Health Care and Irresponsible, Incompetent Government
This entry was posted on 9/24/2009 8:32 AM and is filed under Politics.
A letter from my Dad to the Hopkins & Minnetonka Sun Sailor;
In your Sept. 17th issue you published a guest column by George Greene attacking Eric Paulsen's position on health care reform. Greene complains that Paulsen opposes a public option, that Paulsen "conjures the specter of a government takeover of health care." He implies that those who have been expressing their views at town hall meetings and tea parties are not citizens employing their First Amendment right; he calls them bullies and thugs. He demands that Paulsen "repudiate the scare tactics, bullying and lies of his fellow opponents" of Obamacare, and calls on him to support the President. Mr. Greene is entitled to a response.
I do believe that health care insurance is in need of reform. I believe that major reform can be accomplished with a couple of relatively simple steps: There are some thirteen hundred companies selling health care insurance in the United States. They should be permitted to sell it across state lines. This would maximize competition and drive prices down. We can buy homeowners' insurance or life insurance or automobile insurance wherever we can find the policy that best suits us. We should be able to do the same with health insurance.
Also, we certainly should demand that Congress enact some legislation dealing strongly with tort reform. The trial lawyers have been looting the medical world for many years, forcing physicians to practice defensive medicine, ordering all kinds of unnecessary tests and therapies in anticipation of future lawsuits. This outrageous situation has to end and the ending of it will dramatically lower the cost of health care. Of course, the Administration has not said a word about tort reform because it gets so much money from the trial lawyers; it's been said that the trial layers own the Democratic party.
I simply do not believe that government has the answers to our problems. In fact, the evidence continues to accumulate that government is incompetent. It is difficult to imagine why anyone would think we would be better off by having the government make health care decisions for us. Consider:
* In the past couple of months the House of Representatives has passed two bills, one on health care and the other on cap and trade, each of which runs to more than a thousand pages. Not a single member of Congress knew what was in either of these bills before voting on them. Nor did President Obama know what was in them. This is disgraceful, shamefully irresponsible. To my mind, it is criminal malfeasance. I believe that before any member of Congress should permit himself to vote on proposed legislation he should have to certify that he has read it in it's entirety and knows what is in it.
* The financial destruction resulting from the political notion that every American has the right to own a home whether or not he can pay for it was engineered by politicians, i.e., the government, the key players being Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd (the Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1977 during the Carter Administration and fitted with teeth in 1993 by the Clinton Administration). Lending institutions were warned to go along with this ludicrous policy lest the government approval they would need to implement plans that were important to them be denied them. Frank and Dodd were warned several times that this policy could lead to the disaster that actually ensued, but both issued public assurances that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were well managed and highly efficient, and Frank famously insisted on "rolling the dice".
* There is little evidence that the Bush Administration's so-called stimulus, nearly $800 billion, has stimulated; Fed Chairman Bernanke now advises that the recession has ended, but unemployment nears ten percent, and there is no sign that it will abate soon ---yet Bernanke tells those millions of unemployed that the recession is over.
* The bailouts of the auto companies, instead of allowing them to reorganize in bankruptcy, involved, literally, a theft, by the government, from bondholders and gift to the UAW.
* In the face of all the hot air being blown at us about global warming--or climate change, or whatever the "Greens" now call it--our political leaders have not had the courage to summon testimony from any of the many scientists in the relevant disciplines who dissent, who insist that the dire forecasts of ice caps melting and coastal cities drowning are nonsense. Yet, Al Gore and his legions, including many in Congress and the Administration, keep telling us that there is a "scientific consensus", that from a scientific standpoint the matter is settled. Not only is there no such agreement among scientists, there is no such thing as a "scientific consensus": science is not a matter of opinion. it is the process of proving or disproving a hypothesis-- of proving that something is either a fact or that it is not a fact.
* The Postal Service is a continuing failure; even President Obama acknowledges it. According to the Congressional Budget Office it will finish the current fiscal year $7 billion in the red, and an additional $7 billion in the red next year.
* We have been told repeatedly by our President that there are 46 million Americans who have no health insurance--until last week that is, when he said there are 30 million uninsured. If true, that would be about one/tenth of the population, but the actual number of uninsured probably is far less than that.
According to the National Institute for Policy Analysis, about 14 million of those without health insurance are young people who are financially able to purchase private insurance -- most earn in excess of $50,000 annually, and some nine percent earn $75,000 or more. At this point in their lives they are healthy, and choose not to purchase health insurance; they prefer to spend their money on other things and to confront health issues out of pocket as necessary.
Well, they are going to start buying it whether they want it or not, because the Administration's plan will mandate that every American purchase health insurance or pay a substantial fine. This does not strike me as something that should happen or even be proposed in an allegedly free country.
Millions of others are eligible for government programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Schip, who simply haven't signed into these plans.
The Administration's plan will also cover millions of illegals, notwithstanding the Administration's insistence that it won't.
So, the actual number of uninsured is far less than 30 million. Why would it make sense to revamp the whole system to accommodate such a small percentage of the population? Surely it would cost taxpayers much less by having the Treasury simply buy health care insurance for these few million, just give it to them.
* All the polls show that the vast majority of Americans, something like 87 percent, have private health insurance, and that the overwhelming majority of this majority likes the plans it has.
A cursory look at our history reveals much more about government incompetence and its costs. In the years following World War II, for example, DDT, an insecticide developed during the war to protect members of our armed forces against malaria, had been put to use throughout the world and had virtually eliminated the disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) credited DDT with saving 50 million to 100 million lives. By the late 60's, however, the Green lobby had worked itself into an hysteria over the stuff. In late 1971 and into 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted seven months of hearing on the pros and cons of DDT. The hearings completed, EPA's own administrative law judge found that, "DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man...the use of DDT under the regulations involved here does not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."
No matter. On June 14, 1972, EPA banned the use of DDT, and most of the countries in the world followed suit. The result has been the loss of many millions of lives to malaria throughout the world, and the loss of life continues.
In like manner, the EPA now wants to ban carbon dioxide* as a dangerous pollutant, and is preparing draconian step that seem certain to lower the American standard of living.
About the only things the government seems to do well are building highway systems and managing wars-- and it' only good at the latter until the politicians take over from the professional military.
So I think it is only common sense to oppose the government's plans to nationalize health care insurance, and lots of other things; in most respects, we should trust the people to do what is best for themselves.
All of which, I suppose, makes me a right wing extremist, a bully and a thug to those who embrace the nanny state.
*carbon dioxide is what you, I and every other living animal on earth exhales.
