Death spiral for Socialist "health-care reform"

Investors' Business Daily analyzes why the Washington Post has warned "that congressional Democrats, in trying to save their increasingly unpopular health reform bill, are sneakily making it more like European-style socialized medicine" and in the process are making it less and less palatable to the less Progressive factions of Congress and the public (Gallup finds 70% opposed).

The reasons for the "death watch": a report from the chief actuary of the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that says health "reform" will mean the opposite of its advertised promises.

...because "individuals with health problems or who anticipate a greater risk of functional limitation would be more likely to participate than those in better-than-average health," premiums would rise and rise, causing an "insurance death spiral" and making the program "unsustainable."

But isn't it all worth it to insure the uninsured? Actually, after Congress and the president get through wrecking the finest health care system in the world, there would remain "an estimated 24 million" Americans still without health insurance 10 years from now.

Think of it: We're increasing health care costs in America, cutting services and "jeopardizing access" for Medicare patients as we accelerate Medicare's insolvency, setting up a new government long-term care entitlement that's doomed from the start — and after all that we still end up with 24 million uninsured!

24 million uninsured. They were the reason we needed to have Obama's know-it-alls take over the health-care sector in the first place.

These Progressives are so smart! Just the way they want to destroy the world's economy for zero effect on "Global Warming".

What I fear is that the Fascists will sweeten the deal enough to buy the votes of the Lite-Fascists, and we’ll get something of the absurd architecture of mandates, restrictions, price controls, service limitations, and criminalization that the Progressives have concocted.

 

Martha Coakley the witch hunter

Ann Coulter has a good column this week (Martha Coakley: Too Immoral For Teddy Kennedy's Seat) on the Dem nominee for Ted Kennedy's blessedly empty seat.

Coakley was not the establishment candidate.  She did not try to run as the new Ted Kennedy.  However, after she won the primary, “John Kerry” sent out a fund-raising e-mail lauding her and blathering about breaking the glass ceiling for that particular Senate seat.  [Hear her roar!!]

This is well up to JFKy’s standard of nonsense and hypocrisy. Teddy had squatted on it since before feminism got any steam up.  If Jacques had any honor, he would have stepped aside for a woman long ago.

 

Thanksgiving double dactyl

At Thanksgiving dinner there was a brief discussion of odd verse forms, including the Clerihew and double dactyl. I could give examples of the Clerihew but not of a double dactyl.

I was out walking later that night and the name “Martin Van Buren” popped into my head, and I soon had the following verse. The historical details are all from memory, so I haven’t bothered to verify them:

Higglety-pigglety!
Martin Van Buren,
President Jackson’s own
Éminence gris,
Led his campaigning to
Bi-electorial
Vict'ries, then followed in
The White House, D.C.

 

The Vile Legacy of Ted Kennedy

At http://www.tedkennedy.org/ we are asked to share our memories of Ted Kennedy. Here is what I shared:

Sen. Kennedy leaves behind a legacy of shame and irresponsibility, of always taking the easy, expedient way, from his cheating in college and his self-indulgence at Chappaquiddick to his abandonment of babes in the womb and his defaming and bullying of designated victims of his political colleagues. Although his Catholic upbringing is often cited as though that nominal and residual affiliation were informative and meaningful, the connection was only an embarrassment and scandal to the Church. Not once in his life did he ever defend a Catholic principle or even the Church itself from assault by its public enemies. One wonders what his sister Eunice thought of his fervent enthusiasm to spread abortion into every hospital and clinic in this country. One wonders what his brothers would have thought.

I remember watching him in 1972 chair a committee hearing on amnesty for draft dodgers. A witness from the Vietnam Veterans for a Just peace rebuked him for abandoning the cause of freedom in South Vietnam that his brother—and he at one time—had championed. Was it Emerson, Sen. Kennedy replied, who said "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds"? Actually, Emerson said “a foolish consistency". The self-serving misquote is of a piece with the essential falsity of his character.

That falsity was further revealed in the way he dealt with his guilt—his inappropriate guilt—that his inherited affluence gave him advantages that other lacked. He sacrificed nothing to improve the lot and fortune of others. Instead he basked in the plaudits of the wicked for using his political influence to promote social schemes that debased their targets, impoverished the public forced to fund them, and corrupted the Constitutional character of our Republic. He justified himself by “trying to help people”, but whatever his averred intentions, in fact he devastated four generations of the black community, killed 45 million unborn infants, weakened our national security, and in innumerable ways assaulted the character of the American people by tempting where he did not force them to be less responsible for themselves, their families, and their communities.

We cannot know the state of another person's soul, but we can be sure that in whatever state of grace that Edward Kennedy died, the legacy of his political life is such that he shall regret it for all eternity.

 

Do the uninsured really die faster?

Are there really, as we are told, 18,000 deaths among the uninsured that could have been prevented had the dear departed had employer-funded medical insurance? The “18,000 deaths per year because of a lack of insurance” claim is from a 2002 study. The estimate has recently been updated to 22,000.

Let’s think about this a little bit.

First: How many of those uninsured could not get insurance because government mandates for covered items made the cheapest policy unaffordable, while the states forbid buying insurance from states with less oppressively expensive mandates? And how many deaths occurred because government regulation, demanded by unions and liberals, kept them from getting a health savings account with a high deductible policy? (John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, by the way, suggests removing these restrictions in his infamous WSJ op-ed.)

The first government reform should be to get out of the way.

Second: Let’s put the 22,000 estimate in context. The crude US death rate is 8.38 per 1000 population. That means we would expect 377,100 deaths per year among the putative 45 million uninsured. So upwards of 94% of the uninsured who died did so for reasons utterly unrelated to insurance. There are about 2,574,400 deaths per year in the US. 22,000 is 0.85% of 2,574,400. So Obama wants the government to take over (i.e., stifle) a productive, creative, vibrant, fast-growing sixth of the economy because he thinks it will fix less than 1% of the US annual mortality? And Obama thinks he knows how much the US should spend in toto for medicine, and the prices of all medical services, treatments, and medications! That’s not just insane; it’s megalomaniacal.

Which brings us to

Third: The 22,000 annual deaths caused by lack of insurance was not calculated by seeing whether the uninsured population had 22,000 more than the expected 377, 000 deaths per year. It was done statistically. This month PolitiFact published a correction to its affirmation of the 22,000 statistical estimate: When your statistical estimate adjusts “for a number of demographic and health factors,

such as status as a smoker and body mass index . . . the risk of subsequent mortality is no different for uninsured respondents than for those covered by employer-sponsored group insurance. In other words, once you compare death rates in an apples-to-apples fashion—comparing insured smokers to uninsured smokers, for instance—the likelihood of dying evens out. This, in turn, would mean that [the earlier] estimate of 18,000 deaths would drop essentially to zero.”

Poof! . . . goes your 22,000 deaths because of lack of insurance. This is just one more indication that the “completely-broken-health-care-system” hysteria is lying propaganda to cover a fascistic takeover of the US economy.