Wasting Time With Alex
Medicine
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Can’t bring myself to feel sorry for them..
The other day I was watching some panel debating the current government takeover of healthcare dollars masquerading as some healthcare or insurance reform bill debacle. Indubitably the progressive pushing for this reform on the panel came up with the sob story to pray on sympathy. The lady went on and on about how the system was broke because of some example where the wife of some poor shlob that got a heart attack went looking for healthcare coverage for them, and was denied coverage. Because of his preexisting condition, no less. She became indignant that these poor people got turned away in their time of need. And no body challenged this idiotic premise.
My first thought was WTF? No, not because I am a heartless bastard or evil, but because I think her sob story should have been followed by the simple question: “Why did they not have coverage already?” Think about that. What we have here are people that did not see the need to buy healthcare insurance until they actually had a healthcare problem. While I think that’s a great thing – to have the freedom of choice – I also believe they should bare the responsibility and consequences of their choices. We are not dealing with people that had coverage and lost it because of a medical condition here. They chose not to buy coverage. I empathize with their plight, but I do not like the idea that people like me that decide the risk is too great should pay for their bad choice, a lot more.
Why don’t you hear progressives agitate for property insurance reform so they can go buy a car policy after they had an accident? That’s the same scenario as we have here with the poor people looking for health insurance. Nobody would even be taken seriously if they asked for that, would they? Why the hell would anyone buy any insurance if they could wait until they needed it? In the simplest terms, insurance is basically a pool of people coming together and putting a predetermined amount of money into, for the lack of a better word, communal pot from which they can then draw money in their time of need. The premise is that you spread the group wide and large and collect enough money so that there are always enough funds to pay out for people that need it. Granted it gets more complicated because of the massive regulations around and the costs of all the peripherals & permutations, but that’s the concept in a nut shell. So let me ask again why the hell should those of us that decide to join this pool before we get in trouble be penalized when others that chose not to do so suddenly hit a bump and want in?
The collectivists government solution to solve this problem is to force everyone to pay for the insurance plan, through taxes, so that they belong to the pool from the start and then don’t get denied. But why do we need government to make that happen? In my state car insurance coverage is mandatory. If you don’t have it you are not going to be able to drive legally. All government did was mandate that however. They do not play any other role in it. And it works quite well all things considered. So then the question begs to be asked why the left feels government should grab the healthcare dollars to protect these people without insurance. Especially when they could simply make it obligatory to have insurance or conversely tell the people that choose not to have insurance and then hit the skids that they are on their own.. It would for all intents and purposes immediately negate the preexisting condition denial of service sob story scenario. But it would not achieve the real end goal, would it?
I guess my point is simple. The next time you come across some progressive pushing for the government takeover of the healthcare dollars based on some sob story, think that scenario through. Indubitably you will find that the great majority of these stories could easily have been addressed – if they even needed to be addressed - without the need for this takeover. You can even feel free to empathize with the victims. But you should not fall for the idiotic premise these collectivists live by that choices should never have consequences and that it is theirs or government’s job to protect people from their own stupid choices. Subsidizing bad & stupid behavior is a sure fire way to guarantee a ton more of it. That’s what I see the progressive movement is about though. Know what I am saying?
UPDATE: It looks like the people that want a government take over so evil insurance companies that deny them or someone else coverage for a preexisting conditions don’t know that when government runs the show it will likely be worse After all, when government owns healthcare and they say that your preexisting condition - in this case your terminal illness - isn’t worth bothering with, who are you going to turn to? Hope you can afford flights to India or Egypt, are loaded, or can benefit from a plan like Ted Kennedy did because you are one of the lucky few excluded from the government run public plan.
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Thursday, August 27, 2009
Meet Obama’s healthcare advisor…
The democrats in this government’s plan to get their grubby hands on all the healthcare dollars - trillions of extra dollars for politicians to use in their vote buying schemes and the power over life & death decisions in the hands of bureaucrats that enhance these same politician’s power - will result in healthcare rationing. And the scary thing is the guy advising Obama on this stuff is one frightening bastard:
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.
The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel. They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House’s health initiative.
Dr. Emanuel says that health reform will not be pain free, and that the usual recommendations for cutting medical spending (often urged by the president) are mere window dressing. As he wrote in the Feb. 27, 2008, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA): “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.”
True reform, he argues, must include redefining doctors’ ethical obligations. In the June 18, 2008, issue of JAMA, Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the “overuse” of medical care: “Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness,” he writes. “This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition to ‘use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.”
In numerous writings, Dr. Emanuel chastises physicians for thinking only about their own patient’s needs. He describes it as an intractable problem: “Patients were to receive whatever services they needed, regardless of its cost. Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life. . . . Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.” (JAMA, May 16, 2007).
So there you have it. Doctors will be re-educated so that their priority is no longer to provide the best possible care to those in need, but to know when not to provide care. Looks to me like Sarah Palin’s call that we where dealing with “death panels”, is dead on. You can’t make this shit up, I tell you.
Here are some more pearls of wisdom from the guy advising Obama on what needs to happen:
Dr. Emanuel’s assessment of American medical care is summed up in a Nov. 23, 2008, Washington Post op-ed he co-authored: “The United States is No. 1 in only one sense: the amount we shell out for health care. We have the most expensive system in the world per capita, but we lag behind many developed nations on virtually every health statistic you can name.”
This is untrue, though sadly it’s parroted at town-hall meetings across the country. Moreover, it’s an odd factual error coming from an oncologist. According to an August 2009 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, patients diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. have a better chance of surviving the disease than anywhere else. The World Health Organization also rates the U.S. No. 1 out of 191 countries for responsiveness to the needs and choices of the individual patient. That attention to the individual is imperiled by Dr. Emanuel’s views.
Dr. Emanuel has fought for a government takeover of health care for over a decade. In 1993, he urged that President Bill Clinton impose a wage and price freeze on health care to force parties to the table. “The desire to be rid of the freeze will do much to concentrate the mind,” he wrote with another author in a Feb. 8, 1993, Washington Post op-ed. Now he recommends arm-twisting Chicago style. “Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda,” he wrote last Nov. 16 in the Health Care Watch Blog. “If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”
When these leftists tell you the goal is not a complete government take over and single payer system in the hands of government employed bureaucrats - with the power to decide life & death, not on a contract you have with them like most of us with private healthcare have with our insurance companies, but based on who you are, if they like you, and how much it costs - know that they are shamelessly lying to you. Even if they rename it or try to shove this turd down our throat for Ted Kennedy, it remains a nasty turd of a deal. One that needs to be killed dead, and especially not to be passed piecemeal. Because the end goal for the left will forever and always be this system for us peasants. The elite – government employees, congress, and unions – will of course be exempt. Like you get in collectivist paradises, Cuba for example, they will have their own special care where they will not need to mingle with, or deal with mediocre to bad care, like us peasants. Party of the little people indeed…
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Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Obamacare Death Panel
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Friday, August 14, 2009
All is well now, because they can’t add it back later…
Oh, with move by congress, I finally feel that the government take over of healthcare is OK. Because, you know, they can’t add it back on later once they have taken it over and everything..
People telling you things like this, have a vested interest in convincing as many people as possible that these power hungry scumbag collectivists in congress will not screw us over, even at a later date, so they can get this thing passed. Don’t buy into it.
If the democrats get their way we will be on a guaranteed path to a single payer system, government rationing, massive loss of freedoms, and even more expansionism by government. It is not a question of “If”, it is one of “When”. That’s the end goal. Do not fall for this. Fight it.
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009
More healthcare news
Why are we not shouting this from the roof tops? I understand why the MSM has a vested interest in keeping this under wraps, but anyone that sees the inherent danger of the current a massive collectivist government take over of healthcare and the subsequent downgrading of quality, access, and services, should be rallying against these communists and their plan:
Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access. Indeed, the principal impact of the Obama health care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.
In short, to keep costs down, we are going to screw the elderly, and screw them hard. Real freaking hard too if you buy Obama’s argument that this reform is about cost cutting. The biggest cut in cost that can be made is denying elderly people, those that use the system and cost the most, as much expensive care – that means almost any care at all – as possible. There is an important point to be made here too:
It is so ironic that the elderly - who were so vigilant when Bush proposed to change Social Security - are so relaxed about the Obama health care proposals. Bush’s Social Security plan, which did not cut their benefits at all, aroused the strongest opposition among the elderly. But Obama’s plan, which will totally gut Medicare and replace it with government-managed care and rationing, has elicited little more than a yawn from most senior citizens.
The elderly were vigilant because the MSM fed them the democrat talking points verbatim. They were told Bush was going to take away their check. A blatant lie, but it worked to rile them up. Unfortunately we can kiss off any real reporting from the MSM on this issue. They are in the bag for the democrats. But the scary truth is that nobody, not even the politicians, have had a look at this monster bill. It is now almost 1100 pages already and growing daily with special pork and sweeping ideological generalities: healthcare is now a right! And it should be mentioned that Pelosi has made it clear she will call for a vote long before it is even ready to be read. The agenda is to push this through before anyone can figure out the damage and derail the plan and take over of 1/5th of the American economy.
The rich will be robbed again to come up with some of the nonexistent funding. What nobody is saying is that there simply aren’t enough rich people to cover even a fraction of this monstrosity. Sooner than later they will tax everyone working for this, everyone. There is no other way to come up with enough money. And there is no denying that the left’s ultimate goal is to force everyone into the arms of the government. That 8% surcharge will definitely force many businesses to simply stop offering healthcare and pay the tax. It is likely cheaper. Then once they have everyone, they can raise it to 20%, or even more. And I have not even bothered discussing the consequences of how we will be impacted by this plan. Just look at Harvey’s post though. It’s a disaster of epic proportions. The only thing that might save us is the massive cost and taxes that must come with this plan, and the craven democrats up for reelection’s need to not piss off their constituents any more than they already are.
Update: This is the future:
BOSTON — A hospital that serves thousands of indigent Massachusetts residents sued the state on Wednesday, charging that its costly universal health care law is forcing the hospital to cover too much of the expense of caring for the poor. The hospital, Boston Medical Center, faces a $38 million deficit for the fiscal year ending in September, its first loss in five years. The suit says the hospital will lose more than $100 million next year because the state has lowered Medicaid reimbursement rates and stopped paying Boston Medical “reasonable costs” for treating other poor patients. “We filed this suit more in sorrow than in anger,” said Elaine Ullian, the hospital’s chief executive. “We believe in health care reform to the bottom of our toes, but it was never, ever supposed to be financed on the backs of the poor, and that’s what has happened in Massachusetts.”
Not sure what that comment about the Massachusetts’ health system being financed on the back of the poor means – unless it is the likely usual collectivist MSM propaganda about how they should be sticking it to “the rich” to give these poor people “free” healthcare or simply these people using good PC political speech to point out they need government to steal and funnel more money their way – at all, but the rest is clearly obvious: government was forced to reduce the payment for services to cut the horrible costs for this “free” healthcare, and now the hospital is going broke. Don’t take my word for it:
According to the suit, Massachusetts is now reimbursing Boston Medical only 64 cents for every dollar it spends treating the poor. About 10 percent of the hospital’s patients are uninsured — down from about 20 percent before the law’s passage in 2006. But many more are on Medicaid or Commonwealth Care, the state-subsidized insurance program for low-income residents.
One of the state’s reimbursement rates to Boston Medical, dropped from $12, 476 in 2008 to $9,323 by 2009, the suit says. Wendy E. Parmet, a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law, said the suit was “a step in a wider minuet” as state lawmakers, health care providers and other stakeholders try to figure out how to make the new law work in the long term.
“I think it’s going to be a very hard lawsuit for them to prevail on,” Professor Parmet said of the hospital. “I think they’re trying to bring another weapon into what is essentially, in many ways, a political and economic battle going on in the state about how to pay for health care, and making sure their voice gets heard.”
The suit comes as Congress looks to Massachusetts as a potential model for overhauling the nation’s health care system. Even before the suit, the state’s fiscal crisis had cast doubts on the law’s sustainability.
Fun, fun, fun! This ends up only one way. More money is confiscated from the productive - leading to many deciding it is not worth the trouble, giving up or moving elsewhere, and the gravy train drying up, the trickle down effect costing many their employment, drastically reducing the available pool of cash, and increasing the number of “poor” needing the free care, a vicious never ending cycle - and as the cash dries up, more and more services being cut or denied, because they can’t be paid for. But everyone can be happy they now have “the right to free healthcare”! In the end government will own us lock, stock, and barrel.
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Monday, July 06, 2009
Get ready for the “Cali-Style” federal IOUs
There has been a ton of meaningless drivel going around by the usual lefty propaganda outlets about how conservatives, and in particular Rush Limbaugh whom mentioned it back when, want Obama to fail. The meme is that conservatives are going to do things to make that so. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, unlike democrats/leftists, who do actually undermine things they do not like - see Iraq war 2003 to present for undisputable proof – as a matter of recourse, conservatives, notice I did not say republicans BTW, in general do not need to do anything to make the current Obamanomics policy fail. For proof, just look at California where Obamanomics has been the de facto policy for the last 2 decades.
July 6 (Bloomberg)—Last week, we discovered that the state of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion in IOU’s in July alone. Instead of cash, those who do business with California will get slips of paper. The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.
It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results. Voters will occasionally change their allegiance from one party to the other, but the bacchanal will continue regardless of the names on the office doors. California has engaged in an orgy of spending, but, compared with our federal government, its legislators should feel chaste. The California deficit this year is now north of $26 billion. The U.S. federal deficit will be, according to the latest numbers, almost 70 times larger.
Bleak Picture
Bleak is an understatement. Remember that Obama and democrats ran and won big on picking at how horribly fiscally irresponsible the republicans had been during the Bush years. Well, Obamanomics is about to outdo those years and deficit spend in one year what it took Bush and the republicans 8 years to do. Have a look at how much money the Obamanomics plan is going to put us in the red by.
By the time Obama is done we will have tripled if not outright quadrupled our current deficit! And it is a guaranteed thing we will see nothing of the growth promised, unless you think a bigger government is equal to an economic boost, for all this spending.
The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.
Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.
Character Deficit
And I should remind everyone that the above projections does not yet contain the massive, and drastically underestimated, costs of the Obama “Cap and Tax” and “Healthcare” plans. The first one is a massive new tax burden that serves but to enrich some politicians and their elected entourage of sell-out companies at the people’s expense. The second is a plan that I should add will do nothing but eventually make government the sole provider of healthcare, drastically reduce its quality and availability – to cut costs – and guarantee a level of intrusion and suppression of our personal freedoms that would be on par with the very tyrannical forms of government so many Americans died fighting off.
Can’t wait for the IOUs to be given to all these old Baby Boomer idiots that voted for this guy. Be it as their primary form of income as the economy continues to tank, as they find themselves looking for energy to meet their needs, or their critical healthcare needs as Obamacare becomes the law of the land. Hope and Change, indeed!
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Tuesday, May 12, 2009
These are the people trying to take over healthcare
For a taste of what healthcare will be like when the democrats have government take it over check this story out. Or visit your DMV. Don’t forget that they will set a new record on deficit spending to bring us this failed system. Are we ready for massive inflation yet? Funny how when the Bush Administration was deficit spending the conservatives, democrats, the left, and the MSM hated it. Now however it is all OK for all but the conservatives. They are getting away with this crap because the people they cater too care more about idiotic crap like this, the hard core leftists only want to punish Bush and his people for not letting Gore steal the 2000 election and keeping them away from power for 6 years, and there is only a small minority which is ignored or demonized for pointing out the fact that the democrats are destroying the country. And yet we are about to hand them control of our healthcare. I hope I continue to be able to afford private healthcare for my family so I can at least avoid the disaster that the other idiots, deservingly, will have to suffer through.
UPDATE: It is much worse than they are reporting:
There is a cleverly constructed sentence in the AP report about the 2009 budget deficit being $89 billion higher than expected, which will raise the projected annual deficit to $1.8 trillion, or nearly four times as much as the previous record. Here’s how AP explained it: “The unprecedented red ink flows from the deep recession, the Wall Street bailout, the cost of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill, as well as a structural imbalance between what the government spends and what it takes in (emphasis added).” In sports journalism, such a sentence is called covering for the home team, which in this case includes the present and previous White House occupants and the present majority in Congress.
The two key words in that sentence are “structural imbalance.” Sounds like something beyond the ability of mere mortals to change, doesn’t it? Part of the natural order, kind of like the swine flu. It just happens. Out in the real world beyond Washington, “structural imbalance” means: Washington politicians are on a spending rampage the likes of which has never before been seen anywhere in human history. The spenders include President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, plus a supporting cast of bureaucrats like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his predecessor, Henry Paulson, and the Democratic majorities in the Senate and House (joined by a few Senate Republicans). These officials are terminally afflicted with what Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, calls “federal spending disease” (FSD) an incurable addiction in which the sufferer is utterly unable to stop spending other people’s money. An intervention by voters is the only effective treatment.
They keep making more debt we can not repay. Does anyone doubt that the strategy is to give the losers the supposed freebees then claim they woul have to take them away because there is no money or tax us to death, and hope most people grin & bear it and do nothing (of course not the ones that do not pay any taxes anyway because they are in already as they stand to gain the most). Hope & change? We are hoping we are left with some change when this is all done…
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Thursday, April 30, 2009
Things are not getting better…
Our newly elected Messiah now that he never liked the old America and is remaking it. We all know from what and into what. The left no longer even feels obligated to tell people they are not remaking the USSR here. But I was particularly galled at Obamateur’s claims that he was fixing the economic wreckage and our image abroad. Does he forget which political party and philosophy lead to banks being told to lend money to people that could not pay it back, with government backing of course, and then encouraged to trade these ridiculous loans as valuable assets? Or even worse, which party won the election by hammering the deficit spending of the party in charge only to outspend them at a rate that is simply incomprehensible? I guess he is pretending not to know because he is not even accepting responsibility for his part. The MSM might be lying about how things are getting better, but the facts are there for anyone that wants to look em up: things suck and that’s the facts. The government is not making anything better it looks like. I have however not missed all his kow-towing to, and ass kissing of, leveled at evil dictatorial thugs. Or was he talking about how we are now going to treat terrorists like VIPs. This is sure to dissuade them from thinking we are a weak nation and should be attacked again. What a way to remake our image! I guess he is trying to impress the UN? At least we are not getting a ton of Monday night quarterbacking and a heavy dose of politically motivated moral grandstanding. And they keep blowing smoke up our arses too. I do not often agree with Dick Morris’s opinions, but he has got this right. And be worried about big government’s promise to be vigilant about the faux swine flue pandemic, because the real way to stop it from getting worse here, is off the table. They do not care much about the average Joe, but the politicians sure are looking out for their own. Guess it is more of that “new America” we are being promised. And that speech we got last night? Find here the many corrections the MSM will never bring to light. America is being remade, but the final product sure resembles a pile of manure instead of the bed of rosesw these collectivists keep promising…
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Sunday, April 12, 2009
Here comes another Dark Age
It is a fact, ignored, glossed over, or refuted only by moronic collectivism embracing idiots that our modern Western world, our very freedoms and quality of life, exists only because of the actions of the United States over the last century. Ask people living in people’s paradises like Cuba or even our neighbors to the south, just to name a couple of places quick and off the top of my head, if you do not believe me. This fact of course pisses off all the people actively rewriting history these days to make America and American interests look bad. If America is an empire, it then truly is the greatest and most beneficial empire ever to have graced this globe. Can anyone imagine, and do so realistically and based on true history, not the pap that these collectivists pass off as history these days, what this planet would look like with out te US? The world would be split between communists and fascists at a minimum. People everywhere would live in misery and under oppression. But according to the collectivists at least they would all have a “level playing field” (equal misery for all!), free healthcare (even when there is none to speak off because there are massive shortages of supplies and skilled healthcare people), free education (more like indoctrination, but its free!), and that’s what counts. Don’t you just take my word for it. Check out what these geniuses have to say:
Film director Ron Howard is “very optimistic” about the future of America, so long as the nation makes an “adjustment,” to fulfill his hope a “more progressive” nation will mean “at a certain point I don’t think we’ll be so consumed with being the pre-eminent super-power and, you know, driven by sort of militarism and this need to export, you know, democracy.” Howard’s reasoning, on Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher, came in response to Maher’s formulation that America has “seen better days. We’re sort of in place that has made a lot of people nervous. Some people would say this country has jumped the shark.”
Yeah, that’s worked real well for the world. Now we have pirates telling us they are not afraid of us. Maybe the world would be better off if China was the super power. At least these pirates would be dealt with, shot on sight, their camps bombed, their efforts squashed, they would be driven before the troops, the women and children lamenting the fate of the idiots. My bet is that if Iran was doing this to China, well. Forget it. Iran would never have gotten here. The Chinese would have glassed Iran as soon as the mad man in charge had uttered his first threat. We would all be living in places like this run by people like this. But hey, America is the real villain, because evil capitalism and the American way does not level the playing field! Can one say greed, envy, and jealousy are the prime motivators here? I have already onc eposted on this “level playing field” issue on a blog post over at Right Wing News:
Wow. I am wicked late to this conversation, but I had to comment on the discussion about “level playing field”. Nobody ever can level the playing field, and anyone trying to do so is involved in not only a cynical exercise in futility, but likely knows so. In fact the liberal politicians all give lip service to this “level the playing filed” belief because they know it gives them perpetual power (they get to decide who needs their field leveled, why, and how often).
The fact is that the field can never be leveled. Even if we where able to miraculously level the playing field, lets say we redistributed the entire world’s resources equally across all its people, I guarantee you that things would be different a week from now. The same people that have more today will again have more a few weeks from now, while life’s losers will return to that, some sooner than later. Life is not fair. As was pointed out, despite the bull, and while we all have the same rights, there are always differences. Some people are smarter than others. Some are more industrious. Others simply have a work ethic, while some do not. Some people will wisely invest their money, while some will spend it all on hookers, booze and/or drugs, and a big new Cadillac. What then? Do we reset again?
There is no way to create or guarantee any kind of a level playing field, ever. Too many variables, and the requirement that a perfect and totally unbiased arbiter keep score, make it impossible. And that’s why every attempt to create one, no matter how well intended or noble, indubitably levels the playing field by dragging everyone down into misery. From the USSR to North Korea to Cuba, and everything else in between, the only level playing field is where everyone ends up poor and miserable. Because that’s the only and simple way to level the playing field.
It is not a mistake or coincidence that the very people demanding a level playing field tend to be the ones that, no matter how many chances they are given, end up at the bottom of the rung. It is also not a coincidence that there are so many of them. It is always easier to let others do the work for you. It is also a given that when these people take over and get their way societies eventually implode. Some do it in decades. Some may take a couple of centuries. But this model is unsustainable. And the public school system is the best example of this. Ability, dedication, parental involvement, human nature, all combine to determine the outcome. In fact one could make the argument that today the public school system guarantees a skewed system because it serves politicians, unions, and teachers, not the students or America. No matter how noble or great someone claims this idea of a leveled playing field is, in the end it is a mythological entity. And there will never be anyone that will get it to work. Said being would have to be divine, and God, if you want to believe in a higher power, has already told us that he didn’t want that job when we got free will.
That’s why I so seriously oppose this crap. And it is crap, no matter how palatable the people selling it make it sound, plain and simple. Especially when the left preaches about it, but never tells the people that the only level playing field they can deliver, the one they have delivered every time they have tried, everywhere they have tried, is one where we are all poor, miserable, and oppressed slaves of the elite leveling the field. Color me stupid for actually thinking that the left lying this way is actually more evil than someone that actually tells you he intends to abuse and oppress you. At least the later one is being honest.
There is no way to dispute this obvious fact. The people engaging in this hyperbole and wishing America was no longer a super power, because they feel that’s why the world is such a bad place, and that democracy and the American way where not follwed, are simply idiots. They will all claim to be “positive” and have “hope”, fantasizing about a better future. Logic, facts, reason, and accurate historical analogies will never be part of their progressive vision. That’s on purpose. If they actually were forced to base their beliefs on reality and not fantasy, they would have to abandon the idiocy they preach. The people wishing for the American age to come to pass should be taken to task. The world they envision when this happens is a great lie. When America no longer leads we will again be plunged into a Dark Age. And that Dark Age is coming faster than you think off.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009
More reasons why they need the bill passed before anyone can really figure it out
Late night I saw Obama make Bush, whom usually had a hard time talking and was prone to gaffes, look like a genius. Not only did Obama lie, but he sounded like he had no idea what he was doing. He urged this monster bill be passed. No need to look at the details. Just vote already or else! Well the reasons they want this thing voted on and not looked at are numerous. But here is another:
Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department. Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version). The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.
But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.
Basically government is trying to grab control of healthcare. I once belonged to an HMO. I hated it and it sucked. The worst coverage I had in my life. When government takes healthcare over, that HMO will be remembered with fondness. That’s precisely because of things like this. How the hell is letting government take control of doctor’s duties going to help our economy? Can any idiot explain that to me? Kill this crap ASAP.
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Monday, September 15, 2008
Thank God I am a meat-e-terian!
Wow, just wow! This explains why so many of these people -vegans and vegetarians - are democrats.
MELBOURNE: Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain-with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage. Vegans and vegetarians are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish. Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause anaemia and inflammation of the nervous system. Yeast extracts are one of the few vegetarian foods which provide good levels of the vitamin.
The link was discovered by Oxford University scientists who used memory tests, physical checks and brain scans to examine 107 people between the ages of 61 and 87. When the volunteers were retested five years later the medics found those with the lowest levels of vitamin B12 were also the most likely to have brain shrinkage. It confirms earlier research showing a link between brain atrophy and low levels of B12.
Frankly, the whole argument about how being vegan or vegetarian is better for you is moot, if not outright stupid, to me. It’s a question of simple biology. This lack of simple scientific reasoning is something that always makes me shake my head at these people that claim to be above religion and completely driven by science. If mama nature had wanted us to be like cows, she would have engineered teeth that matched those of cows: designed to grind vegetation. Our teeth are the most compelling proof we where never intended to be vegetarians, and especially not vegans. See those sharp incisors and the teeth you have in the front? Their sole function is to cut meat up. The ones in the back are to grind vegetables. Man was, and will continue to be omnivorous. Play with that at your own risk.
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Monday, March 10, 2008
Talk about exagerations…
Alarmists are at it again. What is the big problem this time?
A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
Holy crap! This is some scary news. The consequences would be devastating on these poor people’s health and could have repercussions that would doom the same people for generations to come. Except…
To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.
At the risk of completely removing any seriousness from this argument - and that is exactly what should happen as this is plain and simple silly people hyping up a non-issue - let me point out that panicking about these below trace amount levels of contaminants is like panicking because you discover that there are minute traces of fart gas, at levels so small that you can’t even smell them, in the air we breath. Now, one could make the argument that farts are not toxic, but that’s a question of degrees. Farts are nothing but a nuisance precisely because the concentration of the chemicals is sow low that the worst it does when we get enough dosage is smell nasty and gross you out. But in a close room where the concentration gets increased the gas can become dangerous. The issue is that level of concentration needed to make it dangerous is enormous.
And that’s why this entire story is nothing but bull. Parts per billion or trillion? How many millions of gallons of this contaminated water would you have to chug in record time to even get enough of a level where these contaminants suddenly step up from “negligible” to “trace amounts”? I bet you will likely die from a water overdose - yes you can get too much H2O into your system and die from that - as your body chemistry goes bonkers dealing with the amount of water it needs to process as you try to drink enough water to make these contaminants an issue. Or even more obvious, you would drown long before you have ingested enough of these chemicals to make a difference. Coming back to the farts, I guarantee you that you would have a bigger & better chance of some adverse effect if you rode the elevator once with someone farting in it than if you drank a lifetime of this contaminated and supposedly dangerous water.
There is a real simple reason why nobody mentions what would be considered the minimum medical dose, or even what would be concidered the treshhold for a risky dosage. But I bet the people that led with this idiotic story will have everyone panicking over this crap and their names mentioned everywhere for their civic duty. Now that would not be too bad because stupid people deserve to be made fun of, but I am certain some politician will suddenly see a chance to score some cheap points, and we will all be made to pay with some legal idiocy that does absolutely nothing but cost the tax payer a fortune while expanding the death grip of big government. Talk about a bad smell…
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Thursday, October 11, 2007
More joys of government run healthcare programs
The left loves to tell us how much better all those socialist nations government run healtcare programs are than ours because they supposedly cover everyone when our system does not. Of course this is plain bullshit. The USSR, one of the most brutal and evil empires ever, had one of the most beautiful Constitutions ever written. It was full of all the stuff that makes the left’s heart strings strum. Espoused all the values of humanity and citizenship. A grand work, but only on paper. The reality on the ground was very different, and the tens of millions were send into exhile for simply not agreeing with the political class and the millions that died or were killed for their beliefs, is ample proof of that. Everyone in the USSR was literate, had healthcare, a job, and was equal. Of course this was all a nice bunch of lies and of no real significance other than to liberal tools that are impressed by what is claimed on paper and not the truth as usual.
What does all of this have to do with healthcare you ask? Well one of the biggest slights of hand by those that want to stick us with socialist government run healthcare is that they are masters of the art of used car sales. They tout all the greatness of these systems, greatness that is usually just on paper of course, and especially the fact that supposedly everyone is covered equally, their paramount concern and fondest desire, in their attempts to make that sale. Of course, the reality is that while on paper everyone is covered, everyone is not really covered when they have to wait so long for service that so many end up dying long before they get to que up (a great cost savings vehicle if there ever was one). But this goes even further than just those that are terminal. Check out how even a simple, but important, thing like births has become a problem that necessitates travel to the evil US for a solution:
Mothers in British Columbia are having a baby boom, but it’s the United States that has to deliver, and that has some proud Canadians blasting their highly touted government healthcare system. “I’m a born-bred Canadian, as well as my daughter and son, and I’m ashamed,” Jill Irvine told FOX News. Irvine’s daughter, Carri Ash, is one of at least 40 mothers or their babies who’ve been airlifted from British Columbia to the U.S. this year because Canadian hospitals didn’t have room for the preemies in their neonatal units.
“It’s a big number and bigger than the previous capacity of the system to deal with it,” said Adrian Dix, a British Columbia legislator, told FOXNews.com. “So when that happens, you can’t have a waiting list for a mother having the baby. She just has the baby.”
Of course who cares if some old geezers, really sick people, or idiots die waiting for care. And it is not an indictment of the system when people have to run across the border to get the care they need. Everyone is covered so that system is better! When we get straddled with a Canadian system we can all go to Mexico for care I guess.
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SCHIP LOGIC
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Before you buy into socilaist healthcare…
Check out how a Canadian PM had to come to the US for cancer treatment. Her people are now spinning to hide the fact it was done because she would have had to wait too long in Canada and claim that it was because this hospital was the best place to get this surgery at. Well in either case you lose. See if you had to come to the US for the best care it doesn’t bode well for your health care system period.
Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report. Stronach’s spokesman, Greg MacEachern, told the Toronto Star that the MP for Newmarket-Aurora had a “later-stage” operation in the U.S. after a Toronto doctor referred her.
“Belinda had one of her later-stage operations in California, after referral from her personal physicians in Toronto. Prior to this, Belinda had surgery and treatment in Toronto, and continues to receive follow-up treatment there,” said MacEachern. He said speed was not the reason why she went to California. Instead, MacEachern said the decision was made because the U.S. hospital was the best place to have it done due to the type of surgery required.
Me, my bet is that she came here because she didn’t want the wait and feared pulling stings. I am also pretty sure they tried to keep it quiet and are just in damage control mode right now. But there isn’t anything you can say to make this look good. And this is the best proof of why the elite don’t mind straddling us with a cumbersome and dangerous socialist healthcare system: they will always be able to afford private care when the need is dire.
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