The AP is reporting that President Obama is “looking at any way to create jobs”. That’s interesting. He must not be looking very hard. Or maybe he really is looking, but managed to get something in his eye. Or maybe he’s faking it. Never waste a crisis, you know. It’d be hard to imagine that Americans would be too eager to shift complete control of their lives to the federal government if unemployment was not at 10% and the housing market hadn’t collapsed. That’s got to be it, then. He’s not really interested in finding any way to create jobs because as long as we’re all unemployed, we’ll continue to be led around like sheep. That’s why all of Obama’s “fixes” all smell funny. His fingers are too deep in all of them.

Here’s more from the AP:

SPRINGFIELD, Va. (AP) – Standing at the site of a highway project funded by his massive economic stimulus plan, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he is committed to exploring all avenues to create jobs.

“Middle-class Americans are the ones who built this country,” Obama said. “They deserve leaders in Washington who are willing to work as hard as they work.”

[ . . . ]

Despite the stimulus, the national unemployment rate stands at 9.8 percent. Economists have said unemployment could continue to rise.

First—Obama is certainly not committed to “exploring all avenues to create jobs”. That’s just a lie. Note that the AP isn’t quoting Obama directly for that little nugget. If Obama were willing to explore “all” avenues, he’d think about tax cuts for small businesses. Tax cuts, after all, will permit these businesses to keep more of the money they earn…which they would of course use to…hire people. With less money left after taxes, businesses are not too motivated to employ more people.

Second—However nice it sounds to your populist disciples, America wasn’t built by Middle Class people. Not if the word “built” means anything, that is. Sure, they’re the ones that may have wielded the hammers and populated the plants, but these people were uniformly employees—hired by rich people with ideas to move technology forward. The Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts and Fords which dot our history are the ones that “built” America. Not by themselves, of course, but without their entrepreneurial spirit and capital, America doesn’t become industrialized and that’s just a fact. It’s a hard fact for the left to acknowledge, however, and it’s the reason why they see “tax cuts for the rich” as “unfairly” lining the pockets of those in least need of the extra money. The fact is that one of the primary functions in our society of rich corporations is that they hire the rest of us. They enable us all to have health insurance. To save for our retirements and the education of our children. Without rich people who make things and hire people, we’d all be poor. So unless Mr. Obama is exploring ways to incentivize rich people to hire more of us so we can make more stuff, he’s spinning his wheels. Every second he talks about taxing corporations to death, he’s making it more and more likely that unemployment will continue to rise and the recession will continue to grow. Spending billions of TAXPAYER dollars to hire people doesn’t do the trick, either. Tax dollars must first come from someone who earned that money. It is not in itself the product of any growth. That’s why this Stimulus is just a gigantic shell game. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, if you will. Eventually the bills become due. Eventually, we’ll understand that shifting money around like this without creating any new growth is a dead end.

Which brings us to that last bit of the article. Incredulously, the AP admits that “despite the stimulus” unemployment is at 9.8%! As if the stimulus would lead to any other result except higher unemployment. This is shocking? When you take money away from rich people, they have nothing left to hire new people and make new things. They contract. It’s no surprise (to anyone except the AP, that is) that economists are saying that unemployment “could” continue to rise. High taxes work as disincentives for corporations and big business to hire people and make things. THe higher taxes go, the less things are made. The less people are hired. The longer unemployment lasts.

If one lone Republican supporting your socialist bill indicates “bipartisan” support, then Max Baucus and the Democrats got that yesterday as the first hurdle to a government takeover of our insurance industry was cleared.

Here’s Liberal in Republican clothing Olympia Snowe ruminating on whether a “public option” might be the thing to fix “what’s wrong” with accessibility to health care in this country:

“I think the government would have a disproportionate advantage” in the event of a government-run option, the Maine Republican said in a nationally broadcast interview. Snowe said “at the same time, I want to make sure the insurance industry performs, and that’s why we eliminate many egregious practices.“

Egregious practices, you say? Sounds serious. You’d think the AP would get right to telling us what those practices might be and why they’re so egregious. The AP of course doesn’t do that. We have to wait until paragraph 17 to find out what “egregious practices” this new bill is aiming to fix, which to me is strange. Burying them so deep in the story leads me to believe that they’re really afterthoughts. That the reason to support this bill that the AP really wants you to take away has nothing to do with the egregious practices at all, but has everything to do (as did Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize ‘victory’ last week) with…rooting for Obama (and maybe also re-making America into a socialist trough). See for yourself. Tell me if these “egregious practices” are really all that bad:

The measures would bar insurance companies from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions and for the first time limit their ability to charge higher premiums on the basis of age or family size.

Think about that. We’re about to embark on trillions of dollars of government spending over the next couple of decades at least because we don’t like the fact that insurers price their products differently depending on the risk they’re assuming.

Imagine you’re a skydiver with a bad heart. You’re attempting to set the new world record by Scotch-taping yourself to a 1968 VW Bus and parachuting out of a B-1 Bomber. Over the grand canyon. While on fire. You go to your local insurer and attempt to buy insurance. Would you reasonably expect to be charged the same for your policy as a healthy 25 year old non-smoking female Olympic swimmer? Would you really?

Insurance is NOT the same thing as “FREE CARE”. Too many people think it is and it’s this misconception that is driving this debate into the dirt. Insurance companies don’t have to offer you insurance in exchange for money. This (for now) is a free society. They could just as easily go make hot dogs or mow lawns. Instead, through their own free will, they have (thankfully) decided to offer a service to cautious people. In exchange for a monthly sum (called a premium), they’ll promise to pay you a set amount of money in the event that some event happens. As I’ve said in the past, it is a bet. You’re betting that the thing will happen and they’re betting that it won’t. Your death for example. Life insurance. You’re betting Prudential that you will die within the next 30 years. They’re betting you won’t. They’re so confident you won’t die that they’re willing to pay you a lump sum of a million dollars if you end up dying. And all that bet will cost you will be a monthly premium payment.

How big should that premium payment be? Let’s go back to our sky-diver. How big should his monthly premium be? How likely is it that he’ll be right and end up dying? Pretty likely, right? So of Prudential is going to pay him that million dollars for dying in the next 30 years, they’re going to require that the monthly premium be high, right? Higher at least than the 25 year old non-smoking female Olympic swimmer. She’s not likely to die at all. Their promise to pay that million dollars is then a safe bet.

People with pre-existing conditions, who are extremely likely to require care,  are by economic necessity going to be priced higher than people without those condition. Remember, it’s all about managing risk. Betting.  If insurers charged people with pre-existing conditions as if they were healthy, then when it came time to pay out benefits, insurers would take a huge loss. Multiplied over millions of policies, it wouldn’t be long before insurers went out of business.

This would be bad.

For everyone.

The same thing with premiums which “discriminate” by charging higher premiums to older people or to people with larger families. Whenever a party becomes “more likely” to receive a benefit, an insurance company must manage that risk by charging more. Low risk people mean low premiums. High risk means high premiums. All these “egregious practices” which have motivated the left to overhaul our entire insurance industry, are all founded upon basic economic principles. These insurance companies aren’t evil. Their practices aren’t “egregious”. They offer us ALL protection against unforeseen events and the current witch hunt against them is criminal.

Let’s get back to that word for a minute. “Unforeseen”. Health insurance, unlike life insurance, deals in things which are foreseeable, right? We know we want to go to the doctor twice a year and to get “routine” bloodwork done. We want  “regular” breast and prostate exams. Remember our sky-diver? His death was “foreseeable” in the life-insurance context, which means his premiums were adjusted up. Not much of a bet when it’s very likely you’re going to lose. To manage that (high) risk of loss, you charge a higher cost to the insured to play the game. Same with the sort of “regular” care most people want in the health-insurance context. If you’re telling your insurer up front that you’re going to DEFINITELY be making claims MULTIPLE TIMES a year to cover exams, shots, etc., then how can your policy be ANYTHING except EXPENSIVE?

This is what people on the Left just do not seem to understand, or if they do, they do a good job of concealing to perhaps realize their underlying objectives of a socialist government in general.

And this should all seem very familiar to you. This should all seem like deja-vu. There was a time when the government thought that more people should receive loans to buy houses too. Remember what happened there? Despite the basic economic principle that people should be given loans based on the likelihood of their ability to pay, the government forced lenders to lend to high risk people, then subsidized those loans and guaranteed them with Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac. What happened there? Do you remember? Look at the headlines if you’re unclear. Unemployment at 10%. No money to be found. Credit dried up. Housing market plummeting.

And we go blithely on pretending that THIS TIME the government knows what it’s doing and that THIS TIME they’ll get it right. Forcing insurers to make economically unsound decisions to insure high risk people at low premiums and then have the government guarantee those bad policies with tax dollars is ITSELF an “egregious practice”. Do we have to wait until it all blows up AGAIN before we realize it was a bad idea?

And this of course is not to say that high risk people should not receive care. That’s dumb. Of course they should receive care and of course they should be able to purchase some type of policy that insures the costs associated with that care. It’s just that government until now has stood in the way of private insurers working together to solve this problem via competitive markets. It is ILLEGAL for example to purchase policies across state lines and to buy policies that do not contain state-mandated things like prostate screening for women or breast exams for men. Because states require that all policies contain provisions for insurers to pay for these things, the costs of those policies (as we’ve seen above) rise unnecessarily. Astronomically. How about a sick person in NY being able to buy a stripped down policy covering only his immediate requirements via the internet from an insurer in California? He can’t. It’s illegal to do so.

That’s where health care “reform” should start. That it’s not, is all you need to know about Olympia Snowe and her “egregious practices”. Reform is not “reform” because someone tells you it is. Break it down. Look it over. When you do so, if it seems like it’s only really an excuse for another expansion of government, you know you’ve hit on something. You’ve hit on exactly why nobody on the left gets too into specifics when they talk about “what’s wrong” with the current system.

The following is part of a longer piece published by Doug O’Brien over  at biggovernment.com (the site on which all those delicious ACORN videos originated) that unfortunately is too long for a bumper sticker, but which nonetheless captures the spirit driving a majority of Americans in opposition to Obamacare these days:

Every day, the administration’s promotional campaign becomes more politicized, more strident, more arrogant, and less aimed at a discussion of the real concerns arising from the desire to hastily revamp one-sixth of the nation’s economy. Tell us in real terms how this will be paid for, not with vague estimates of possible “savings.” Tell us exactly how you will prevent rationing and unwarranted delays in care. Tell us how you will guarantee the survival of private insurance, not just pat us on the heads like children and promise that you won’t directly force anyone out of their current plan.

via Big Government » Blog Archive » Rev. Jackson to the rescue of Obamacare.

Obama and his flacks in the media of course won’t tell us those things because they can’t. Reform will be paid for with new taxes. Rationing won’t be prevented. It will be encouraged. Private insurance won’t survive. It’s obsolescence in fact, is the point.

But what kind of sales pitch is that?

So they lie. Peddle half truths. Counter legitimate questions with charges of racism. Because nobody ever chooses Socialism willingly. To gain the authority of law it must rely on the same coercive strategies which Obama is implementing right now.

Lies. Half truths. Manipulation.

Someone named Noam N. Levey penned this wonderful little bit of misinformation in today’s LA Times:

Imagine the debate over healthcare legislation on Capitol Hill as a tussle among three friends out for dinner.

All three have been struggling to pay their bills lately. When the check arrives, they try to figure out how to divide it. The problem is no one can really afford the meal. And if one manages to pay less, the other two will go home even deeper in the hole.

That is the dilemma facing President Obama and his congressional allies as they try to develop healthcare legislation that can unite liberal and conservative Democrats and make it to the president’s desk by the end of the year.

“It is all a question of balancing,” said Ken Thorpe, a healthcare economist at Emory University who has advised congressional Democrats working on healthcare bills.

Think of our three friends as consumers, businesses and government, the three major groups that pay for healthcare in America.

The check is the nation’s healthcare tab, which now tops $2.5 trillion a year.

via Splitting healthcare tab is a balancing act — latimes.com.

Does Mr. Levey not realize that “government” pays for nothing? Every dollar spent by government must first come from a “consumer” or a “business” that created it in the first place.

Some might ask (and they’d be right in asking) why government needs to place itself in between citizens and their health care at all. Wouldn’t it all be more efficient to permit citizens and businesses who create their dollars to pay it directly to the insurance companies themselves? Wouldn’t it make sense to permit interstate competition between health insurance companies? Wouldn’t that competition (like competition between potato chip and motor oil companies) result in more choices for the consumers? Lower prices? Better quality? And wouldn’t it also make sense to permit consumers to purchase insurance against whatever type of contingencies they wish? Shouldn’t a healthy 22 year old male be free to insure against ONLY catastrophic occurrences? Why is he instead required to obtain and pay for a policy insuring things he doesn’t need?

Ah…and now we get to the reason for government. The reason that the government insists on insinuating itself between citizens and their health care is that without the government, the millions and millions of people who feel that they are entitled to FREE health care and who exist like CHILDREN within the soft fluffy womb of Big Government Insulation would be out of luck.

I’m not talking about people who despite their best efforts find themselves temporarily in need of assistance. I’m also not talking about the old, the young, the truly poor, the incapacitated. These people should be helped by the government and the government should be able to collect a little bit of money from the hundreds of millions of us who have some in order to help those who absolutely cannot help themselves.

But there are ALREADY government programs like that. Tremendously wasteful and inefficient ones, I grant you, but systems currently being funded that help the young (SCHIP), the old (MEDICARE) and the poor (MEDICAID). Not to mention social security.

Why isn’t “health care reform” focusing on fixing EXISTING programs to more effectively help those who are already eligible to receive that help?

Because that misses the point, doesn’t it? The object of the current Obama-liberal reform packages is to insure that the producers in this country are screwed to the highest possible degree so that those who are content to recline in the padded lap of government may do so from cradle to grave.

That’s why the various free market approaches that I outline above won’t be seriously entertained by any liberal. Because just as the Stimulus wasn’t created to stimulate anything except the liberal base, so too is health care ‘reform’ not intended to reform anything except capitalism.

The cure for capitalism is a heavy dose of socialism….and that’s just what Obama is planning to deliver.

If recent polls are any indicator though, these plans may be crumbling. Which of course is a good thing, despite what great thinkers like Noam N. Levey believe. The more Obama and his liberal cabal open their mouths to scold Americans on health care ‘reform’, the more we learn of his socialist mischief and the more sick and tired we become of his Presidency.

This chart from Rasmussen says it all:

Keep talking, Mr. President. Keep talking.

Is it really true that BUT FOR racist white Americans, Obama’s liberal agenda (including the socialization of our health care industry) would skate through Congress and become law?

I guess we could test the data, couldn’t we? If racism is really the single factor holding Obama’s agenda back, we should be able to find recent historical evidence of white presidents successfully pushing similar agendas through congress without opposition, shouldn’t we?

Of course we should.

So let’s look.

In 1972, after 4 years of Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Viet Nam War, Americans were so eager for an anti-war liberal to come in and fix things that they….re-elected Nixon 49 states to 1.

In 1980, after 4 years of Jimmy Carter’s unabated liberalism, Americans went ahead and elected Conservative Ronald Reagan 44 states to 6.

In 1984, Americans were so upset with this Reagan Conservatism and so attracted to the prospect of Carter’s old liberal VP taking over, that they came out in DROVES…and sent Mondale back to Minnesota 49 states to 1.

In 2004, after 4 years of the rumblin’, bumblin’ and stumblin’ antics of NeoConservative George W. Bush and his “illegal” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans were so eager for Liberal John Kerry that they…re-elected Bush.

News flash.

Naked Liberalism is not very popular at all with American voters, regardless of the color of the skin of the head Liberal in charge. Whether it be McGovern or Carter or Mondale or <gasp!> Barack Obama himself, Americans like their capitalism and they like their individualism and they get off on the fact that a citizen should be required to be accountable to himself and his community and rise and fall on his own merit.

Barack Obama didn’t run as a Liberal though, did he? No, he was smarter than that. He read his history. He saw the same election results that you and I saw. He figured he’d run as the only thing he knew he could convince Americans was good.

He ran as a black guy.

No other credentials. That he was black was enough. And he was right. Our media didn’t ask questions where questions were painfully wanting.

What of your lack of experience? What of your shady connections? What of your roots as a “community organizer” and your association with and support for people who wished to tear America down?

Irrelevant, said Obama. Don’t you know I’m not running as a Liberal? Anything in my past that may make me appear to be liberal is therefore irrelevant. I’m actually running as a black guy. Therefore, given the state of race relations in this country (thankfully inflamed by my minions of race baiters, white and black, who populate the upper echelons of the Democrat party), it’s impossible for you to condemn me. I’m black, you see, and whites can’t criticize blacks without appearing hateful and small and ignorant. And since no white person wants to be made to appear or even feel hateful and small and ignorant, I should skate by.

And skate by he did.

Because his real agenda was Liberal, but he knew he couldn’t advertise that.

And now we’ve got what we have now. An unabashed, dyed in the wool Socialist operating the levers of the United States Government like he’s moving toy soldiers around in some 3rd rate banana republic.

Want to criticize him?

Careful.

He’s black you know.

And we all go blithely along….

It’s like a Twilight Zone episode, isn’t it? I suppose I’ll get a few nasty comments about how racist I am, but I’m Conservative so I’m used to those comments. I get them when I post about abortion or Israel too. I’ve got a thick skin. Besides, everything any white person does can’t be racist. Otherwise, racism has no meaning, and I don’t think that’s the object of the game, is it?

If it isn’t, then Democrats need to start being real careful about how and where they throw that word around. People who disagree with you on health care are not racist. People who voted for Bush are not racist. People who go to church are not racist. To be sure, there are racists who do go to church and who did vote for Bush and who do disagree with you on health care, but that and a token will get you on the subway, right? There are also racists in the Democrat party, who voted for Kerry, and who never go to church.

What does this mean? Like I said, not much.

How about let’s talk about the issues instead?

Anyone?

Here’s Thomas Friedman in yesterday’s NY Times:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Our One-Party Democracy – NYTimes.com.

One party autocracy (cf. modern day Venezuela, Cuba, China as well as historical (key distinction) Germany, Italy and Soviet Union) has “drawbacks”? Assuming by “drawbacks” he means “absence of freedom” and “stultifying political bondage”, is there really any room for a “but” at the beginning of the next sentence?

That’s like saying that Mussolini may have had “drawbacks”….BUT he sure did get the trains running on time, didn’t he? Can’t forget those trains.

Go ahead and read the entire article. He’s actually saying that it’s a good thing to have an autocracy running things because then they’d get to impose “politically difficult” fixes on policies which in their own unopposed view are important to society.

I wonder if he’d have been in favor of giving the Bush administration absolute freedom to pursue their own “politically difficult” yet “critically important” fixes to counteract global Islamic fundamentalism. Do you think?

This is the same nonsense that Obama himself spouted soon after he took office. Remember all that “the time for petty political debate is over” stuff? The unspoken follow up was that “now get in line behind me and stop asking questions.”

Which all of course misses the point of our little Democratic Republic, does it not?

“Political difficulty” is actually a pretty good thing. It forces compromise, which insures that the greatest amount of people agree with your fix before it moves forward. Again, this is a VERY GOOD THING. Your own fix, however great you think it is, may not be all that popular with everyone else. Giving the strongest party the leverage to do whatever it wants ASSUMES that that party’s plans are the BEST solutions to ANY problems and are beyond reproach.

This is an obscene viewpoint.

Sure, as Friedman says, China has the “freedom” (I use this term in the loosest possible sense) to position itself in what Friedman perceives as the “lead” on “clean power and energy”. In essence, they can do whatever they want because there’s no opposition. But what  are the long term consequences of this freedom? Because nobody is opposing certain things that the Chinese are doing the way people are opposing certain things that we are thinking about doing here in the US, what important details are being left out? What interests are being overlooked? What will these supposed great “fixes” look like in 10 or 15 years because nobody was there NOW to say WAIT…you FORGOT to think about THIS?

While the Soviet Union was doing all those 5 year plans and planning the Soviet economy in an echo chamber…nobody was permitted to say STOP! If you keep this up, you’ll be out of business in 50 years!

And what happened?

They were out of business in 50 years.

The founders of the United States set up a pretty cool Democratic Republic on the back of a cocktail napkin more than 230 years ago–the fundamental premise of which was that unopposed, autocratic dictatorships should be AVOIDED at all costs. Why? Because they are unfree. Because they depend on coercion and bondage of their own people to survive. Because the best and most lasting policies should be openly debated in the marketplace of ideas  and be a genuine pronunciation of the People.

Someone please tell Mr. Friedman.

The title of this post is almost as long as the post itself.

Consider that the Washington DC Public schools are the only public schools in the country that are completely administered by the Federal Government.

Want to take a guess at what they spend per student?

You got it. $16,540.

Bear in mind that the average cost per pupil for all states (including DC) is about $9,500. So it costs DC almost twice as much to educate each pupil as it does the average pupil in other states. As a frame of reference, it costs about $34,000 a year to send your kid to Princeton.

So for $16,540, you’d expect DC students to be among the best educated in the nation, right? After all, according to Obama, once the Feds get involved, waste and inefficiency magically disappear.

Want to take a guess at how the DC public schools rank in terms of overall test scores?

You got it. Dead last.

So what do you think? Is it time to turn over health care to the Feds?

Sometimes, when you’re arguing back and forth on a topic for too long, it’s easy to sort of lose focus on what all the hub bub is about and it’s worth taking just a few moments to step back and put your hands on the arguments once again.

Health Care reform. Or is it Health Insurance reform? All we seem to know is that some powerful Americans (namely, the President and his fellow travellers in Congress) are pissed off that a condition exists in this country whereby becoming sick can be very costly.

“We should not be forced into bankruptcy by our health care bills!” they say, and “We should not be denied coverage for any reason!”

Does that about cover it?

I think a good way to get back to square one here is to look at the term “insurance”….since the companies who give us these policies (in exchange for money) seem to be bearing the brunt of a lot of rage these days. Evil profiteers, you know. Filthy lucre.

The purpose of an insurance policy is to protect yourself against damages likely to be sustained by the occurrence or non-occurrence of a particular event (or set of events). For example…let’s just say you run a flower-selling operation out of your backyard. In order to grow flowers, you need for it to rain. If you’re a forward thinking individual, you may want to consider purchasing an insurance policy that will pay you the cost of losing a particular crop of roses in the event that you lose that crop because it didn’t rain. Since you’d normally sell that crop for say $2,000 and the cost (in terms of time and money) to replace a lost crop would be say another $1,000, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for you to take out a $3,000 policy against it not raining. If it doesn’t rain AND such non-rain causes you to lose your crop, then the insurance company will give you $3,000. Not bad. But what does a policy like that cost you?

Suffice to say, there are very smart people currently being paid A LOT of money to determine at what cost insurance policies should be sold. I’m not one of those people, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I’ll take a crack at it. You’re obviously not going to want to pay $3,000 for that policy, right? Since that’s the amount you’d benefit if it didn’t rain, it would make better sense at that point to just save your $3,000 in a bank and hope that it doesn’t rain.

In order to entice you to purchase a policy, an insurance company has therefore got to offer it to you for less money than the total benefit of the policy, right? Insurance companies also have to consider the likelihood of the thing being insured against. If the event is likely, then your policy will cost more money. If it isn’t likely, the policy will be cheaper.

Why is that?

This is the great equalizer as far as the current debate about health care goes. If an insurance company is promising to pay not only you but thousands of other rose-growers in the area $3,000 apiece if a drought occurs which ruins crops, it will NEED to know how likely it is that the event itself will happen. If you live in the Sahara desert, then the likelihood of them paying out is near 100%. It never rains there and therefore, it’s very likely that a drought will ruin your crop. And since they’d have to charge you less than $3,000 for the policy to begin with (see above), they’d LOSE money on every policy. In a free market economy, there would be no market for these types of policies. People would save their money and pay for damages out of their own pockets, or better yet, choose another profession. The risk of losing their entire crops without insurance would be enough for them to take up boat-making instead.

Let’s say instead of the Sahara, you lived in a Costa Rican rain forest. What’s the likelihood of a drought coming there and destroying your rose crops? Near zero, right? So how much do you think that policy would cost? Pennies. Insurance companies would be very competitive in this market, right? Offering you insurance against events that are practically guaranteed never to happen means they can price their policies very modestly. Then the rose-grower would have to decide—if the event is NEVER going to happen, is it worth insuring against? Probably, because you never know, but we’re talking nominal fees here.

So what have we learned? If you want to insure against things that are practically GUARANTEED to happen, you’ll find that policy (if indeed anyone will offer it) to be very expensive. If you want to insure against things that are practically guaranteed NOT to happen, you’ll find that policy to be very cheap.

Of course the crucible of this little experiment anticipates a free market without government interfering with the natural allocation of resources through pricing. Which brings me to my next point.

Why is health insurance so expensive?

Simply, health insurance is so expensive because insurance companies are being forced (through individual mandates of both the states and the federal government) to cover things they would ordinarily find to be too risky. Not only that, but you and I are forced to buy these policies, covering things we don’t even need. Why is this happening? Because government, in its infinite wisdom, decided once again that it knew more about markets than the private businesses engaging in those markets themselves. Does the Community Reinvestment Act ring a bell? This of course was the government’s ill fated attempt (*cough* RECESSION *cough* HOUSING BUBBLE *cough*) to ‘guarantee’ that poor people with poor credit be afforded the opportunity to receive a mortgage…regardless of their ability to repay loans. You see, the government thought that because poor people with poor credit (gasp!) weren’t receiving loans for HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of dollars….banks were therefore not only EVIL but RACIST to boot (because anyone’s a racist, don’t you know, who doesn’t loan money to people who can’t repay). The government acted on a supposition that EVERYONE regardless of credit rating had a RIGHT to OWN a HOUSE. That right eventually translated into a recession that we’re still enduring today.

The current government project is to create a RIGHT for everyone to receive FREE HEALTH CARE….and then to destroy the INSURANCE industry to realize that “right”. The result will be the ruination of the insurance industry (and subsequently, the level of care accessible to all Americans) similar to the ruination of the financial industry.

Insurance, as we saw above, is not set up to be a guarantor of free stuff. Insurance is RISK MANAGEMENT. The more you require insurance companies to cover EVERYTHING (and not just unlikely, but costly events), the more expensive those policies will end up becoming. We’re asking our insurance companies to provide more and more coverage for more and more things, but asking the PRICE of that coverage to go DOWN?

It’s illogical and irrational. If you want to say that the government (and doctors) should be in the business of giving away free stuff, then say it. But don’t pretend that this is an INSURANCE issue…since any reasonable person knows that INSURANCE is not about guarantees. It’s about a safety net. This major disconnect is causing immense confusion in the current debate.

Imagine this in terms of car insurance. Imagine that we wanted every single expense associated with our cars to be covered under an insurance policy. That means gas fillups, tolls, tickets, regular maintenance, oil change, car washes, etc. What do you think that sort of policy would cost?

Astronomical, right? As well it should be because we’d be transforming our policy from one of “risk” to one of “guarantee”. In other words, we’re no longer insuring against the occurrence of an unlikely event, but insuring against the occurrence of very likely events. Events so likely, they’re guaranteed. Will our cars be “healthier” if we had all this stuff covered under our “insurance”? Sure. But at what cost?

We’re currently in the “at what cost” stage of the debate in health insurance. Everyone wants to be covered against drought in the Sahara desert, and insurance is just not set up to make that a cost-effective policy.

We need to remove “insurance” from this debate and clear the air. This is about the government guaranteeing that everyone be issued “free stuff”, to be paid for by people who are already paying too much relative to the value received. It’s nonsense, and it’s time we all realized it.

Ever get the feeling that Democrats can’t possibly be this stupid? To increase deficits to unmanageable levels on purpose under the guise of ‘fixing’ the economy? To cram health care ‘reform’ legislation through congress without even bothering to understand what it means let alone whether it will actually reform anything or make things infinitely worse? Purposefully putting in place “climate” legislation like “cap and trade” that will knowingly bankrupt our coal industry all because of Al Gore’s cuckoo and demonstrably false environmental fantasies?

It’s so easy to sit back and let it all wash over you. They’re smart people. They know what they’re doing. Someone, somewhere, deep in the party, wants the economy to actually work and for our health care system to be better. Eventually, Obama will listen to these better angels and “do the right thing”. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with the means, if it ends up fixing things, then who cares in the end, right?

That all wouldn’t be that bad a plan if Obama and the Liberals currently jerking the levers of government had the same idea of “fix” as you did. You may be a Yankee fan (I won’t understand it, but you may) and you may hate their manager, Joe Girardi. He may hit and run in the wrong spot. He may not position his outfielders well. But you know that regardless of all that, he basically wants to win baseball games. And because of that, you root for him to succeed, despite the methods he uses. If he can bring your guys the rings in October, he can play the outfielders in Monument Park if he wants. Just win, baby. As well it should be.

What does it mean for Obama to “win”?

Recall that the single thing that all his policies to date have in common is that they are very expensive.

That’s it. Whether it be cap and trade, the Recovery Act or health care reform, the bills (where there are bills) have all been hastily (and poorly) written, rushed through the legislative branch, and believed by experts to do little to “help” the situation that they were ostensibly launched to remedy. What everything was sure to have, however, was a steep price tag.

So if the object of these bills was not to actually fix anything or help anyone, then what was the point?

The point was to take your money.

Expensive things need to be paid for. By inking these legislative promises to pile up enormous debt, Obama is guaranteeing that the federal government will be in your pockets into the foreseeable (and unforseeable) future to repay. So it doesn’t matter that none of this legislation will “work” to “fix” the stated “harm”. What matters is that we will have guaranteed a commitment to tax. And tax. And tax.

Victor Davis Hanson lays some groundwork as to why:

The point [of the deficit-exploding legislation] . . . was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.

Individual compensation is now seen as arbitrary and, by extension, inherently unfair. A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.

“Patriotic” federal healers must then step in to “spread the wealth.” Through redistributive tax rates, they can “treat” the illness that the private sector has caused. After all, there is no intrinsic reason why an auto fabricator makes $60 in hourly wages and benefits, while a young investment banker finagles $500.

Spread the wealth.

We heard that from Joe the Plumber during the campaign and the Left went into near hysteria trying to convince America that the term didn’t mean exactly what Obama meant it to mean. Because the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. But the term is real. It has meaning. Socialists embrace this meaning. They’ve been running (and losing) on this platform in United States elections for 100 years. Obama would have lost too if he’d been honest about his plan to reorder America according to his  disproved theories of Social Justice. Americans reject the notion that happiness should be guaranteed. We reject the notion that anything other than the “pursuit” of it is mentioned in the “mission statement” of our nation–the Declaration of Independence. We reject the notion that “luck” determines outcomes and that there is anything “arbitrary” or “capricious” about a hard-working family’s salary that needs to be “adjusted” to permit a non-working person to achieve something he didn’t work for.

Obama embraces all those things, and has pushed through terrible legislation designed not to fix anything except the scales of “social justice”.

Again, from Mr. Hanson:

[W]hy would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) — that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?

Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment in private catastrophic coverage.

Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan, and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was likewise of no concern.

The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of how America receives health care.  Whether more or fewer Americans would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care, or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements, oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.

Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern. “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many). Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.

Read that last bit again.

“Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.”

It’s like the Joe Girardi suddenly running the Yankees like a little league coach, making sure that everybody got a chance to play, regardless of how such acts impacted the results of the game. Would Yankee fans still root for him to win if he did that? Would they still believe that, regardless of means, he was still interested in winning the game? Of course not.

They’d want his ass out of there.

What is Obama’s end game? To get health care, the environment and the economy right? Or is it something more sinister—to pronounce that it is ‘unfair’ for people ‘with’ money to ‘have’ it anymore, and to ‘take’ it away through ‘taxes’ and ‘give’ it to others?

Ask any liberal why we should embark on a UK/Canada style of nationalized health care (go ahead, I’ll wait, I’m sure you won’t have to look too long), and I’ll bet you a thousand dollars they’ll shoot back that the life expectancy in those 2 countries is greater than ours. They probably won’t say anything after that, but the inference is that if the UK and Canadian systems are so bad, how is it that citizens live longer there? Forget the rationed care, the long lines, the month- and year- long waits for basic care we take for granted here like MRI’s and hip replacements. It’s the “life expectancy” that  makes all the difference.

It’s so facile an argument that it’s actually tempting to accept it. And since liberals tend to be among the most facile in any society, they swallow it whole.

Don’t make that same mistake.

Truth is (damn those facts!) there are MANY factors that go into determining the life expectancy of any nation, likely the LEAST important of which is the manner in which that nation goes about insuring its citizens.

Consider this excellent piece over at RedState:

The Life Expectancy figure is based upon an average of death ages from any cause; and that includes non-medical causes.

But you are asked to ignore other, non-medical causes of death.  Causes like violent crime, household accidents, car accidents, etc.  These are numbers which should not be ignored in this discussion; if average age of death is seen as important to the issue of healthcare, certainly the circumstances surrounding those deaths, and whether a single-payer system would actually effect those rates, are equally important.

For example, let’s compare car accident fatalities.  Comparing the United States to the U.K. and Canada (since, after all, they have higher life expectancies), we see that per capita fatalities are dramatically higher in this country:

For 2002
United States: 14.9
Canada:  9.3
United Kingdom:  6.1

Would you say that this has nothing at all to do with the disparity in life expectancies?  In the United States in 1996, the per capita deaths by car accident for people aged 0-74 is 127.5, versus 58.4 for those aged 75 and older.  Surely, even this one set of statistics has a role in the national mortality rate.  And what about murder rates?  According to NationMaster.com, the three countries rank in murders per capita thus:

24. United States with 0.042802 per thousand people
44. Canada with 0.0149063 per 1,000 people
46. United Kingdom with 0.0140633 per 1,000 people

Those are two examples.  My point is not that these two sets of statistics themselves explain the difference of death rates between the United States and these other countries.  The point is that clearly, there are other factors to consider here.

[ . . . ]

You simply cannot view a single statistic, like life expectancy, and expect that it makes the point.  In this case, it simply does not.  Life expectancy, as I said above, tells you nothing at all, other than the average age at which people die. There are too many other mitigating factors for this single statistic to be used as any sort of indicator of the quality of the health programs of these countries.  Especially because the ages in question are so close (within a couple years between the countries).

Liberals who attempt to tell you that average life expectancy in any way negates your arguments about the quality of care in single-payer countries are either outright lying, or simply don’t understand how statistics work.

And this upper cut from the indispensible Mark Steyn:

As is often pointed out, U.S. life expectancy (78.06 years) lags behind other developed nations with government health care (United Kingdom 78.7, Germany 78.95, Sweden 80.63). So proponents of Obamacare are all but offering an extra “full year” of Euro-Canadian geriatric leisure as a signing bonus.

“Life expectancy” is a very crude indicator. Afghanistan has a life expectancy of 43. Does this mean the geriatric wards of Kandahar are full of Pashtun Jennifer Lopezes and Julia Robertses? No. What it means is that, if you manage to survive the country’s appalling infant mortality rates, you have a sporting chance of eking out your three-score-and-ten. To say that people in Afghanistan can expect to live till 43 is a bit like saying the couple at No. 6 Elm Street are straight and the couple at No. 8 are gay so the entire street is bisexual.

Next this right cross from the inimitable Jonah Goldberg:

In his big speech before the American Medical Association in June, Obama insisted that “the quality of our care is often lower, and we aren’t any healthier. In fact, citizens in some countries that spend substantially less than we do are actually living longer than we do.”

It’s true, a few countries beat us in terms of life expectancy. But life expectancy is only partly about health care. Other factors matter. Swaziland’s life expectancy is 31.88 years. That doesn’t mean the average Swazi dies just a couple of weeks before his 32nd birthday. It means lots of people die young and a few people die old and the average comes out to around 32.

According to the CIA World Factbook’s 2009 estimate, American life expectancy is 78.11 years. In the U.K. — with its nationalized system — it’s a whopping 79.01. Taiwan’s is 77.96 and so is Albania’s. Do we really think the best explanation for all this is how they pay for medical care? Or perhaps things like diet and culture are more important? Is Japan’s health-care system what explains Japanese longevity, or is it that fish and seaweed are staples of the Japanese diet?

Even greater disparities exist within America. Asian-American women, according to a 2006 study by Harvard’s School of Public Health, have a life expectancy of 87 years, while for African-American men it’s 69. The healthiest white people in America are the low-income folks of the Northern Plains states. Again, is our health-care system the biggest factor?

And finally, the knockout blow from the Champ himself, Thomas Sowell:

One of the many phony arguments for government-controlled medical care is that Americans do not have any longer life expectancy than people in many other countries, despite much higher medical expenditures.

This argument is phony because longevity depends on health — and “health care” and “medical care” are not the same, no matter how many times the two are confused in the media or in politics. Health care includes things that doctors cannot do much about.

Homicide affects your longevity, but there is not much that doctors can do about it when they arrive on the scene after you have been shot through the heart, except fill out the paperwork. Rates of homicide, obesity, and narcotics usage are higher here than in many other countries, reducing our longevity.

But in the things that medical care can do something about — like cancer survival rates — the United States ranks at or near the top in the world. But that can change if we give up the real benefits of a top-flight medical system for the visions and rhetoric of politicians.

Moral of the story, I guess, is to carry a few facts with you into any argument you may get into with a Liberal. Lord knows he won’t be.

–Al