Posted on

Universal Healthcare Truths and Myths

Actual photo of a Venezuelan supermarket

Often you will read or hear that except in America, healthcare in all developed countries around the world is recognized as the “basic human right” that it actually is, and this is why “America is the only civilized country in the world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare to its people.”

You will often hear that this is a black-eye on the face of the United States.

You will often also, as a corollary, read and hear such things as Why Healthy People Should Subsidize the Sick, and in such discussions, you’ll read or hear that single-payer is frequently opposed because it “forces” people to be humane. The word “forces” will often be in scare quotes.

No caring or compassionate person — which is to say, most people — wants to be thought of as “inhumane,” and that’s how you know that this sort of talk is a tactic: a type of propaganda.

The purpose of this ridiculing tone and the scare quotes around “force” is an attempt to bully you into believing that force is perfectly acceptable when it’s for the sake of something “humane,” or something that’s deemed a “greater good.”

Don’t be bullied. Don’t be duped.

I will show you that even if they don’t intend to, the people who advocate any kind of force, even for ostensibly humane ends, are in actuality perpetuating much greater suffering for all people involved.

The only way to truly solve the healthcare crisis that plagues the world is through a policy of no force whatsoever.

First, last, and always, nobody has the right to the life and labor of any other human being — and this includes the life and labor of any and all doctors.

It is true that despite the mighty push and the stupefying corruption involved in that push, America does not yet have universal healthcare — and it is a very, very good thing for the sake of the entire world that America does not.

One of the (many) things you’re not told about universal healthcare is this:

In every country that has it — even those listed as the best: France, Japan, Canada, so on — healthcare is perpetually out of money. They all operate in the red. This is a fact.

They operate at a loss — just as Medicare and Medicaid do in America, and for the same reasons. They are in debt, and that debt grows deeper and deeper and deeper, endlessly.

But that’s okay, people will reply, because healthcare should not be for profit.

Says who?

Things cost money to produce and to make and to manufacture and to do.

Whether it’s aspirin and antibiotics, or beds or oxygen tanks and tubes, or MRI machines and computers, or an almost endless number of other things besides — it costs money to produce.

(Money is only a symbol of production, a medium. Money is a facilitator, and as such it drastically simplifies life for a conceptual species.)

This is to say nothing of the fact that the doctors, nurses, medical techs, paramedics, custodians, administrators, bio-pharmaceutical researchers, and so on, this is their work. It is their livelihood. And so if healthcare isn’t for profit, then all this staff is expected to provide it for free? Or for whatever wages the government deems? (Yes, actually: cost controls are a BIG part of all universal healthcare systems.)

These hard-working people, then, because it’s bourgeois and vulgar to regard healthcare as something at which you make money, they must therefore get other work so that they might put better food on their tables and support their families in a higher-quality way, and have money to travel and for leisure and everything else, like the rest of us?

In other words, the argument goes, in one of the most demanding and specialized industries there is — healthcare — people should by definition not be able to support themselves by their work as a open-market would determine, because for-profit medicine is “bourgeois and inhumane,” and so the people who spend years and years gaining the knowledge and the expertise required to practice it, they must not be allowed to support themselves by means of it, and so they must work two jobs (at least).

I hope you can see how ridiculous this is.

It’s precisely why in all countries with universal healthcare — i.e. all developed countries except America — doctor shortages, especially the most accomplished specialists, are a very serious problem.

(Where, I ask again, is the “right” to brain surgery if no one exists with the expertise required to perform it?)

In all countries with universal healthcare, staff and medical personnel shortages are a constant issue.

This is one of the reasons that when somebody like Canadian politician Belinda Stronich — who is a good friend of Hilary and Bill Clinton and who, like them, totally supports universal healthcare — when she’s stricken with cancer, she does not opt to be treated in Canada but instead comes to the United States.

And then there’s Hugo Chavez.

It’s also part of the reason that free market principles are being quietly introduced into many systems of universal care — to save them from collapsing — though they don’t want you to know this.

It’s also why MRI machines are abundant and no problem in, for example, veterinarian clinics in places with universal healthcare for humans, whereas in hospitals and other places of care for humans, you must often wait and wait and wait for access to (often life-saving) MRI tests: because universal care creates so many OTHER shortages beyond doctors, nurses, and other staff.

These endless shortages are the result of still more Marxist economic naïveté.

In the real world, thus, so-called universal healthcare, because it by definition operates at a perpetual loss, requires constant measures to prevent it from collapsing economically:

As mentioned, one of those measures is cost controls.

In all places with universal healthcare, strict cost-controls are implemented and constantly added — by a gigantic bureau of planners — which is why in such systems the average amount of time doctors spend with patients is limited: in Japan, which is often regarded as one of the best universal healthcare examples in the world, the average doctor-patient time is less than five minutes!

This bureaucracy also by definition mushrooms into endless permutations and red-tape, and among the many ramifications of this — please listen — America, which because of the profit-motive leads the world overall in medical technologies, innovations, and medicines, subsidizes the entire world because of the policy of universal healthcare.

Yes, you read that right.

In other words, you’ll often hear, for example, how inexpensive the same drugs are in places with universal healthcare compared with America. And this is true: they often are drastically cheaper.

But you won’t ever hear why: i.e. that it is precisely because America must pick up the remaining tab for the rest of the world that our costs are more expensive.

This is just one of the many ramifications of the cost controls that must be implemented in countries with universal healthcare.

Nor will you hear how the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes it mind-bogglingly complex for new medications to be created and approved — sometimes taking decades — and this as well drives up the cost of medicine and medical care: it drives it up astronomically.

It’s also another textbook example of how socialism loathes laissez-faire even while it relies upon it ENTIRELY in order to exist.

And it’s also, of course, another textbook example of how government controls and regulations create problems to begin with, and then the “free-market” (that doesn’t actually exist) is the one blamed for these problems so that deeper controls can then be demanded. All the while, it’s only actual laissez-faire principles that can truly fix the problem.

Another thing you’ll see in all countries with universal healthcare is healthcare rationing.

Rationing is part and parcel of universal healthcare because it’s necessary.

They don’t like to call it rationing, of course, and so they use any number of different terms (i.e. “limited funds,” “over-use of medical care”), but no serious person I know of, even those in favor, denies that under conditions of universal care, bureaus ultimately determine who gets what care — including, of course, who lives and dies, as Obama’s medical advisor famously made no secret of.

As the Alfie Evans case recently demonstrated to the world so starkly and horrifyingly.

I ask you in all sincerity to, at least for a moment, think of it this way:

You may not in theory like “for-profit healthcare,” but under such a system, can you deny that your health is at the very least NOT determined by government or governmental bureaus? You may have other arguments and objections, but you cannot, I don’t think, seriously deny that.

Please remember also: American medicine is already over half socialized, which has created staggering inflations and any number of other insoluble issues.

I ask you to please consider the following:

Imagine if food and shelter — both which are even more urgent human needs than medicine — imagine if they were deemed too important to be left to “open-market and unbridled laissez-faire,” and therefore government must provide universal food coverage, food care for all, and shelter for all. This is not purely hypothetical, by the way. It’s exactly the philosophy behind virtually all strains of socialist theory, and it’s how they’ve played out in a number of different countries — ranging from North Korea and Cuba, to the USSR and Pol Pot’s Cambodia and of course Communist China.

Under such systems, governmental agents assume control of food production and food distribution and housing, and do you know what happens then?

Many, many, many things — none of which are good:

Everything from lack of food diversity to government telling you what you may and may not grow to eat, or cultivate or milk or raise, to starving people waiting hours in breadlines for stale bread and then, after waiting all day in the bitter cold, being told that the bread rationing for the day is done, and so you must leave empty-handed and still starving.

Houses old, cold, and crumbling.

Which is PRECISELY why Nikita Kruschev and Boris Yeltsin simply did not believe their eyes when for the first time they saw an American supermarket: the sheer abundance and diversity that laissez-faire creates, with no shortages even imagined — this was beyond anything their socialized systems (and brains) could conceive. (To his great credit, Boris Yeltsin completely changed his way of thinking.)

The exact same is true of medicine.

I promise you what I’m telling you is accurate.

Perhaps most insidious of all: once such systems are enacted, no matter how dismal and inefficient they actually are, in a very short time, people cannot imagine life without government providing said things. In fact, this is the very situation we’re in with universal healthcare — and it’s the most challenging thing to overcome in demonstrating to people why universal healthcare does not work: the notion has already become so entrenched that people simply cannot conceive government not providing at least some measure of it.

Entrenchment is in this way a form of indoctrination.

I urge you to begin thinking of healthcare in a slightly different way. Think of it, even if it’s just for a moment, like this:

Think of it as dentistry already is in America.

Think of it as veterinary medicine already is, and Lasik and other cosmetic procedures.

Think of it like your eye-glass-clinic or optometry shop.

Now observe the sheer number and variety and quality of vet clinics and dentists and optometrists you have to choose from right now in America — precisely because those industries have been left comparatively free (though it IS significant to note that no industry has been left untouched by the horrid hand of government, and to the precise extent that it’s been meddled with, it is inflated and warped, and would be even less expensive and with better care and more options had it all been left alone).

Observe, for instance, how many dental practitioners or orthodontists or optometrists you have to choose from — their payment plans, the ACTUAL insurance you may (or may not: it’s up to each individual) purchase.

Observe the generosity and charity of most all providers and clinics.

(Though I’m not a fan of Ron Paul or his equally religious son Rand Paul, they are both MD’s — and by all accounts they are good MD’s — and they make the following point articulately, no matter the smears from both rightwingers and left: under conditions of freedom, in cases of emergency, medical practitioners don’t heartlessly let people die, as the government-lovers never tire of telling you. And before government got so involved in healthcare, many, many, many private charities — both religious and non-religious — as well as actual insurance, existed for emergency care. And it works far better than political care.)

Observe how today in America people are not bleeding from the mouths in the streets for lack of dental care, with nowhere to go. It is not a crisis. Dentists and dental offices are everywhere.

Nor are animals in America dying everywhere in the streets for want of veterinary care. Vet clinics (24 hour included) are everywhere. Private organizations and charities are everywhere for pets.

Observe how many clinics there are of ALL kinds, walk-in and otherwise: observe how they’ve sprung up under conditions of freedom and the corollary freedom to make money providing these services.

You must not allow yourself to be intimidated, bullied, or brainwashed into believing that you’re “inhumane” if you don’t believe in the vague and totally untenable notion of universal care.

Allowing full freedom, I absolutely assure you, will bring about far, far, far more care and vastly more compassion than being forced into providing medical care for everyone, and this is not just speculation.

It will also instantly abolish all the impossible-to-negotiate red-tape and bureaucracy — including (very significantly) the crony insurance system, as well as everyone’s concern with what her or his neighbors are eating and drinking and smoking since we’re all paying for each other.

If you truly want to solve the healthcare crisis — and I mean truly — you must change your thinking about what creates the problems in the first place, and also what the proper solution is.

What creates and maintains the best care?

Government bureaus?

Or conditions of freedom?

To help answer that, I urge you again to think for a moment about dental care, orthodontics, veterinary clinics, Lasik and optometry.

If you can get past all the dogma and the propaganda behind the dogma that you’ve been hammered with your entire life, you’ll see that the evidence is overwhelming.

At the very minimum, I urge you not to fall for the ridiculing tactics that you’re “inhumane” if you don’t believe in being forced to provide healthcare for everyone else. Such policies, even if they sound good and humane in theory, have dire practical consequences in how they play out: from shortages, to cost controls, to death panels and other rationing measures, to never-ending inflation.

I’ll close by saying that people often tell me that my notions of laissez-faire may have worked at one time, and yet now the world is “far too complex,” as one person recently put it, “for such a system of hands-off.” But the paradox of this and the actual truth of the matter is that just the opposite is the case:

The MORE complex a society becomes, the LESS equipped and able centralized-planning committees are to manage that complexity.

One of the best illustrations of this — best because it’s demonstrated in such a way that virtually anyone, no matter their political leaning or their level of economic understanding, can see the inherent logic of it — is in how pencils are made.

Another example is in how a sandwich is made:

Andy George tried to experience the production of a sandwich from scratch. He made a sandwich by using as little trade and processed products as possible. He had to grow vegetables, produce cheese, make bread, all himself. Of course, he ‘cheated’ a little by using kitchen tools and other ‘capital goods’ which would have been unavailable in a total autarkic economy. But even with this, he spent $1,500 and six months of his life to obtain one sandwich.

Today, it costs a few dollars and mere minutes to buy a sandwich in a supermarket. Free trade is precisely what allows us to obtain an ever more optimal division of labor when it is enabled on a large scale. This division of labor allows us to save time while reducing poverty.

That, mind you, is one sandwich, and he didn’t, of course, manufacture any of the machines or equipment he needed to make all the ingredients — nor does it even touch upon all the transportation required.

Concerning complexity and the impossibility of centralized-planning bureaus able to manage this complexity, there’s also the very closely related and insurmountable calculation problem.

Even if you hate economics, a sentiment with which I completely sympathize, I nonetheless believe it is vital that all people — left, right, or middle — grasp this very basic issue, which is not really hard to grasp: economic calculation.

It is bedrock. It is a crux. And it is in many ways all that really needs to be said.

I repeat:

The more complex any given society, the more impossible it is for any planning committees or bureaus, no matter how brilliant its members, no matter how vast their numbers, to manage for any length of time.

Whereas upon the other hand laissez-faire, through its legal recognition of person and full property rights (including the right to trade products and services and to earn money), organizes all this complexity voluntarily, seamlessly, elegantly, peacefully, and in a way beneficial to all.

And this is why so-called universal healthcare creates a healthcare system that is in actuality not universal at all — not any more than it is compassionate or humane.






Posted on

The Life and Death of Alfie Evans



“Whether one likes it or not, it is a fact that the main issues of present day politics are purely economic and cannot be understood without a grasp of economic theory.”

Wrote Ludwig von Mises.

I think his words are true, unfortunately.

Like the human body, knowledge forms an indivisible unity. It’s interconnected and deeply interwoven. Knowledge is hierarchical and contextual: one part flows inevitably into another.

At the foundation of it all is philosophy.

Philosophy forms the underpinnings of all knowledge.

People don’t believe me when I say this, and yet it’s the truth: I don’t particularly care for politics and economics.

The reason — the only reason — I’ve spent so much of my life and my time writing about these subjects is that they’re inescapable, and because they affect our lives so immediately and extraordinarily:

One is either knowledgable about them, or one isn’t.

One is either informed or one isn’t.

One either buys into the easy platitudes of the day — right, left, or middle, it makes no real difference — or one considers the issues for oneself and forms non-dogmatic conclusions.

Package-deals — i.e. what right, left, and middle offer — do not work for philosophy. Philosophy is too vast and complex.

It requires independent thought, and a great deal of it.

It takes a great deal of thought and conscious effort.

It requires independent integration, which is what true apprehension consists of.

One either jumps in and swims, or one is swept along with the tides and the trends — until, in the latter case, one grows old and one day finds that he holds convictions — convictions he’s even willing to die for — the foundations of which, however, he’s never seriously thought about or questioned, but mostly grew up with or among.

This not only can happen: it happens, I think, more often than not. People grow old and die holding like grim death onto beliefs, either secular or non, it doesn’t matter, which they’ve never bothered to seriously investigate. It is a tragedy.

The unexamined life is a tragedy.

The following is for all those who think I exaggerate the dangers of socialized medicine — a very recent event and article, even though in many ways it seems like something out of the Dark Ages: a child who didn’t die when taken off his oxygen, and his fate decided by the state against the parent’s wishes.

From the online library of Law and Liberty (an excellent resource):

In the United Kingdom, a child’s fate was decided [by the government]. The boy, Alfie Evans, died on Saturday at 23 months of age. He had been hospitalized with a rare neurological condition. The doctors decided treatment was futile and recommended it be stopped. The parents went to court to continue treatment. A judge sided with the doctors, and sent the police to make sure no one would interrupt what amounted to a medical homicide. The parents, trying everything they could to save their child, saw their own powerlessness in the powerlessness of the infant even as all involved in this situation were stripped of their innocence.

The authorities removed oxygen from the boy, who, however, refused to die during the day he was left without medical care. Like all living things, the boy wished to live, even with his disease, and so the authorities put him back on life support. At that point the father went to see the Pope, who offered the boy protection in an Italian hospital. The Italian state offered the boy citizenship and to fly him to treatment. The judge refused to allow his parents to take Alfie to treatment.

It was just another event in the news, but it is also a fundamental conflict between faith and the state— between sacred law and political power. The several judges who came to be involved in the case seemed sure that the state should take the child from the family. They told his parents that he would inevitably die, and they insisted on the state’s taking responsibility for assuring death when they did not have to. The court insisted that his death en route to a hospital still willing to treat him would not be tolerated.

What does this conflict mean in terms of freedom and virtue?

The authorities thought they were doing justice. The parents thought they should be free to seek care for their child in another country. The state disagreed and insisted that it would be illegal for them to do so. Observe how each party viewed the requirements of virtue: The father thought he was doing the right thing in taking his boy to the hospital, to save his life. Everything about being a British subject was turned upside down, for he was now required to define the right thing as consenting to allow his child to die on the orders of the very authorities who were supposed to defend Alfie’s rights, starting with his right to life. This father was in the situation of a tragic hero.

What was done was done legally, with expertise, in full view of the public, all according to authorized powers to whom everyone deferred. The judges and doctors embodied a view of justice and wisdom which few seemed to be arguing against publicly—not politicians, not the high officials of the Anglican Church, not any other important organization. Nor were there massive protests over this boy’s fate. It would seem that those who represented the majority of the people of Britain decided in favor of Alder Hey Hospital, so much so that the authority of two parents over their child was denied.

This is a view of the state that would tend to make self-government impossible, for it removes the ground of the difference between freedom and obedience to authority. Theoretically, such a state cannot be legitimated by the consent of the governed, because it does not secure their rights, starting with the right to life. It is legitimated instead by its expert and orderly administration of rules of its own making. Theoretically, the state has assumed control of human life and the definition of its limits—death, ultimately. The state has secured passive consent, so that if it does not face a revolution, there’s nothing to worry about.

Kate James and Tom Evans, Alfie’s parents, argued for their freedom, and for their right to decide for their child. They obviously thought, in taking their child to the hospital, that they had certain rights as subjects of the sovereign and certain duties to their child. Had they let him die, which was what the state would later insist on doing, they might have been prosecuted for neglect. They acted freely, but at the same time compelled by necessity. They sought to match their own moral virtues with the intellectual virtues of the doctors, for the National Health Service is a public institution. This turned out to be impossible.

From Social Contract to Suicide Pact

Britons believe that the rights their government should secure for them include a right to healthcare through the National Health Service. This is the law of the land, and a man like Tom Evans is brought to his crisis because he fulfills the requirements of the laws and believes in their justice—only to find out that the community he is part of does not believe in those rights, but instead in something else.

Since it is not reasonable to expect parents—Tom Evans, other Britons who have come into conflict with the NHS over the fate of their ill children in the past, the others who will no doubt do so in the future—to respect such decisions by the government, it can make no claim to their allegiance under the right to life. Indeed the state is discovering entirely different sources of legitimacy involving not the protection of life, but the weighing and culling of lives and the decision as to what life is worth living and what life is not worth living.

This is the tragic conflict almost everyone is ignoring. We do not think any of us should be put in such a situation in any country where politics is built on human rights. We must now confront an example of one of the most prosperous, peaceful, and sophisticated countries in the world reorienting itself away from saving lives to ending them, if the life doesn’t seem worth living.

To some extent, British authority is now a suicide pact, to borrow the phrase of Justice Robert Jackson, who insisted that the U.S. Constitution was not one. Something very important has been lost if the right to life depends on circumstances ascertained by experts and decided on by judges. And if British hospital and police personnel are willing to enforce such decisions, the loss seems coextensive with the British state. It is not an exception, but the new rule.

(Link — thank you, Marti.)


It is no joke and no game when in any society the state holds this sort of power over individual lives and decisions.

The root cause of this mentality is the notion that healthcare is a right that government grants — or not.

That, in microcosm, is why I’ve spent so much of my life and my time writing about political-economic philosophy:

Because knowledge is life, and knowledge is completely interconnected.


Read more

Click-click




Posted on

Single-Payer Falls Apart In Vermont

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin
Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin

 

Vermont, which is an extraordinarily liberal state with at least one openly socialist senator, was at one time regarded as America’s frontrunner for single-payer healthcare. But that frontrunner status just changed.

Single-payer, a disastrous idea on dozens of different levels, means that everyone pays for everyone else’s healthcare, and Vermont has just discovered one of the reasons that single-payer is, in fact, disastrous: taxes must rise.

Quoting the liberal mag Politico:

Advocates of a “Medicare for all” approach were largely sidelined during the national Obamacare debate. The health law left a private insurance system in place and didn’t even include a weaker “public option” government plan to run alongside more traditional commercial ones.

So single-payer advocates looked instead to make a breakthrough in the states. Bills have been introduced from Hawaii to New York; former Medicare chief Don Berwick made it a key plank of his unsuccessful primary race for Massachusetts governor.

Vermont under Shumlin became the most visible trailblazer. Until Wednesday, when the governor admitted what critics had said all along: He couldn’t pay for it.

“It is not the right time for Vermont” to pass a single-payer system, Shumlin acknowledged in a public statement ending his signature initiative. He concluded the 11.5 percent payroll assessments on businesses and sliding premiums up to 9.5 percent of individuals’ income “might hurt our economy.”

Vermont’s outcome is a “small speed bump,” said New York Assembly member Richard Gottfried, who’s been pushing single-payer bills for more than 20 years. But opponents says it’s the end of the road.

“If cobalt blue Vermont couldn’t find a way to make single-payer happen, then it’s very unlikely that any other state will,” said Jack Mozloom, spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business.

“There will never be a good time for a massive tax increase on employers and consumers in Vermont, so they should abandon that silly idea now and get serious,” Mozloom added.

 

Might hurt the economy, Governor? I think you can bet your health on it.

 

 

Posted on

Rebel MD

Screen Shot 2014-05-20 at 3.28.30 PM

There are several factors that contribute to the absurd costs of healthcare in America today — and all those factors are, without exception, a result of government intervention, in one form or another. But one factor alone stands out above all others. That one factor is the third-party payment system.

It doesn’t matter if the third party is an insurance company, or if that third part is a government bureau: by placing a middle-man between patient and doctor, you create this nightmarish scenario of $20,000.00 emergency room visits for an elbow injury.

As Dr. Jeffery Singer (MD) recently explained:

Last week, researchers at Harvard and Dartmouth released a report estimating that health care costs will continue to grow faster than the economy for at least the next two decades. This is a tremendous burden on average Americans, who already spend nearly a fifth of their average annual pre-tax income on health care.

Why can’t Obamacare stop this trend? Because the law doubles down on one of the biggest contributing factors to the high price of medical care: Health insurance.

Health insurance is a complicated system that serves patients’ needs last. It introduces a third party into the doctor-patient relationship. This can be a private company—such as modern insurance companies—or the government—such as in Medicare and Medicaid.

“Obamacare’s architects expanded a health insurance system that artificially increases costs and decreases choice.”

Third party entities don’t spend money like you and I do. We care about two things when we buy a product: quality and affordability. Insurance providers aren’t overly concerned about either. Affordability isn’t their biggest concern because they’re spending someone else’s money—their members’ premiums. They’re also not concerned as much about quality because they’re spending that money on someone other than themselves—the patients receiving treatment.

This is a basic reflection of human nature.

The failure to understand this has been a fatal chink in all Republican arguments against ObamaCare:

You can’t denounce one form of third-party payment only to favor another, since any form will invariably drive up costs.

Remember: what we call “health insurance” in America today is not actual insurance. It’s pre-paid healthcare. Insurance is something you buy in the unlikely event of an emergency. Actual insurance, free from government regulation, is legitimate.

All of which I mention because if there’s any good thing that’s come out of the whole ObamaCare dog-and-pony show, it’s that it’s brought many of these issues to the forefront — and people are beginning to realize exactly what’s at issue here.

It’s also spawned (at last) a number of doctors to become more forceful and philosophical in the defense of their own lives and labor, which, incidentally, is the fundamental and inarguable principle at stake in all questions of socialized medicine:

Do doctors and nurses possess the right to their own life and labor, or do they not?

Rebel MD is the most recent website I’ve come across the defends, forcefully though somewhat inconsistently, the principle of individual rights in medicine.





Posted on

The ObamaCare Provision That Compels You To Pay For My Contraception


The storm of controversy surrounding the provision in ObamaCare that will force America’s many Catholic institutions to fund, for example, sterilizations, contraceptives, and morning-after pills for their employees — “despite each of these being fully athwart fundamental Catholic doctrine on sexuality, abortion and life,” as Rex Murphy eloquently put it — has many people like me wondering the following:

Why suddenly the big furor now? I mean, this is socialism:

I don’t pay for my own medicine, because it’s not my responsibility: it’s yours.

This is exactly what you voted for when you voted for Barack Obama.

Please don’t insult us by being surprised now, after all the time we spent trying to tell you.

Governmental compulsion: it’s the American way.

“We’ve actually been operating in a way entirely consistent with free-market principles.” — Barack Obama, 2009



Posted on

The Best Day Yet For Individual Freedom — By Ilya Shapiro

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Before joining Cato, he was a special assistant and advisor to the Multi-National Force in Iraq. The following article, which is brief and well-done, appeared June 8th, 2011, on the CATO website:

In the most important appeal of the Obamacare constitutional saga, today was the best day yet for individual freedom. The government’s lawyer, Neal Katyal, spent most of the hearing on the ropes, with the judicial panel extremely cautious not to extend federal power beyond its present outer limits of regulating economic activity that has a substantial aggregate effect on interstate commerce.

As the lawyer representing 26 states against the federal government said, “The whole reason we do this is to protect liberty.” With those words, former solicitor general Paul Clement reached the essence of the Obamacare lawsuits. With apologies to Joe Biden, this is a big deal not because we’re dealing with a huge reorganization of the health care industry, but because our most fundamental first principle is at stake: we limit government power so people can live their lives the way they want.

This legal process is not an academic exercise to map the precise contours of the Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause — or even to vindicate our commitment to federalism or judicial review. No, all of these worthy endeavors are just means to achieve the goal of maximizing human freedom and flourishing. Indeed, that is the very reason the government exists in the first place.

And the 11th Circuit judges saw that. Countless times, Judges Dubina and Marcus demanded that the government articulate constitutional limiting principles to the power it asserted. And countless times they pointed out that never in history has Congress tried to compel people to engage in commerce as a means of regulating commerce. Even Judge Hull, reputed to be the most liberal member of the panel, conducted a withering cross-examination to establish that the individual mandate didn’t help that many people get affordable care, that the majority of people currently without coverage would be exempt from the requirement (presumably due to their income level).

In short, while we should never read too much into an oral argument, I’m more optimistic about this case now than any other.

Posted on

Second Judge Rules Individual Mandate Unconstitutional

Tad the bartender: Did they shoot your horse?

Tom Reagan: If there’s any justice.

— Miller’s Crossing (1989)

Well, thank goodness, there is still some, Tom.

This Monday, January 31st, 2011, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson became the second judge to officially recognize the painfully obvious: namely, that forcing people to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.

Judge Vinson ruled that the reform law’s so-called “individual mandate” went “too far” in requiring that Americans start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty, stating furthermore:

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications.”

Difficult decision? Seriously? This is a no-brainer.

Today was a small victory for my favorite lady, and yet Judge Vinson — who was so overwhelming correct in his ruling — makes me nervous with his equivocal language, leading to the real question:

How could any sane person actually believe that government possesses legitimate authority to force me or anyone to buy health insurance?


Posted on

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas: ‘The Health Care Bill Is A Disaster’

No shit.

The only real question here is this: what took you liberals so long to figure it out?

And, make no mistake, Evan Thomas is a liberal — about as liberal as they come, as a matter of fact, once even uplifting his hero Barack to the status of a deity.

From The Daily Caller:

“It ain’t because of Congress,” Thomas said. “The unemployment will go down a little bit but the game in Washington will still be this unreal game. Health care though – I got to say, is one place where I think where Republicans are right.”

Back in November 2009, Thomas admitted the health care reform bill had flaws, but still voiced his support for it. Now he has proclaimed it a failure.

“The health care bill is a disaster,” Thomas continued. “We’re sort of slowly learning – it’s not working. It’s interesting – they’re implementing it and it’s not working out at all as people anticipated. There’s all sorts of wildly wrong projections. As it’s being practiced – it’s failed.”

Read the full article here.

Watch the video here:


Posted on

The States Versus ObamaCare — By Pam Bondi

Smart Lady Pam Bondi
Pam Bondi is the attorney general of Florida. In the latest edition of the Wall Street Journal (January 5, 2011), she wrote the following article, which is a rather remarkable article that I think should be read by every American who believes that (a) government has legitimate authority to force each of us to pay for one other’s healthcare; and (b) that congress acted lawfully in the methods used to pass that abortion known as ObamaCare:

This week begins the inauguration and swearing-in ceremonies for newly elected officials all over the country. One thing many of us have in common is that the voters rewarded us for our outspoken opposition to ObamaCare.

The electorate’s decisive rejection of the Obama administration’s policies reveals a pervasive concern over the federal government’s disregard of fundamental aspects of our nation’s Constitution. No legislation in our history alters the balance of power between Washington and the states so much as ObamaCare does.

The tactics used to pass the health-care bill gave all Americans ample warning of the constitutional wrongdoing that was about to occur. Concerns were raised in the summer of 2009 over the constitutionality of the individual mandate and other portions of the bill, yet the president and Congress proceeded full-steam ahead. In the Senate, the much-ridiculed “Cornhusker Kickback” gave Nebraska an all-expenses-paid Medicaid expansion program. Due to public pressure, the provision was eventually removed from the final law.

Following Senate passage, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to “deem-and-pass” the federal health-care bill, a constitutionally suspect procedure of passing a bill without actually voting on it. Instead, the speaker allowed the House to vote on the Senate version of the bill without amendments, and Congress subsequently used a parliamentary maneuver called budget reconciliation to “fix” the flawed bill [emphasis mine]. In the end, not a single Republican voted for the legislation.

Unwilling to acquiesce to such a blatantly unconstitutional act, Florida and 19 other states challenged the new law and its requirement that nearly every American purchase health insurance. The lawsuit is based on the common sense notion that an individual’s decision not to purchase health insurance is not an act of “commerce” that can be regulated under Congress’s constitutionally enumerated powers. Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has invoked shifting and contradictory arguments in its efforts to defend the indefensible.

The U.S. Department of Justice first argued that the fine triggered by noncompliance with the individual mandate was not a penalty but a tax authorized by the Constitution’s Taxing and Spending Clause—hoping no one noticed President Obama’s claim on national television that the individual mandate is “absolutely not a tax.” The Justice Department continued to press this tax argument despite the fact that Congress referred to the individual mandate as a “penalty,” excluded it from the bill’s revenue-raising section, and claimed the Commerce Clause as the constitutional authority to pass it.

The federal judge presiding over the states’ lawsuit in Pensacola, Fla., got it right when he wrote: “Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing, after which the defenders of that legislation take an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ tack and argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely.”

The Department of Justice has even argued that the individual mandate regulates the so-called commerce-related activities of “mental processes” and “economic decisions.” It doesn’t matter if a person is currently engaged in an activity affecting commerce, according to the Justice Department, but only that a person inevitably will. Gaining little traction with this thought-equals-action argument, the Justice Department pivoted and claimed that the individual mandate is “essential” for this kind of health-care reform. The Constitution grants Congress only specific powers—it does not empower Congress to pursue its policy objectives by any means necessary.

As new state attorneys general take office in the coming week, I fully expect an increase in the ranks of the states fighting ObamaCare in court. Our lawsuit, together with a similar lawsuit filed by Virginia’s attorney general, has exposed the health-care law’s threat to individual liberty and to the constitutional structure that the Founders designed as a means of protecting that liberty. The stakes are clear and compelling: If the courts deem the federal health-care law to be constitutional, then there are no meaningful constitutional restraints on Congress’s power to regulate virtually every facet of our lives.
(Link)

Here, though, is what I’d really like to know from all defenders of socialized medicine:

Upon whose authority or upon what authority do you justify the wild notion that a group of bureaucrats possesses legitimate power to force me to pay for your healthcare? Says who? And why?

Posted on

Mandatory Health Insurance And Car Insurance — “A Stupid Analogy”

Tibor Machan
The following article, which I reprint only in part and which destroys the mandatory-car-insurance-mandatory-health-insurance canard, was written by Tibor Machan, who teaches business ethics and general philosophy at Chapman University in Orange, CA:


A Stupid Analogy

Now that Judge Henry E. Hudson of the Virginia district court ruled that the Obama health care measure violates the U. S. Constitution by forcing people to make purchases they may not want to make, there are innumerable sophists who want to refute the rationale for the ruling. They trot out the “argument” that since people living in states may be required to carry auto insurance, they can also be made to purchase anything the government, including the feds, decides they must.

But this analogy fails because people do not have to drive! Yet under Obamacare by simply being living citizens, they would have to purchase health insurance. Never even mind that the state regulations requiring people to purchases auto insurance aren’t universal across the country and different states have the constitutional authority to handle the issues involved in their own way, with no federal mandate dictating to them what they must do.

Furthermore, one rationale in support of the state requirement that citizens who choose to drive carry insurance is that nearly all driving happens on state roads. There is no requirement to get insurance if one stays off them and confines one’s driving to private thoroughfares. And this is because it is the states that claim legal ownership of roads and they then get to set the standards for what those using the roads need to do for the privilege. (Yes, it is deemed a privilege, not a right, because of the state’s collective ownership of most roads.)

So the analogy with state requirements to carry driver’s insurance is fallacious. But when that’s pointed out, another tack is put forth, namely, that ill health is contagious like the plague or leprosy. This is desperate since it is blatantly wrong. One can have all sorts of ailments that will not be communicated to anyone near or far. One can contract ill health, injuries, maladies and so forth without the involvement of others. Sometimes it is just misfortune that brings this about, sometimes it is one’s own reckless conduct, sometimes the recklessness of people with whom one freely associates and rarely because of injuries sustained from what others do. In no such cases are those left out implicated and thus no one should be legally required to foot the bill of the health care measures, including insurance, that may be need to fix or treat things.

The sophists who bring up this line of shabby reasoning are capitalizing on the common sense idea that when people emit harm from their private activities–such as manufacture, smoking, reckless driving, and so forth–they ought to shoulder the burden that befalls others in consequences of it all. In short, no one ought to dump on other people the cost and liabilities of one’s own malpractice.

(Read the full article here.)

Posted on

Judge Rules AGAINST ObamaCare’s Individual Mandate

Sage Judge Henry Hudson
In the biggest blow yet to ObamaCare, Judge Henry E. Hudson (U.S. District Court of Virginia) recognized the obvious: namely, it is utterly unconstitutional for any government to force its citizens to carry insurance, or pay a penalty if they don’t. In the Judge’s wise words: “[It] exceeds the constitutional boundaries of congressional power.”

And:

“[The individual mandate] would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers. At its core, this dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance — or crafting a scheme of universal health insurance coverage — it’s about an individual’s right to choose to participate.”

Indeed, indeed. This is a textbook example (one of an endless number) of how so-called progressive liberalism is, like all other forms of socialism, a philosophy of force — a philosophy that must resort to force in order to achieve its goals. So don’t be duped by all their peace-loving talky-talky. In actuality, these people worship at the shrine of authoritarianism, governmental power, and state coercion. Their ideology cannot succeed in any other way.

Though this ruling will be appealed, drug-out, and very possibly overturned, it is appropriate, I think, for us to take a moment to say, thank you, Judge Henry E. Hudson, for recognizing and codifying the painfully obvious.

More here.

Posted on

Saudi King Abdullah Won’t Use “Universal” Health Coverage But Comes To The U.S. For His Blood Clot Treatment

This isn’t new: everyone knows and has always known that the best doctors and the best healthcare in the world are to be found in the United States. Which is why, when the chips are down, the United States is precisely where they all come for treatment.

No, the reason this particular story is a little more interesting than the usual traduce-America’s-health-care-system-until-you-get-seriously-sick scenario is that Saudi King Abdullah reportedly phoned Obama the day after Obamacare was forced through congress (via the unlawful use of the reconciliation process) and congratulated him on its passage.
As Doug Powers reports:

The day after the Obamacare law passed, Saudi King Abdullah reportedly called President Obama to congratulate him. The bill, it seems, was one more step toward the US embracing a superior universal health care system like that which can be found in Saudi Arabia, where treatments for medical problems such as, oh, say, blood clots, are fully covered.

Now, the king of the country with that health care system that gives the US something to strive for won’t be treated in that system, but will instead come to the US for treatment. He’s lucky the law that will make US health care system more closely resemble the Saudi system — the one that isn’t good enough for Saudi royalty — hasn’t kicked in yet:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Saudi Arabia’s aged ruler will fly to the United States for medical tests over a blood clot, according to a Saudi official, in a development that would renew questions about succession in the oil-rich kingdom.

The 86-year-old King Abdullah is set to leave on Monday, three days after he was admitted to the hospital suffering from back pain due to a blood clot, the official said late Saturday. The official didn’t say which hospital would receive the king.

To paraphrase John McCain’s question, when Obamacare is fully implemented in America, where will rich Saudis go for health care?

(Link)

Posted on

Doctor Hal Scherz: Dear Patients — Vote to Repeal ObamaCare

Dr. Hal Scherz
Doctor Hal Scherz is a pediatric urological surgeon at Georgia Urology and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. He also serves on the faculty of Emory University Medical School and is president of Docs4PatientCare. Just recently, he wrote that “because the issue this upcoming election is so stark — literally life and death for millions of Americans in the years ahead — we are this week posting a ‘Dear Patient’ letter in our waiting rooms.” This is, in part, what that letter says:

“Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish care guidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in charge of your health care decisions. This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world.”

In this same letter, Doctor Scherz writes:

“Badly exacerbating the current doctor shortage [ObamaCare will bring] major cost increases, rising insurance premiums, higher taxes, a decline in new medical techniques, a fall-off in the development of miracle drugs as well as rationing by government panels and by bureaucrats like passionate rationing advocate Donald Berwick that will force delays of months or sometimes years for hospitalization or surgery.”

He also cites the brutal, unignorable, irrefutable facts of ObamaCare’s passage:

“Despite countless protests by doctors and overwhelming public opposition — up to 60% of Americans opposed this bill — the current party in control of Congress pushed this bill through with legal bribes and Chicago style threats and is determined now to resist any ‘repeal and replace’ efforts. This doctor’s office is non-partisan — always has been, always will be. But the fact is that every Republican voted against this bad bill while the Democratic Party leadership and the White House completely dismissed the will of the people in ruthlessly pushing through this legislation….

“In the face of voter anger some Democratic candidates are now trying to make a cosmetic retreat, calling for minor modifications or pretending they are opposed to government-run medicine. Once the election is over, however, they will vote with their party bosses against repealing this bill.”

The letter’s final lines are perhaps the most important:

“Please remember when you vote this November that unless the Democratic Party receives a strong negative message about this power grab our healthcare system will never be fixed and the doctor patient relationship will be ruined forever.”

In the Wall Street Journal, the following from Doctor Scherz is appended:

This message is going out to an electorate that is already frustrated over what they see happening to health care. Missouri voters rejected ObamaCare overwhelmingly in August, voting by a margin of 71%-29% to reject the federal requirement that all individuals purchase health insurance. Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen has assessed that ObamaCare is “a disaster” for Democrats. And around the country many little-noticed primaries have reflected voter rage—including the Republican primary victory of surgeon, political newcomer, and advocate of repeal Daniel Benishek in Michigan’s first district.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s damage-control efforts have fallen flat. The latest round of pro-ObamaCare television spots targeting the elderly and starring veteran actor Andy Griffith have not only failed to move the polling numbers. They have caused five U.S. Senators to ask for an investigation of the ads as a violation of federal laws barring the use of tax dollars ($750,000) for campaign purposes.

(Link)

Posted on

A Doctor’s Take On Healthcare


The dynamic Doctor Mariela Resendes (M.D.) is a private practitioner who spent her previous 5 years as the Managing Partner/CEO of the largest Radiology practice in the San Joaquin Valley of California, CMI Radiology Group. Just recently, she wrote an irrefutable and scathing essay on the coming healthcare disaster that Barack Obama and his clownish administration have just unleashed. I reprint it here in full:

As a practicing doctor in California it troubles me that those with the ability to influence health care legislation have either been politically motivated to remain silent, or strikingly inarticulate when it comes to voicing the major issues patients and taxpayers will face with the new health care bill. My own, long-held view has been that any reform should be of the free market variety.

In that sense, I’m increasingly scared as I learn more about what’s inside the health legislation passed by Congress not long ago. Despite the rising level of unhappiness with what has transpired, it dismays me that the general public, like me, is not fully aware of the financial tsunami that is on the way for patients, insurers and hospitals thanks to this legislation, not to mention the irregular way in which it was passed.

In the newspapers we all read that the legislation was passed via reconciliation. Most people do not understand what this represented. What Congress did was to pass this legislation under the Congressional Budget Act of 1984, which allows a loophole to avoid a 60 vote filibuster in laws which refer to changes in revenue and spending amounts; i.e. budgetary issues.

The legislation which Congress passed certainly does affect the budget, but clearly the bill’s intent wasn’t budgetary; rather it concerned dramatic changes for a large portion of our economy: health care. Given the bill’s intent, one can only hope that the upcoming elections bring greater ideological balance so that what promises to be damaging can at the very least be amended.

“Obamacare”, as it is colloquially termed, is financially a disaster for doctors, hospitals, insurers, and will ultimately be a disaster for our nation’s budget. It is also unfortunate for patients needing care.

Obamacare’s proponents tout the legislation’s cost controls, along with expansion of coverage for those who currently do not have insurance. The policy wonks seek cost containment and “efficient” use of resources. More realistically, cost containment could only be achieved if access to care were rationed.

Rationing in mind, Rahm Emmanuel’s brother published a very well received paper in the New England Journal Of Medicine about efficient or optimal deployment of resources in health care. The upshot is that a young man is worth spending a lot of money on, a young child much less, and for seniors, pretty much nothing; all in a calculated return on investment model.

For physicians, Obamacare initially offered promises of tort reform, as well as promises to reverse the Medicare cuts that made it so difficult for physicians to practice. Neither is in the final legislation. As a result, doctors will continue to practice defensive medicine, and for doing so will face 20%+ cuts in their Medicare payments.

Physicians in primary care will initially see an income boost from 2011-2014, thus encouraging them to take on indigent patients the system needs to absorb. Unfortunately, starting in 2014, the payments per patient will fall for primary care doctors too.

Specialists will receive a financial hit right from the beginning. The goal here is to have less in the way of specialists, and more general practitioners. On its face this will drive more doctors into early retirement.

As for the physicians that choose to continue practicing, they’ll have difficulty staying afloat financially, and many will seek employment opportunities similar to those of “foundation” practices (such as those seen in states like California where hospitals can’t employ physicians), or hospital owned practices in other states.

The explicit goal here is to slow the move toward private practice. Doctors in foundation types of practices act more like union or shift-workers, and less like professionals. Their productivity tends to be lower than in traditional private practices; ergo more doctors are needed for a similar number of patients. Considering a scenario of rising physician retirement alongside a large increase in the number of patients, it is unclear how treatment and diagnosis will occur in a timely fashion.

Hospitals are similarly not going to fare well, and many will simply go under. Previously, hospitals took in higher payments from privately insured patients in order to care for those who couldn’t pay, or for those covered by Medicaid. At the same time, hospitals which had a higher number of indigent patients also received what is called disproportionate share funds from state and federal governments. Rural hospitals in particular received extra funds.

But with Washington’s new mandate, the expectation is that all of the previous non-paying patients will now pay for themselves such that subsidies for indigent-care will be eliminated. Unfortunately, this will occur in concert with reduced inflows from privately insured patients whose costs will be reduced to Medicaid levels.

In short, the money from the increased volume of “paying” patients is not enough to counter the loss of disproportionate funds and decreased classic private insurance payments. The net result will be a deficit for many hospitals. They will not be able to keep their doors open if they sustain persistent losses, which is what is expected.

Many insurance companies will be squeezed out of existence thanks to rules that will bar them from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. And unlike the federal government they won’t be able to operate in the red forever. The end result points to a single-payer system run out of Washington.

Looking ahead, it is increasingly apparent that by 2020 we will have severe cuts in service thanks to rising retirement among doctors, a decrease in the number of private insurers, and a reduction in the number of hospitals due to federal mandates that fail to marry costs with services. The end result will be rationing and delay of elective procedures, denial of expensive but effective treatments a la England, and most likely a single-payer system the likes of which is seen in other, less advanced health care systems around the world.

Here is more on how our healthcare crisis began.

And here is the real solution.