Medicinal Fried Chicken

I have a mother. She's awesome. She taught me right, and that I should eat healthy and not stuff my face with candy and deep-fried everything. I don't need a second mother in the national government. But once again, through manipulation of school lunches by the USDA, the nanny state is here once again to tell kids, parents, and schools what is good for them. This time, in the form of health food requirements for schools.  I noticed a headline on Sayanythingblog.com, referencing this article by the L.A. Times, showing that because of the health food craze, a BLACK MARKET for junk foods has sprung up in schools, showing a dramatic failure of the attempted "EAT YOUR PEAS THEY'RE GOOD FOR YOU" micromanagement by the Obama administration. People will do as they please...just let them make decisions for themselves, and as long as they don't hurt anyone else, who cares what they eat?

Oh, and South Park had an episode 2 seasons ago (Medicinal Fried Chicken) about THIS VERY TOPIC of a black market for fried chicken forming after laws banned it. The difference is, South Park is a cartoon comedy making fun of stupid policies. Now it's happening in real life.

Perhaps Isurance Is Part of the Problem?

John Stossel opines on one aspect of the health care debate in this video.

Getting the third party, insurance companies, involved with low deductibles that will cover every health care whim creates a system where the free market is not allowed to work, because nobody knows what the prices are, nor are there any incentives to lower costs.

Blue Dogfighting

Shut Up and Trust the Government?

Trust the Government

by Newt Gingrich

Posted 08/12/2009 ET

"How much is one additional year of your life worth?

Or one more year of life for your father or your wife? For your child?

In Great Britain, the government has settled on a number: $45,000.

That’s how much a government commission with the Orwellian acronym NICE has decided British government-run health care will pay for one additional year of life for a British subject.

Think it could never happen here? Then you need to pay closer attention to what Washington is planning for your health care.

British Government Bureaucrats Literally Decide if Your Life is Worth Living

The British single-payer bureaucrats arrived at the price of an additional year of life in the same way they decide how much health care all British people will get, through a formula called “quality-adjusted life years.”

That means that if you’re sick in Great Britain, government bureaucrats literally decide if your life is worth living and, if so, how much longer and at what cost.

If it’s more than $45,000, you’re out of luck.

A Well-Connected White House Advocate for Allocating Health Care Based on Perceived Societal Worth

In the highest levels of the Obama Administration there is a theory of how to ration health care that is troublingly reminiscent of the British system of “quality-adjusted life years.”

Dr. Ezekial Emanuel is a key health care advisor to President Obama and the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Earlier this year, Dr. Emanuel wrote an article that advocated what he called “the complete lives system” as a method for rationing health care. You can read it here.

The system advocated by Dr. Emanuel would allocate health care based on the government’s perception of the societal worth of the patients. Accordingly, the very young and the very old would receive less care since the former have received less societal investment and the latter have less left to contribute.

“Forstall[ing] the Concern that Disproportionate Amounts of Resources Will be Directed to Young People with Poor Prognosis”

“The Complete Lives System” would also consider the prognosis of the individual.

Quoting Dr. Emanuel: “A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognosis.”

When fully implemented, Dr. Emanuel’s system, in his words, “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”

“Chances that are attenuated” is a nice way of saying the young and the old are considered less worthy of health care and, under this system, will get less.

Once Government Becomes the Provider of Health Care, Personal Decisions Become Public Decisions

The point is not that a health care rationing system like the one favored by Dr. Emmanuel will be implemented in the United States tomorrow.

The point is that, as in the British system, once government becomes the single payer or even the main payer of health care, what were once intensely personal decisions become public decisions. And as costs rise, government will look for ways to contain them.

The inevitable result of this pressure to control costs will be rationing, whether it occurs during this administration or the next. At some point, the government will be forced to deny care to those who don’t meet the latest “quality-adjusted life years” cost-benefit analysis.

So the decision on what treatment to pursue that once would have been made by you and your doctor is now made for you by a bureaucrat using a formula -- a formula to literally determine if your life is worth saving.

The Camel’s Nose Under the Tent of Health Care Rationing

Societies don’t arrive at this point overnight.

British health care was nationalized soon after World War II, but NICE, the health care rationing agency, wasn’t created until the late 1990s as a way to control costs.

Today NICE routinely denies Britons life-prolonging drugs that are deemed not “cost effective” -- drugs that are widely prescribed in America to treat cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other serious conditions.

The result, studies show, is that Great Britain’s cancer survival rates are among the worst in Europe and lag behind the United States.

In America, Rationing Begins with Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER)

In our country, the road to dehumanizing, bureaucratic health care rationing begins with something called comparative effectiveness research (CER). It sounds completely innocent. In practice, CER means comparing different treatments for diseases to see which works best. And what doctor or patient would object to that, right?

The problem is that, in the context of a government-run health care system, comparative effectiveness research becomes a way to find a cheaper, one-size-fits-all approach to medicine that will limit health care choices for patients.

But don’t just take my word for it. Congressional Democrats included $1.1 billion in the Stimulus Bill for CER. Report language explaining the bill noted that the treatments found to be “more expensive” as result of the research “will no longer be prescribed” and that “guidelines” should be developed to manage doctors.

Congressional Democrats also killed several amendments to the current health care bill that would have prevented CER from being used to ration care. (To learn more about the common-sense amendments to the bill that have been blocked, click here).

The Government Has Determined You Must Take the Blue Pill

President Obama innocuously described the intended result of comparative effectiveness research like this: “If there’s a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?”

Listen to what the President is saying here. He’s saying that the government is capable of determining which pill works best for you and should therefore only pay for that pill.

But this one-size-fits-all approach goes against everything modern medicine is learning about the genetics of the human body. Different individuals and members of different ethnic and age groups respond differently to treatments. More and more, treatment of diseases like cancer is highly individualized and based on a genetic analysis of both the patient and her disease. Science is leading us in one direction and the administration and the Congress are taking us in the other.

What if you get sick and your doctor says you need the red pill, but the government has determined that the blue pill is what works best for its budget? In a single payer health world, what do you do then?

Creating a Commission to do the Dirty Work

Government bureaucrats limiting health care choices is terribly unpopular of course, which is why politicians use terms like “comparative effectiveness research” instead of “rationing.”

Another method Washington uses to avoid complicity in health care rationing is the creation of government boards or commissions -- like Britain’s NICE -- to do the job for them.

President Obama has expressed his support for using the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created to advise Congress on Medicare, to achieve cost savings under health care reform.

Because the commission’s decisions could only be over-ridden by a joint resolution of Congress, it would be virtually unaccountable to the people -- and nervous members of Congress could blame the commission for unpopular decisions.

Combine this kind of a commission with the “complete lives system” advocated by White House health care advisor Dr. Ezekial Emanuel and you end up with a government rationing board literally determining which Americans should live and which should die.

Just Trust the Government

Supporters of government-run health care dismiss these worries as alarmist. They argue that because their big government health care bill doesn’t overtly call for rationing, it is somehow illegitimate to talk about this danger.

But it is always legitimate to consider the long-term consequences of a government program. By refusing to have an honest debate of this issue -- to explore honestly the consequences of the “painful choices” that all supporters of government health care say must be made -- their argument boils down to nothing more than this:

Trust the government.

Trust the politicians who are passing 1000-page bills they haven’t read.

Trust the leaders who are demonizing the citizens seeking to express their disagreement by calling them “un-American.”

Trust the advisors who advocate sacrificing the weak and the old and then hide in the shadows.

Trust the government to know what’s best for the most intimate, most personal part of you and your family’s life: your health.

Go ask a British citizen if it’s worth it.

To just shut up and trust the government."

"Pliers and Vodka" Healthcare

And the Left worries about coat hanger abortions...well with this kind of health care we'll have coat hanger gall stone removal, because the care simply won't be available in a timely manner...

Click here...

A Revolution is Brewing...

People are starting to get mad...real mad about the things Obama is trying to do. Take this video where Kathleen Sebelius and Arlen Specter are trying to sell Obamacare at a townhall meeting:



Or this video where Congressman Lloyd Doggett is chanted away from his speaking engagement on health care:

Stealth Tactics

A lot of us conservatives are terrified over the way this health care "reform" pushed by the Obama administration is shaping up. The stated goal is a public health insurance "alternative" that will compete with the private sector, offering people alternatives to their current health insurance plans, and that the government has no intentions of completely taking over the health care industry (20% of our economy).

Sure. And I'm a leprechaun. The administration is using stealth techniques to take over the health care industry.

First, I see a huge disconnect between the stated problem and the offered solution. The problem is high costs of insurance and health care in general, yet the stated solution is a government health insurance program. Switching who pays for health care doesn't fix the problem...just who pays for it...and if the government is paying for it, YOU are paying for it as a taxpayer. Perhaps we should work more on decreasing the costs of health care rather than switching payers. Malpractice suits could be a place to start. I talked to a nurse here in Brookings who said her son was a doctor out in California. He QUIT delivering babies, because the malpractice insurance he had to purchase was simply too high...and he was paying $125,000! That's just for insurance to be a doctor! Our legal system needs reform to fix a lot of problems (although it may be tough with a Democrat-controlled Congress, as lawyers are the top contributors to that party).

The most disturbing thing about the administration's proposal is how Obama says that the government's new insurance plan will simply compete with private industry plans, as if that will somehow not be nationalized health care. In the end it will end up being just the government providing insurance, and I'll explain why through basic economics:

People often complain when a major chain store comes to town (like Walmart, Perkins, etc.). The biggest issue people have (although misguided, as I'll show), is that businesses that come in sell their goods very cheap, below cost, in order to push competition out of business in that area. The idea is that once competition is out of business, these bigger companies can then raise their prices to a higher level than before. This is a process referred to as "predatory pricing."

You with me?

The problem is, this rarely ever works, because it's not in the bigger company's long-run interests. Once they raise their prices again, competitors will once again move in to fill niches to compete with the bigger business, so once again they will have to sell their goods below cost to try and push competition out. Companies have to maintain profits, so chronically selling below cost simply to force out competition doesn't really pay, in that selling goods below cost for too long hurts the bigger store too much, and it's a losing battle anyway as smaller businesses return once prices go back up.

What does all this have to do with health care?

Enter the government. People like to hate Walmart and big business when they practice predatory pricing? The government is the ULTIMATE predatory pricer. The one thing that kept private sector, bigger businesses from predatory pricing was that in the long run, they have to eventually switch this process around and turn a profit, and turn consistent profits. When the government is "competing," with the private sector, they never have to worry about profits. Amtrak has turned a loss since 1970 and exists as a passenger railroad monopoly, even though it can't turn a profit. The government can keep operating things below cost for as long as it likes, through government subsidies (YOUR tax dollars thrown at it to keep it going)...eliminating private business competition and creating a government monopoly. Government does not have the private sector requirement of a profit to keep going, so it can unfairly undermine private business, even if they are hugely unprofitable, inefficient, and provide crappy services.

This is what will happen with the health care industry. Government will force all other insurance programs out of business simply because it can operate at a loss for so long.

Obama will not come outright and say this...preferring to stealthily take over the health insurance industry through these more subtle means--techniques that make me a little nervous and seem a bit Soviet Unionish.

If you want to take over the insurance industry, why not come out and say it? Because people might have a problem with that...and that doesn't get your party votes, does it now?

"Not a Principled Fight"

This is how radical our leaders in Washington are now...they believe they are so superior to everyone else in intellect that they do not even have to fight fair to get a single-payer health care system here in the United States. Because we know politicians are experts on health care and providers and insurance companies know nothing. I can't wait to stay get in line for a year before I can receive triple bypass surgery. Receiving that care the very next day after diagnosis in our current system rather than dying waiting in line is just tragic... To remedy the increased demand for "free" health care, the government would be in charge of rationing who gets care and who gets thrown on the waiting list, based on perceived need. Just watch this clip and see how extreme things have become, that the powers that be are willing to give the ax to the private health care industry in favor of pursuing a public payer experiment, which has failed in Canada and Great Britain: