Save Our Souls. Repeal ObamaCare.

ObamaCare is back on the front burner. That's what happens when you pass an historic and revolutionary piece of social legislation by the barest majority and against strong popular opposition. People are not tired of the health care debate. They are tired of arrogant, liberal social engineers and wealth redistributors.

In "The Moral Dividend of Replacing ObamaCare" (Worldmag.com), I argue that the 2010 health care reform will be a devastating blow not only to the nation's economy but also to our sense of personal responsibility (which is bad enough as it is).

I set up my closing argument with this reductio ad absurdum scenario.

Democratic lawmakers argue that healthcare is too important to leave to individual responsibility. Because some people cannot afford it, the right thing to do morally is to socialize the costs so that everyone has this basic good at public expense. But that claims a rationale for ever-greater government takeover of people’s private affairs that has no limiting principle. Food is important. So are clothes. People can’t get to work without a car. Why should some people have free access to these basic goods and with Cadillac-quality (literally, in the case of cars) while others go without them or get by with shoddy quality? When it comes to food, clothing, housing, and transportation, they will complain that we have a two-tier society. Ban the private car or give everyone a functional government-made, government-issued car. Why shouldn’t everyone live in worker housing? Let’s nationalize Nike and Tommy Hilfiger. Style for everyone!

I close by saying that, morally, this approach to government,

...leads to infantile dependency. People lose the inclination to provide for themselves as responsible, self-governing, adult people. “I have this need! Why does the government not provide for it! It’s important!” The government becomes a benevolent zookeeper, and the people are all nicely preserved. But, like the lions sunning themselves on the rocks behind the fence, no one resembles what a human being is supposed to be.

This column provoked a long string of comments in which people debate (I use a polite term) back and forth about the merits of ObamaCare. They also debate what I'm saying, and who is being rational and polite about it, and who is not. Someone calls me a "political hack" for joining God and mammon in the phrase "moral dividend." Sheesh! Another condemns me for, he says, callously just wishing someone with cancer or MS a boost in character. Someone comes to my defense, pointing out that I clearly state: "There are better ways of helping people in need." That's all I say because the substance of what should replace ObamaCare is not the subject of the column, and we only have 400-700 words to work with anyway. My defender also rebukes the fellow for rudeness and indifference to understanding the arguments of others. Unrepentant and undaunted, the curmudgeon gripes on.

It is interesting to see how many nasty and unreasonable leftists--both professing Christian and clearly non--spend their time tussling with conservative World readers on the commentary pages of the website. Are they unemployed? Are they employed by George Soros? That leftists would occupy themselves with this constant sparring in a conservative forum is one thing, but how ungracious the professedly Christian ones are is another.
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*Save Our Souls: of course, I mean souls in the classical sense.

Big Government and the iGeneration

Michael Barone noticed what is perhaps impolite to mention, viz. that the current Democratic leadership is really, really old (”Wily Old Dems take on Whippersnapper Republicans“).

The ages of the ranking Democrats on the Appropriations, Ways and Means, Education, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Foreign Affairs, and Judiciary committees are 70, 79, 65, 71, 70, 69, and 81. The three party leaders are 70, 71, and 70.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with that on its own. But he adds that their generation thinks of the country's business based on an outdated model that he calls “Big Unit America.” It is a country controlled by big government, big business, and big labor. We saw it in the 111th Congress. Huge stimulus package to move the economy. Prop up the unions with card check. One big health care insurance system to cover everyone (eventually).

It struck me, however, that this view is entirely out of step with this Internet formed, emerging generation who, in my Worldmag column, I call the iGeneration ("The Politics of the iGeneration").

While it is true that younger voters are still breaking for the Democrats, as they grow up and put life and politics together they will find that the Big Unit view of the world is not theirs. The younger generation values personal control of their lives, and this priority is driven by technology. They have personal settings and privacy settings for everything. They are used to having My-this and My-that. Niche news and information sources on the Internet have replaced the big three networks of the 1970s. They are used to being heard (or at least thinking they’re being heard) through everything from blogs and comment threads to the widely publicized chatter of social network sites. Centralized, bossy, deaf bureaucracies will not be their thing. It’s not how they roll.

These are people who design their own Converse high-tops online before they buy them.

What will this young generation expect in place of centrally planned, centrally administered government health care, for example? It will be precisely what John McCain advocated (but tepidly, and explained poorly) during the 2008 election: consumer-driven health care.

See my 2008 post on it: "Hope for the Health Care Mess." That comes with links to Regina Herzlinger's three books on the subject.

Slaying ObamaCare for Liberty's Sake

In this column, "In with the Constitution, Out with ObamaCare," I explain what limited government is, i.e., our system of government, and how the Democrats violated all three principles of it when they passed ObamaCare.

Opponants of H.R.2, "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Act," say it is meaninglessly symbolic because the Democratically controlled Senate won't take it up. I argue that it is meaningfully symbolic and a good use of House time.

Every elected representative takes a solemn oath to defend the Constitution. Yet, judging by what they do, not by what they say, Democrats these days don’t seem to believe in any of these features of limited government. If the purpose of government is not simply to praise what is good among the people (1 Peter 2:14) but to provide for the people’s good itself, then to limit the government in any way is an act of hostility toward the people.

Apparently, the people don’t see it that way. That’s why this week, in response to unambiguous popular demand, the Republican majority in Congress, perhaps along with some keen-eared Democrats, will send a message to the upper house and the president about limited government and liberty.

The bill to repeal passed the House "245-189 with three Democrats -- Reps. Mike Ross, Dan Boren and Mike McIntyre --joining the Republican effort," Fox News reports.

The Foothills of the Health Care Summit

President Obama's health care reform bipartisan summit has just got underway. This is what I saw.

The President began with a call for putting good ideas on the table. His tone was a listening one, and disarming. But he paraded the usual sob stories about various people in trouble over health issues. This is the political theatre side. Such anecdotes are irrelevant to the issue. You do not undertake reform of this magnitude on the basis of a few touching stories, real though they are.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) led off for the Republicans. He is a reasonable and winsome fellow, and came across that way. There was one point where he quickly expressed his party's objections to the Democratic bills. It was jangling and difficult to follow. Otherwise, his two main points were, first, that attempting to solve what everyone agrees is a health care problem by a single 2700 page bill was doomed to failure. It would, as it has repeatedly in the past, fall under its own weight. American is too large and complicated a country for anyone to expect he can solve a problem involving 17% of the economy by a single bill. It will require a series of legislative measures, dealing with the problem one step at a time, building separate majorities for each one.

Second, he called the President to forswear any attempt to jam the legislation through the Congress by the 50% + 1 in both houses process called "reconciliation." That process, he said, has never been used for legislation of this scope and importance. He cited the opposition of Robert Byrd (D-WV), one of the ancient authors of the present Senate rules. He cited the important bipartisan support that President Johnson secured for his Civil Rights Acts of 1964. He also quoted then Senator Obama's objections to the contemplated Republican use of reconciliation when that party was trying to get judges confirmed over Democratic opposition, as well as Senate majority leader Harry Reid's claim that the use of reconciliation under those (comparatively less significant) circumstances would mean the destruction of the Senate.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Harry Reid shared the next allotment of speaking time, and they were elegantly predictable. Both gave us heart rending anecdotes. Speaker Pelosi basically said that on the basis of this and that story, there was no time to start from scratch. We must pass existing legislation now. Period. She signaled no openness whatsoever to discussion or compromise. Atta girl!

Senator Reid was his usual angry self. He led off by cautioning his colleague, Sen. Alexander, that while he was entitled to his own opinions, he was not entitled to offer "facts of his own making." In other words, he accused the first Republican speaker of being a liar. And then it wasn't clear at all what the purported lie was. That's why the Senate majority leader is so far down in the polls, not only nationally, but even in his own state going into the November elections.

Hello Canadian State Run Inefficiency

So we're closer to health care reform. When the Democrats secured the sixtieth vote to support the bill that they jiggered together, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) proclaimed, "We stand ready to pass a bill into law that finally makes quality health care a right for every America, not a privilege."

Where we stand is several steps closer to Canada. What does that mean? Here is a Canadian television report on Lyme disease. Sufferers come to America where "they know what they're doing." Watch both segments (12 and 7 minutes). It is stunning how bad things can be in a state run health system. Perhaps it is not so stunning.

David Leggett, in Part II, is an old friend of mine. Here is the account from the print story of his plight with Canadian doctors.

David Leggett used to love the outdoors. He was a healthy, active, family man who enjoyed camping trips with his wife and two daughters. His job as a high school principal came with a long summer vacation -- the perfect time to enjoy Canada's vast stretches of wilderness.

That all changed in July 2004, after camping in a provincial park near Sudbury, Ont. "We were out hiking and then one day I couldn't hike anymore and my knee ballooned up. I felt really, really strange. I had no energy," Leggett recalled.

By October, Leggett was too ill to work. After doing some research on his own he suspected he might have Lyme disease -- but his doctors told him that was impossible because it was too rare in Ontario and it didn't exist where he had been camping. They were wrong.

These days Leggett spends his time lying in bed, unable to get up to eat or even bathe himself. Most of his Canadian doctors continue to insist he is not suffering from Lyme disease, even though a blood test from an American lab came back positive for Lyme.

When a service becomes a "right," instead of a "good," and as a consequence becomes a service of the government rather than a provision of the private economy, you can expect its management to be politicized, its consumers to be impoverished, and its development to be stunted. But you can expect misery of one sort or another to follow when you use something for a purpose other than God's design for it. God instituted government to punish evil and praise what is good (I Peter 2:14), not as the instrument to provide all manner of human goods from schooling and health care to opera companies and baseball stadiums.

Truly historic health care reform would free up the present monstrous system, so that it is not tied to employers but carried by individuals, purchasable with pre-tax income, and open for purchase across state lines. Go would see greater innovation, not less as you will see under anything that the Democrats pass. American citizens would be more in control of this important aspect of their well-being, not less.

here is Mr. Leggett's blog where he discusses the lyme disease problem in Canada. He writes, "Personally, I have a number of friends who are medical doctors. They care very much about all of their patients, including those that they might suspect of having lyme disease. The problem is systemic. Even if a doctor really wants to do everything possible to help a patient who is exhibiting early symptoms of lyme disease, the tests aren’t accurate, an eager medical response often brings an investigation from the provincial college of physicians and surgeons, and the general medical support infrastructure isn’t conducive to an informed and timely response."

Mapping the Uninsured

 The Geography of the Uninsured - Jim Gimpel

Here is a really fun and informative interactive map that shows the percentage of the state population that has no health insurance.

The top rate is over 40%. The lowest rate is 3.4%, but those lowest rates are all in Massachusetts where people are required by law to have it. The top rates are all in the border states, like Texas and California, where there are particularly high concentrations of illegal aliens. Almost all of the states with a rate of over 25% are Democratic districts.

My friend Matt Laslo at PRI (Capitol News Connection) put me on to this.

Here's an interactive map at NPR that distinguishes the numbers for uninsured children from those of adults under 65.

Big Government Needs Big Laws

Big government requires big laws. It seems appropriate, therefore, that the House health care reform law (HR-3962) requires 1,990 pages to cover everything that needs to be put right.

Back when it was HR-3200, but only about half the size of the present bill, Jimmy Fallon had this fun with it.



Incidentally, the law is sponsored by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich) who takes a withering blow in Time magazine's cover story on "The Tragedy of Detroit" by Daniel Okrent (Oct. 5, 2009). "Dingell has in fact played a signal role in destroying Detroit," that is, his own constituency. With proven judgment like that, the longest serving member of the House of Representatives lends his good name to the Congressional effort at reforming one sixth of the U.S. economy.

Two words: buy gold.

Abe Lincoln Weighs In On Health Care Debate

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) speaks homespun common sense in good midwest American fashion here in his opening statement on the currently proposed health care reform legislation. Let the Congressman have the floor.



He's eloquent. He's sincere. He quotes Lincoln ("You can't make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak.")

Of course, I was curious as to the source of this Lincoln quote, so I went searching. It does not appear that Honest Abe wrote these words, although they have been attributed to him for many years. Snopes traces it to a Presbyterian minister named William John Henry Boetcker who was the director of the Citizens' Industrial Alliance when he penned these truisms in 1916. The theory goes that they were later published on the back of a leaflet of genuine Lincoln quotes and the confusion was inevitable. Nonetheless, the ideas are Lincolnian.

Ronald Reagan quoted these pearls of wisdom at the 1992 Republican National Convention, and attributed them to Lincoln.

I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know that the opposition has really changed.

This clip does not include the spuriously attributed Lincoln line (it follows just after), but it is well worth the five minute investment to watch it.



You can read the full text of the speech here.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me ObamaCare

During the 2008 election campaign, I was struck by how Barack Obama would describe someone's heartrending personal story, then leap immediately to suggesting a federal government solution. The assumption in between was that whatever unhappiness there is in life is the responsibility of the federal government to remedy. John Kerry did the same thing in 2004 because that is the way liberal Democrats think.

But that is not our system of government. Ours is what we call a "limited government." It is limited by the security of each one of us in our individual rights. They are rights against the power of government. Our government is limited also as to its ends. Its powers are enumerated and therefore delineated. We have established our government to accomplish specific tasks, and we have enumerated those tasks in the Constitution. That brings me to the third way that our government is limited. It is limited by law. Those who govern us govern only under law, ultimately a fundamental law we call the Constitution. Those who make the law must themselves submit to the laws they make.

If you judge Democrats not by what they say but by what they do, you can see that they don't believe in any of these features of limited government. Why should the enlightened class be limited in any way? To subject The People's Party to limitations of any sort is an act of hostility toward the people themselves. At any rate, that is how communist parties have reasoned for almost a hundred years, and that appears to be the way liberal Democrats think. And Barack Obama is a turbo-liberal Democrat.

Consider his plans for health insurance reform, plans in which he is in harmonious alliance with the "liberal bulls" in Congress. The fact that the scheme is baldly unconstitutional gives them no pause whatsoever. The suggestion that it is unconstitutional just means that they have to find a constitutional rationalization of some sort. After all, these people have long ago stopped caring what the Constitution actually says. If it is a "living constitution," then the challenge to those living under it is not to conform their legislative wishes to the Constitution, but by clever rhetoric and legal reasoning to conform the Constitution to the legislative wishes of the day. This is very opposite of the rule of law and of limited government.

As to the ends of government, people like Barack Obama cannot think of anything the federal government should not be doing. If there is suffering in the world, then the government is the most effective and most trustworthy agent to be addressing it. The broader the government, the more egalitarian the solution will be, and so the federal government is always the instrument of choice, whether directly or indirectly through its control of state and local governments. This may be a kind-hearted sentiment, but it is not a noble sentiment because it does not respect people's liberty. Even if Obama and all those in political alliance with him on this were entirely public spirited in their intentions (which any sober adult should admit is unlikely), their reforms would establish a structure for a less high-minded generation of elected and unelected government officials to lord it over a prostrate and helpless American people.

Blind to these dangers, however, and convinced of the self-evident moral superiority of their understanding, Obama's Democrats have launched themselves into the restructuring our health care system--one sixth of the American economy--expecting that the only opposition will come from selfish corporate interests, the Republican party which is the tool of those interests, and whatever rural simpletons and Christian fanatics the Republicans can deceive.

But opposition is coming from honest lovers of liberty and of the rule of law. Two such patriots are David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey, both of whom served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and Bush. In "Mandatory Insurance is Unconstitutional" (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 18, 2009), they make the case that it goes beyond the powers of the federal government to force people to buy something they don't wish to buy. "Congress...cannot regulate simply because it sees a problem to be fixed." Since the Progressive era began almost a hundred years ago, government activists have justified most federal regulatory powers on the interstate commerce clause. The federal government can act to regulate interstate commerce (Article I, section 8), but it cannot punish you simply for sitting in your living room not buying health insurance. Rivkin and Casey take you through the history, the current health care reform proposals, and the bearing of the Constitution on it all. It's good read, and you are sure to look very intelligent and well informed to your friends for having read it.

Because Obama's Democrats don't care about the spirit of our system of government which is the spirit of liberty, they will look for a way around that restriction. Because there are others in the country who love liberty and the Constitution that supports it, they will fight him to the highest court in the land.

Things to Keep in Mind

John Stossel, long employed in yeoman's work on behalf of the republic, brings his acute eye to the government-run health care about to be pressed down on us by our betters. You and everyone you know should hear this piece in order to accurately assess the President's last ditch attempt to keep the wheels on his rolling disaster. Only a massive push back is going to prevent the Canada-ization of our medical industry.




And just for fun, here Stossel confronts the useless idiot Michael Moore on his claims of Cuban superiority in health care. What a crock.

Government "Care"

A headline up on the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper marks yet another reason not to trust government health care. "Sentenced to death on the National Health Service" is a line that doesn't mince any words. Seems those programs put in place by state run health care systems, which commence with such concern for patients, health, and care, come soon to be seen as cost centers by administrators desperate to cut costs regardless of patients, health, or care. This is yet more evidence, if any were needed, that the end of life provisions the Democrats were attempting to include in their bills are indeed dangerous, no matter how neutral or anodyne the language. The trajectory is dark but predictable. The power over people's literal lives seems to be of a more intoxicating kind than just the power to make us recycle or pay huge portions of our earnings to the Treasury. The Dutch and the Swedes have also found that sending the old, the weak, and the terminal into that goodnight is a power doctors get a taste for, and one they soon begin using early and often, sometimes without even notifying the families. Especially when beds are scarce, budgets are strained, and the overwhelming directive from above is to cut costs.

"In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

"Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

"The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours. Developed by Marie Curie, the cancer charity, in a Liverpool hospice it was initially developed for cancer patients but now includes other life threatening conditions.


"It was recommended as a model by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government’s health scrutiny body, in 2004.

"It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.


Notice, to begin with, the Orwellian language tricks--euthanasia is the "pathway;" the government board--or death panel, in Palin's parlance--is NICE. Nice. These soft despots and coercive Utopians always set out with the thought that they are doing good, and doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Of course, a big part of the plan is to steadily increase that which we cannot do for ourselves, leaving more and more for the government experts to shoulder in their valiant lives of selfless public service.

The surface appearance of a tender hearted and sensitive government panel concerned to improve the public weal is soon belied by the reality under that appearance. People are not equal; there are less desirables among us, and it is government's duty to be hard nosed enough to recognize the fact, and act upon it in a way that maximizes utility for the rest of us. We are all "the rest of us" until we are the one on the gurney--but you know, everyone's number comes up eventually, and who better at discerning it than the government's expert numerologists?

The doctors blowing the whistle on this understand that palliative care is perhaps the portion that most needs to be individualized; that patients near the end or in desperate straits need closer attention from attending physicians, not another set of bureaucratic guidelines that allow thoughtless box checking by doctors who then agglomerate patients under preset parameters based on general symptoms or indicators.

[Dr Hargreaves] said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in. “It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway.” He added: “What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying.

“It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking.” He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.

Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.

But hey--aren't we all better off with that bed freed up for the next--probably more deserving--patient?

The Other Shark in the Water

Perhaps you have forgotten about that other ominous monster from the deep out there, but it has not forgotten you. I refer to the Cap and Trade bill lurking off to port, forced to wait its turn for a bite of taxpayer shank as its larger cousin, the Jaws-like health care killer, makes its repeated passes past all that taxpayer flesh, sizing up just the right moment to carry off its pound(s) of flesh.

It's hard for me to imagine how the economy survives the bite from just one of these, let alone both; but some form of both have some non-zero probability of getting through. So, maybe it'll just cost an arm and a leg; we'll be economic paraplegics instead of quadraplegics--a nation of "bobs", as it were.

This video trailer from the Cascade Policy Institute will help you stay focused on the other predator out there. Perhaps a sharp rap on the snout by alert citizens will send it back into the deep.

ObamaCare Means Lay Down Your Life

In the competing views of health care reform, we see the fruit of different political philosophies and different moral universes. When considering the public good, Democrats think more socially whereas Republicans are more individualistic in their approach to the question. In modern times, the social trump leads in the direction of totalitarianism, an all powerful state overseeing and directing all things for what it judges to be the good of the people (or so they say). Individual sovereignty leads increasingly to a destruction of moral community. In other words, they lead to Castro's Cuba and Capra's Potterville, respectively. The Founders of our republic envisioned neither one.

Betsy McCaughey, in "Obama's Health Rationer-in-Chief," shows how the social trump that neglects the importance of individual self-government and the inherent worth of every human being works its way out in the Obama administration's approach to managing scarce health care dollars from Washington instead of at the point of consumption.

It is horrifying, but at the same time revealing, that a man with this moral orientation would have such a prominent role in the formulation of our government's health care policy.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.

The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel. They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House's health initiative.

ObamaCare gives new meaning to the call to lay down your life for your country. It gives a perverse twist to Kennedy's noble call at the end of his 1961 inaugural address: "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Of course, I would like to re-produce the entire article, but I can only encourage you to read the whole thing in the Wall Street Journal.

Like Lunch, There is No Free Health Care

The Democrats are puzzled as to why Americans aren’t flocking to grab a piece of the “free health care” that their generous and compassionate party is trying to arrange for us. Paul Krugman attributes this insanity to the “zombie” ideas of the Reagan years which, though dead, continue to live among us ("All the President's Zombies" NYT, Aug. 23, 2009).

But Guy Sorman explains in this short City Journal essay ("Paying for Le Treatment," Aug. 24, 2009) that, as it is with lunch, there is NO FREE HEALTH CARE. He uses the recently celebrated French system as an example.

In a New York Times Magazine essay ("Le Treatment"), Sara Paretsky, a novelist travelling in France with her husband (ah, the privileges of wealth) explained how impressed she was by the quality and speed of the care that her husband received when he went to the hospital with chest pains. This care would have been free if they had been French citizens. Instead, the system billed them, but for only $220. She recommends this paradise which can be ours if we would just follow the President into the happyland of hope and change that he promised us and is now trying to deliver.

Wealthy liberals believe this sort of fantasy because they are used to having things just handed to them. They turn on the tap of life, and out flows whatever abundance they desire. They put bad things at the foot of their driveway, and the next day it has magically disappeared. Surely the government--especially the Obama government--can institute a national health care system than mandates low prices from wicked price gougers and top quality care from health care professionals who, as government employees, will become public spirited instead of narrowly selfish in their service to patients.

What a wonderful world. But it exists only in the dreams and delusions of political liberals. The rest of us look at the post office and the IRS, and dread the thought of our health care in the hands of the similarly callous and inefficient.

Sorman ends his brief lesson in the economics of "free" government goodies with this warning:

"In the end, who paid for Paretsky’s husband’s nearly free ride in a French hospital? French workers and taxpayers; American patients; and the young, unqualified, and out-of-work French unable to find jobs because of the unemployment that national health insurance engenders. There is no such thing, anywhere, as a perfect health-insurance system. It’s always a trade-off among competing goods, and the choices to be made are ultimately political ones. Americans commenting on health-care reform should try to make the costs and consequences of these choices transparent, rather than resorting to misleading morality plays."

We Have Seen the Future--and it's Oregon

Sarah Palin coined the phrase "death panels" that is sticking like death to the ObamaCare health care debate. We note that it is Sarah Palin, mindless gun toting hillbilly, ONE, Barack Obama, brilliant constitutional lawyer and auto and health care industry expert, ZIP. Due to the whistle blowing by the ex-governor, the Senate was shamed into removing the provision they said did not exist. They lost this round to Palin because there were just too many eyes on the thing for their denials to hold up--even the Washington Post's Charles Lane admits the slippery-slopiness of the provision requiring end of life counseling. Eugene Robinson, one of the president's staunchest supporters, agrees that the import of the provision is to shorten lives, and thus curtail the medical spending that supports the waning years of people's lives.

Nat Hentoff, an Old Left colleague of Christopher Hitchens at the Nation magazine two decades ago, weighs in with his characteristic bluntness in his piece "I'm Finally Scared of a White House Administration" . As a constitutional scholar and ardent critic of government power (mostly Republican government power), he validates and then some Palin's concerns over where this is going.

Despite media reports, Palin's Facebook post responding to Obama is a model of successful refutation--clear, concise, and heavily footnoted. I don't know if she wrote it--she may still have staff working for her--but no fair minded person would associate such successful argumentation with the cartoon character the media has invented to represent her.

But it is not just the logical points that immediately follow from the language in the bill that show the likelihood of the death panel charges. The actual implementation of the laws Congress writes falls to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats whose only means of administering such massive programs is to shuffle individual cases into the nearest category and get on to the next case. Or go to lunch, Whatever. It is they who decide what the categories are, and what the criteria for judging which cases fit which category. And they will never see a single patient whose life outcome they are deciding. There is also the inconvenient fact that in several government-run health care systems the advice given to old patients turns out to be euthanasia (Sweden and Holland both give a lot of weight to government doctors to make the decision to pull the plug, even against the patient or the family's wishes, often outside official guidelines).

And now this story from Oregon's experiment in socialist living surfaces just at the wrong time for the deceiving sponsors of government control of everything. This is exhibit A in what government run health care portends for a large swath of its victims, in its all-caring, all knowing benevolence. I meant to say bureaucratic callousness.

This lady has a form of cancer treatable with a drug deemed too expensive for her case. The letter she received from the Oregon state authority suggested her best option under their wise and noble program is "aid in dying". So thoughtful of them. Listen to the director of the state commission--Oregon's death panel-- skate around the obvious cost basis analysis for the twice-appealed decision.

Reagan Weighs In On ObamaCare

If only Ronald Reagan were alive to speak into the debate about government takeover of the health care system.

But take heart! Though he is gone, he speaks nonetheless!

Here is the Gipper himself in 1961 explaining at that time why citizens should actively oppose "socialized medicine." This is a 10 minute recording on a record album produced by the American Medical Association. But it's all Reagan: his thoughts on the subject; his eloquence.



Notice how he speaks directly to the ordinary American as an ordinary American himself without talking down or pretending to be something he was not. Notice also his appeal to political theory and the Founding. Notice lastly, that his appeal is not to prosperity nor to fiscal sanity, as good and legitimate as those are. His appeal is to the noble concern for liberty.

He closes with this warning:

If you don't do this [call your Congressman] and if I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

Yes--he saw socialized medicine itself as being decisive in the fight for liberty against socialism, which he viewed as antithetical to the American spirit and the American system of government, and which he identified with tyranny.

Our Bodies, Ourselves

In that 1970's tract of feminist political thought masquerading as a medical self help book, women were encouraged to regard their bodies as the battleground where the forces of reaction--the Establishment patriarchy grounded in Christianity and capitalism, warred against the progressive, enlightened socialism of the New Left. The same seminal, revolutionary moment brought the slogan that helped collapse the important distinction between what is private and what is public, and what is the legitimate extent of government control and intrusion into private lives: The personal is the political. The Supreme Court almost at the same time famously derived a right to privacy from the "emanations of penumbras" of certain of the articles of the Bill of Rights which finds a right to privacy, and which disallows states from legislating restrictions on abortion, validating in one way the right of a woman to her own body (skipping over of course the baby's right to hers--that, apparently was an emanation not appearing in the particular penumbra examined by Justice Douglas.)

It is interesting then to find that same tender concern for the privacy rights of individual bodies kicked to the curb deep in the legalese of the House bill conjuring universal, affordable, non-budget busting health care for all God's children. The bill contemplates boards of experts to advise--no, rule on--both what treatments are necessary and feasible, and which citizens are worth spending the republic's limited treasury on. (Funny--for other purposes, the Treasury is always unlimited--no end to the Blue Sky projecting for the goodness of what the Congressional shepherds intend for its little flock, or what the Congress spends on itself.)

The Congress' insistence on making government the provider of health services forces the logic of the distortion of the public/private distinction to its ugly end: your body is not your own, if the government is paying for its upkeep. It's hard to think of a deeper intrusion into private right than the loss of control over one's own health and life, because, well, there isn't one.

Our Bodies, Our Selves co-author (there were twelve) Nancy Miriam Hawley said of writing the book that "We weren't encouraged to ask questions, but to depend on the so-called experts. Not having a say in our own health care frustrated and angered us. We didn't have the information we needed, so we decided to find it on our own." This laudable, and I should say, quintessentially American attitude, helped foster a take-it-back kind of can-doism recognizable in many aspects as what makes America great and exceptional. And of course that is exactly what is under attack in so much of the legislation of this radical left Congress, unleashed under the aegis of the age of Obama.

It occurs to me that this is not merely an assault on the Constitution and way of life of these United States, a solemnly constituted people, although that is serious enough. It goes beyond the Constitution and self understanding of the people of the United States as encoded in our official public documents, all the way to the natural rights philosophy that grounds the constitution and that self understanding itself. It undercuts the first principle of freedom, articulated most famously by John Locke in his theory of labor, property, and freedom. A person has a natural right to what will sustain his life because he owns his body, his self. He has absolute dominion (humanly speaking), and property in, his own person and body. All property right, and all right whatever, follows from that fact. Personal freedom, personal property, constitutional government by consent, and the rule of law all begin in this natural right to one's own self. This is the basis for the well known triad of Lockean natural rights in the Declaration, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or property, as Locke has it).

The intrusion into what one may do with one's body, is, like the intrusion into what one may do with one's property, fraught. There is some State interest in restricting property rights in the interest of the greater public good. Pig farms, abattoirs, and salvage yards are not permitted in residential neighborhoods. Likewise, ingestion of narcotic drugs is restricted because of the danger to the public from people out of their minds on them. To the extent that your personal actions or the property that you control is a threat to the health, safety, or welfare of other equally endowed rights-holders--that is to say, every other person, it falls within the province of the public legislation to limit it. Against such legislation seen to exceed these limits, the Supreme Court has established a benchmark which must be met or overcome--strict scrutiny. The Court will apply strict scrutiny to any law thought to impose an undue burden on any fundamental right, or thought to bring invidious discrimination to groups or individuals based on race, sex, religion, and a growing list of things. The restrictions on abortion that Roe swept away were thought to impinge just such a fundamental right--the right of a woman to choose whether or not to carry a baby to term, not withstanding the state's interest in the protection of life and the interest in the ongoing generation of citizens.

Yet now we begin to see legislation restricting what we consume, starting with trans-fats and tobacco. Sugar, alcohol, and non-organic milk are soon to follow. If Congress is paying for our health care, they will certainly not blanch at serving up as laws and regulations all kinds of good ideas about how we should live. (For a fuller discussion, go here) The property we have in our bodies--literally, what is proper to us, and us alone--is, under the health care monstrosity being considered, about to be taken, in much the same way as real property is taken, via something like eminent domain. The government in such cases abrogates personal property rights in favor of a public good--new highway or sewer line needs to run through your yard, so out you go--thanks for playing.

This seems to be what is in prospect for our most personal property, our bodies. We will have restrictions on choice of procedure and drug regimen based on what an expert panel decides is right (read cheapest) for situations like ours--not even a revue of the actual case at hand, just categories of cases, rated first and foremost by age and ability to contribute. Anyone recall just now the Nazi propaganda initiative against the "useless feeders"--disabled, retarded, insane, aged, etc? Anyone not full of Aryan health and vigor was given the heave-ho. But that's really unfair isn't it, to bring in all those Nazi comparisons. Although they didn't cotton to any natural rights either did they? Everyone created equal? Capable of self government? Government by consent? Freedom for self-actualization? I can hear Hermann Goering cocking his pistol at the very sound of those ideas.

The natural right basis of our Constitution is to be overthrown to accommodate the State's spurious interest in equalizing health outcomes. We will all be made miserable at the same rate by government employees masquerading as health professionals who give a damn. Oh, except for Congress. And their staffs of thousands. And the entire federal workforce. And Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites. And all unionized workers. (want to rethink that offer of union representation at your workplace now?) All the rest of us will queue up and wait for whatever rationed bit of drug therapy or surgical expertise is left over, and our right of personal decision over what is most personally proper to us, our bodies, will have been taken under something very much like the doctrine of eminent domain, where the State's interests supersedes our own.

Makes you wish for the timely publication of a good feminist tract regarding personal body decisions and our right to make them. Oh wait--they've got their abortions paid for in this thing, so we won't be hearing any objections from them this time about "experts" or patriarchal intrusion into personal lives.

If only we had a Court that could look for some more penumbral eminations...

Zoo Animals Have Great Health Care Benefits

Mark Steyn points out that, sadly, the main argument against Obama's government health care takeover is pragmatic--it would cost too much. Rather, the argument should be a principled defense of liberty. Someone reminded me last night that the predominant theme of Reagan's speeches prior to becoming President was liberty, not prosperity. Prosperity is a natural and happy consequence of liberty, but it is not the noblest aspiration of the human heart. It is beneath contempt to choose comfortable slavery over precarious liberty.

Steyn draws from his Canadian experience of both government health insurance and doughnuts to make his point.

You can make the “controlling costs” argument about anything: After all, it’s no surprise that millions of free people freely choosing how they spend their own money will spend it in different ways than government bureaucrats would be willing to license on their behalf. America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe. America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially). Canada spends more per capita on doughnuts than America — and, given comparative girths, Canucks are clearly not getting as much bang for the buck. Why doesn’t Ottawa introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency? You’d still see your general dispenser for simple procedures like a lightly sugared cruller, but he’d refer you to a specialist if you needed, say, a maple-frosted custard — and it would only be a six-month wait, at the end of which you’d receive a stale cinnamon roll. Under government regulation, eventually every doughnut would be all hole and no doughnut, and the problem would be solved. Even if the hole costs $1.6 trillion.

How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies?

Read the whole article: "A Liberty Issue." (Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.)

Zoo animals have great health care benefits. Does that life look attractive? Are you having trouble? Trying singing "Born Free" once or twice through. Maybe that will help you with your freedom vs comfortable, government captivity decision?

Threatened With Health Care

Mary Catherine Hamm over at the Weekly Standard caught this exchange on--what else? the health care legislation hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles. Paul Ryan, an exceptional young Republican Congressman more than holds his own--and our own--against the two administration propagandists posing as MSNBC hosts. This media absorption into the democrat party is a serious problem converging on a bad joke.

My favorite is Katrina vanden Heuvel, whose family fortune has allowed her to, like William F. Buckley, helm a national magazine without having to make a living at it. She however uses her wealth to make sure no one else ever attains such filthy lucre, while posing as one of the "little people." She is owner and editor of that beacon of international socialism, The Nation. And like every other committed leftist, she and her magazine do not let bourgeois notions like facts deter their narrative. Not even leg-tingling Chris Matthews, another MS-LSD host, could allow her outright deceit going out over his air: while making a point about "understanding the poor", she validated it by saying she lived in Harlem. Matthews, in a moment of journalistic integrity, interjected that she lives in a multimillion dollar townhouse in ultra-tony Morningside Heights. No doubt she watches--and understands--from her upper story veranda through binoculars as the poor shuffle around gathering what ever it is they gather in those shopping carts.

In this segment with Congressman Ryan, vanden Heuval has the utter audacity--and mendacity--to attempt to argue (along with the president, by the way) that a "public option"--i.e., Medicare for everyone--would be good for the insurance industry because it would foster competition, and wouldn't you agree Congressman Ryan that competition is the American Way? If only every Republican were as quick on his feet as Ryan. Vanden Heuval, the consummate progressive/socialist/communist, trying to pass herself off as someone concerned for traditional American values like free markets and competition, is directly refuted by Ryan--much as Chris Matthews would not allow her Harlem dwelling lie. Someone needs to do the same with Obama, who has been a Saul Alinski poseur from the beginning.

The Health Care Power Grab and the GOP

The Congressional wheels are turning to give us a government-run health care system before year's end. Everything the Obama administration is planning seems to threaten to smother what is left of our liberty, squander our prosperity, and lay us prostrate before our enemies abroad. The health care issue is no exception.

George Will argues that the President, like his party, has a "dependency agenda" ("The Stealth Single-Payer Agenda," Washington Post, June 21, 2009).

Why does the president, who says that were America "starting from scratch" he would favor a "single-payer" -- government-run -- system, insist that health-care reform include a government insurance plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer system. ... The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making them equally dependent on government for more and more things.

Will brings out the dishonesty in President Obama's rationale's for this government initiative: competition for a system with 1300 providers competing with each other, and coverage for the 45 million uninsured, almost all of whom are either illegal aliens or could get coverage if they wanted it, whether by enrolling in an existing program or just buying it. Yuval Levin and William Kristol expand on this in "Dare To Defeat ObamaCare." President Obama said recently: " One of the options in the exchange should be a public insurance option...[because] if the private insurance companies have to compete with a public option, it will keep them honest and keep prices down."

Levin and Kristol point out what should be obvious to everyone.

It's an interesting statement. We had thought that the role of government was to set rules for honest private competition, which does keep prices down and improve products. And there are reforms that could improve the important rule-setting role government should play, and could increase private competition and transparency. But Obama wants government to be one of the competitors--in the alleged interest of honesty and price reduction. When has a government alternative produced these results?

Consider where this argument leads. Why not a government bread company to keep food prices down and keep food producers honest? Why not a government construction agency to keep home prices down and home builders honest? Why not as parallel government auto industry? Oh, but we have one of those. And a financial sector too. Obama's deceitfulness is disheartening, but only to those who expected better from him.

The Obama plan is so shrouded in terrors that not only does no Republican support it, but several Democratic Senators have positioned themselves against it, and it is opposed also by the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, and AHIP, the association of insurance providers.

If ObamaCare fails to pass, Levin and Kristol see then a window of opportunity then opening up for a market-based Republican alternative, one this is more consistent with and even supportive of American liberty.

Karl Rove lists many of these criticisms of the government's health care reform proposal in "How to Stop Socialized Health Care: Five arguments Republicans Must Make." Above all, he says, the power grab would be irreversible. In "ObamaCare Isn't Inevitable," he shares the results of a Resurgent Republic poll that shows Americans generally satisfied with their health coverage, and suspicious of a government run health system and the significantly higher government spending that would attend it.

Americans are increasingly concerned about the cost--in money and personal freedom--of Mr. Obama's nanny-state initiatives. To strengthen the emerging coalition of independents and Republicans, the GOP must fight Mr. Obama's agenda with reasoned arguments and attractive alternatives. Health care must actually be an issue that helps resurrect the GOP.

This leads us to Regina Herzlinger's paradoxically titled article, "Why Republicans Should Back Universal Health Care" (The Atlantic, April 13, 2009). At first glance she seems to be making her peace with some form of government run health plan, but in fact she merely shows how the Republicans can pitch a market based system as universal coverage--and do it truthfully--and save the country at the same time. "With one brilliant foray, Nixon converted the massive threat posed by the isolated China into an asset, secured a favorable mention in history, and stripped the Democrats of a key issue. By embracing their own brand of universal health coverage, Republicans can do the same."

The health insurance system is approaching crisis proportions.

• "millions distort the efficient allocation of labor in our economy by opting for jobs in dying, big companies that offer health insurance, rather than productive ones in small companies that do not."

• "our employer-based health insurance system forces American businesses to pack our massive health care costs ... into the cost of their exports, a huge albatross in a globally competitive economy"

Though most Americans want a better system, and employers would love to be free of the responsibility for providing and paying for employees' health benefits, the public nonetheless has "substantial concern about the Democrats' reliance on universal coverage through a government-controlled system like Medicare." In view of the cost of a government-run, Medicaid style program, the public is also concerned about the inevitable rationing of services. Herzlinger points out that, "the truly sick constitute only 20 percent of health-care users, but account for 80 percent of health-care costs," and so the sick are "a politically vulnerable target for cost control through rationing."

In addition, either doctors will flee the country or people who would otherwise become doctors will choose a more lucrative profession, leading to a doctor shortage and waiting lists for everything from general practitioners to surgery.

There will be far less money for research. "Venture capitalists will find it too risky to invest in markets where one payer controls prices."

So Herzlinger tells the GOP to seize the opportunity to "offer a consumer-controlled universal coverage system, like that in Switzerland."

• "the Swiss choose from about 85 private heath insurers"

• "the Swiss poor shop for health insurance like everyone else, using funds transferred to them by the government"

• In that system, "The sick ... pay the same prices as everyone else in their demographic category"

The bottom line: "This consumer-driven, universal coverage system provides excellent health care for the sick, tops the world in consumer satisfaction, and costs 40 percent less, as a percentage of GDP, than the system in the US."

For more on Herzlinger's efficiency producing, consumer driven, liberty oriented proposal, see my post from February 2008 on Herzlinger's books and her address at The King's College, "Hope for the Health Care Mess."