Saturday, March 05, 2011

Dirty, Filthy, Greedy Capitalists

In the midst of the Obamacare debate, an astounding and possibly racist, imperialist discovery has been made. Capitalism is responsible for lowering medical costs. Can you believe it?
In some of the most significant changes in decades, hospital systems are beginning to post their prices publicly and offer a range of help, including big discounts to uninsured and underinsured people with limited household incomes.

Health insurers also have embraced the trend. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Health Alliance Plan, Priority Health and Aetna are among those with improved Web sites that provide the average cost of a procedure. Some sites even zoom in on local prices when visitors type in their ZIP code.

"It's a fundamental shift" in how health care prices are set and publicized, said Stephen Hathaway, chief revenue officer for the Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System.

The changes come as Michigan's uninsured population has grown to 1.35 million, an increase of 200,000 between 2007 and 2009, the latest year of information available from the state health department.
Didn't Obama and his progressive minions assure us that only the government can bring down health care costs? And they insisted that only their preferred method, strong government intervention to the point of forcing all citizens to buy health insurance from from a government insurance provider )as private insurance companies are to be driven out of business) would insure that we Americans continue to enjoy some of the world's best medical care. This, of course, doesn't apply to the over 700 organizations (including labor unions who fought long and hard to encourage the passage of Obamacare) who have been given waivers so that they do NOT have to participate in Obamacare because it's driven up their health care costs. Huh? What? Driven costs up?

Wait. Did up become down, and down become up? Have I not been informed of Progressive changes in the English language? Or is somebody not being honest with the American public?

But seriously folks, now that it has been demonstrated once again that Capitalism and free markets are responsible for lower costs, greater wealth creation, greater freedom, increased innovation, a better standard of living by just about any honest measure you can choose, and that increased government control over the economy leads to the opposite, why are some people still clamoring for more government spending to "create jobs."

Do some people absolutely refuse to learn?

Update:
I found this article after I posted.
“It’s an industry that’s going through the roof,” said Mark Semple, president of Vancouver-based Passport Medical. “It’s wait times, it’s cost, it’s price, it’s quality and accessibility.”

Retired accountant Gary Davidge of Calgary started looking into hip replacements two years ago when they cost $45,000 U.S. in Arizona. When the arthritis pain in his hip intensified in December, a medical broker found him a price of $18,800 in Montana.

Although Mr. Davidge’s preference would have been to have his operation at home funded by Canada’s public health system, the average wait was a year to 18 months, and no one could tell him with certainty when the surgery would take place.
So, as others before me have asked, where do the Canadians go (and where do we go) to escape socialized medicine?

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Friday, August 01, 2008

A Couple of Interesting Links

As people living at a certain time in history, we look around at all that is wrong with the world and think to ourselves that it was so much better way-back-when. The problem is that there was no way-back-when. All of the problems we face today have been faced in the past by other societies. The thing to remember is that we must keep our sense of humor. As bad as things may seem at times, you can always find laughter somewhere. The newest source is the website created by those faux commies at The People's Cube. This one is: Best Obama Facts. According to the description at the top of the page,
The living heroic legend that is Barack Obama has already broken the pop-culture record of Baghdad Bob and is now approaching that of Chuck Norris and Vladimir Putin. When even Obama's official campaign is forced to launch a fact-checking website to keep his runaway aura under control, you just know that Obama's public persona has developed a life of its own and is resisting efforts to catch it and put it on Ritalin. We thought that the best way to take control of the situation would be by using Obama's own patented method of hopeful approach to reality. So we built a radically different website: it looks like Obama's fact-checking site, only instead of chasing cowardly facts and arguing old truths that are tarnished and tedious, we invent new,sparkling-clean truths that are exciting and heroic. The beauty of this approach is that when new truths become old and tarnished, they can be easily thrown under the bus and replaced with newer and better heroic truths, ensuring Obama's glorious march towards a higher metaphysical plane of unstoppable service to humankind.
There is much more, some of it first seen at The People's Cube, and some brand new; at least I'd never seen it before.

While not nearly as humorous as the previous link (although he can provoke chuckles when he wants to), Jonah Goldberg's column on capitalism is still worth reading.
We've all witnessed the tendency to take a boon for granted. Being accustomed to a provision naturally leads the human heart to consider that provision an entitlement. Hence the not-infrequent lawsuits from prison inmates cruelly denied their rights to cable TV or apple brown betty for desert.

And so it goes, I think, with capitalism generally.

Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.

People ask, "Why is there poverty in the world?" It's a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.

The interesting question isn't "Why is there poverty?" It's "Why is there wealth?" Or: "Why is there prosperity here but not there?"

At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.


So go get some laughs and go be better informed. The world's troubles will remain, or they will be traded for new ones. We can still care about them, but if you don't laugh sometimes you will go nuts.

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