01.26.10
Why the world needs examples of righteousness
Because there are far too many cultures where this is the norm.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that they share in common a particular religion.
09.09.09
Beautiful and glorious – today’s edition
TCM is one damaged Freedom-Hater. According to a fresh AP poll 52 percent of us disapprove of his handling of the health care issue. The number is the same for his handling of the economy.
J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker has an in-depth look at this monumental collapse.
Health care week
Of course, tonight the Aquarian Totalitarian throws his Hail-Mary pass for socialist health care on Capitol Hill. I have to be out of town this evening, so I may not get to watch it live.
I remember when the H-Word Creature made a fuss about our nation’s health care system in 1993. At the time, I thought, what an odd domestic issue to make such a focal point out of. I mean, a person decides to either carry or not carry health insurance, based on a number of factors such as one’s general health, one’s income, one’s priorities and one’s plans. You get sick, you go get treated for it, and you pay the deductible, or you pay the whole thing.
Milton Friedman famously asked why companies shouldn’t offer food benefits, since food is even more essential to basic existence than health insurance.
I’m a pretty simple person by nature. I try to keep my worldview and my ideas for public policy as uncomplicated as possible. It seems to me that what’s called for is completely portable insurance, with no weird tax implications for making one insurance choice over another. I ought to be able to buy a policy from Pheonix, Arizona, or Bangkok, Thailand, for that matter, if the price and provisions suit me. It further seems to me that catastrophic insurance with a fairly high deductible is what most people need. Some may also want some incidental insurance of the Aflac variety. Other than that, one ought to lead a healthy lifestyle, not run to the ER for every case of the sniffles, and not sue doctors for things that weren’t their fault. If you get some serious but treatable malady, go see a doctor or a nurse practitioner, get treated and pay for the service out of pocket.
I think the reason Freedom Haters latched on to health care as a key issue is that it’s easy to make it look like something that ought to be a right. Good health has a lot to do with being sure you’re going to keep living, right?
But that’s what makes the whole undertaking so insidious. Nothing is more personal than tending to one’s health. As I’ve said in a previous post, “health care” encompasses so much of life that it’s easy for the state to insert itself into every aspect of our lives once it gains a toehold.
Key things to stay on top of this week: any “compromise” talk or triggers or cooperatives, how abortion is dealt with, how tort reform is dealt with, and, most importantly, whether this notion of health care being some kind of right gets properly quashed.
09.04.09
A supremely important point
An American Thinker piece by Michael Keehn entitled “Health Care Is Not A Group Service”
09.01.09
“The producers . . . have the moral right to sell it to willing consumers on any mutually acceptable terms”
Paul Hsia, a Denver-area physician, explains that free-market health care is most definitely not rationing, and why we must not let FHers get away with saying that it is.
08.19.09
Why we call them Freedom-Haters – today’s edition
Ever heard of Anthony Weiner, D-NY? He’s the kind of hard-core Marxist-Leninist who is willing to say up-front what the endgame is. He’s on record right here saying he wants to obliterate the free market in health insurance.
08.17.09
If you like your chow fresh and organic, you’re expected to tow the ideological line
This was to be expected. Whole Foods is being subjected to boycott-organizing attempts and various forms of Internet vitriol over CEO John Mackey’s Wall Street Journal column in which he outlined how his company is pointing the way to a free-market alternative to FHer-Care.
It’s not surprising, but it is sad and pathetic. None of the lefty remarks in this item about the development offer any kind of substantive refutation of Mackey’s argument. These people just see him as a turncoat. What he proposes is working wonderfully in his own organization. It would greatly and quickly transform our nation’s health care landscape if put into practice on a widespread basis. Yet these idiots cling to their utterly unfounded ideas of what’s “fair.” And “hip,” whatever that means at this late date.
Who would get to define “cooperative”?
Edmund Haislmaier at the Heritage Foundation says that the cooperative model could be useful if it were designed like the already established mutual-insurance organizations, but that, given the tilt of those putting the idea forth, would probably just be another taxpayer-subsidized way to get to the ultimate FH-er goal: a single-payer system.
UPDATE: This is getting good. Screamin’ Howard Dean is publicly wondering if TCM’s Freedom-Hating chops aren’t getting rusty. He insists on a public option. Pass the popcorn.
08.16.09
Banish the word “compromise” from your mind
Blue Crab Boulevard admonishes us that we haven’t defeated FHer-Care by any means. That will only be the case when any possibility of its regaining vitality due to vaguely worded clauses and sections in any health-related legislation has been obliterated.
So we fight on.
08.12.09
This is the biggie
Who would have thought that late summer 2009 would be the time in which we would be up against make-or-break prospects for what we’ve known as the United States of America? There may have been a few other such times - 1864, 1941, 1968 – but I suspect that what saw us through those previous episodes of diciness was a conviction, however latent, in the minds of a sufficiently large portion of the American populace that we were blessed, divinely guided, big, and resilient enough to survive and prevail.
I’m encouraged to believe in such resilience, ruggedness and reverence at our current juncture when I see each new set of Rasmussen poll numbers, as well as angry crowds at the August-recess townhalls. What keeps me from embracing utter certainty is the fact that we are – rightly – determined to see this through in a lawful and civil way, while our enemies in their current manifestation are perfectly willing to pull out any extra-constitutional stops necessary to defeat us and replace the United States of America with their totalitarian vision.
Why health care? Why is that the particular “domestic issue,” to frame this momentous matter in its most mundane way, the one on which such fateful consequences turn?
I think it’s because it is the one area of human life perfectly calibrated to encroach upon people’s most intimate areas of sovereignty without their immediately thinking that it has been encroached upon. Milton Friedman used to ask why we assume that organizations that employ us should offer health insurance as part of our compensation, and not, say, food. After all, he reasoned, food is an even more immediate need than medical attention. Well, that is exactly why the Freedom-Haters have, going back to the H-Word Creature’s attempts at this in 1993 – actually all the way back to the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 – been able to fine-tune their pitch to reach what they hope is an appealing balance between policy-wonk-level rigor and an emotionally charged message of urgency. Food would be a human need too far. We still have enough sense of personal autonomy that we reserve the right to put what we damn well please in our mouths. Witness the number of discarded Polar Pop cups and Taco Bell wrappers one sees lying along any thoroughfare in the land.
Actually, the matter of food will be one of the first things to be encompassed by socialist health care. Cost and the need for preventative considerations will be constantly thrown up in our faces.
Therein lies another aspect of the beauty of health care as the issue of choice for the dismantling of America in the eyes of the Freedom-Haters. There is no part of life that ultimately can’t be considered a matter of health care. Under the banner of looking out for our mental health, all kinds of censorship becomes possible. Under the banner of stress management, all kinds of minute and arcane restrictions on where we go and how we spend our time can be imposed. It will dovetail perfectly with the green agenda, as no one will want to burden the system with undue expenses related to respiratory or circulatory disorders brought on by dirty air or water.
Abortion advocacy will be a cakewalk once the Peter Singer / John Holdren notion of what “authentic human life” is informs decisions about allocating resources related to saving lives that, without intervention, will be lost. One can see how it will be a short leap for left-of-center “religion” in America to get behind heavy reliance on hospice programs in the name of “the common good” and “personal dignity.”
The reason this issue, crytallized into a debate about “public-option”-based legislation, has flared into a red-hot struggle testing our most fundamental bonds as citizens of one republic is that the stakes couldn’t be higher. If we win, the United States of America has a chance. If the Freedom-Haters win, it’s all over.
And don’t even bother wasting your reading time on news accounts of “compromise” deals. Those afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome are completely inconsequential. Compromise is just another way to surrender.
Exactly
Everybody thinks of Whole Foods as a tie-dyed, dreadlocked, save-the-planet-type operation, but its CEO and co-founder John Mackey seems to have had a true awakening. His WSJ column this morning on the private-sector route to real health-care reform sounds like a Heritage Foundation paper.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html
08.11.09
Why we call them Freedom-Haters – today’s edition
It’s Democrats – not normal Americans – who go in for the single-payer idea.
08.07.09
How dissent is handled in The People’s Republic of Obamica
In Iran, they’re known as the basij. Here in Obamica, we call them the SEIU.
