Globalizing Health Care

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we are not so sure about the 15 percent of GDP spent on health care.  When it comes to improving life expectancy, expensive bio-medicine isn’t exactly outperforming sanitation and baisc OB-GYN care  to keep infant mortality down.

And then there’s the regulation and the licensure and the special interests, not to mention the herioc end-of-life care that doesn’t relieve suffering and doesn’t extend life.

So it’s good to see the chaps at Democracy Project doing a bit of thinking. They don’t like

the status quo or various extensions of the status quo such as proposals for a single payer system, mandating employee coverage, mandating employer coverage, health spending accounts[.]

Everyone, Democrat and Republican, wants to give the present system a few tweaks.  But nobody is thinking big ball.

The problem with our health care system is over-regulation. Yet, all the Republican solutions and Democratic solutions involve extending or reshaping the regulation.

Why not sidestep regulation altogether?

This can be accomplished through overseas medical treatment.

 What, medical tourism, risking life and limb in third-world countries?  Well, not so fast.

Back in the 1950s, many Americans believed that goods "made in Japan" were of low quality. As it turned out, by the 1970s "made in Japan" meant better quality than U.S.-manufactured goods. There is no reason why health care can’t be provided in the third world.

What makes you think that medical care in say, India, won’t be competitive with the US in 10 years or so? 

The beauty of it is that it would force the US health care industry to start cutting costs and improving quality.  Just like the US auto industry had to do.

We’ll find out, along the way, just how privileged and subsidized our vast health industry has become.  And we can expect our doctors and nurses and adminstrators to go screaming to Congress for relief from medical “dumping.”

But we won’t pay a blind bit of attention to their screeching.

Forget Racial Profiling, Now It's Political Profiling!

Who was not outraged by the shocking practice of law enforcement officials racially profiling minorities.  Why, they were picking up blacks all over the place, way disproportionate to their actual representation in the community.

(Of course, blacks have tended to commit crimes at up to ten times the rate of other races, but that doesn’t count.)

But now a new front has been opened in the fight against profiling.  In a breathless article in E Pluribus Media Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan announce that the Bush Justsice Department has targeted Democratic elected officials for investigation far more than Republicans. 

Our ongoing study of the Bush Justice Department (to be published in 2009) investigates the implications of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department’s blended religious -fundamentalist and neo-conservative rhetorical vision.

It was un-biased economist Paul Krugman who first publicized this scholarship.  And instapundit picked it up.

We will leave it to others to remind the two scholars that “religious-fundamentalist” and “neo-conservative” are not strictly scholarly terms but political perjoratives which change their meanings according to the present needs of Democratic politicians and activists.

And of course the findings of the study don’t really justify the scare headlines.

If you actually look at the numbers they cite you see that at the national level the “profiling” is not that great.  In their Appendix B Shields and Cragan show that the Bush Justice Department is currently investigating the following state-wide and federal elected officials: 36 Democrats and 30 Republicans.

But it is at the local level in Appendix C where the disparity rears its ugly head.  Here the Justice Department is investigating 262 Democrats and 37 Republicans.

How could this be, other than the bigotry of religious fundamentalism and neo-conservatism?

Well, if you look at the names on the list it is amazing how many of them come from notorious cellpools of corruption: New Jersey (30 under investigation), Baltimore (20 in a “wide-ranging investigation”), and so on.

And it is a shocking fact that Republican elected officials are grossly underrepresented in the corrupt inner cities of America.  (Why is this?  More research is needed.)

It couldn’t be, could it, that the Bush Administration is just doing its job, trying to root out corruption where it is most likely to be found, in Democratic controlled big cities?

President Bush Draws a Line

Republicans are fit to be tied about pusillanimous Republicans that won’t fight back against Democratic attacks.

As David Limbaugh sees it:

From the war on Iraq, to Gitmo, to the NSA surveillance program, to the Wilson-Plame fiasco, to global warming, to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, deceitful Democrats engage in relentless warfare against Republicans, and Republicans -- way too often -- roll over without even returning fire.

Actually, whenever Republicans do fight back they get skewered as mean-spirited and Puritan.  So, they figure, what’s the point?

There’s another problem.  Republicans don’t believe in fighting other Americans.  We believe in fighting foreign terrorists, not foolish mouthy Democrats.  We are professionals, business owners, and investors.  We believe in voluntary cooperation, following the rules, and serving our fellow men.  That’s what successful people do under democratic capitalism.

But Democrats do believe in fighting other Americans.  They believe that justice can only be achieved by political fight, by fighting for the people against the powerful, in the immortal words of Al Gore.  And they believe that it is not enough to write laws to work towards justice, or commutative justice.  They believe in distributive justice, taking stuff from some people and giving it to others.  They only sorta believe in democratic capitalism.  What they really believe in is politics.

Today, it seemed that President Bush has his limits when it comes to truckling to the Democrats.  In a statement to reporters about the US Attorney firings he said:

I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials.

It’s not exactly a ringing counterattack to the Democrats’ charges but it’s a start.

Who Do You Believe?

Who do you believe in the recent Atlanta shooting?  A National Guard soldier, Spc. Craig Perkins, claims he was taunted by young Muslim men and was pursued by them to his girl-friend’s apartment.  The young Muslims said they:

were simply out for a walk with two women when they passed through Perkins’ apartment complex. [They] told police Perkins came out of his apartment and confronted them for allegedly looking at him or his girlfriend.

That’s according to  David Simpson in The Atlanta Constitution.

Perkins and his girl-friend lived in an apartment complex whose renters were mostly “refugees of violent conflicts around the world.” Perkins

said he could feel the animosity when he walked by his Middle Eastern neighbors in his Guard uniform.
Women and older men tended to be polite, but the younger men were hostile, he said.
On many occasions, he said, he received signs of disrespect he knew from Iraq.

And then it ended in a confrontation in which Perkins shot one of the Muslims in the leg. 

It’s an interesting story.  Who do you believe?  The black US soldier in uniform whose service in the “National Guard helped him straighten out after a series of scrapes with the law as a young man?”  Or do you believe Tareq Ali Bualsafared, a student from the United Arab Emirates?

The question is, as it always is: Who is the victim?

But, as a conservative, I’m just not qualified to judge.

The Other "Creationism"

One of the great tasks to which our liberal friends are called is to champion the cause of “science.”  They mean by that witnessing for Darwinian explanations of reality against Christian “fundamentalism.” Yet while busily plucking the speck of dust out of the eyes of the creationists and the Intelligent Design activists, David Horowitz explains, they are letting the nation’s universities truckle to a different band of religious activists.

Yet at that very moment professors in American universities were teaching a form of secular creationism as contrary to the findings of modern science as the Biblical claim that the God had made the world in seven days.
...
The name of this theory is “social constructionism,” and its churches are Women’s Studies departments situated in universities across the United States...

These priests and prophets maintain that differences between men and women are not biological but “socially constructed” by a patriarchal society.

Even though it is scandalous to say so in an American university, the science is in on this one.

The scientific evidence is summarized in a recent book, Sex Differences in Cognitive Ability, whose author, Diane Halperin, is president of the American Psychological Association and was a social constructionist herself before reviewing the scientific literature.

Yes, socialization is important.  But underneath it all are biological factors that cannot be explained away as social conditioning.

But you are not allowed to say that at Harvard, at least, not if you are President.

Tom DeLay on Rush

Everyone has forgotten about Tom DeLay, who was “gotcha-ed” last year by the Democrats in the run up to the mid-term elections.

But now Tom Delay has a book out, No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight, and Rush Limbaugh interviewed him on Friday.  Major take-away from the interview is DeLay’s appreciation of the Clinton machine.

You cannot discount, Rush, the massive, unseen-before-in-my-lifetime coalition that the Democrats have been able to build over the last six years.
...
When they needed an organization, Harold Ickes created America Coming Together, which is a group that has 1400 full-time employees that canvass. They needed somebody to do media for the 527s. They created the Media Fund.
...
They’ve investigated probably every sitting Republican that we know of right now through a group called CREW, and Democracy 21 and Common Cause... To fund it, you’ve got George Soros foundations, hundreds of foundations, like the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation, the Soros Foundation pumping money in. The unions.

This, of course is the Clinton machine that is being built to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.  But where are the ideas, the vision of the future?  What they have built is a political machine to do the bare knuckle work of political street fighting to get across the finish line.

RUSH: ... You don’t defeat your enemies; you destroy them.
DELAY: That’s the Democrats. They don’t have any ideas. They don’t have a vision. They don’t have an agenda. How do you think they won in 2006?

That raises the big question.  Suppose the Demcrats get into power in 2008?  What will they do with it beyond just pumping money through to the “programs?” 

The Ancien Regime of the Good Old USA

OK I admit it.  When I read Jacob Aronson’s article Conserving and Consolidating the Progressive Liberal Tradition in TCSDaily, I blew a gasket.  Writes Aronson:

One of the core challenges now facing the Party is the collapse of the New Deal coalition and adaptation to the underlying economic realities that brought it about. Bill Clinton’s rallying cry to "end government as we know it" was an attempt to reform government along private sector lines.

Well, yeah!  But since then the Democratic Party has turned away from Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform it.  It is now driven partly by street brawlers like Markos Moulitsas who want to make the Democrats into a fighting party again, fighting the big corporations that are now more powerful than governments, and partly by the new progressives like Jacob Aronson.

But “reforming government along private sector lines” or using it to fight for the people against the powerful, as Al Gore wanted to do back in 2000, is delusional.  Let us look at government in the United States.  Let us follow the money in this unified table of government spending in the United States in 2004.  It is obtained by combining two spreadsheets, one from the US Census Bureau on state and local government spending, and one from the President’ s budget documents.

Here is the top line result for 2004:

• Programs for seniors: $1 trillion
• Programs for youth: $700 billion
• Programs for defense: $700 billion
• Programs for the poor: $660 billion
• Programs for transportation: $175 billion
• Interest on the debt: $400 billion
• All other programs: $2 trillion

Now it seems to me that the great power, the great interests in the land, the folks for whom we work at our jobs and for whom we pour the most money through our government is: senior pensions and health care, education of children, defense against enemies foreign and domestic, relief of the poor, and transportation.

And this is a huge commitment.  In fact, it is a commitment that can’t be met.

That is what politics is going to be about in this century.  It is a sideshow to talk about management along private sector lines, or using government to punish corporations. 

The question is: how long can we go on like this?