John Edwards, medico-fascist
John Edwards to all those fat and lazy McDonalds patronizing SOBs out there: you get you butt in here so we can give you mandatory preventive care.
And while you’re at it, you lose that 100 lbs of blubber you’re carrying or we’ll strap you down for some good ol’ lipo action. If you don’t, we’ll find you; you can waddle, but you can’t hide:
He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of problem.” Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned and spread.
Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.
“The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death,” he said.
Love that continuum dude. Birth to death, and everything in between. Sieg Heil and all that.
It takes a village to steal your child
When Tom Cruise filed his Minority Report, it was science fiction. Now, it’s news.
This is unbelievable. Flag it and fear it, because it’s possible anywhere the aggressive nanny state is [see book by Hillary Clinton]. England is suffering from a rash of preemptive child removals where no harm occurred and there is no indication any will. Seizures are being made on the basis on vague assessments by doctors who never met the mother or child.
In the case cited here, the mother was raped when she was sixteen and suffered emotional trauma from that for a few years. [Duh.] Now she is an adult and pregnant, and she shows no signs of being a risk to herself or anyone else. But some pompous pediatrician has announced, purely the basis of her past history, that she presents a risk of “Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy,” where a parent harms a child to fake an illness and get attention. So the state is poised to seize the child from her at birth.
The horror, in part, is that it mimics the attitudes in extreme Islam, where a rape victim is treated as polluted and can never be whole–as if the crime against here were her own fault. Now England is doing this to rape victims too, under the guise of protecting children?
The case adds to growing concern, highlighted in a series of articles in The Sunday Telegraph, over a huge rise in the number of babies under a year old being taken from parents. The figure was 2,000 last year, three times the number 10 years ago.
Critics say councils are taking more babies from parents to help them meet adoption “targets”.
John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Justice for Families campaign group, said the case showed “exactly what is wrong with public family law”.
He added: “There is absolutely no evidence that Fran would harm her child. However, a vague letter from a paediatrician who has never met her has been used in a decision to remove her baby at birth, while evidence from professionals treating her, that she would have no problems has been ignored.”
And some people wonder why libertarians [that’s libertarians, not librarians] fear and loathe government.
Dogpile on Mitt’s health plan
Of course the Dems are going to attack it. Doesn’t go far enough, unfair to the poor, yada yada yada. I’m more interested in Giuliani’s response, through a spokesman:
“Mitt Romney’s legacy is the creation of a multi-billion dollar government health bureaucracy that punishes employers and insists middle income individuals either purchase health insurance or pay for their own health care,” said Scott Atlas, a Giuliani healthcare adviser. “The former is a mandate, the latter is a tax, and neither one is free-market.”
Let’s look at this again in slow motion. If you have to buy health insurance, that’s a mandate. Fair enough. Just like we mandate that you buy auto insurance because I don’t want you ramming your front end into my back end and then shrugging about who’s gonna pay for it. So that’s a mandate, and we can debate it’s merits.
But the second: requiring us to pay for our own health care is … a tax? When you are a spokesman for a front-running presidential candidate, aren’t you paid to make sense? Color me confused.
[Heresy warning: proceed at your own risk.]
If we require a parent to pay child support for their children, is that a tax? No. It’s simply a statement that you must fulfill your obligations, as society will otherwise be stuck with the mess and the tab.
The real question is whether we have reached a point where we are no longer willing to let people without medical care wither and die. It seems pretty clear to me that we have. If so, then we are either heading for a national program like Canada or England, or we are must reform the tax code, restructure the health insurance industry, and require that people be responsible for their own health care.
Unless you are willing to live in the world of Ayn Rand–and few, thankfully, are–then the question is not whether we have obligations as well as rights, but what those obligations are.
I don’t think the Uniform Code of Republican Conduct has a cut and dried answer on this.
But can she feed her children?
India appears to be poised to become an economic and military superpower, but gross disparities in wealth and education persist, seemingly a legacy of the damning caste system of yesteryear. The figures are astounding, bespeaking more a severely deprived third world country within a modern society, rather than one nation uniformly advancing:
An astonishing 46.3 per cent of all children under the age of three in India are malnourished, and nearly 80 per cent are anemic, according to the government’s National Health and Family Survey of 2005-06. There has been marginal improvement since 1992-93, when 51 per cent of under-threes were underweight. But in Madhya Pradesh, figures have worsened from 55 per cent in 1998-1999 to 60 per cent in 2005-2006.
Aid agencies say it is difficult to fund projects to combat the pervasive problem of malnutrition because of ’fatigue’ among donors. But India’s malnutrition ranks far worse than sub-Saharan Africa’s average rate of 27 per cent for children under the age of five, an ugly fact that rouses officials from complacency.
Scotter Libby has to think this is pretty funny
Just to set the stage, this is the South African Health Minister who gained infamy for promoting vitamins and garlic as alternatives to AIDS drugs. Now, she’s been unveiled as an alcoholic who cheated her way to a liver transplant and more:
The opposition called on the president, Thabo Mbeki, to sack his health minister, calling her a “moral and legal liability” after Johannesburg’s Sunday Times reported that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang and her doctors hid her drinking problem so she could receive a donor liver in March from a teenage suicide victim, even though she had not given up alcohol - normally a prerequisite for the operation.The paper reported that the minister needed the transplant because alcohol had destroyed her liver and that usually a woman of her age - 66 - who had failed to give up drinking before the operation would not have qualified for an organ. The article claims that doctors and staff knew Dr Tshabalala-Msimang was drinking immediately before the transplant.
The paper also revealed that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang had been convicted of stealing from patients and banned from Botswana as an undesirable alien for 10 years when she worked as a hospital superintendent there in 1976. She was caught after taking a watch from an anaesthetised patient and wearing it to work. The police searched her home and found other stolen items, including hospital property.
What, exactly, do you have to do to get fired from a government ministry post in South Africa?
Huckabee channels Edwards
Huckabee is a populist, calling himself more Main Street than Wall Street. He’s sounding some themes that lead Jonathan Martin to evoke John Edwards. Here’s Huckabee:
“There are a lot of people who are working harder than they ever worked, they’re staying at best even. But their cost of health care, their cost of fuel, their cost of college education means that no matter how hard they’ve worked, they’re not quite making it to the next level. That’s a sensitivity the president better have.”
“We can’t ignore that there are kids every day in this country that literally don’t have enough food. And don’t have adequate drinking water. In America.”
That’s some serious compassionate conservativism. I can see the attraction. It’s fair on the merits and can appeal to the center. I would like to hear him articulate what he means, though. There was a moment in the 1990s when Republicans were sounding the themes of opportunity and ownership, rather than handouts.
Empowerment policy would be one thing. “Nationalizing everything lite” is neither going to persuade the base nor distinguish the brand.
Consumer panic is what tiggers do best
In the Winnie the Pooh movies, Tigger is constantly “bouncing” the neighbors, to which they object, to which he replies, “bouncing is what Tiggers do best.”
So now the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland, CA is looking for a little cheap publicity by jumping on the “China is poisoning us with lead bandwagon.” They claim to have found, horrors, that certain bibs sold in Toys ‘R’ Us stores, have 3x the allowed lead levels in … baby bibs, of all things. They even give details, so you can freak out and run to the store with them:
The vinyl bibs, which feature illustrations of baseball bats and soccer balls and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh characters, are sold for less than $5 each under store-brand labels, including Especially for Baby and Koala Baby.
Tests this summer, financed by the Center for Environmental Health of Oakland, California, found lead as high as three times the level allowed in paint in several styles of the bibs purchased from both Toys ‘R’ Us and Babies ‘R’ Us stores in California.
A separate test by a laboratory hired by The New York Times of the same Toys ‘R’ Us bibs, purchased in Maryland, found a similar level of contamination.
But hold on. Let’s put this in perspective. First, U.S. standards are so protective I would be shocked if a 3X violation represented real risk. Second, there is question whether there is any violation at all. Toys ‘R’ Us did its own tests and found no violations, and the CPSC says it has as well:
Officials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates children’s products, said they agreed that lead had no place in bibs.
But their own recent tests of baby bibs on the market in the United States found that the lead, when present, was at levels low enough that a child chewing on or rubbing the bib would not get an unhealthy dose.
It’s always hard to parse this kind of thing. The panic industry in the enviro-media industrial complex has every incentive to overplay such a story. But China has no business exceeding the formal limits, if they are. Which seems a bit in doubt. However, U.S. limits on this sort of thing are generally so hyper-protective that a 3X probably represents no real risk.
When life is cheap
Africa has much more on its mind than air safety. Hence, stories like this one, about an air safety bureaucrat who refused to bend, are more the exception than the rule.
Only one other region of the world had a rising crash rate, the Middle East, but even it was safer than Africa, rising from 0.5 to 1.8 fatal crashes per million departures. The United States, with the best safety record on earth, declined from 0.7 to a record low 0.4 in that period, and Europe dropped from 0.8 to 0.6. Latin America, with the second-worst safety record, dropped from 2.4 to 1.7 fatal crashes per million departures.
Using a more common measurement - destroyed aircraft per million departures, even if there is no fatality - Africa is much worse. For the 1996-2005 decade, Africa had 9.7 “hull losses” - the total loss of an airplane - per million departures, while the United States had 0.4 and Europe 0.6.
It’s a key measure of progress when random death becomes so rare that we can begin to focus on things like air safety:
Charles Schlumberger, principal air transport specialist with the World Bank, said that there were other dedicated people like Taal throughout Africa, but that many African politicians had difficulty understanding why they should worry about aviation safety when millions of citizens die every year from diseases like malaria and only a few hundred die in plane crashes. Others readily accept bribes.
This is one of those vignettes that bring into focus African skepticism about things like global warming, and why they remain aghast at our preoccupation with DDT. Only a wealthy society can move to such second, third and fourth order risks.
A leftist who got the memo
At WSJ Jurgen Rheinhoudt has a piece noting that European leftist are busy scrambling to the right on the fiscal/demographic crunch for entitlements. But oddly, American leftists continue to push hard to the left:
Far from tackling the looming fiscal crisis, presidential candidates are busy marketing expensive new plans to voters. The health-care plan of John Edwards would “cost the federal government some $120 billion a year,” $1.2 trillion over a 10-year period, for the foreseeable future. And that’s not including $15 billion a year in proposed antipoverty measures. No word on how the existing entitlement shortfall will be dealt with.
Similarly, Sen. Barack Obama’s health-care proposals would cost “$65 billion a year,” roughly $650 billion over a 10-year period, “though other health experts think it would be higher.” No credible word yet on how the existing entitlement shortfall can be managed.
There is another problem: Estimates of new entitlement programs inevitably understate the actual cost, either for political reasons (to ease passage) or out of innocent miscalculations, as happened with Medicare. In 1966, its first year of existence, Medicare cost $3 billion a year: the House Ways and Means Committee predicted it would cost $12 billion in 1990, taking inflation into account. But instead of costing $12 billion in 1990, Medicare cost $107 billion. And it is set to cost $488 billion in fiscal 2008.
There is one American leftist, though, who got the memo. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, whose health care reform empowers individuals by altering the tax code. Unfortunately, that isn’t nearly as fun as promising freebies to the masses. That’s why you’ve heard so little of it.
China pulls another boner
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more ridiculous, Fischer-Price is recalling nearly a million Chinese-made toys which were–brace yourselves–painted with lead paint. Guys, that is so 1958. Is there some kind of stupid virus going around over there?
Toy-maker Fisher-Price is recalling 83 types of toys — including the popular Big Bird, Elmo, Dora and Diego characters — because their paint contains excessive amounts of lead.
The worldwide recall being announced Thursday involves 967,000 plastic preschool toys made by a Chinese vendor and sold in the United States between May and August. It is the latest in a wave of recalls that has heightened global concern about the safety of Chinese-made products.
Antsy doctor may face eight years in prison
Both Britain and the U.S. have an opt in system for organ donors, which means you have to choose to be a donor. Some have been pushing for an opt-out system, where you would have to choose not to.
No one is very amused by this story, however, where a California doctor ordered a lethal dose of a drug to a handicapped patient in order to hasten death and harvest kidneys. A few more of these, and I won’t be the only one reconsidering my donor status:
“You are supposed to keep a very tall wall between who’s managing the patient’s care and pronouncing death, and the triggering of any activity regarding organ donation. If you hasten death, that not only breaches the wall, it blows it down completely,” Dr Caplan said. “Discussions about moving towards an opt-out system are imperilled as a result. People will be worried that if they carry a donor card they might not be treated as they should.”
Details emerge on Libyan torture of medics
The Palestinian doctor who was held in Libyan custody along with five Bulgarian nurses on charges they infected hundreds of children with HIV, has described in detail how they were tortured during their eight-year ordeal. Ashraf Alhajouj, 38, said he was beaten, held in cages with police dogs and given electric shocks, including to his private parts. He said that he and the nurses were sometimes put together naked in the same room and tortured.
In a harrowing first-person account, published in the latest edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel following the release of the six last week, Dr Alhajouj described how following his initial arrest in January 1999, along with the nurses, he was taken to a police dog training centre outside Tripoli.
Again, it is almost gratuitous to note, the fatuous United Nations gave Libya the chair of its ludicrously named Human Rights Commission as recently as 2003. What more do we need to know about the UN?
And will the EU and its member states now follow through on the ridiculous extortion agreements they made to secure the release? Does Libya walk away from this not only unscathed, but materially strengthened?
Badgers on drugs
Wisconsin Democrats are toying with the tax implications of single-payer universal health coverage. Making no concessions to individual choice and accountability in conserving resources, they plan to tax the hell out of the state and then ration health care through the bureaucracy.
Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare.
This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger State could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden. “At least federal taxes pay for an Army and Navy,” quips R.J. Pirlot of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce business lobby.
There is a reason why advocates insist that a national solution must come first. Under this plan, Wisconsin would be a sitting duck, as productive workers flee the state and its confiscatory taxes, while unproductive workers flow in for the “free” health care.
But stifling the ability to flee would really only beg the question: why should an entire people be forced to pay through the nose to get cattle care from a single monopoly provider?
Tipping their hand on health coverage
Why would you spend more to help fewer, asks a pair of Heritage Foundation analysts:
Under the proposed expansion, 1.1 million children will be newly enrolled in SCHIP. But the approach would make less of a dent in the uninsured population than you might expect. CBO notes that half of those added to the SCHIP rolls under the expansion in Baucus’ bill won’t be drawn from the ranks of the uninsured. Rather, many middle-class children will lose their existing private coverage.
Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt summed up the bill’s effect like this: “Billions of dollars for health-insurance coverage would be shifted from the private sector to the public sector and from state government to the federal government with little actual gains in insurance coverage.” In other words, the approach does far more to increase the government’s role in controlling and financing health care than it does to expand health coverage.
That would be at enormous cost in public funds. Compare to this:
Dubbed the “Every American Insured Health Act”, Plan 2 would use tax policy to attack the problem of the uninsured. It would offer generous tax credits for individuals and families. This would enable Americans to own their own health insurance and take it with them from job to job. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that this budget-neutral approach would reduce the ranks of the uninsured by 24 million over 10 years — six times what’s expected under the five-year Baucus plan.
Obviously, the real motivation is the onward advance toward nationalized health care. This is not even thinly veiled: it’s fully transparent.
Republicans would do well to hook up with Ron Wyden ASAP. The goal should be to fix the perverse tax structure to allow individual choice in coverage and create incentives for self-rationing.
Maybe not, on second thought
I’ve always thought that one indicator of a healthy mind is a willingness to keep tentative conclusions tentative and to revisit them when appropriate. After a few weeks ago discussing openness on the question of pot legalization, I’m taking a quick step backward after a report just released in Lancet.
The Government-commissioned report has also found that taking the drug regularly more than doubles the risk of serious mental illness.
Overall, cannabis could be to blame for one in seven cases of schizophrenia and other life-shattering mental illness, the Lancet reports.
The grim statistics - the latest to link teenage cannabis use with mental illness in later life - come only days after Gordon Brown ordered a review of the decision to downgrade cannabis to class C, the least serious category.
The Prime Minister is said to have a ‘personal instinct’ that the change should be reversed, with more arrests and stiffer penalties for users.
Cannabis has been implicated in a string of vicious killings, including the recent stabbing of fashion designer Lucy Braham.
Schizophrenia is no light matter, not by a long shot. If this research is anything but disastrously wrong, then the legalization of pot could be a disaster.
Says I, tentatively.
We don’t care, we don’t have to
Those who learned their health care talking points from Michael Moore may be shocked to learn that socialized medicine carries a high risk of side-effects, namely indifference and incompetence, as this report from the ground in the UK confirms:
One third of deaths in hospital investigated by a patient safety watchdog could have been avoided, claims a report released today.
The National Patient Safety Agency looked into 1,804 fatal hospital incidents reported to it in 2005. It found that 576 were “potentially avoidable” if there had been better communication between staff, faster recognition of the patient’s deteriorating state, improved training and more accurate interpretation of test results.
Some 425 of the deaths investigated by the NPSA in 2005 were in acute or general hospitals. Of these, 71 were reported to be related to diagnostic errors, in 64 cases the patient’s deteriorating condition was not recognised or not acted upon, and 43 involved a problem with resuscitation after cardiac arrest.
In the classic SNL routine from the pre- telephone deregulation dark ages, Lilly Tomlin condescendingly explained, “We don’t care; we don’t have to: we’re the phone company.”
30 years after we escaped that government monopoly, Moore, Edwards and Clinton want to take us back–this time with doctors.
HT: Hugh Hewitt and Blue Crab Boulevard
China incinerates homing pigeons
That’s right: incincerates.
This trade war with China starts to sound like an article from The Onion. First it was pig’s ears, now it’s homing pigeons:
Inspectors at Beijing’s airport discovered severe problems with the birds, which were killed and incinerated, the Chinese government said. Health certification was said to be incorrect and the number shipped failed to correspond with documents.
And this:
The US has also banned Chinese shrimp, and four types of fish after finding traces of chemicals that cause cancer. China has retaliated by suspending some US pork and poultry imports, citing disease concerns. Pigeon raising is a widespread in China, and the birds are also a popular restaurant dish.
They couldn’t just ban them. Or BBQ them. They had to seize them and … incinerate them.
It seems pretty clear that China doesn’t even feel the need to pretend that their payback moves are based on real concerns. They’re just being petulant and bratty about getting caught with their pants down on exporting really bad consumer goods.
That petulance is not a good sign about their intent to solve the problems.
Bulgarian medics freed after eight years of torture
I guess we’re all supposed to be happy about this? At least they didn’t kill them.
After eight long years of torture and imprisonment, the Bulgarian medics falsely accused of intentionally infecting hospitalized children with AIDS have been freed.
The nurses did not want to speak in detail about the torture they said they had suffered at the hands of Libyan officials in order to force confessions used by prosecutors. Several had said that they had been denied visits by any Bulgarian diplomats during the first months of their captivity, while their wounds were still visible.
Nenova said that until she met a Bulgarian presidential envoy in April 2000, more than a year after the initial arrests, she did not know whether Bulgarian officials had been informed about the torture.
“It was the first time I managed to whisper into his ear what happened to me in the previous months,” she said.
This is the same Libya that took the chair of the U.N. Human Rights commission in 2003. Insert your own note of tragic irony here: __________________.
On aging alone
The rapidly aging Japanese population presented distinct difficulties in coping with the earthquake. This isn’t the first time this has occurred, and as the population continues to age and the succeeding generations remain thin, it will only worsen.
When children shifted sharply from an expectation and a norm to a luxury, inconvenience or even stigma, this was bound to happen. The result is rapidly aging or depopulating societies [as in Russia], or the rapid turnover of demographics [which will likely lead to the Islamification of Western Europe.]
But the child-catchers are still on the prowl.
This is the underlying but little-remarked big story of this century.
Gateway drug or cultural artifact?
Kathleen Parker has a provocative column on the pot legalization. The argument is that pot is no more harmful than alcohol, and probably less so, either in its direct effects or in the secondary impact on families through addiction. We tolerate alcohol because it is culturally embedded. But we prosecute pot users, give long prison sentences, and split otherwise healthy families.
She argues that this is purely a cultural artifact that we should revisit with rational distance.
Parker says her drug of choice is wine. I myself am totally abstemious. I don’t drink, smoke or take any recreational drugs. The strongest thing I ever touch is Dr. Pepper.
I’m open to be persuaded, but intrigued by the proposition. My question is whether pot is a gateway drug to harder drugs in a way that alcohol or even tobacco is not. If I can persuaded that it is no worse in this respect–and I am leaning this way–I might favor some form of decriminalization. My preferred approach in that case would be to ban advertising or branding, tax it heavily, and stigmatize it like a dry state treats liquor.
