Tag Archives: Control

Podcasts

Understand the right way to reform health care… with short podcasts!

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CBO says that the total cost of Obamacare is 1.3 trillion over 10 years
CBO says that the total cost of Obamacare is 1.3 trillion over 10 years

Source: The Heritage Foundation

The problem with health care today in the United States is that medical care and services cost too much. Now, everyone seems to think that the only solution to this problem is to go with a single-payer system like Canada or Cuba. Only one problem: there is another solution that no one is talking about: consumer-driven health care. And this is the only solution that actually works.

At lunch yesterday, I went to the Chinese buffet and started to read a new book on this issue by Regina Hertzlinger, a professor at Harvard University who specializes in health care policy. So now I understand it a little more. And I managed to round up a few podcasts that can explain her idea of consumer-driven health care to you, too. (I listed them in a sensible order)

Consumer-driven health care:

Health Care: Fostering Focus Factories
with Dr. Regina Hertzlinger
(8:46)

Choice, Competition Should Drive Health Care Reform
with Dr. Michael D. Tanner
(5:21)

The Republican Plan (“Patient Choice Act”) is consumer-driven:

Obama’s False Health Care Choice
with Rep. Paul Ryan
(10:39)

Ideas for Free-Market Health Care Reform
with Rep. Paul Ryan
(8:30)

Obamacare, Medicare, RomneyCare and CanadaCare are all garbage:

Competing with the Government
with Dr. Michael F. Cannon
(7:34)

Medicare: A Model for Reform?
with Dr. Michael D. Tanner
(4:34)

Lessons from Massachusetts Health Care Reform
with Dr. Michael D. Tanner
(4:18)

The Canadian Health Care Experience
with Sally C. Pipes
(7:45)

Puncturing the Myths of American Health Care
with Sally C. Pipes
(about 8 minutes)

Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal entitled “Universal Health Care Isn’t Worth Our Freedom”. (H/T Club For Growth)

This is the key insight that everyone must understand:

Many Americans would willingly pay for insurance to protect them against the exorbitant cost of treating their own leukemia. But how many Americans would willingly pay for insurance to protect them from the expenses of treating their own depression?

Everyone recognizes that the more fully we wish insurance companies to defray our out of pocket expenses for our car repairs, the higher the premium they will charge for the policy. Yet foregoing reimbursement for trivial or unnecessary health-care costs in return for a more suitable health-care policy is an option unavailable under the present system. Everyone with health insurance is compelled to protect himself from risks, such as alcoholism and erectile dysfunction, that he would willingly shoulder in exchange for a lower premium.

Liberty means choosing the right amount to pay for your own health care, based on your own lifestyle choices, and your own risk assessment. Anything less is tyranny.

Along those lines, people who are sexually promiscuous or who abuse drugs will be paying the same medical premiums as everyone else, under Obama’s health care plan. Your lifestyle decisions are irrelevant to the amount you pay and the amount of coverage you get.

Excerpt:

Under the terms of the health-care reform bill approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the legal use of tobacco products is the only vice for which insurance companies will be able to charge their customers higher premiums.

…In other words, a person could have been admitted to hospitals three times for heroin overdoses, or been pregnant five times out of wedlock, or been treated for venereal diseases at least once per year for the past five years, but none of these factors could be used to charge that person a higher insurance premium.

This is a massive transfer of wealth from clean–living, productive citizens to citizens who are not minimizing lifestyle risks and who are not productive. This is nothing but a massive incentive for people to stop working and stop being moral. What would be the point to restraining yourself? Someone else will pay for your mistakes anyway, right? And that’s just what the compassionate, progressive secular-leftists want. To abolish income differentials and the privileges of moral living. So everyone will be the same, and no one will feel bad for being lazy and immoral.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough…

Investors Business Daily is reporting this scary story.

Excerpt:

It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

As Ed Morrissey explains in this Hot Air article, the government has a track record running health care programs already, such as the Indian Health Service. This is a single-payer system run by the federal government. Click through to the article and find out how good of a job government does of running anything. People are dying. Government-run health care is an inefficient system that allows bureaucrats to decide how health care is rationed.

Books I am reading about health care

Right now, I’ve picked out 3 books on health care to help me learn about the issue.

Who Killed Health Care?: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure
by Dr. Regina Herzlinger

The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
by David Gratzer, M.D.

The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care
by Sally C. Pipes

The latter two books are by Canadians intimately familiar with the Canadian single-payer system.

Videos

MUST-SEE: Steven Crowder’s undercover expose of single-payer health care in Canada!

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UPDATE: Welcome Canadian visitors from Blazing Cat Fur! Thanks for the link! I am going to tell you all straight – I have seen Canadian Football and it is twice as exciting as American Football. Please allow us to have CFL teams (again)!

Hilarious, and totally un-scripted, totally undercover!

How long must you wait for FREE HEALTH CARE in Canada?

You can leave a comment at his blog here. (H/T IMAO.us)

Hot Air summarizes the lessons of the video:

The big lesson from Steven Crowder’s undercover look at the single-payer health-care system in Canada? “Don’t get sick on Sunday.” Actually, we can probably narrow that to, “Don’t get sick,” because Steven demonstrates that the only thing reliably covered in CanadaCare is the bill.

What would Obamacare do to us?

Check out this assessment by Chapman university law professor Hugh Hewitt. (H/T The Heritage Foundation)

Some of my law firm’s clients and some executives in my broadcast audience are quietly preparing for the necessary analysis that will follow the passage of Obamacare by asking their personnel departments the obvious question: Will it make economic sense to discontinue health care coverage for my employees and instead push them into the government plan?

These employers –manufacturers, builders, entrepeneuers of all sorts– cannot yet get an answer to this question because they don’t have any specifics about costs from which they can make an informed decision.

But they all know they will have to “do the math” if the “government option/public plan” makes it into law. They cannot not do so for they owe shareholders and investors an objective assessment of what will improve their bottom lines.

If the “government option/public plan” costs $300 per employee per month and private sector insurance costs $350 per employee per month, the choice to push their workforce into the waiting arms of President Obama’s new bureaucracy will make itself.

Under Obamacare, your employer will decide whether you are on the private or public option – by dumping everyone that costs them too much. That’s Obama’s public option – it’s not your option.

Obamacare will run huge deficits

The latest report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is out. (H/T The Heritage Foundation)

Excerpt:

For the past half-century, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP, federal taxes about 18 percent of GDP and the budget deficit 2 percent of GDP. The CBO’s projection for 2020 — which assumes the economy has returned to “full employment” — puts spending at 26 percent of GDP, taxes at a bit less than 19 percent of GDP and a deficit above 7 percent of GDP. Future spending and deficit figures continue to grow.

[T]he major causes of the budget blowout are well-known: an aging population and rapid increases in health spending. In 2000, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — the main programs providing income and health care for those 65 and over — totaled nearly 8 percent of GDP. In 2020, CBO projects that will reach almost 12 percent of GDP. But the deeper source of our predicament is a self-indulgent political culture that avoids a rigorous discussion of government’s role.

…Obama would make matters worse. He talks about controlling “entitlement” spending (mainly Social Security and Medicare) but hasn’t done so. He’s proposing just the opposite. His health-care proposal would increase federal spending. He says he will “pay for” the added outlays with tax increases or other spending cuts, but what people forget is that every penny of this “payment” could be used (and should be) to close the long-term deficit — not raise future spending and taxes.

As if we were not already spending too much!

Previous posts on health care

Verum Serum has more Canadian horror stories:

Canadian visitors, please leave a comment with your worst health care story so that we can understand what you are going through.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit reports that Obamacare will provide taxpayer funding for abortion just as polls show that the country is more pro-life than ever.

UPDATE: But there’s hope! Obama’s teleprompter has been smashed! Perhaps this will be an end of Obamacare now that the evil genius is no more.

News

Democrat Waxman believes that opposing Obama’s energy tax is equivalent to opposing America

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Check out this Politico.com post. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who has had an eventful couple of weeks to say the least, believes House Republican opposition to climate change legislation and the stimulus indicates they’re cheering against the good ol’ US of A.

“It appears that the Republican Party leadership in the Congress has made a decision that they want to deny President Obama success, which means, in my mind, they are rooting against the country, as well,” the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman told WAMU radio host Diane Rehm on Tuesday morning, promoting his new book, “The Waxman Report.”

All the lies they spoke about that Christian fascist Bush was just so much projection, foreshadowing how they themselves would deal with “unpatriotic” dissent.

Al Gore and Goldman Sachs

In a related story, repeat college drop-out Al Gore (NOT A SCIENTIST) equated his war on global warming to the war against Nazism.(H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.

…Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.”

And he has good reason to do so, given that his personal fortune has skyrocketed from $2 million to over $100 million. Oh, don’t let those tolerant Democrats fool you. If you oppose their greed and lust for power, then you’re worse than Satan. How dare you assert your rights to liberty and prosperity against the power of their oligarchy?

And he isn’t the only one who is ready to cash in. The employees of investment firm Goldman Sachs donated tons of money to Democrats, and they are positioned to strike it rich if cap-and-trade passes. Steve Milloy writes that “Goldman Sachs has spent millions of dollars lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation in anticipation of making billions of dollars at the expense taxpayers and consumers.”

The war on small business

Here is a Fox News article that describes how the cap-and-trade bill championed by Democrats like Waxman and Gore destroys small businesses. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

David McArthur, vice president of the 52-year-old family operation, a Gateway City institution, is one of a growing number of business owners and taxpayers nationwide who are mobilizing against the so-called cap-and-trade bill, which would levy harsh fines on energy consumption that harms the environment.

McArthur told FOXNews.com that every aspect of his business relies on the forms of energy targeted by the American Clean Energy and Security Act, and that his congressman, Carnahan, was supporting “a direct tax increase on small business” by voting for it.

“We make (our product) with electricity, we bake it with gas, we refrigerate and freeze it with electricity and we distribute it with gas and oil,” said McArthur, who said he worries that high prices could cost his company up to $15,000 a year in an industry with a very tight margin for profit.

This is cause-and-effect, people. There is a reason why Cuba and North Korea are poor today – they voted in radical leftists just like Obama. This is the way the world actually works.

Obama’s energy tax ships jobs overseas

The Times Online reports that India and China decided against crippling their economies for the myth of global warming. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

As world leaders sat down for a working lunch at the start of a three day meeting of the G8, it emerged that negotiations had failed to reach agreement on halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Summit negotiators, who do the hard bargaining before the heads of state arrive to complete the agreements, failed to make progress on the issue in talks that continued late last night. China and India are understood to have blocked any mention of the target in the draft communiqué, insisting that the developed economies should promise to cut their own emissions sharply by 2020 before asking developing nations to commit to a long term target.

The breakdown in negotiations has undermined President Obama’s chances of producing a diplomatic coup when he chairs talks on climate change at a meeting of the 17-nation Major Economies Forum tomorrow.

Where do you think all our manufacturing jobs will go when it becomes expensive to manufacture goods here?

Meanwhile, WattsUpWithThat reports that Prince Edward Island in Canada is seeing the first frost ever in July.