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Health savings accounts promote personal responsibility and lower health care costs

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An Investors Business Daily editorial by famous surgeon and conservative, Ben Carson.

Excerpt:

Health savings accounts can be funded in a variety of different ways and give people total control of where, how and with whom they wish to spend their health care dollars. Most people will want to get the biggest bang for the buck and will independently seek out both value and quality.

That, in turn, will bring all aspects of medicine into the free-market economic model, thus automatically having an ameliorating effect on pricing transparency and quality of outcomes.

Many corporations and communities already have very positive experiences with HSAs. Those experiences could be further enhanced by allowing family members to shift the money in their accounts among themselves.

For instance, if a family member was $500 short for a procedure or test, another family member could provide the money by authorizing its deduction from his account. This provides a whole other level of flexibility to the concept of health savings.

The overwhelming majority of encounters with the medical world could be handled through this type of system, eliminating bureaucratic delays and frustration.

Under ObamaCare’s many rules, the amount of money allowed to be managed through health savings accounts is severely restricted. Perhaps that is because the crafters of this gigantic, bureaucratic monstrosity realized that a well-functioning savings system would be easy to understand, much less expensive and give people control of their own health care.

It would also eliminate two-tiered systems of health care, making every patient equally desirable from a business perspective. There should be no limit to the money that can be contributed to and managed in an account. Money unspent at year-end should simply accumulate without penalty.

If accounts are established at the time of birth, they will be even more potent, because the vast majority of people will not experience catastrophic or major medical events until well into adulthood. By that time, a great deal of money will have accumulated.

Since bridge or catastrophic insurance will not be drawn upon for routine medical expenses, its costs will plummet, very much like homeowners insurance, which costs vastly less when there is a high deductible.

Somehow over the past few decades, we as a society have wandered away from the concept of using health insurance only for major medical issues and paying for routine service ourselves. This is largely responsible for the tremendous spike in medical costs. By using HSAs, we can return to a semblance of rational thinking.

I think it’s important for us to be aware that increased government control of health care is not the only approach to reducing health care costs. In fact, my view is that health care costs have been rising precisely because the government has been so involved in controlling the health care industry.

 

 

 

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Brisbane gets coldest temperature in 103 years, Antarctic ice extents at record high

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From The Australian.

Excerpt:

If you are lucky enough to be reading this from the comfort of your blankets, it might be best to stay there, as Brisbane has hit its coldest temperatures in 103 years.

Not since July 28 1911 has Brisbane felt this cold, getting down to a brisk 2.6C at 6.41am.

At 7am, it inched up to 3.3C.

Matt Bass, meteorologist from BOM, said the region was well below our average temperatures.

“If it felt cold, that’s because it was, breaking that record is pretty phenomenal for Brisbane,” Bass said.

“The average for this time of year is 12C, so Brisbane was about 9C below average, it is pretty impressive really, to have the coldest morning in 103 years is a big record.”

And from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

The levels of Antarctic sea-ice last week hit an all-time high – confounding climate change computer models which say it should be in decline.

America’s National Snow And Ice Data Center, which is funded by Nasa, revealed that ice around the southern continent covers about 16million sq km, more than 2.1 million more than is usual for the time of year.

It is by far the highest level since satellite observations on which the figures depend began in 1979.

In statistical terms, the extent of the ice cover is hugely significant.

It represents the latest stage in a trend that started ten years ago, and means that an area the size of Greenland, which would normally be open water, is now frozen.

The Antarctic surge is so big that overall, although Arctic ice has decreased, the frozen area around both poles is one million square kilometres more than the long-term average.

In its authoritative Fifth Assessment Report released last year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted that the computer models on which scientists base their projections say Antarctic ice should be in decline, not increasing.

The report said: ‘There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979, due to… incomplete and competing scientific explanations for the causes of change.’

So what about those climate simulations? Well… the UK Telegraph reports on that.

Excerpt:

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

I wonder if taxpayers will get back the billions of dollars we wasted funding this flat-Earth theory? It was just junk science. Researchers adopted it to get grant money, governments adopted it to get more control of businesses and individual consumption. That’s it. It was just Santa Claus mythology.

News

How does each side of the Israel-Hamas conflict treat civilians?

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You can learn everything you need to know about the Middle East conflict from this short video by Dennis Prager:

Now Israel is having about 80% of their country targeted by rocket attacks right now, and the attacks are designed to deliberately kill civilians. These are not military strikes designed to avoid civilian casualties, they are terrorist attacks designed to inflict civilian casualties.

Here is an article from leftist CNN that makes the point about Israel, Hamas and civilians.

Excerpt:

Israeli forces dropped leaflets in northern Gaza on Sunday to warn residents to move away from Hamas sites to avoid military strikes.

The warning came as the death toll in Gaza reached 168, with more than 1,100 people injured, the Gaza Health Ministry said.

About 70% of the fatalities were civilians, of which 30% — 27 people — were children, said Chris Gunness, spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which said the figures came from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Israel said its forces have struck 1,320 “terror targets” across Gaza, including 735 concealed rocket launchers.

Israel has used its Iron Dome defense system against many of the more than 800 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel, the military said. Two more were intercepted Sunday over the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.

[…]Video on Hamas-run television showed a Hamas spokesman urging people to serve as human shields, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported Thursday.

[…]Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, regularly uses sites and facilities populated by civilians.

“The leadership of Hamas and the other organizations has chosen — at a time when they are using the population of Gaza as human shields — to hide under ground, to flee abroad and to deliberately put civilians in the line of fire,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Cabinet meeting Sunday.

“This is the entire difference between us and Hamas — we are using defensive systems against missiles to protect the residents of Israel, and they are using the residents of Gaza to protect arsenals of missiles. Nothing better underscores the difference in this campaign. Israel is a democracy that is fighting — in a legitimate and focused manner — against unbridled terrorists,” he said.

[…]Throughout the conflict, Israel has warned Gaza residents of upcoming attacks targeting militants and terrorist infrastructure. On Twitter on Sunday, the IDF posted: “To warn civilians of an impending strike, the IDF drops leaflets, makes personalized phone calls & sends SMSes. How many militaries do that?”

“Sirens heard across (Israel). Gaza terrorists are firing barrages of rockets. Israel is under attack,” the IDF posted, with a photo asking “What would you do?”

[…]In leaflets dropped Sunday, the IDF warned residents that it intends “to attack terrorists and terror infrastructures.” The leaflets list areas that will be targeted. “Israel is currently attacking, and will continue to attack, every area from which rockets are being launched at its territory.”

The leaflets told residents which roads were safe to take and gave a time frame. “The IDF is not interested in hurting you or your family members. These operations are limited and short. Whoever does not adhere to these instructions and does not vacate their house immediately is subjecting their lives and the lives of their children and family to danger,” the leaflet said.

The Israeli military said it also drops empty shells on roofs, an operation it calls “roof knocking,” to alert civilians that airstrikes are imminent.

The goal of the airstrikes, the military said, is to get Hamas militants to stop firing rockets into Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel spent a ton of money on the “Iron Dome” missile defense system in order to protect Jewish and Arab residents of Israel.

So, I hope this is enough to explain to people that there is no moral equivalence between Israel and terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. If you are targeting civilians deliberately, you are a terrorist. It’s wrong, and only one side does it. Period.

I also want to point out that I have no religious reason for backing Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah in this conflict. I don’t like Israel’s anti-evangelism laws. But compared to the alternatives, they are the most pro-Western democracy in the area, and that’s why I support them. It’s strictly foreign policy and moral concerns. I am opposed to terrorism and to wage war against it, we need allies in the theater. Israel is always going to be looking out for Israel, not us, but they are a strong ally and we need to be encouraging them for that reason.