And it’s NOT that it’s too expensive (though it is expensive).

The problem with health care in America is that there is no reason for people to pay for what they can get for “free”. And if something goes wrong, you’re just a phone call away from heaps of cash (after the 35-50% that goes to the lawyers, of course).

I see people using the Emergency Room as their Primary Care Facility. Not because they think it’s better than a doctor’s office, but because if they can’t pay for it, the hospital can’t come after them.

The bill that passed the House last night, supporting President Obama’s “Hope and Change” agenda is going to cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.  The only way of paying for that, since the government never CUTS spending (except for President Clinton who cut our defense budget in the 90s), is for taxes to be increased.

As it stands now, someone earning $40k in the US (depending on the state) pays about 9% to Social Security and Medicare. Another 0-10% to their state. And 10-20% to the IRS. That’s a total of 20-40% of their income being taken from them. Add on top of that the sales taxes that [almost] every jurisdiction in the country charges (4-10% from where I’ve been, except OR and DE). Also add-in fuel “surcharges”, phone taxes, etc – and the typical American is paying about 50% of their income to various taxes.

Yes, I do understand that government services are paid-for with taxes. And I understand there are a host of taxes available. Some people even manage to pay [almost] no taxes. Due to earning too little, there are a host of Americans who benefit from government services who never pay into them (other than sales taxes).

Should citizens benefit from their government’s provided services? Of course. Should citizens contribute (something) to benefit? I believe that is also a resounding “YES“.

Should citizens be forced to pay for things they are not using? That’s where this health care “reform” bill has me against it. It’s where most of the state and federal budget items have me upset.

Property taxes supposedly pay for education in most areas. Except, of course, for where there are “educational” lotteries. If lotteries pay for education, why are property taxes still as high as they are? And if property taxes pay for them, then the lotteries are just get-rich-quick-schemes taking advantage of people who can’t do math. (Personally, I think if you can derive $1 of entertainment from a scratch-off ticket, then it’s ok; it’s when someone looks to the lottery as a “way out” of their current economic situation that I have a problem – they’ll keep coming back and back and back, because “you can’t win if you don’t play”.)

Fuel taxes supposedly pay for road maintenance and expansion.

Income taxes (personal and corporate [and capital gains and taxes on interest earned etc]) pay for pretty much everything else.

The current federal budget is about $3 trillion. I have no idea how much money that is. No one does. If you split it evenly over the population, it’s about $10000 per person (man, woman, boy, and girl) in America. According to the BEA, Americans earned about $5 trillion in personal income last year (excluding the $1 trillion governments paid in salaries). Additional to that was another about $1 trillion earned by proprietors of businesses. After all is said and done, that comes out to a per capita earnings of about $35000.

Estimates I have seen so far put the cost to the federal government (and therefore US – taxpayers: it’s where the “government” gets its money from) in the range of about $1000-5000 billion ($1-5 trillion) over the next decade. That’s an additional $100 billion per year – just over the next 10 years. That’s an increase to our national budget of about 3-15% per year. As a percentage, the bottom of the range is not big (but the top is huge). As a “real” number, the whole range is huge.

Various reports put the number of “uninsured” in America at 30-45 million people, or about 10-15% of the population. Why is it important that these folks become insured? What percentage of those “uninsured” actually NEED coverage? Why do they not have it? Is it truly because they cannot afford it (they earn too little, etc)? Is it because they DO NOT NEED coverage? I went without health insurance for 4 years. I’ve had it since January 2007, and haven’t needed it yet. It would be far far cheaper for me to not have health insurance and just pay my doctor once a year when I go for a checkup than it is to pay for insurance. (Yes, if I *did* need it, it would be nice to have.)

What costs are actually associated with health care? How much of that $200 you pay your doctor per visit is really associated with “care”, and how much goes to overhead costs, such as staff and their OWN insurance in the event the patient decides to sue them? The medical practice I used to use employs two doctors and three nurses. Let’s say for sake of argument that the nurses are paid $20 per hour for 40 hours per week. That’s $160 per day and $800 per week per nurse. So, if 4 patients come in on Monday, their office fees have paid one nurse for the week. Four patients in a day seems low based on every visit I’ve ever made to a doctor’s office: it seems to be typically about 2-3 per hour (or more), which is about 20 per day. Twenty patients times $200 are $4000 a day (gross) that the practice is charging.

Some amount of that goes towards utilities. Other goes to security. Some is used for supplies. Some chunk is paid directly to the government in the form of taxes. And some noticeable amount is paid to a liability coverage company to protect the staff in the event a patient sues them for malpractice (real or imagined).

I read that twenty years ago, a neuro-surgeon in Australia only had to carry $100000 in liability coverage because lawsuits are capped in Australia (except for gross malfeasance, which carries criminal penalties as well as civil ones). At the same time, US-based general surgeons had to carry $1 million in coverage, and neuro-surgeons $5 million. That’s 10-50 TIMES the coverage – at a MINUMUM! And that did not guarantee that if the surgeon was sued, he would be able to cover the costs of the lawsuit with his liability insurance.

That means that two, otherwise identical, surgeons, practicing the same type of work, had to have a ~50x difference in their insurances due to litigation law.

America is a very litigious (lawsuit-happy) country.

Only in America could you have someone sue their microwave manufacturer for not telling them not to use it to dry-off their hamster.

Only in America could someone sue McDonald’s for spilling hot coffee in their lap and burning themselves.

Only in America would a family sue Ford for the death of a wife and mother when she was backing her car on the interstate (patently illegal), and was rear-ended.

Only in America can a home-invader/thief/mugger sue the very family he was attacking because he got injured while trying to escape.

Only in America would a physician be required to carry millions of dollars in liability insurance, order “unneeded” tests, get extra opinions, etc: just in case the patient (or their family) decided that something wasn’t perfect in their care and therefore the doctor should have to pay.

What America needs is not “health care” reform. What America needs is “attitude” reform: we need to not be a country of victimhood, a nation of folks who think it’s someone else’s job to pay for their needs, a citizenry who all participate in the betterment of their nation, a society that is not afraid of mistakes – the society and citizenry that described America during its founding all the way through the early/mid-20th century.

I’m sure most of the folks who use ERs for their PCF aren’t trying to game the system. I’m sure many of them truly can’t afford the cost of going to see a doctor preventatively. I’m positive the percentage of those gaming the system is small.

The problem is that even a small percentage of a big population is a big number. If only 1 percent of 1 percent of the population were in the “gaming” category, that would be about 30000 individuals. Spread across the fifty states, it’d be merely a few hundred per region. If that was the percentage, health coverage would not need be so expensive.

Instead, and whether they intend to “game” or not (and I’m positive the great majority do not), the number of uninsured is 10-15% of the population. The number of insured, then, is 85-90%.

How many of those who have health coverage abuse that coverage? How many never go to a doctor, never use the insurance they pay for, and only have it just-in-case? How many go to the doctor every time they have a sniffle?

Forcing all Americans to have health coverage will cost taxpayers hundreds or thousands of billions of dollars.

Capping and limiting lawsuits would cost little more than passing yet another law.

Health care providers need to not be afraid that an honest misdiagnosis will land them in the poor house. Patients need to realize that there is no perfect diagnosis – sometimes even the best teams and techniques won’t determine the cause of their malady. Maybe it’s imagined. Maybe it’s real. Maybe it’s never been seen before. Maybe it’s just that the doctor you use doesn’t know what he’s looking at when he reads the X-ray. Maybe he’s new. Maybe he’s tired. Perhaps it was just your loved one’s time to go.

Forcing yet another trillion-dollar measure down the throats of hard-working Americans won’t cure the ills of the system.

How often does merely throwing money at a problem solve it?

How often does throwing people and ideas and a healthy attitude at a problem solve, mitigate, or refocus it?

Once good ideas, attitude, and people are working on a problem, money can be directed well. We won the first space race because we put all the best people we could find to work trying to solve the problem – and gave them fiduciary resources to make their visions happen.

Everything we as a nation have ever won has been because those with the vision, courage, and ideas to make somethign happen have gotten out there and done it.

We can reform health care once we remove [most] fear from the system.

Fear cripples any environment: doctors fear being wrong, so they order more tests; they fear patients suing them, so they are hyper-cautious in evaluations and diagnoses. Insurance companies fear lawsuits, so they charge customers lots of money for even the most basic of services. Patients fear the costs of insurance and that their doctor may not be perfect, so they use the ER for their doctor – or they sue for a misdiagnosis or “wrongful” death.

Doctors are human. They can make mistakes. Health care professionals don’t make many mistakes – ever. It’s one of the few professions where everyone is expected to be flawless. And it’s one of the few professions where the vast majority (I’d venture to say >99%) are flawless. From drawing blood and giving shots to replacing livers and hearts: medical professionals daily turn out not only their best work, but exceed the expectations of any reasonable person.

40 years ago Sesame Street premied on PBS, signaling the use of television as an aide to education and learning.

I think the Berlin Wall fell because Sesame Street turned twenty.

Oh come on! Kids can find anything they want anyways. I certainly could when I was younger – and it didn’t require the internet. Encyclopedias, libraries, talking to people. The list goes on and on.

Back to the article, ” half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.”

Fortunately there is [some] sanity in Australia, though – ‘”The Australian democracy must not be permitted to sleep with this loaded gun. This week saw Australia joining China and the United Arab Emirates as the only countries censoring Wikileaks.”‘

For such an otherwise [mostly] pro-democracy nation, Australia really bolloxed it up here.

‘”Adult supervision is the most effective way of keeping children safe online and people shouldn’t be led into believing by Labor that expanded blacklists or mandatory filters are a substitute for that.”‘ Right. That makes sense, and always applies.

On a related note, it’s funny that they compare the blacklist to a loaded gun, since fireams are [effectively] banned in the country, too. And like banning information, banning guns hasn’t dropped the crime rate – criminals still have them.

The piece de resistance, though, is this quote, “No one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list.” Huh? The list has nothing to do with “cyber safety”. It’s an attempt to control information, and a poor one at that. Blocking 2500 sites does nothing to the other 38 million “unsavory” ones out there.

Remind me to not move to Australia.

That’s right – if you operate a website in Australia, just linking to a banned site will cost you $11k per day.

So.

Mr Australia government guy… you’re banning domains? What happens when folks copy data from places like http://wikileaks.org to their own sites? Or other domains? Or change the domain name? Or refuse to pay the fine?

Just curious.

I find this quote amazing on his profile, “The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”

He flat-out admits to manipulating data to better his study’s goal.

I’ve seen brazen folks before (myriad politicians come to mind), but someone who’s supposed to be an impartial researcher?

That’s frightening.

I wonder how many of his esteemed colleagues do the same thing?

But please tell me how this cartoon is racist?

According to Roland Martin, it’s a racist attack on the president. “The cartoonist didn’t hang a sign around the neck of the chimp, so he left it up to the reader to determine exactly who the cops were referring to. We all know that the stimulus bill was the first priority of the new president, so when reading the caption, it was easy to infer that the cartoonist was implying the president of the United States.”

I’m a smart guy.

I’m pretty up on the news.

I saw the story about a chimpanzee that was shot in Connecticut after escaping and attacking several people.

If I hadn’t seen the CNN editorial, I wouldn’t have known about the cartoon (I don’t get the New York Post frequently). Now that it’s become a broohaha, I’m looking at the cartoon.

Mr Martin is sorely mistaken – no one I know would’ve seen a racist comment being made in this cartoon. Nor a statement against the President of the United States. Congress wrote the bill (even if the President did back it).

The statement obviously being made is that Congress is a bunch of monkeys, and a chimp could do no worse.

In my experience, it’s people like Mr Martin, Al Sharpton, and others who constantly bring-up racism (who, may I add are black themselves) who keep the issue alive and well.

In my experience, skin color has never had any role in any interaction I’ve ever had. Where I grew up, the line of work I now have, jobs I’ve previously held, and where I’ve gone to school all show that if the person (irrespective of ‘color’) gets his work done, is pleasant, and overall just a ‘person’, they’re fine. I have friends of all sorts of colors and backgrounds. None of them feel any race issue.

I have a huge problem with hyphenated Americans. Other countries don’t have hyphenated citizens. There are no African-British. No Italian-Canadian. Never heard of a French-Chinese. So why do we have African-Americans (especially when a large percentage of black folks in America didn’t come from Africa)?

We are a post-racial country, as long as folks like Mssrs Martin, Sharpton, Jackson, and myriad others who vault themselves into the public eye keep quiet. Did America do wrong by other colors in the past? Absolutely. We participated in enslaving blacks (who we typically received as already-enslaved blacks from competing tribes), turning Chinese into barely-human workers to build railroads, etc.

This cartoon, and the [apparent] whirlwind of attention it is getting, just go to show that the only reason it’s an issue is because a few people make it one.

Had Roland kept quiet, anyone who had missed the cartoon wouldn’t have known, and everyone who saw would have gone along with the surface, obvious, not-read-into ‘meaning’ of the drawing as a political statement drawn on top of a recent news story that the stimulus bill was written by monkeys.

“News stories” like this contribute to people hating the news media. When the media becomes the news, makes the news, and comments about its own news, they’re not reporting’ the news’ – they’re participating in a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing series of congratulatory back-patting to make themselves feel better.

Maybe folks like Roland Martin could go back to doing something productive in life, rather than making an issue of something that isn’t there.

Less than 8 months after President George W Bush took office, some group of people hostile to the United States flew aircraft into densely-populated buildings in one of the largest cities in the world.

Had our president NOT reacted, Americans worldwide would have been on the road to kill or impeach him. And hostiles worldwide would’ve looked at us as a bunch of pansies who turn and run when the going gets tough.

In 2000 I voted for Mr Bush. I wanted someone else to get the Republican nomination, but he didn’t. I personally could not have voted in good conscience for Mr Gore.

But regardless of who could’ve won, I would not have wished such a monumental situation on any elected official – even those I vehemently disagree with.

Had Mr Gore, or anyone else, won the presidency in 2000, all things being equal, what would their reaction to 9/11 have been? Could anyone else have made a “better” decision with what little data we had? I don’t think so. I think many worse decisions could’ve been made, and I’m convinced that equally valid, but different routes could’ve been employed in prosecuting those who attacked us.

I hope and pray that the man about to take over from Mr Bush doesn’t have another issue to deal with the way Mr Bush did. I’d like to see Mr Obama recant his liberal leanings and at least move to the center, if not be converted to a conservative. But mostly I hope that nothing happens for the term of his presidency – and that he goes home when he’s done the way Mr Coolidge did 80 years ago.

“The commander of American and allied naval forces off the coast of Somalia has begun efforts to halt a spike in piracy, urging merchant vessels to sail with armed guards on board and to travel only within lanes now patrolled by warships. The commander, Vice Adm. William E. Gortney of the United States Navy, said crews of merchant ships were being taught measures that did not involve the use of force to prevent pirates from boarding their vessels.”

“The techniques include complicated rudder movements and speed adjustments that make it hard for pirate speedboats to pull alongside, as well as simple steps like pulling up ladders that some ships leave dangling for an entire voyage.”

I understand pulling-up your ladders – if you’re at sea, why have them down? Plus, if the pirates are on a speedboat (5-10 feet of the water) and you’re on a supertanker (50-100 feet off the water), they can’t board if they have no path.

I do not, however, understand why the Navy would be encouraging the merchant vessels to not use force if need-be.

“Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week that there were legal and military obstacles to combating piracy. ‘One of the challenges that you have in piracy, clearly, is, if you are intervening and you capture pirates, is there a path to prosecute them?’ he said.”

It used to be that if someone was trying to board your vessel, steal your stuff (and that of the group for which you work), and potentially kill you had not only the right, but the responsibility to defend yourself. I’ve never heard of “prosecuting them” beyond a simple Captain’s Mast at sea. Hanging them from the yardarm is an encouragement to others to think twice (or maybe three or four times) before trying themselves.

“In Al Qaeda’s first response to the American election, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a “house Negro” who will continue a campaign against Islam begun by President George W. Bush.”
…
“American officials dismissed the new video as spin control and a desperate tactic by a terror group that suffered a defeat in the global war of ideas when the United States elected a black president with a Muslim name.”
…
“And in a blunt personal attack on the new president, Zawahiri painted Obama as a hypocrite and traitor to his race, unfavorably comparing him to ‘honorable black Americans’ like Malcolm X, the 1960s black Muslim leader. The Qaeda video drew extensively on archival footage of Malcolm X, and much of the message juxtaposes a still picture of Obama wearing a yarmulke during a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem with a photo of Malcolm X kneeling in prayer at a mosque.”

…

You all know I don’t especially like our new President-elect, but I’d point to this as a case-in-point that we’re still hated by extremists the world over. Personally, I think it’s a Good Thing™ that we are – if we weren’t, we’d be either a bunch of wishy-washy assholes who don’t believe in anything, or we’d be just as fanatical; neither of those appeal to me.