Kevin Fleming

I missed the apparent lovefest over healthcare between Newt and Hillary last Thursday at the National Press Club. It was covered in Friday’s WaPo article The Reformer and the Gadfly Agree on Health Care, also covered in philly.com’s piece entitled Former political foes patch up differences to tout health care.

Some of the more eyebrow-raising comments:

“Gingrich, out of elected office, was free to depart from his anti-government roots. With Clinton nodding in support, he came out in favor of mandatory daily physical education, healthful food in schools and a “transfer of finances” from rich to poor. Some of this,” Gingrich said after a long list of concessions to the left, “may surprise you.”

Mandatory exercise and diets? Mandatory??

Clinton had surprises, too. She nodded in support of Gingrich’s proposal to “voucherize Medicaid” and agreed with his statement that “welfare reform has really worked.” She granted that “there is enough money in the system right now to cover the uninsured” and she said that piecemeal reform was the best route.”
In other words, Clinton believes that egalitarian redistribution works and is cost-free.

This little sentence on the philly site is hilarious:
Clinton and Gingrich both said there were ways to fix the system that would not raise ideological red flags, or trigger bitter partisan fights.
Of course they do. It looks like both Dems and the GOP have agreed that piecemeal expansion of government power in health care can be a nonpartisan affair.

P.S. Has Gingrich gone completely mad?

Apparently, the Washington Post is shocked (-shocked-) that Bad Practices Net Hospitals More Money. This weekend’s article in the WaPo contains the following howlers:

In a four-year period, 106 heart patients at Palm Beach Gardens developed infections after surgery, according to lawsuits and government records. More than two dozen were readmitted with fevers, pneumonia and serious blood infections. The lawsuits included 16 patients who died.

How did Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly, respond? It paid Palm Beach Gardens more.

and

Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, who have been studying Medicare’s performance for three decades, estimate that as much as $1 of every $3 is wasted on unnecessary or inappropriate care. Other analysts put the figure as high as 40 percent.

Despite collecting “reams of information on quality of care”, the data are left unused. As a result, “[t]he way Medicare is set up …it actually punishes you for being good.”

So did WaPo finally discover that the market is superior? Nope.

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My home state of Minnesota has raised the minimum wage, from $5.15 an hour to $6.15/hr. While chief sponsor of the bill Sen. Ellen Anderson, D-St. Paul said “$6.15 is still a barebones pay rate.“, she feels it shows that “[w]e support you. We believe everyone who works hard in our state should have the opportunity to succeed.”

The article notes criticism by Republicans that this is merely a “feel-good” vote. A local business man complained, “it’s going to make a substantial impact to our cost of doing business. What we’ll have to do is pass that along to our customers. People can only afford to pay so much for your product. You’re going to price yourself out of business.”

On May 2nd, Florida similarly increased the minimum wage to $6.15 per hour. Florida’s new minimum wage is indexed to inflation, so the state will readjust the minimum every fall. A a spokesman for the Florida Chamber of Commerce said that “such increases will result in higher prices for Floridians, which will hurt elderly people living on fixed incomes.” Apparently, the socialist group ACORN had pushed for the state’s minimum-wage law, which was enacted last year as a constitutional amendment.

That’s the background.

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