Dueling Realities on Health Coverage

What does our nation need on health care?  Or rather, what should we force other people to pay for?  That is what we are talking about when we talk about health care plans and presidential candidate.  

Columnist Roger Simon went to listen to the Democratic candidates talk about it.  Here is what John Edwards promised.

I would cover all Americans. There would be shared responsibilities: Employers must cover their employees or pay into a fund. The government would create health care markets, and you could choose your health care provider. Some would be private and some would be Medicare-plus -- kind of single-payer (i.e., government-run) plan. Everyone in America will be required by law to be covered by a health care plan.

It would cost, he said, “$90 billion to $120 billion per year in government costs.” 

Hillary Clinton, she of HillaryCare fame, was more circumspect.

A lot of people like what they have now. We don’t want people feeling that government will come in and tell me what to do and what doctor I want to go to. We will give people a choice. We have to look at that as a framework.

So although she was all in favor of a universal system she put its implementation out into the future.

I want universal health care coverage by the end of my second term

On another planet is Robert J. Cihak, retired physician.

Look for “disruptive innovation” in your health-care future, he advises.

About a year after his diabetes diagnosis, he started using his own handheld blood glucose meter. He used it to observe how his blood sugar responded to... food... exercise... and other life activities... He then knew much more about his body’s response to his diabetes than his doctors ever could.

But of course, he’s not allowed to get his own “HbA1c test (glycosylated hemoglobin)” test.  For that he has to go into hospital for a three-hour procedure.  And then the results are reported to his doctor, not to him, the expert.

But then a new company offered a $16 do-it-yourself test kit. He "put two drops of blood on a strip, mailed it back to them, and three days later, they sent me my HbA1c score."

Do you get the feeling that the Democrats will have their universal health care just about put in place by the time that medical advances make it completely obsolete?

Kinda like their government pension scheme, and their government education scheme?

Let’s see now.  Let’s get the current government spending numbers on all that, before we get universal health care.

United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2007
Amounts in billions of dollars

Pensions: $872.7
Health Care: $844.4
Education: $744.8
source: usgovernmentspending.com

Hey.  What’s another $100 billion on top of that?

Business Boring? Please!

The chap at the BBC explained why they don’t put much business on TV. “It’s seen as just a bunch of boring men in suits, sitting behind desks.” Not enough sex, presumably, and not enough progressive values.

Oh please, writes business editor Jeff Randall:

Business is full of brilliant, eccentric, dynamic, flawed, creative, venal, visionary, devious, generous and crooked people. It’s drama. It’s greed. It’s lust. It’s envy. Boring, it ain’t. Business is the constituency of control-freaks, show-offs, workaholics, plotters, schemers, bullies, wimps, winners and losers. Some are obsessed about becoming super rich. Others couldn’t care less. Their drug is glory.

The most boring 15 months he worked was as sports editor.  Sports is boring

I soon discovered that dealing with most sports folk was mind-numbingly dull, compared with swimming alongside sharks such as Tiny Rowland and Bob Maxwell. Like Lord Byron, they were mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Our modern society seems to have an infatuation with dull.  It loves the mayhem of sports on TV.  But don’t ever get into the real thing, like battling Islam for world domination!

Well, real life has a way of elbowing its way into the living room whether you like it or not.  And that is when you need the dangerous people to get you out of trouble—mad, bad, eccentric, creative, devious, and all the rest.

The War Will Go On

In a sense, military historian Victor Davis Hanson has it backwards.  Never mind about the tactical considerations of Iraq vs. Afghanistan, he says.

Depending on how we leave Iraq, this global war against radical Islamic terrorism will either wax or wane. But it will hardly end.

Wrong, Mr. Hanson.  On the contrary, whatever we do in Iraq, the global war of Islamic terrorism against us will go on. 

After all, we don’t give a damn about whether Islam lives or dies.  As far as we are concerned we are the future and the Islamists are a bunch of parallel-cousin-marrying barbarians.

It is the fact that the Islamists won’t live and let live that we are in this war, pace the Noam Chomsky brigade.

But, of course, we are just quibbling.  Hanson is making the point that Iraq is just a battle, a tactical or operational question.  We can win it or lose it. But win or lose in Iraq the war with an enraged Islam will go on.

Most likely, it will take a western city or two damaged by a dirty nuclear bomb before the West gets mad enough to get serious.

The trouble with barabarians is that you don’t know when to take them seriously.  Usually they are just a nuisance.  But sometimes they can take down an empire.  It happened to the Roman Empire, and it happened a few times to the Middle Kingdom, most notably when Genghis Khan and his chaps took over in the 1200s and inspired Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea

and so on.

Strategically speaking, the next item on the agenda is what the Democrats will do when they are next in power.

Because that is a very different thing from being in opposition.

Housing Bust: Minorities Hardest Hit

Unfortunately there’s a lot of truth in the old joke about the final news item from the mainstream media: “World Ends, Minorities and Women Hardest Hit.” 

Because when disaster strikes it is the least experienced, the most vulnerable, those least able to adapt who suffer the most.

So you’d expect that minorities would be having a hard time in the current housing bust.

And you’d look to The New York Times to tell you all about it.

From the vantage point of 34th Street, things don’t look good, at least not across the Hudson in Jersey.  Report Kareem Fahim and Ron Nixon:

Broad swaths of Newark are groaning under the weight of mortgage debt, much of it accumulated in the building boom of recent years that has transformed some parts of the city with gleaming redevelopment.

You have to feel sorry for these folks:

[A] heavy mortgage debt has led thousands of residents — many of them first-time homebuyers — close to financial ruin, experts and local officials say.

And here we go: sub-prime loans rear their ugly heads.

Federal lending data show that a high percentage of mortgages for homes on the north, south and west sides of Newark — as much as 50 percent in some neighborhoods — are subprime loans.

Expect the question of sub-prime loans to surface in the campaigns of the Democratic presidential contenders.  These are Democratic voters that are hurting, and it’s time the government “does something.”

How Do You Spell C-r-e-d-i-t-C-r-u-n-c-h?

It’s always a mystery how the economy swings from easy credit—when lenders are filling the airwaves with loan ads—to the good old credit crunch when you can’t get a loan if your life depended on it. 

But maybe the story of New Century Financial Corp. gives us a clue.

Reuters’ reporter Jonathan Stempel tells today how New Century can’t sell its paper to the government-sponsored mortgage giants any more. 

New Century said it decided voluntarily on Monday to stop selling or being the main servicer of loans for Freddie Mac, the second-largest U.S. home loan financier. Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM - News), the largest financier, cut off its own ties with New Century earlier this month, saying the company breached some contracts.

Hum.  Just when poor folks are going to need credit the government decides to cut the cord.  Or at least the quasi-monopoly government-sponsored politically-connected mortgage-bond floaters cut the cord. Or pull in their horns.

Just to be on the safe side.

It ain’t fair. 

But does it mean a credit crunch, or at least a continuing slide in the housing market?

The simple answer is that we don’t know.  We’ll know in about another year as we look back.  Pundits will knowing say either:

1. You could have seen that coming, or
2. Well, those perma-bears were wrong again.

But right now, you can place your bets.  There is still time.

Go For It: usgovernmentspending.com!

It’s a great story of rags to riches.

First it was an idea.  Then it was an article on roadtothemiddleclass.com.

Last Thursday it was up on a website completely modern with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).  On Friday night it was propagated worldwide as usgovernmentspending.com.

On Saturday we sent a sitemap to Google.  On Monday night we were indexed and searchable on Google.

On Tuesday, our regular article was publicizing usgovernmentspending.com on The American Thinker.

Today Andrew Sullivan has linked from The Atlantic on his Daily Dish:

Here’s a great new online guide to where your taxpayers’ dollars end up. The vast majority goes to the elderly in pensions and healthcare. Some acerbic commentary can be found here. I’m just glad the web can expose the reality of government spending and redistribution.

Dare I send an email to Rush?  Would it demolish the site?

Oh the nightmare of success!

UAW Says It's Full of Fight

You’ve gotta hand it to the UAW.  They’re not ready to roll over and play dead.  Why, the whole idea of bankruptcy is absurd, a management trick, as Tom Krisher reports from the UAW bargaining convention.

(By the way, Tom does not tell his readers whether he is a union member.  It is the official position of us here at Road to the Middle Class that all journalists should disclose their union membership status when writing about labor unions.  Anyone that doesn’t isn’t really a journalism professional.  Disclosure: Nobody at Road to the Middle Class is a union member.)

Martin Shawl, 53, a 28-year Delphi Corp. and General Motors Corp. worker from Bay City, said he doesn’t believe the Detroit automakers are in financial trouble.

"It’s voodoo accounting," he said, questioning the timing of the Chrysler Group’s losses and GM’s restatement of earnings due to accounting troubles

He said the union shouldn’t give back anything to the companies, and it should end a two-tier wage scale that pays new hires less than longtime workers.

God bless the fellow!  It’s all smoke and mirrors designed to exploit the working stiffs on the shop floor and to force give-backs.

Tell you what, Marty, old chum.  I just checked the financial box scores today. General Motors is capitalized at about $18 billion.  Google is worth about $144 billion.

Now I don’t know what kind of voodoo goes into the pricing of common stock on the global finance markets.  Probably there is a fair amount—dead chicken, entrails, the whole Haitian thing. 

But when General Motors is worth about 12 percent of upstart Google it has to mean something beyond smoke and mirrors. Old sport.