This letter is excellent, clear and direct. It needs wide circulation.
A generalized version (fill in the variables) of Babka’s letter for use against future assaults on the market.
Health Care
Nope, No Bias Here
Check out the headline on this AP story:
Can you image the AP describing non-leftists’ ideas on health care as “reform”? Can you imagine them describing leftists’ objections to non-leftists’ ideas as “attacks” on those “reforms”?
Revealingly, the “attack” is just an industry study of the cost associated with the supposed leftist plan du jour. The horribly unfair and unjust industry conclusion of the evil insurance companies?
The chief reason, said the report, is a decision by lawmakers to weaken proposed penalties for failing to get health insurance. The bill would require insurers to take all applicants, doing away with denials for pre-existing health problems. In return, all Americans would be required to carry coverage, either through an employer or a government program, or by buying it themselves.
But the CBO estimated that even with new federal subsidies, some 17 million Americans would still be unable to afford health insurance. Faced with that affordability problem, senators opted to ease the fines for going without coverage from the levels Baucus originally proposed. The industry says that will only let people postpone getting coverage until they get sick.
It is one of the strange conceits of leftists that they believe that people do not respond to economic incentives. It’s simply common sense that if insurance remains very expensive for people, but they know that by law all insurance companies will have to grant coverage at any time, even if they’re already in the hospital, the economically rational thing for people to do is to delay purchasing health insurance until the very moment they need it. Pointing out that people respond to economic incentives and that they make decisions that provide them the best economic outcome is considered an “attack” by the AP
The AP is so far in the tank they can’t even see out of it.
[update (2009-20-12 3:58pm): I must not have been the only one to notice. Now the headline reads, “Insurance industry assails health care bill.” Maybe they can learn.]
“When the President chose a partisan path in his speech, he pushed the real debate behind closed doors. This is now a debate among House and Senate Democrats”
The real action is not taking place at markup. It is taking place behind closed doors, away from the markup. When the President chose a partisan path in his speech, he pushed the real debate behind closed doors. This is now a debate among House and Senate Democrats. Republicans can influence that debate only to the extent they can change the decision-making process of Democratic members, since everyone assumes that almost every Republican will vote no.
The comments to the above linked post are utterly depressing. Elections have consequences: I wonder how the ‘Obama’ libertarians and the ‘teach the GOP a lesson’ conservatives are feeling about their respective votes, now? Yes, in a moment of frustration I am being unfair; I barely managed to pull the lever for McCain. In the comments, Keith Hennessey shows up to make the following suggestion:
Call your Representative and Senators (in their DC office). Don’t email them. Call them. Email is largely ignored. Phone calls are not. As an individual citizen, your greatest impacts are (1) speaking up at town meetings, (2) calling, (3) meeting with your representatives and/or their staff, (3) voting, and (4) letters to the editor.
Each individual call has a trivial impact. If enough people call, it can have a big effect.
Out of the Woodwork
My friend Janiece seems to attract the whackos. This time it is the alternative medicine crowd glomming on to an old post – what is it with these people? Neither they nor Wagner can stand having a piece of criticism out on the Net, even an old one. Do they spend all day vanity Googling? I had completely forgotten about Janiece’s post until the crazies showed up again months later.
One of the crazies showed up with “data” from the Gerson Institute, and being the truth seeker that she is, Janiece responded:
I’m not a doctor, but I do understand the scientific method, and this is not a clinical trial or a well constructed study. What I will concede is that the information was interesting enough to me as a layman that I think further study by qualified professionals wouldn’t be uncalled for.
Janiece is quite kind in her willingness to be open minded. This is not a character flaw*, because she also wanted to test the hypothesis provided – this is precisely what internalizing and living the scientific method as an heir of the Enlightenment and citizen of the modern world entails. But then, Janiece is my friend for many reasons, and this is one of them.
I do have a little bit of experience with clinical trial design, however, although (let me be very clear, here) I am not an MD. There are, however, methodological flaws in the study that negate even the glimmer of interest that Janiece detected – ones that do not require a statistician or an MD to find, though I will concede that the layman will need some specialized bits of information to parse the full impact on the claims made by the alt-med whackos.
There are so many red flags for quackery in that article it is hard to know where to begin.