Life

NY Times’s coverage on the healthcare bill comparing the House and the Senate’s proposed bills.

I just don’t understand how someone could not take a look at this comparison and wonder a few things:

1. Total cost: “About $1.052 trillion. Expected to reduce deficits by $139 billion.” for the House version. “$849 billion. Expected to reduce projected federal budget deficits by $130 billion.” for the Senate version. How is this not double speak? When has a government program ever not cost more than it originally was expected to, by at least double? When has a government program ever worked as drafted? How does spending $1 trillion ever reduce the deficit? And how will continued spending ever reduce the deficit in the future? Please ask these questions to yourself and I suggest that you be highly suspicious of these bills. Why does a healthcare reform bill have to cost anything? Why can’t it get rid of existing government regulation and actually reduce the deficit immediately if that’s such an important target?
2. “36 million people would gain coverage, leaving 18 million uninsured.” – House, “31 million people would gain coverage, leaving 23 million uninsured.” – Senate. First off, why are there tens of millions of people left uninsured under both of these plans? If you’re going for universal coverage, why are any left out? Utter failure. Second, healthcare is a scarce resource and no, not everyone can have access to all of the medical coverage that they need all of the time. It just won’t happen, this is not Star Trek with a replicator that can create anything out of generic energy. Are you prepared to have bureaucrats decide who gets what treatment instead of you and your doctor deciding? Yes, insurance companies currently suck, but as even This American Life mentioned in a recent podcast, the government created this insurance company nightmare in two very important ways: first, during WWII, the federal government declared the need for almost all of the country’s resources needed to go towards the war effort. They declared that no company may raise wages or may hire new workers with the incentive of higher wages. So how do you attract top talent then? Yes, you start giving fringe benefits like health insurance and other non-liquid benefits. Follow this with the federal government again messing things up by declaring that any company that provides health insurance to their employees will no have to pay any taxes on the worth of that coverage. This declaration made health insurance offered by companies explode. Before that time, it was about 20% of U.S. companies. After that time, it jumped to around 70%. So why are we giving the government more power to make more awful decisions about our healthcare market?

Please ask yourself these questions and also examine the other insane things the bills propose.

Economics, Political, healthcare

Click to watch video of interview with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels

I think Mitch is right on in this video. The only thing I disagree with him on would be accepting Federal money. But I don’t blame him for doing it. He is absolutely right about health reform and that our budgetary debt in the U.S. is the single most important issue outstanding today. It is a shame that it is not part of the Obama administration’s priority however.

Economics, Political, healthcare healthcare, Mitch Daniels

Get it while it’s hot. I’ve been running the pre-release of 9.10 for weeks now and it’s arguably the best, most integrated Linux desktop experience ever. I’ve really enjoyed using it, even when certain things have broken along the development path. That’s what I get for being an early adopter though.

Linux

Check this out. Another way that Capitalism has made the lives of people better and safer: http://cafehayek.com/2009/10/cleaned-by-capitalism-xviii.html

Uncategorized

From a comment left on the Cafe Hayek page:

“You are defending the most wasteful and inefficient system in the world.”

What do you expect to happen to a market when:

1) Roughly 50% of all the market’s participants on the purchasing side are relieved of any financial responsibility for their purchases, thereby destroying any incentive to shop for the best value for the dollars being spent or to consider the most cost-effective way of dealing with their condition — and also thereby reducing any incentive to compete among doctors and hospitals.

2) The agency — Medicare and Medicaid — that assumes the financial responsibility for this 50% has access to unlimited government funds (i.e. taxpayer dollars or government debt) and thus has no incentive to police for fraud — no incentive to care what anything costs — and no incentive to tole.

3) That same agency — though it has no actual incentive to police for fraud or to care what anything wants — is nonetheless run by power-hungry bureaucrats who, in the name of “cost control”, push off on the providers (the doctors) over 130,000 pages of Medicare rules and regulations — rules so onerous and complicated that doctors that accept Medicare patients report that they must spend at least ONE FULL DAY per week on nothing but Medicare paperwork and must employ, on average, two additional clerical assistance to help in complying with those rules.

4) Another agency, state governments, gives in to special interest lobbying and forces ALL insurance policies sold by insurance companies in that state to include benefits such as alcohol rehabilitation programs, mental health programs, maternity benefits, etc, and demands that ALL such policies are sold at the same price — which means that those that want these benefits get them primarily at the expense of those who don’t want them.

And if you think you can just buy a cheaper policy from another state — a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t contain certain benefits you know you’ll never use — well, tough luck, because the states with these mandates generally have laws prohibiting you from purchasing from other states.

5) Another agency, the FDA, adds millions to the costs of new drugs by spending years approving drugs after drug companies have already spent years on double-blind studies proving the drugs work.

6) That same agency — which has zero experience in manufacturing and generally employs people that know nothing about manufacturing — nevertheless promulgates a vast set of regulations known as “Good Manufacturing Practices” that forces those manufacturing medical devices to create thousands of pages of written procedures, audits, etc., thereby driving up the costs of all manner of medical devices.

This massive set of regulations, in addition to driving up the costs of existing manufacturers, also constitutes a huge “barrier to entry” to any new firms that might wish to compete with existing firms, thereby reducing the competition in the field of medical device production.

7) Still yet another agency — the tort court system and the trial lawyers — forces doctors to carry malpractice insurance policies whose premiums may exceed $100, 000 a year — as well as forcing doctors to run numerous medical tests not because they think the patient needs it or has asked for it, but simply to practice what is known as “defensive medicine”.

If you think the economic effect of this tort system is small, ask yourself why the trial lawyer’s professional groups give millions in campaign contributions every election to Democrats sympathetic to the current tort rules.

Still yet another agency, the Federal Reserve, continuously inflates a fiat currency thereby guaranteeing an ongoing, constant decrease in the value of everyone’s dollars.

How, in the face of this onslaught, can you expect anything BUT rapidly rising costs?

And why on earth — in the face of all the evidence that these government interventions are economically disastrous and unsustainable — would anyone think we can put 40 million more people into the system at no additional cost?

How is more of the same poison going to make us well instead of killing us off?

Economics, Political, healthcare free market, healthcare, Life expectancy, non-free market, obama

Hot off the virtual press, it’s GNOME Journal issue 16. Get it at http://www.gnomejournal.org

Uncategorized GJ, GNOME Journal

This is a much watch. It’s common sense and to the point. Everyone should be able to see and understand what John and his guests say are true.

Stossel on health insurance

Economics, Political, healthcare healthcare, John Stossel, Obamacare

Democracy, n.:
A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass
meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy.
Attitude toward property is communistic… negating property rights.
Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate,
whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion,
prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences.
Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.
— U. S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 (1928-1932),
since withdrawn.

Uncategorized Democracy, government, politics

I woke up this morning to NPR doing a report on how some health insurance companies deny coverage to people once they file a claim. They went a step further and said that some of these people were denied present and future coverage even though they abided by all of the rules. NPR was trying to vilify this action, as they should since it is shady, but they are on a streak of trying to make the current health care system look so horrible that we the population will be clamouring for government-run healthcare. Nice try NPR, but you’ll have to try harder than that.

NPR even cited the number of people who this happens to and it’s just under 10,000 people in the entire country. Let’s do some math. There is an estimated 310,000,000 people in the country. If we take very conservative numbers and say that half of those people are adults who currently work, and then subtract 40,000,000 for the “uninsured,” we get 105,000,000 insured working adults. If we take 10,000 and divide that by 105,000,000, we get 0.000095238, or 0.0095% of the working population. NPR wants reform for 105,000,000 people based on shady practices to 0.0095%! There are more people that die from the common flu each year and yet we don’t talk about throwing out the current healthcare system so that 20,000 flu victims don’t die. Life is full of risks and the government is worse at eliminating risks than are a free and prosperous people independent of the government. This is why I call it idiocracy, NPR is no better than Fox News for sensationalism.

For all of you who think that universal healthcare is a utopia, don’t come crying to me when you can’t get the immediate care that you need because there are too many other people in line ahead of you. Economics is about the rationing of scarce goods in the most fair and balanced way. Politicians are not better at this than a market system where people, not politicians, place the value of goods and services like scarce healthcare resources. To anyone that thinks otherwise, I invite you to start a debate in the comments to this post.

On a related subject of government run healthcare, I submit this article as some more food for thought. The moral of the article, how are we going to afford government-run healthcare when we already have a national debt of $11 trillion and up to $50 trillion of unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Medicaid. How exactly is government-run healthcare more cost effective?

Economics, Political healthcare, idiocracy., NPR, rationing

I’m all updated to iPhone OS 3.0. Time to check the new features out. Will post my overall impressions of the upgrade in the near future.

Update: The upgrade is definitely a worthy one, however I’m experiencing consistent slugishness sometimes when I go to enter my 4-digit code to unlock my phone or when I first call up an app, the first few seconds of interacting with the app. Otherwise, the copy and paste are good though I really haven’t used it practically yet. The full phone search is excellent. The ability to turn off a repeat notification of when a call or text is received is so awesome.

Overall, I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars right now. If the update to 3.0 fixes the slugishness, I’ll give it 4.5 out of 5.

Apple 3.0, Apple, iPhone