killed. And emotions, intuitions, peer-pressure and pop-culture don’t help you to know how to drive a car. Be careful, think for yourself.
I also recommend that young, unmarried women become informed about anti-family, anti-father policies. If women don’t want to be hurt by men, then vote for stronger families, lower taxes, and policies that promote good husbands and good fathers. Girls need to see love modeled between a husband and wife as they grow up, and they need to have fathers in the home. Good public policies encourage men to marry and stay married.
Women need to get better criteria for choosing men
A while back, I posted on some of the criteria women have for choosing men, and here are a few:
Being tall
Being aloof and disinterested
Playing a musical instrument
Well-dressed
Stylish shoes
A deep voice
Handsome face
What do women expect when they choose men based on criteria like that? It makes no sense to blame a bad man for being bad. He’s BAD! Don’t go near him, he’ll be bad to you, too!
Shouldn’t women judge themselves first, before judging a man?
Shouldn’t women begin by removing the plank in their own eye before removing the speck from the man’s eye?
I think an excellent first step would be for Christian women to take a good look at the music they listen to, the movies they watch, and also what they read. Are they listening to Melissa Etheridge, watching “Thelma & Louise”, and reading Margaret Atwood? Are they informing themselves about truth in many areas, like economics and cosmology, so that they can make informed choices of men? Are they building resistance to cultural trends?
UPDATE: Two more things I thought of.
1) Shouldn’t this woman have put some effort into testing out the claims of her parents and the church by reading the Bible itself? I mentioned reading extra-biblical stuff but even the Bible doesn’t ground anything that she was doing or anything the church was telling her to do that was wrong. Driscoll seems to think that women are not obligated to read the Bible, and that if someone in the church tells them a lie, then the church is to blame. But shouldn’t we expect people who attend church to test these things out for themselves? I realize that she wasn’t a Christian, but in order to take responsibility, she could have said “I should have checked things in my Bible and so I share the blame”. She doesn’t say that because she doesn’t blame herself at all for anything that happened. Well, probably she went to church for the singing and never read what the Bible had to say – or didn’t take it as an authority. But she never blames herself for either one of those.
2) I noticed that she claims that if the church tells her something and she does it, then the church is to blame. Well, the church (or at least her parents) undoubtedly told her not to have sex before she was married, but she didn’t mention that in the video. Why not? Well, she only mentions things that other people tell her to blame them. When they tell her the right thing and she doesn’t do it, she doesn’t mention what they told her. Because she won’t blame herself for any reason. And Driscoll has nothing to say about that, either. Any time the church tells her something bad and she does it… it’s the church’s fault. Any time the church tells her something good and she DOESN’T do it… she just doesn’t mention it because she isn’t responsible for anything she does – it’s always the fault of someone else.
I don’t mind if she explains the circumstances surrounding WHY she made bad choices. I don’t even mind the bad choices, because I make bad choices. I just don’t like her blaming other people, I especially don’t like her blaming bad men. Bad men are bad. Don’t blame them for not being good – it’s your fault for choosing them. There are other men who are good who get no attention from women at all.
With increasing frequency I am consulted by nurses, who for the most part come from and were themselves traditionally members of (at least after Florence Nightingale) the respectable lower middle class, who have illegitimate children by men who first abuse and then abandon them. This abuse and later abandonment is usually all too predictable from the man’s previous history and character; but the nurses who have been treated in this way say they refrained from making a judgment about him because it is wrong to make judgments.
And again:
Why are the nurses so reluctant to come to the most inescapable of conclusions? Their training tells them, quite rightly, that it is their duty to care for everyone without regard for personal merit or deserts; but for them, there is no difference between suspending judgment for certain restricted purposes and making no judgment at all in any circumstances whatsoever. It is as if they were more afraid of passing an adverse verdict on someone than of getting a punch in the face—a likely enough consequence, incidentally, of their failure of discernment. Since it is scarcely possible to recognize a wife beater without inwardly condemning him, it is safer not to recognize him as one in the first place.
This failure of recognition is almost universal among my violently abused women patients, but its function for them is somewhat different from what it is for the nurses. The nurses need to retain a certain positive regard for their patients in order to do their job. But for the abused women, the failure to perceive in advance the violence of their chosen men serves to absolve them of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them to think of themselves as victims alone rather than the victims and accomplices they are. Moreover, it licenses them to obey their impulses and whims, allowing them to suppose that sexual attractiveness is the measure of all things and that prudence in the selection of a male companion is neither possible nor desirable.
Read the whole thing, you young women. And judge men hard. It’s good to judge them beforehand so that you don’t have to condemn them for being bad later.
Dr. Donald Berwick, nominated by President Barack Obama to run Medicare and Medicaid, praised the government-owned British National Health Service (NHS) for not letting their health care system “play out in the darkness of private enterprise.”
[…]Berwick, who said that Britain “chose well” in establishing a health care system completely controlled by the government, contrasted the NHS with the American health care system, which he derided as being dominated by private doctors, hospitals, and insurers instead of the government.
The article is filled with alarming quotes from Berwick making it clear that he is a committed socialist. Just like Obama!
For example, the BBC — hardly a hive of free-market zealots — has run a series exposing routine neglect of elderly patients in a major NHS hospital.
[….]In addition to sheer neglect, NHS patients are often subjected to incredibly unsanitary conditions.
[…]Many British patients never endure such conditions because treatment is denied outright as too expensive.
[…]The NHS is run by health care bureaucrats who, like Donald Berwick, regard the free market as ethically dubious and economically inequitable. Yet the “morally superior” and “fair” medical system they have created for the U.K. produces results that give new meaning to the epithet, “Perfidious Albion. As David Gratzer recently pointed out, “British cancer outcomes don’t just trail U.S. results; they rival those of Eastern European nations.” This isn’t hyperbole. A 2008 study showed that cancer survival rates in the U.K. don’t come close to those of the United States. American men, for example, have an 80 percent better chance of surviving prostate cancer than do their English counterparts. The study revealed similar disparities in comparative survival rates for victims of breast, colon and rectal cancers.
[…]Heart patients subjected to the tender mercies of the NHS also fare poorly. The Telegraph reports that British heart attack victims are much more likely to die after being admitted to a hospital than similar patients in the United States and other developed nations: “Around 6.3 per cent of patients who have suffered a heart attack have passed away within 30 days of entering a British hospital — significantly higher than the 4.3 per cent average.”
I snipped ALL THE HORROR STORIES out of the excerpt. Yes, even the one with the DECOMPOSING RAT IN THE OPERATING ROOM. You better click through and scare yourself silly from ever voting for the Democrats again. And don’t let your friends vote Democrat, either. Would you like to have health care from the DMV or from Amazon.com? In the UK, you get it from the DMV. And that’s where Obama is taking us.
