The focus of this article is the fact that Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the person responsible for administering Obamacare, doesn't really understand the laws surrounding implementation of this new set of laws. Going by past Obama appointments, and Obama himself, this is not surprising.
What caught my attention though, was this sentence:
Larry Levitt, health insurance expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said that in setting the sign-up start date the administration had to balance three competing interests: keeping the enrollment period short enough to prevent people from waiting to see whether they developed a health condition that needed insurance; keeping the period long enough to allow consumers to learn about their options; and allowing enough time to have the sign-up system ready for an onslaught of applications.
I thought that one of the selling points of the deceptively named, Affordable Care Act, was that insurers could no longer discriminate against a person with a pre-existing condition.
It seems that while insurers can't, the Obama administration can.
Go ahead. Watch the video. Warning: you will have to laugh to keep from crying. This idiot is EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus. The EPA, as we know, is a government agency that functions to create havoc out of progress, and to hamstring society in its quest to create wealth. It works to raise the cost of everything so that we, the average tax payer and consumer get screwed coming and going. We pay taxes to support this life-sucking agency, and we pay higher prices to compensate for the higher cost of doing business thanks to the infinite and constantly expanding lists of regulations. The fact that we have this agency, created in 1970, gives us one more way to shoot ourselves in the foot, or if you want to get more extreme, as I did in my previous post, as a tool to bring down our society.
I had NPR on the radio this morning as I was driving. Daniel Schorr was doing his weekly news analysis schtick with who-ever-the-host was. In discussing Obama's plan for an executive order to create a deficit reduction panel, they brought up the conundrum associated with reducing the deficit. You see, according to these two NPR geniuses, we need government spending in order to create jobs. And this, of course, will increase the deficit. We have two mutually exclusive needs which can only be solved by the Obama government.
Now, I'm probably not smart enough (as evidenced by the fact that I did not vote for Obama) to work for NPR, but in my backward, simple-minded way of thinking, it seems to me that the way to reduce the deficit is to stop spending so much money, especially the money that the government has to borrow. As approximately two thirds of government spending is done on entitlement programs, I would suggest we start cutting there. After all, entitlement spending is predicated on taking my money that I've worked for, and money from other workers and giving it to people who did not work for it. So besides cutting government spending, that would also leave more money in the pockets of the people who worked for it. We, the people who worked for the money could then take this money and spend it on things that we wanted to spend it on. You know, things like home improvement, new appliances, food, clothes, cars, books, music, vacations to exotic places.
Hey! Wait a minute. If we regular folk we allowed to keep more of our own money and spend it on things that we in our own simple minded, non-government controlled think that we want and need, more people would need to work to create the things that we want and need. Why, that would mean more jobs. For people. Outside of the government. It would be just like an uncontrolled market, a free market even.
That's my embarrassingly foolish plan. I bet Daniel Schorr and the other heavy thinkers at NPR would never come up with anything as silly as what I'm suggesting. After all, they're on NPR. They love Obama, and they understand that all wealth and all freedom is government created. The idea of being endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights is the height of naivete. How could I think such a thing possible?
The following letter was printed in today's Detroit News:
The doctor-patient relationship is already compromised. Patient care decisions are influenced by private insurance companies, private clinic administrators and private hospital business officers. Private institutions lack transparency and provide little or no opportunity for doctors and patients to effect changes and improvements. Government, on the other hand is participatory. Witness health care debate. Private companies would never consider opening public discussion on what they do and how they do it. I favor the Obama health care initiative because government is by Constitution and legislation more responsive to public opinion than any other American institution.
Go ahead, read it again. I didn't believe it the first time either.
So since government is participatory, will there be public debate on my next colonoscopy? What about yours? Will the letter writer, instead of getting a second opinion if he needs one on a serious medical issue, take his doctor in front of a televised congressional investigation? Will there be debate in the Senate?
What about intrusion by lobbyists and wealthy special interests? Will the writer know he's getting the best care possible, or will he (or she) be subject to some inferior yet more expensive methods that were pushed on his congressional representative who then forced them on to his busy, unsuspecting doctor? Will congressional opinion on the writer's medical care be based on knowledge of the writer as a person or a patient, or will it be based on what ever will get his representative reelected? Will campaign contributions have any effect on the medical care he receives?
It doesn't matter. Government is transparent . . . especially under Obama.
Whose responsibility is it to make sure a child is fed? Being a parent, I always assumed that one of the responsibilities that parenthood brings is providing for the children that you bring into this world. I know that others disagree with me, and that there have been parents since the beginning of humanity who have ignored their children, ran away from them, or worse. But the average parent who brings or sends their children to school every day should take that responsibility seriously, and I'd like to think that most do.
At the school where I teach, around 85 percent of students qualify for a free or reduced price lunch. And now, as I'm sure I've reported before, all students are entitled to free breakfast, which is usually some kind of sickeningly sweet General Mills cereal and milk, or a Poptart, or these weirdly shaped edible objects that are labeled as bagels with cream cheese. Not all of the students eat these breakfasts. Some pull out their Flaming Hot Cheetos, or Cheez-it's, or Doritos, or BBQ flavored potato chips, or Airheads, or Snickers bars instead. I used to object. I used to insist on healthy snacks. Parents overruled me.
One little girl has come in late a couple of times recently, around 11:00. This is about a half hour after snack time, and almost two hours before lunch. Both times she's asked if she could get her breakfast. She was hungry. Mean guy that I am, I refused. Students pick up their breakfasts when they walk in the room at 8:25. By 9:00, the remaining breakfasts are carted off to be reused the next day. She would have had to walk down to the other end of the school to the cafeteria, where lunches were already being served to beg for her cereal and milk. I thought it would take too much more time out of her already shortened school day. Then she asked if she could eat her snack, a bag of chips. I wasn't going to let her until she explained that Mom doesn't feed her breakfast on school days, as she gets a free breakfast at school.
Yes, she is being raised by a young single mother, you know, the kind that Ann Coulter was less than kind to when she had the politically incorrect nerve to reveal the statistics on how poorly children of single mothers do in life. Coulter took a lot of heat from resentful members of the media who can't admit that their feel-good opinions of their own virtue have no basis in reality. This is the kind of mother that Coulter was talking about.
I have no doubt that mom loves her daughter and that she is doing the best she can. However, mom, like many single moms I've dealt with over the years, is working and going to school. She wants to improve her own life and the life or her daughter, but due to the time she must spend on her own pursuits, time and money for her daughter are in short supply. Should she and other single moms be held up as heroes for working hard for their children?
I don't think so. Yes, they're working hard, but they've made the poor decision to create a human being who is totally dependent on them, who looks to them as the example for life, and who has to suffer due to the adult's lack of maturity and decision making ability. Single moms have to work much harder than women who have a husband to help with child rearing. And as Ann and other vilified writers point out, children need fathers. And not just to make sure they have breakfast at home on the days that they're late for school. Well, that is, I think there are other reasons. I'll ask my kids.
One mom, a few years ago, thrilled at the birth of her latest fatherless child, was further cheered because her boyfriend (the father) was visiting regularly and wanted to help raise the child. I never heard anything about the father of her child who was in my class.
It's not just single moms though. One year, one of my students came in with a free lunch form. I sent her to the office to turn it in. She was from a two parent family. Mom drove a new Mercedes.
Is the government, through myriad welfare agencies, subsidizing laziness, cheating, irresponsibility, and poor choices? You bet they are. But that's one of those things that's obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to patterns in child rearing these past 40 years.
OK, I disagree with the premise. That doesn't make the editorial writer stupid. But for the Free Press to run thinking this sloppy, I just have to wonder how the writer and the editor make a living in their jobs. The article begins,
Anyone who still can't understand why health care reform should be the government's business need look no further than the pharmaceutical industry, which is raising its prices at the fastest rate in years despite an economic downturn that has pushed most consumer prices lower.
It ends,
What federal lawmakers should take away from this is the necessity of giving the government broad authority to negotiate drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid recipients, just as large private insurers do. Economists are divided over how effective such reforms will be at reining in prices, but as current price trends show, what consumers pay for prescriptions is too important a cost driver to be left entirely to the private market.
But inbetween these two paragraphs, it is written,
Pharmaceutical industry spokesmen cite the need to maximize profits on popular drugs whose patent protection is about to expire. But most outsiders believe drug makers are anticipating government regulations that may limit their ability to raise prices in the near future. Economists recall a similar spike in 2006, just before Congress agreed to subsidize prescriptions for tens of millions of Medicare recipients.
So, according to this editorial, pharmaceutical companies are raising their prices in response to predicted government policies, which are going to interfere with their abilities to price their products as they see fit. That is neither your mother's nor Adam Smith's private market. What the Free Press is calling for is more government interference to solve problems created by previous government interference in the marketplace. But somehow, the government jumping in and distorting the market to the point that people can't afford their medicine is the fault of the "private market." That's a cycle (and a tactic to increase demands for more government) as old as governments. The problem is that we are taught to forget or ignore previous government episodes of big government screwing up the market in order to make us accept the next round of interference, which, with past experience as our guide, will only lead to more problems.
With the pharmaceutical industries one of the scapegoats du-jour, I suppose we can expect to see more "hard hitting" editorials exposing them for daring to make a profit in these times of economic turbulence . . . caused by whom? Oh yeah, a government that is out to solve all of our problems - at the cost of - greater and more numerous problems.
I read a lot of history. I usually mark pages with a tiny bookmark if there's something I want to remember. Sometimes I go back and look through some of the things I marked. Sometimes after reading the marked pages, I forget what I marked. Sometimes I don't. A few months back, I read Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose. It's about the Lewis and Clark expedition, and I highly recommend it. It's a great adventure story, and a great lesson about what Americans can do when we put our minds to it. It was only a brief time ago when we lived in a "can do" culture. Somehow over the past 40 or so years, we've slowly convinced ourselves that we can't and that even if we could, we're not worthy of doing it. That's a mode of thought that must change if we're going to survive as a nation, and if our nation is going to be worthy of survival.
But that's not what I wanted to write about. As we get closer to November's presidential election, both candidates are making big promises. If elected, they are going to be generous with government largesse. Except for Obama. He's going to be really, really generous. But then, if I had access to billions and billions of dollars of other people's money, and if I could get elected president of the United States by promising some of this money to - let's say "encourage" people to vote for me, I might be just as bighearted, giving money to my friends in this country, and maybe a few spare dollars to friends in other countries, and if the government hasn't actually collected that money yet, what's a few billion dollars more added to our national debt? Who's going to notice? And outside of a few party poopers, who's going to care?
Things weren't always this way. On page 62 of Undaunted Courage, Ambrose talks about the White House and how it was run under John Adams and then Thomas Jefferson.
. . . His salary was $25,000 per year - a princely sum, but the expenses were also great. In 1801, Jefferson spent $6500 for provisions and groceries, $2700 for servants (some of whom were liveried) $500 for Lewis' salary, $3000 for wine. And it turned out he had to buy his own horses; Congress, thinking it an outrage the government should pay for the president's horses, ordered that the ones Adams had turned over to Jefferson be sold. Adams was so mortified over this action, that he left town before the inauguration.
How do we go back to that? Or at least something resembling fiscal responsibility? Maybe we can't.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. Alexander Tytler
That depressing quote however, should not keep you from voting. Like Abraham Lincoln said,
Elections belong to the people. It is their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.
Here is an excellent column by Father Robert Sirico from yesterday's Detroit News. The whole thing makes a lot of sense, but here is the opening:
The media lately have grilled government officials about their responses to natural disasters -- from the South Asian tsunami to the Gulf Coast hurricanes to the recent earthquakes in Pakistan and India. Media watchdogs want to know what government will do to relieve suffering, how it will rebuild and compensate victims, and what it will do to prevent problems in the future.
Well, we can stop this cat-and-mouse game and state the bottom line: Government officials are mere mortals. They are not omnipotent.
It is true that government officials often create the expectation that they will perform in a way that would remind everyone of their God-like power. That's how they get re-elected, and how bureaucracies survive and expand. Elected officials, in particular, want us to believe they will make us safe and secure in a world without risk. After the government inevitably fails to live up to these expectations, elected officials and bureaucrats promise to learn from the mistake and eradicate the problem in the future. Again.
"No one can find a safe way out for himself if socety is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result." -- Ludwig von Mises
War's legitimate object is more perfect peace. Flavius Vegitius Renatus
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CHALLAH AKBAR
