Tag Archives: Single

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.

Commentary

Does legalized abortion reduce crime rates?

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One of the reasons given by pro-choice people for legalized abortion is that it reduces crime rates. But does it really reduce crime rates?

Let’s take a look at a two-part series by economist John Lott, writing for Fox News.

Here is the first article.

Excerpt:

Academic studies have found that legalized abortion, by encouraging premarital sex, increased the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion.

In the United States from the early 1970s, when abortion was liberalized, through the late 1980s, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, rising from an average of 5 percent of all births from 1965 to 1969 to more than 16 percent two decades later (1985 to 1989).

Here is the second article.

Excerpt:

What happened to all these children raised by single women? No matter how much they want their children, single parents tend to devote less attention to them than married couples do. Single parents are less likely than married parents to read to their children or take them on excursions, and more likely to feel angry at their children or to feel that they are burdensome. Children raised out of wedlock have more social and developmental problems than children of married couples by almost any measure — from grades to school expulsion to disease. Unsurprisingly, children from unmarried families are also more likely to become criminals.

This material is exposited more fully in Lott’s book “Freedomnomics“, which is one of my favorite books. I bought it for 3 of my friends as part of their Christmas present bundle, including Andrew and Jen, the smartest married couple in the world!

About the author

John R. Lott, Jr. is a Senior Research Scholar at the University of Maryland. Lott has held positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989. Lott has published over 100 articles in academic journals. He is the author of six books including: “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws”, “The Bias Against Guns”, and most recently “Freedomnomics.” Opinion pieces by Lott have appeared in such places as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Chicago Tribune. He has appeared on such television programs as the ABC and NBC National Evening News broadcasts, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and the Today Show. He received his Ph.D. in economics from UCLA in 1984.

Commentary

Understanding the effects of government-run health care

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Previous health care posts

Before we see today’s post, here are some of my previous posts on health care.

Socialized medicine by the numbers

I was having a nice chat today with a friend about whether we should expect government-run health care to work as well as private health care. I asked to him to reflect on how incompetent government offices are for services like driver’s licenses, vehicle titles, immigration, postal services, etc. Then I asked him how satisfied he was shopping online from Amazo.com or in person at Wal-mart. A private seller in the free market needs to meet your needs better than other competitors, so you will get good service – because you have a free choice. But what happens when you have only one option?

Hot Air has a post by DirectorBlue that analyzes government-run health care.

Here are just a few of his numbers related to waiting times:

14: The percentage of all patients in Britain who wait more than one (1) year to receive treatment after a referral by a general practitioner. Half of all National Health Care patients in Britain wait between 18 and 52 weeks for treatment.

90: Number of days, on average, each Canadian patient must wait for an MRI under the Canadian government-run health care system.

750: The estimated number of people waiting in line (in the pouring rain) at Britain’s Bury Office attempting to register for dental care.

10,000: Number of Canadian breast cancer patients to file a class action lawsuit against Quebec’s hospitals because, on average, they were forced to wait 60 days to begin post-operative radiation treatments.

443,849: The number of British patients of the National Healthcare Service (NHS) who waited four or more weeks for inpatient admittance into a hospital (Excel file) in May of 2009 (more than 75% of all patients).

1,500,000: The number of Canadians who do not have — and cannot find — a general practitioner/primary care physician due to shortages in medical staff: “In Norwood, Ontario, 20/20 videotaped a town clerk pulling the names of the lucky winners out of a lottery box. The losers must wait to see a doctor… Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery ‘elective.’ …’The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,’ she said.”

The article also discusses the costs of socialized medicine, patient outcomes, illegal immigrants, fraud, waste, etc.

Needless to say, this is a MUST-READ. Send it to all your friends!