Health Care

Healthcare: Mackey, Obama, and Reid

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I’ve had a hard time taking John Mackey (Whole Foods co-founder & CEO) very seriously ever since he was caught engaging in sock-puppetry of a particularly silly sort. But his thoughts on healthcare, as expressed in this article, are well-thought-out and concisely written. Read the whole thing, but Mackey’s ideas include:

–Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
–Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
–Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
–Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.

Meanwhile, our President continues to push his own complex and radical plan through the use of high-pressure sales tactics and exaggerations. Here’s Obama talking about tonsils:

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Does our Prime Minister have nothing else to do?

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It comes to something when the Prime Minister of a country that is in the middle of a serious political, economic and, let’s face it, spiritual crisis can think of nothing better to do with his time than to become involved in a stupid Twitter campaign to persuade Americans that the NHS, well-known for its expense, incompetence and low standards (for a rich Western country) is absolutely wonderful.

Coupled with the most extraordinary hysteria that has once again pushed any notion of a real British debate about healthcare as far away from political discussion as possible, this has not been an edifying spectacle.

I have a rant with more details on Your Freedom and Ours. Enjoy.

Why We Think We Can’t Afford Health Care

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In 1900, most people walked to work, school, shopping and socializing. The percentage of the average household’s budget devoted to transportation was so low that the Census bureau didn’t even bother to collect data on it. Today, the average household spends 21% of its budget on transportation. It’s the second biggest single cost after housing yet people take such spending for granted and easily factor it in to their personal budgets. We do so because transportation costs rose slowly over the course of the last half century while other costs, such as food, decreased. Decade after decade we gradually became used to spending more and more for transportation till now the average middle-class family easily accepts spending several thousand dollars a year in transportation costs.

As a thought experiment, imagine that for some reason people never had to individually pay the cost of their own transportation.

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Some Substantive Review of the Obamacare Bill

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We get told that opposition to the Bill is “hysterical”. Yet I get emails like what I have put below the fold all the time. People who are going to have to live with this thing are reading it, understanding it, and very sensibly, getting alarmed by it. That is not hysteria, it is rationality.

This thing is a pig in a poke. Obama and Pelosi and Reid are trying to rush it through before anyone can figure out how bad it is.

The longer people have to read and understand this thing, the more they are going to oppose it.

Take a look and decide if you like what you see.

[To be absolutely clear, the analysis below the fold was not prepared by me. I received it as an email. It was prepared by a gentleman named John David Lewis.]

UPDATE: And of course Gov. Palin is correct about the Death Panels.

UPDATE 2: Is President Obama telling lies about surgical care in America because he (1) knows the facts but is dishonest, (2) does not know the facts because he ignorant and inept, (3) is desperate and hysterical about the disintegration of political support for his Plan? (Hat tip The Corner.)

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