Reality & The Public Option

Lest there be any doubt that the public option is intended to end private health care, there are Obama's own words:



One would think that public opinion would have completely tanked for the public option after Obama had the following exchange during his hour long infomercial on the public option:

Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.

The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.

That was a telling moment. And it would seem that, whatever he might say, Obama proposes a government takeover of the healthcare system. The losers in this - the middle class who have decent health care coverage now but who will have a system imposed on them that seeks to cut costs by admittedly limiting treatment, particularly to the elderly. Clearly the wealthy, such as Obama, will not be forced to accept the consequence of a single payer system. The poor already have access to health care in many, if not most cases. The large portion of uninsured who do so voluntarily won't be helped - they will be forced to pay for a service they do not think that they need. Ultimately, the only winner in this will be those in government who want to increase their control over our lives.

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Some Of Her Majesty's Animals Are More Equal Than Others

Leave it to the committed socialists to destroy their flagship socialist program. The socialists in this case are Britain's Labour Party and its not-so-inspiring leader, Gordon Brown. The flagship socialist program is Britain's universal health care, administered through its National Health Service (NHS).

Since the NHS was created in post WWII Britain, health care has been distributed upon a simple contract - an individual and his employer pay an annual tax for which the government covenants to provide "free healthcare for all." Or as Karl Marx would have described it, from each according to his means, to each according to his needs. It is socialist utopianism.

Now sixty years after it was first formed, the NHS is ailing. It is not quite yet broken, but it has very significant problems with the quality and timeliness of care. And to add to those woes, the NHS is coming under an ever increasing funding strain. The father of modern capitalism, Britain's Adam Smith, would no doubt suggest building market reforms into the system that would allow it to function more efficiently.

Unfortunately, Adam Smith was followed in the pantheon of influential philosophers by Karl Marx. And it is to Marx that our modern socialists defer. The Marxian solution to such a problem as the NHS now faces is, to borrow George Orwell's imagery, to make some animals on the farm more equal than others. No longer is health care to be doled out on the basis of need, but rather on the basis of social acceptabity as determined by the central government.

This today from the Telegraph:

To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the NHS, Gordon Brown plans to introduce a "constitution" setting out the rights and responsibilities of our healthcare system.

What this seems to amount to in practice are the Government's rights to refuse treatment, and the patient's responsibilities to live up to what the state decides are model standards.

There is apparently to be a clear warning that those who adhere to unhealthy habits such as smoking or failing to take regular exercise may be refused NHS care.

This threat is morally outrageous and legally dubious: if lung cancer victims are really to be left to die without medical care because they are smokers, or heart disease sufferers turned away because they have not succeeded in losing weight, this will make a mockery of the principle of universal healthcare free at the point of need.

. . . If a private insurance company to which people had been paying premiums over a lifetime were to declare retrospectively that it would not cover treatment for smokers or the overweight, its customers could rightly sue for breach of contract.

Bizarrely, while more is to be expected of patients by way of self-reliance in terms of taking responsibility for their own treatment - thus helping to defray NHS costs - they will still be forbidden the most obvious form of self-help, which is to pay for some supplemental treatment (which would help even more substantially to reduce NHS costs).

So there are likely to be more cases of cancer patients being told that they will be cast out of NHS care altogether if they purchase drug treatment with their own funds which their hospital trusts would not provide.

The inadequacy of our healthcare model has led us to a senseless (and heartless) contradictory position: the Department of Health states categorically that "co-payment" is unacceptable because it would result in an unequal system in which better-off patients would have advantages that poorer ones do not.

But it now plans to refuse care to people whose unhealthy lifestyles are usually associated with poverty and deprivation.

The extraordinary high-handedness of these proposals is symptomatic of all that is wrong with a tax-funded monopoly health system run by central government: ordinary people are encouraged to think of healthcare as a gift of the state. . .

Read the entire article here. The history of our world is that capitalism and market based solutions are always the most effective and efficient long term solutions to economic questions. Socialism is not really an economic philosophy as much as it is a populist political philosophy that exalts the government technocrat over the individual. Socialism attempts to micromanage the unmanagable, and it is typified by invasive social engineering based on the technocrat's personal belief of how each individual should act.

It may well be that we are inevitably headed in the U.S. towards a system of universal health care. At the risk of having my conservative credentials revoked, I do not think that necessarily a bad thing. But it must be a system that minimizes government influence and relies, to the maximum extent possible, on market forces. The socialist solution will never work in the long run. If you need proof, just keep a close eye on our socialist cousins across the pond.

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Interesting News From Around The Web - 12/22/2007

Secretary of Defense Gates says that Pakistan is now al Qaeda’s primary target. And now a suicide attack inside a crowded Mosque in a settled area of Pakistan.

When the NYT runs positive front page articles on a particular Republican presidential candidate, why do I feel like there is an ulterior motive?

More on the destroyed CIA Tapes, this time from the 9-11 Commission staff.

Is China’s military operating outside of Politburo control?

Is global warming a cover for countries to try and gain economically at our expense?

The WSJ takes note of the incredible sophistry of Ms. Clinton’s far left foreign policy statements.

Reversing a trend that began with the Jacobites some 200 years ago, Sarkozy, a Catholic, is urging a greater role for religion in France’s public life.

Soccer Dad looks at Iranian influence on this side of the pond which, in reality, has been with us and growing for many years: "Allowing Iranian influence to grow in the Western hemisphere presents a threat to the United States. Will the government act to forestall this threat or allow it to grow unchecked?" If the latest NIE is any indication, we will not be forestalling that threat anywhere in the world.

I do not understand Israel’s restraint in failing to respond with overwhelming force when they are regularly attacked from the Gaza Strip. The latest is six qassam rockets that landed in an Israeli school yard. Joshuapundit has the story.

A Porkbusters letter to the President pleading for an end to earmarks in the Omnibus Spending Bill.

The insane energy bill that skews agricultural production and puts us on the edge of incredible inflation in the price of food.

Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse throws his political endorsement behind Fred Thompson.

The question of universal healthcare has several facets, but the gate keeper is can such a system be made to work without degrading the quality of care. The Glittering Eye has an interesting post on this from the perspective of a Canadian doctor.

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Interesting News From Around the Web - 12/12/07

This is a must-read/watch at Gateway Pundit for many reasons, not the least of which is to put into perspective the threat of orthodox Salafi Islam and Khomeinist Shiaism and all the virulent criticism you will find of it across the net, including on this blog. That criticism cannot be read to implicate your average Muslim in this land. My hat is off to Hassan Askari who jumped into a brawl to save four Jewish men being beaten in an anti-Semitic attack on New York’s subway. I can go one farther to say that, of all the many Muslims I know, there is not a one among them whom I would have any reason to believe would act any different than Mr. Askari.

Also at Gateway Pundit, a humorous Shriek Alert as Hillary lead vanishes. She really is an imperious and hypocritical ass.

RedState looks at a manufactured controversy over remarks by Mitch McConnell that, taken out of context by those who really have no use for our soldiers, are claiming shows McConnel as a "heartless chickenhawk." As a non-chickenhawk, let me say that I concur in RedState’s assessment. Let me say also that this "chickenhawk" label is utterly ridiculous. If you follow the logic of the left, the penultimate "chickenhawk" was Bill Clinton. And to carry it to its logical conclusion, think Pelosi and Hillary attempting to dictate military strategy in Iraq. The neo-liberal left has no intellectual honesty. And as one more aside, it was the transition to an all-volunteer military that has gifted us the most professional military force since the days of ancient Rome.

The NRO endorses Romney in the Republican primaries, finding his social conservatism the deciding factor in distinguishing him from Giuliani. It’s a well thought out piece, though, not being a true social conservative, I disagree with its conclusions. (Hat Tip: Villagers with Torches)

There are two systemic threats to Democracy that gnaw at the base of the system. One is the flow and control of information. The other, more direct threat, is voter fraud. Several authors have argued persuasively that voter fraud has played a decisive role in past elections. The effort to control voter fraud through i.d. requirements at the polls is now before the Supreme Court. Faultline discusses the issue in light of illegal aliens.

Conservative Heresy? Hillbilly Politics discusses the "conservative case" for universal health care. This is a troubling issue. There is not a system of socialized medicine yet that can compete with the somewhat free market healthcare system in America. That said, I happen to concur with the concept of universally available healthcare in the U.S. How to have it without also having all the problems of socialized medicine is beyond my limited intellectual capacity to work out, nor do any of the proposals I have seen floated by Democrats strike me as effective.

Al Qaeda has suffered a huge blow in Iraq, but that hardly spells doom for the larger organization. Right Truth examines al Qaeda terrorism in Northern Africa and the threat it poses to Europe, particularly France.

Bayes analysis, the logic of threat assessment, some past intelligence failures of note, and the NIE on Iran are discussed in an exceptional essay at PJM by the Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez

They can have my Samuari sword when they ply it from my cold dead hands – so sayeth Q&O. It is a sad commentary on what has become of UK. The socialist government believes in complete control of its citizens – after all, the left know what is best for their citizenry. This means that they cannot be trusted with any means of self defense. If a person is hurt by someone misusing a weapon, than that weapon must be taken out of hands of the populace at large.

A good post on atheletes who have transcended their sport at Politics and Pigskins.

An unusual alliance aimed at attacking the failed policies of those in power. Heh.

An interesting analysis at Liberty Corner of the largely negative role government has played in changing our values for the worse, and arguing that the state must affirmatively act if it is to reverse the damage done.

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