Alright, it's been a couple of months and we've got a fuller and richer idea of what Obama means by 'hope' and 'change'. Let's take a look at what's being said, what's been said, and what is being planned for the future.
President Obama, being eternally optimistic and having run on a platform that claimed sunshine and bluebirds every day should he be elected, has been speaking doom and gloom on the economy so often that even Bill Clinton has reprimanded him on the topic. The stock market has dropped further since his election than it did in all the time W. Bush was in office, and every time he makes a speech, it takes a fall of a couple hundred points. His message is simple; the only way for this country to survive is to give him every power, and to oppose any of his decisions is to want this country to fail. As well, to want lower taxes and greater freedom is now unpatriotic.
Our 'stimulus package' was put together under the watchful eye of Nancy Pelosi, who encourages government funding of contraception and abortion services under the unapologetic (her words!) claim that we can cut government spending on education and healthcare for children by reducing the number of children. I would never have thought of that solution. My natural preference is to reduce or eliminate government spending by cutting taxpayer programs for children of rich families, but the expansion to SCHIP either has been or will be passed soon.
The changes in the package made to medical spending were put into place by Tom Daschle, who has praised Europeans above Americans for being willing to accept a 'hopeless diagnosis' for a treatable condition on the grounds that it would cost the government too much money to help you.
Robert Reich, another lawmaker who worked on the package, caused a minor stir when he pronounced that guidelines should be created for the infrastructure upgrades to ensure that construction jobs created by the work do not go to skilled construction workers or white men. We must ensure that "women and minorities" who are not construction workers or skilled professionals are the ones who ensure that our bridges are safe to cross.
But don't despair! You'll be getting tax relief, if you don't make what the government deems to be too much money, which is about $75K/year. Yeah, I know Obama said his threshhold was $250K, but then Biden, I think it was, said $150K, and someone else said $120K, so are you really surprised? Anyways, if you are not rich, i.e. making $75K/year, you'll be getting about $25/month back in your paycheck starting in April. Don't you feel lucky? It's a tax credit, not a cut, but it's evenly distributed so that it looks like a cut. Oh yes, and you will get this money even if you don't pay any taxes at all, so it isn't really a 'tax' adjustment so much as a welfare check. Basically, the government is using the IRS to send welfare checks to people who are already working, whether they want it or not, and anyone making over $75K/year, in other words, the rich, will be paying for it.
This is the Democrat definition of hope, you see. The government will be handling the redistribution of wealth. If they decide that you make 'too much' money, you will be forced to pay for the lifestyles of all the people who don't. However, even if this level of financial burden bankrupts you, it will still not be enough. Therefore, all the 'little people' who don't make 'too much' money have to learn to be content with what the government provides. Instead of negotiating your own prices with an HMO in order to obtain the medical care that you need, you must expect that if you are too expensive for the government, you will not be allowed to obtain care. You must learn to accept that which has been rationed out to you instead of seeking your own fortune.
The government will care for all your needs, and if your needs are too many, the government will see to it that the population of the needy is reduced through abortion and lack of care for the ill and elderly until the finances work. In other words, prevent hunger by killing the hungry and prevent poverty by killing the poor. The survivors will revere you for saving them from want.
Ah, let me take a moment and address the jobs situation. The rise in unemployment is actually less of an all-over set of layoffs and more targeted to a couple of specific industries, primarily construction. But don't despair, you who are losing your construction jobs! The benevolent Obama has foreseen your needs! He and the Democrats in Congress are setting up a large spending spree on upgrading roads, bridges, and highways.
Unfortunately, Reich and others advocate restrictions on this spending to ensure that the money does not go to actual construction workers and/or 'skilled professionals', especially if they are white men. That's right, despite the fact that 'whites' make up about two-thirds of this nation's population, we must make sure that they are not getting any government funding, even if that means that we cannot hire the people who actually lost their jobs in this recent rise in unemployment. Don't despair, however. Plenty of money in the stimulus package will go towards hiring biologists to study field mice and climatologists to study 'global warming', even though there is no indication of a high unemployment level among biologists or climatologists.
How will Obama pay for all these non-white non-construction workers, biologists, and climatologists? Well, next up on the agenda is supposedly a 25% cut in defense spending. That's right, since the housing market collapse has caused many lost jobs among various construction workers and associated professionals, we must pay for non-professionals and people who are not construction workers by taking money away from the people who employ carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians, and welders. With the government refusing to buy military equipment built by blue-collar workers and then refusing to hire those same blue-collar workers with the money they've taken away, I'm afraid we're in for a lot more government-subsidized people lining up for their rationed food and rationed healthcare.
Is this hope? Well, it certainly is change.
I've got nothing better to do so it's time to offer my dime to the cause. First, on health care:
ReplyDeleteMy younger brother, who is getting his degree in economics, has pointed out a fundamental difference between the American system and the Canadian system which accounts for how little improvement we get per dollar poured into healthcare. Essentially, the Canadian government spends all its money and time working on the young to make them healthier and practices preventative medicine during the early years so that as the population ages, they experience fewer problems. America, on the other hand, focuses on fixing what's broken and pays very little attention to preventative care; it is always more expensive to carry out repairs than prevent damage. Our flaw is that we focus on repair; theirs is that they lack the ability to conduct repairs when needed and ALL socialized systems lack the peculiar American ability to invent new medicines that make repair cheaper or replace surgical correction with medicinal correction.
The point is that America has a few things to learn about medicine from the socialized countries but the government is deliberately blind to this need. I remember that my proto-economist brother pointed out to me that beneficial government action vis a vis the economy presumes that politicians are benevolent and competant. They are neither; a politician is not benevolent because their entire purpose is reelection which precludes the possibility of giving freely of their time and the government's funds to do the right thing. A politician also cannot be competant because it is impossible for them to know what to do and when to do it for the maximum possible benefit. This natural combination if greed and incompetance among politicians is an apt explanation for why government is the worst possible source for effective healthcare improvement.
Commentary on the other economic tidbits is easy: this is a graphic illuystration of why no one in their right mind trusts a liberal to run an economy. In fact, no one in their right mind would trust a liberal to run foreign policy after 1930 but that's a different story.
ReplyDeleteActually, the federal government has multiple programs to completely cover the 'maintenance' of children as they grow, as do the private insurance plans. SCHIP/CHIP, for one, now covers children of parents making 200% of the poverty level, raising criticism from those who notice that parents who have their own good, solid health insurance plans are nevertheless switching their children to the government programs because the parents don't have to pay to have the children on their own policies.
ReplyDeletePregnant women in the U.S. undergo a myriad of diagnostic testing, even in a perfectly normal pregnancy. (I should know, I'm going through it now and my pregnancy is considered perfectly normal.) We're monitored on such a regular basis that it surprised a European friend of mine to hear how many doctor's appointments I have. (I'm on the two-week schedule now, about to enter the one-week.) It's an astonishing level of medical care, really, for a completely healthy and natural process.
From there it's the Launch Into Childhood... the pediatrician at the birthing room, the appointment a week later, the three-month, the six-month, the nine-month, the twelve-month, the eighteen-month, and yearly afterward. My son had his six-year a couple of weeks ago and we were offered several services we did not need from discounted government-help dental exams to discounted government-help vision exams. (He's on my husband's plan for both and had already had both.)
He's tested for lead even though our house was built in the 90's, tested for iron, tested for sugar problems, vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tuberculosis, polio, and a couple more that I can't remember.
In the most recent visit, we've been offered a full learning-disability workup by one of the doctors in the practice and are taking advantage of it as things like high iq, dyslexia, and possibly mild Aspergers runs in both sides of the family.
I'd invite your brother in economics to take a look at medicine and let me know what other things American children should be checked for to give them the same level of preventative care as Europeans. I only took economics in highschool, but I did nearly go into veterinary medicine, so I can pick up medical terms and conditions pretty quickly.
Oh yes, many workplaces and town community centers offer free adult screening for blood pressure, cholesterol, body fat measurements, and seminars on dietary planning. The trick is getting people to attend these free programs, eat healthy, and exercise. After all, what good does it do for a tired, overworked parent to take a child to the doctor, be told that the child is obese, and stop at McDonalds on the way home because there's no time to cook a proper dinner?
I believe our health problems to be primarily cultural and not connected to our system. To expand on that point would require another entire post. :)
However, I do agree with you that the government is not the place to solve the problem. I ought to think on that issue for a while before expanding on my thoughts in that area!
Europe isn't Canada, you know. My bro was talking only about the Canadian healthcare system, not all socialized healthcare systems. Admittedly, Gothe, there is a reason that personal experience is always disregarded as evidence of a general truth: there is no way to know if your exceptional preventative medical care is unique to your doctor or to your particular health insurance (certain health insurances focus singlemindedly on preventagive medicine at the cost of fixing something that's gone wrong). So the entirety of the American healthcare system may be just as weak on prevention as my brother was talking about but you can't percieve it because your local healthcare doesn't suffer the same flaw.
ReplyDeleteI personally believe in my brother's thesis because I am well aware of the allopathic bias in American medicine. Essentially, American doctors favor treatment by use of drugs which produce effects opposite to those of the disease. Accupuncture, chiropractic medicine, naturopathy, nutritionalism... there are many very legitimate fields of medicine that are largely preventative or low-impact in nature that fall outside the allopathic mainstream and are not generally respected by conventional doctors. For example, a friend of the family contracted Crohn's Disease. His conventional doctor gave him pills to address the symptoms while a nutritionalist that he consulted pointed out that certain easily-avoided things in the diet magnify the effects of the illness and prescribed a diet free of those things. The nutriotionalist successfully treated the illness but doctors almost never recommend that a patient visit a professional outside the medical mainstream because they are taught to be contemptous of non-allopathic remedies. Magnify this problem a few hundred thousand times and you can see that a whole sector of medicine that could treat certain illnesses sucessfully for a significantly lower cost is shut out of the healthcare system whereas in other countries, it is respected.
Then again, the chiropractors don't have American Medical Association lobbyists wining and dining politicians. Biggest reason of all why the government is the worst possible solution.
I admit all I can give you on the alternative medicine bit IS personal experience... I've switched health insurance providers several times in the last few years and all of them have covered alternative therapies with or without a doctor's recommendation. Most of the health care plans I've been on have been big national companies. I suppose they could operate differently in different states, but as far as I know there's no law in mine forcing them to accept the other therapies.
ReplyDeleteI recently met a retired lactation expert who runs a maternity-and-infant store down a little ways from where I live. She said that insurance often covered her freelance lactation aid services and she could give anyone who needed it all the information needed to file the claim.
I do have the feeling that this stuff is out there, you just need to listen, learn, and research! The U.S. is not really well-geared towards the "hand everything right to you" method. Doctors differ.. mine referred me to a physical therapist for an early sciatica problem in my pregnancy, and my father's sent him to a chiropractor. But even then, your doctor is not the single and sole arbiter of your health in the U.S., just as your employer is not the single determiner of your salary/position and the government (for now) isn't the single deciding factor in where you live or with whom you associate. The extra freedom means that you have to think a little more, try a little harder, and take charge of your own life.
Your friend got treated by the nutritionist. How did he do it? Did insurance take the claim? Did the nutritionist, possibly not being bound by the Medicare/Medicaid rules of treatment despite insufficient recompense, have affordable consulting fees? There is so much more and so much better than government socialized medicine as health care provision, especially in a country founded on the premise that each of us should have a hand in our own fortunes.
Funny you should mention personal experience. I conducted a random poll throughout the day from people in different states across the country on how they would find preventative care if they needed it. I got a range of answers, many of which I did not expect. (Walmart doesn't do free screening tests in my area.) What all these answers had in common was that each person did indeed know where he or she could go to get basic services for free or for a vastly reduced price. In some places it was Catholic Charities, government-funded mobile programs in others, workplaces in others, town centers in others, and places like Walmart in still others.
I took the poll because I know my state is a good one for healthcare... I could get preventative care for cheap or free at the Senior Center (even though I'm not one), a government-funded mobile unit, Catholic Charities, a low-cost pay-as-you-go clinic, my husband's workplace, any doctor through the state health insurance program for a small copay, or any doctor through my husband's health insurance plan through his employer for a moderate copay. Still, even in states that did not have ALL of those options, each one I tried had at least two.
Are there things the U.S. can learn from socialized healthcare? Well, yes. I just honestly don't think the focus on preventative care is a lesson we have yet to learn.
Oh, I know that the American healthcare system isn't about handing everything to you. That wasn't exactly the point I as trying to make by discussing alternative therapies and specialists. The way that most insurance companies work is that they require that your designated primary care physician give you a written reccommendation before they cover alternatives. Thus, while the government may not demand that you be dependent upon a conventional doctor, many insurance companies do. For example, my family regularly uses the services of an allergist whom we are personally fond of and have found to be very good. The only way we can visit this allergist without paying many hundreds of dollars in bills out of pocket is to convince our primary-care physician to phone in the reccommendation. This means, essentially, that we are wholly dependent upon this physician if we want to take advantage of specialists and alternatives.
ReplyDeleteOf COURSE the socialized healthcare system is the worst of most worlds! I am not saying anything different. I'm simply pointing out one reason that the United States spends so much on healthcare without as much return on investment as in other countries. There are multiple levels to the problem, all of them caused by government "help". Government demands that doctors be specially licensed by other doctors (remember what I said about how most doctors regard alternative therapies) and requiring a license causes an artificial shortage of whatever the license is required for. The government also imposed a third party in between most people and their doctor in the 1940s, thus distorting the market in various ways. Finally, the government passed the Medicare Act in the 1960s which lifted an entire section of the healthcare industry out of the private sector and put it within the government's grasp.
Ultimately, the largest problem that American healthcare has is high prices caused by government regulation that has resulted in a severe shortage of doctors; as supply and demand dictates, the lower the supply and the higher the demand, the higher the price. In a normal free market, the higher price would attract additional supply and push the price down but the government does not allow the free market to operate and so, Americans pay more for healthcare than in other places. Ironically, Americans pay more because of an interfering semi-socialistic government and now, that interfering government is holding itself out as the solution to the problem it causes.
Ok, I see where you're going with this. :) Let me give you an idea of the trench you appeared to be running in...
ReplyDeleteI've heard a lot of people use the current problems of this hybrid-socialism system to justify a fully socialist system, and when you first started out talking about ways that a fully-socialist system was better than our hybrid, I thought that's what you were advocating.
I think we probably agree that it's better to have a non-hybrid non-socialist system.
Part of what also drives the prices of medical care up is that doctors and hospitals end up raising the prices on the people who "can pay" in order to make up for the inadequate government reimbursement that they're forced to take. Hence the infamous "$20 band-aid".
I've heard that Obama plans to revoke the conscience clause that allows doctors to refuse to do abortions and such. I was horrified until I learned that what it would mean is that such hospitals that allow their doctors to, well, have a conscience would not be able to receive federal funding. Now I'm not so sure that's a bad thing, if it means that they no longer have to accept certain other federal regulations. Cut 'em loose, and find out how much better they do without government unfunded mandates.
That's sort of odd wording, Gothe... it almost sounds like "let me tell you what you're saying"... :P
ReplyDeleteBut yes, I was horrified by revocation as well. See, I have an inside line into the screwy world of Planned Parenthood (I don't know why, but I get their newsletters). Thus, I saw this particular violation of conscience coming down the tracks long before Obama made noise. I agree, revoking the conscience clause would be a way to cut hospitals off from the federal government but at the same time, the revocation also implies that the federal government is painting bullseyes on people who invoke their religious beliefs or personal morals to object to certain medical treatments. Obama's act is symbolically saying that the concience defense is off the table in the eyes of the federal government. His advocacy of the "Freedom of Choice Act" makes this message all the more clear.
The more Obama talks and the more he acts, he makes it all the more clear that moral questions... heck, ANY questions of importance... are above his pay grade. And yanno what? There's a reason that most people take these questions before God: there's no one above that pay grade.
Oooh, let me clarify that last comment, then. I didn't mean to say "this is what you were saying". I meant to say "This is what I thought you were saying, which is why I responded as I did, but I see your clarification and now think we're on the same page." :)
ReplyDeleteThat out of the way...
Well, I don't think the government should be funding Planned Parenthood either. :) I prefer to see businesses of all sorts being free of the government control that comes from receiving largess from them.
I definitely agree that the notion that religious freedom has no part in government funding becomes more and more dangerous as government becomes stronger and forces more people into dependence. If the government had a much shorter and smaller reach, it's power reduced closer to the point that the Founding Fathers intended, the level of 'religious freedom' involved would not bother me so much. Nobody cares so much where a declawed cat puts its paws.
I agree. And I think, given a choice, most voters would deny Planned Parenthood one red cent because they are not the most stable bunch of people. That, and they like to move into small neighborhoods and offer all the little girls abortions. They actually did this in Portland; they wanted to put a clinic in the city, the residents of the street where they were going to put it went ballistic, and PP smilingly ignored them, invoking all the normal babblings about "freedom of choice". Naturally, whenever there's a local measure forbidding "helpful" people from sneaking a teen into an abortion clinic to take care of their little problem without parental knowledge or permission, PP goes insane, screeching and crying like all the bad stereotypes of hystrical women. Puts a whole new light on their innocent-sounding advocacy of "choice".
ReplyDeleteI don't understand what you mean by that. It sounds like you're saying that presently, you believe that religious freedom should have no part in government funding because of how powerful the government is but if the government was less powerful, that would be the proper time to take religious freedom into consideration.
I can personally attest, however, that I don't mind where my kitty puts her clawed paws because she's always careful not to scratch when using me as a makeshift bed. :)
I'm actually saying the opposite. :)
ReplyDeleteIf the Federal Government did not decide educational standards, did not give money to banks to loan to 'the right kind of people', did not fund abortion centers or even hospitals, did not enforce 'affirmative action', etc. then I wouldn't be too worried about it's dealings with religious freedom.
Another way of putting it is to point out that I worry a lot more about whether a big hulking guy with a shotgun wants me dead than I do if a three-year-old toddles up to me out of the blue and says "I'm gonna kill you!"
I wouldn't be so worried about the government's refusal to allow things like conscience clauses if they had no power over where (or whether) I worked. I also wouldn't be too worried about what people in the federal government claim is a proper curriculum if they had no power to mandate that curriculum in any public or private school. Let the toothless lion roar if he pleases.
Reduce government power over our lives, and a lot of the questions over how to be sure that it is spending money and using power properly just... go... away.
The government that governs least governs best. The commentator Larry Elder wrote in one of his books that while our government condemns socialism like the kind of totalitarian control that the USSR exercised, it seems to believe that 45% socialism is juuuuust right. Imposition of its own values by fiat without sending the secret police after us is just enough tyranny... not too little, not too much (although one wonders how it's possible to have too little tyranny). The thing that really kills anyone who's familiar with the Founding Fathers and how extraordinarily well-educated they were about the failings of past Republican systems is that they foresaw this development. They were agonizingly aware of the fact that a government lusts for power by its very nature and yearns to impose as much control over the people as it possibly can. They built the Constitution for the purpose of tying the federal government in so many knots that it would be unable to become an all-powerful bully but made a single monsterous mistake: they assumed that the judicial branch would remain feeble mice in the face of the executive and legislative lions. They also never foresaw that a constitutional amendment would strip the states of their congressional representation and leave them feeble before a federal leviathan. Even Lincoln, acting as he did to impose union upon the states by force (although there is no indication that he thought of it as dragging the Confederacy back in chains) did not hurt the power of the individual states as much as do-gooder reformers in the early 1900s. As I believe I pointed out in one of my responses to someone in the RH discussion of Lincoln and the Civil War, the reason that measures such as the Wilmot Proviso could pass the populist House (best thought of as the will of the voters) but be crushed in the Senate (best thought of as the will of the state legislatures) was that the Senate was acting in the name of state interests and the states largely regarded the Proviso as counter to their interests.
ReplyDeleteIn the early 1900s, direct election of senators was written into the Constitution. Look upon Harry Reid and weak opposition senators and you start to see why Alexander Hamilton referred to democracy as a disease that was infecting the states.