Tag Archives: Health-care

Women gives birth after NHS nurses send her home from hospital

From the UK Telegraph. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM)

Excerpt:

It was a bitterly cold night in January when Geraldine Weller gave birth in the car park of a London hospital. Three hours earlier, the maternity unit had sent her away. Midwives who said they were short-staffed had confidently told her that it would be “ages yet” before she went into labour. They maintained that view even as her husband made frantic phone calls, reporting from their Surrey home that the baby’s head could now be seen.

In desperation, the couple ignored advice to stay put and drove back to the hospital. With her husband shouting into the security cameras of the maternity unit for help, Mrs Weller stepped from the passenger seat. As she did so, she gave birth to their first child, catching the newborn in one leg of her pyjamas.

She says: “We just huddled together. My husband came back and wrapped Henry in a bath towel, and finally one of the nurses came out and said: ‘What’s this?’ ”

[…]Last month, a survey of 25,000 women who had children in England last winter found that more than one in five was left alone during childbirth at a point when it worried them.

The rest of the article features eyewitness comments from midwives working within the system. Naturally, no real names were used because the NHS sanctions anyone who speaks out against their government-run health care system. The same kind of government-run health care that the Democrats want in this country.

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Let’s learn economics using videos from Thomas Sowell

ECM sent me these videos from the Uncommon Knowledge web site. Tom Sowell is the official economist of the Tea Party movement.

Part 1 of 5: (Housing Boom and Bust)

Part 2 of 5: (Quantitative Easing and Tax Cuts)

Part 3 of 5: (Health Care)

Part 4 of 5: (Trade, Trade Deficit, Protectionism, Tariffs)

Part 5 of 5: (The Federal Reserve, Bailouts, Keynes)

The fourth edition of his new book is out! Only $25 or less. (One of my readers bought it for me for Christmas, so please don’t buy me one!)

You can translate youtube videos into MP3 using the “vidtomp3” web site. Or I could make them FOR YOU!

UPDATE: Within 5 minutes somebody asked me to make the MP3s for them. So here you go if you don’t like YouTube.

These are low-quality so they could be smaller.

UPDATE: Commenter Jim says:

Downloads of Sowell’s interview are also available in both audio MP3 and video M4V formats.

Does the CBO think that repealing Obamacare will help or hurt the deficit?

Gateway Pundit reports that the Democrats have been telling everyone that repealing Obamacare will make the budget deficit worse.

The left-wing Washington Post says:

Rescinding the federal law to overhaul the health-care system, the first objective of House Republicans who ascended to power this week, would ratchet up the federal deficit by about $230 billion over the next decade and leave 32 million more Americans uninsured, according to congressional budget analysts.

The rough estimate by the Congressional Budget Office also predicts that most Americans would pay more for private health insurance if the law were repealed.

The headline of this left-wing Washington Post news article is “CBO says health care repeal would deepen deficit”.

The left-wing New York Times says:

The nonpartisan budget scorekeepers in Congress said on Thursday that the Republican plan to repeal President Obama’s health care law would add $230 billion to federal budget deficits over the next decade, intensifying the first legislative fight of the new session and highlighting the challenge Republicans face in pursuing their agenda.

The budget office estimated that the health care law, including education provisions, would reduce deficits over 10 years by $143 billion. Tax increases and cuts in projected Medicare spending would more than offset the cost of extending health insurance to millions of Americans. The budget office projected that the law would result in even bigger savings beyond 2019.

The headlines of this left-wing New York Times news article is “Republicans Are Given a Price Tag for Health Law Repeal, but Reject It”.

Wow, that sounds bad.

But is it true? Is it possible that the government can cover MILLIONS OF PEOPLE and have health care costs GO DOWN?

Well, look at the latest CBO numbers, straight from the CBO mailing list.

Excerpt:

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have not yet developed a detailed estimate of the budgetary impact of H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, which would repeal the major health care legislation enacted in March 2010. Yesterday, we released a preliminary analysis of that legislation indicating that, over the 2012-2021 period, the effect of enacting H.R. 2 on the federal budget as a result of changes in direct spending and revenues is likely to be an increase in deficits in the vicinity of $230 billion, plus or minus the effects of forthcoming technical and economic changes to CBO’s and JCT’s projections for that period.

We have been asked to provide the revenue and direct spending components of that total.  Extrapolating the estimated budgetary effects of the original health care legislation and accounting for the effects of subsequent legislation, CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion, plus or minus the effects of forthcoming technical and economic changes to CBO’s and JCT’s projections.

Ah. So repealing Obama care would CUT SPENDING by 540 BILLION DOLLARS. And the only way to say that Obamacare can produce a surplus is by RAISING TAXES BY 770 BILLION DOLLARS.

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