Tag Archives: Vote Buying

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Canadian government cuts funding to hospital that refused to kill patients

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Price of healthcare per Canadian household (Source: Fraser Institute)
Price of healthcare per Canadian household (Source: Fraser Institute)

It’s election time in the United States, and many of the Democrat candidate are putting forward government-run health care as an improvement to our current system. Candidates like Bernie Sanders are pointing to the “success” of health care in countries like Canada. I’ve blogged previously about single-payer health care in Canada, but this new story from last week even shocked me.

Catholic News Agency reported:

A hospice in Canada has lost its funding and is being forced to close after refusing to offer and perform medically assisted suicides.

The Irene Thomas Hospice in Delta, British Columbia, will lose $1.5 million in funding and will no longer be permitted to operate as a hospice as of February 25, 2021. Fraser Health Authority, one of the six public health care authorities in the province, announced on Tuesday that it would be ending its relationship with the hospice over its refusal to provide medically assisted deaths to its patients.

Per Fraser Health’s contract with the Delta Hospice Society, which administers the Irene Thomas Hospice, a one-year notice had to be provided before funding could be withdrawn without cause.

“We have made every effort to support the board to come into compliance and they have been clear that they have no intention to,” said British Columbia Health Minister Adrian Dix in a statement.

Government-run health care is very popular in Canada, even with many self-described Catholics. They probably couldn’t foresee that handing all the money for health care to the government would cause them to have to choose between being fired from their jobs and killing innocent people. Fortunately, they chose to leave their jobs in order to not kill innocent people. I would expect that people in Nazi Germany or Communist USSR were faced with similar choices: kill others or starve.

Health care in Canada

So, it’s important to understand how health care works in Canada. You pay into a system based on your ability to earn, and then when you need care, you get in line behind people who never paid. That’s called “equality” and “fairness”. You can’t pay a doctor directly to get faster or better care, because in a single payer system, paying a doctor to get immediate or better treatment is illegal.

So while you’re waiting in line, who decides whether you get treated? The secular leftists in government decide, because they decide what the government will pay for. You work and pay into the system. You pay the salaries of the government workers. And then they dole out health care as they see fit, according to their secular leftist worldviews.

If you need an abortion, that’s free and taxpayer-funded. Drug needles? They’re free. In vitro fertilization? You get two rounds for free. Sex-reassignment surgery? That’s free too. But if you’re old, then you might not get any treatment. After all, your days of voting are behind you. Many people die on waiting lists, especially poor people who can’t fly to America for better care. That’s Canadian health care.

People die on waiting lists in Canada

Here’s an example, reported in the UK Daily Mail:

A girl who died of leukemia was given a final send off after her friends signed her casket with loving messages on January 30.

[…]Laura might have experienced a few more milestones if a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, hospital had been able to accommodate a bone marrow transplant for the young woman.

Numerous donors were a match with Laura and ready to donate, but Hamilton’s Juravinski Hospital didn’t have enough beds in high-air-pressure rooms for the procedure.

Hospital staff told her they had about 30 patients with potential donors, but the means to only do about five transplants a month.

[…]Dr. Ralph Meyer, Juravinski’s vice-president of oncology and palliative care, told Ontario’s TheStar.com there are plenty of others facing the same situation as Laura in Canada.

It just wasn’t important for the government of Canada to spend a lot of money buying one vote. It was much more cost-effective for them to spend a little bit of money on many voters who just needed birth control and abortions. There are a lot of votes to buy from people making reckless decisions with sex. But they don’t have the money for one expensive cancer patient. They let her die because they didn’t need her vote to get re-elected.

And keep in mind, her parents wouldn’t have been able to pay the doctors to do anything. They paid for all the health care they got through their taxes. And those taxes were used to pay for all the people who needed birth control, abortions, sex changes, IVF, etc. When it was time for the government to pay for their daughter, the government had no money left to save her. And her parents had no money left to take her to America, because they trusted the atheist elites in the government to provide their family with health care. That’s why they paid them up front with their taxpayer dollars.

News

Elizabeth Warren and AOC agree: give convicts and illegal immigrants welfare, enact rent control

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Elizabeth Warren is telling people that we have 11 years to live
Elizabeth Warren has a much better way to spend the money you earn

This week, Warren and AOC announced their support for giving taxes paid by U.S. citizens, permanent residents and people here legally on work permits to illegal immigrants. Watch the video below, and read the story, and ask yourself whether you think it is your job to pay for welfare for people who wouldn’t even go through the process of coming into this country legally.

Here’s a short video clip from Fox News:

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren endorsed a Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) policy proposal that includes taxpayer-funded welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.

Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, dubbed “A Just Society,” calls for nationwide rent control and bans the federal government from denying welfare benefits based on an individual’s immigration status and previous criminal convictions. Warren became the first Democratic presidential candidate to endorse the plan, calling it “just the type of bold, comprehensive thinking we’ll need” to make “big, structural change.”

[…]Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, consisting of six separate bills, calls for the expansion of welfare. Bills three and four make it illegal for the federal government to deny welfare benefits to ex-convicts and illegal immigrants.

[…]The last bill in Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal establishes health care, housing, and healthy food as government-provided rights.

[…]The legislation does not address how to pay for the rising cost of welfare, nor does it explain how it would accomplish its goals.

Remember, AOC and Warren already have the Green New Deal on the table, and the cost for that is $94.4 trillion over 10 years. So where will they get the money for this new plan? Would they do it with their own money? No, they want to do it with your money. They want to do it with your employer’s money. They want to do it with the money earned by the companies in your 401K plan. 

By the way, regarding the rent control. If there is one thing that you learn in Economics 101, it’s that rent control policies do more harm than good. It causes a shortage of living space for the poor, because the people who rent out living space cannot make enough money as they can in other investments. So, they stop investing in rental properties.

The Free Beacon article notes:

Ocasio-Cortez’s second bill, titled “The Place to Prosper Act,” calls for federal rent control by imposing a 3 percent national cap on annual rent increases. Similar legislation has failed at the local level amid concerns that such policies increased housing prices while limiting supply. A recent study by the American Economic Association found that San Francisco rent control policy “drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.” The Council of Economic Advisers found that in 11 metropolitan areas with housing regulations, deregulation would reduce homelessness by an average of 31 percent. More than 80 percent of economists surveyed by the University of Chicago in 2012 found rent control to be bad policy.

This is not controversial. Harvard University economist Greg Mankiw is the author of a very widely used economics textbook. In his textbook, he has a section where he reports on what economists (academic and professional) agree on, across the ideological spectrum. The number one item on the list, with the highest level of agreement, is that rent control does not work.

He writes:

My textbook covers business cycle theory toward the end of the book (the last four chapters) precisely because that theory is controversial. I believe it is better to introduce students to economics with topics about which there is more of a professional consensus. In chapter two of the book, I include a table of propositions to which most economists subscribe, based on various polls of the profession. Here is the list, together with the percentage of economists who agree:

  1. A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available. (93%)

You can read the rest of the list on his blog, but AOC and her ally Elizabeth Warren probably disagree with all of them. And that’s who the American left are looking to for leadership. People with no knowledge. People with no achievements. People who have never solved economic problems in the private sector in their entire lives. Warren and AOC have no demonstrated achievements in the area of economic policy. There are just speaking words that make them feel good, and get applause. They don’t know what happens next, if they ever get their ideas put into law.

If you’re not already paying off your debts and saving money, you’d better start. Because when these Democrat demagogues get power, you are going to feel the effects of their economic illiteracy where you live and where you work. Remember Obamacare? We lost our doctors, we lost our health plans, and the costs of our health insurance went up. If you elect an imbecile to make policy decisions, you will be made to feel the effects of your choices.

News

Obama’s irresponsible student loan policies leave taxpayers with trillion-dollar bubble

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President Obama's student loan bubble
President Obama’s student loan bubble

This is from Investors Business Daily.

It says:

In 2010, Obama eliminated the federal guaranteed loan program, which let private lenders offer student loans at low interest rates. Now, the Department of Education is the only place to go for such loans.

Obama sold this government takeover as a way to save money — why bear the costs of guaranteeing private loans, he said, when the government could cut out the middleman and lend the money itself?

The cost savings didn’t happen. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office just increased its 10-year forecast for the loan program’s costs by $27 billion, or 30%.

What did happen was an explosive growth in the amount of federal student loan debt. President Clinton phased in direct federal lending in 1993 as an option, but over the next 15 years the amount of loans was fairly stable. The result of Obama’s action is striking. In each of the past six years, federal direct student loan debt has climbed by more than $100 billion. (See chart.)

And since Obama keeps making it easier and easier to avoid repaying those loans, it’s a problem that taxpayers will eventually have to shoulder.

Through words and actions, Obama has encouraged irresponsibility on the part of student borrowers. He constantly talks as if student debt were an unfair burden they unknowingly had foisted upon them.

At the same time, he’s made it easier and easier to avoid paying back student loans in full. Earlier this year, for example, Obama expanded eligibility for his “pay as you earn” program, which limits loan payments to 10% of income, with any debt left after 20 years forgiven.

Students got the message. The St. Louis Fed reports that 27.3% of student loans in repayment are at least a month behind in payments. That’s a far higher delinquency rate than any other kind of debt, and it’s significantly higher than the delinquency rate 10 years ago.

“This overall level of delinquency is very concerning,” concluded authors Juan Sanchez and Lijin Zhu.

A 2013 Consumer Financial Protection Board report found that less than half of this federal loan money was actually being paid. About 30% was held by borrowers still in school or in a grace period, another chunk in deferment or forbearance, and almost 14% was in default.

The problem here is that whenever the government nationalizes something that the private sector is doing, it always creates a problem. Let me explain. If student loans (or mortgage loans) are run solely by the private sector, then the motivation for lending money out at interest is to make money for the bank’s depositors and investors. In other words, because the bankers are in a free market and have to compete for depositors and investors, they have an interest in making sure that the loans they make get paid back.

But when the government takes over loans, they are not interested in being wise with the money they lend out – it’s not their money. They want to lend out as much as possible today in order to buy votes, and then kick the can down the road on the repayment. So instead of being careful about asking “will this get paid back?” they ask “how can I borrow from the future in order to buy as many votes as I can right now?” And that’s how we got the housing crisis of 2008, as well as this trillion-dollar student loan crisis.

When you take the profit motive out of the lending decision, then money gets lend to people who will never be able to pay it back. No private bank that has to answer to shareholders hands out money to students who want to study underwater basket-weaving. But the government does. They want to buy as many votes as possible. And besides, this is not their money. They are borrowing it from the future earnings of the very students they are giving it to! That’s what happens when you let big government decide everything.

Whenever big government politicians want to buy votes with taxpayer money, they always sell it to the people with sob stories about some poor, helpless group of people will suffer through no fault of their own. There are a lot of voters who will vote for politicians who cry crocodile tears for them, especially ones who don’t understand economics. There is no free lunch – somebody has to pay. Democrats are basically throwing a party for students, and then mailing them the (unexpected) bill for it, with interest.