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The Truth About SwedenCareLink to The Ludwig von Mises Institute

07/10/13 - Klaus Bernpaintner [edited]

Free healthcare in Sweden was intended only for the poor and supposedly would not affect the practices of existing providers.

When government offered a free alternative, many left their private doctor in favor of the free services. The public system had to be expanded, and private doctors lost patients. Private doctors were forced to take employment within the public system or leave

the profession. The result is a public healthcare monolith.

Are there economies of scale? If so, they are dwarfed by the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy that grew to manage the system.

Very few private practices remain. Most of those are part of the national insurance system. A huge bureaucracy has been erected to take on all the necessary central planning of public and pseudo-private healthcare.

 

Company Paid Health Insurance is Part of Your SalaryMore at EasyOpinions

People are already personally paying for their "employer-paid" insurance. They don't buy it directly so (1) it doesn't attach to them when they change jobs, (2) and they can't shop for the insurance they might want.

Healthcare is now tax-free when purchased indirectly as an employment benefit, but mostly taxable through personal insurance or when purchased directly.

Untangle the tax mess, remove employers from the middle, and salaries would go up in the amount of the "free" healthcare benefit through employers. Then people would have enough take-home pay to buy their own health insurance. That is what healthcare reform should be all about.

Most people already pay for their health insurance, but currently have little choice about what they buy. True reform could put that money and choice into their hands. (M)08/26/12 - AdamSmith.org
If your employer provides to you $6,000 of health care insurance, then you don't get $6,000 of wages. No free lunch.

Quip

Government is the ideal director of medicine. Politicians are thoughtful, caring, and altruistic. They devote their lives to helping others.

Contrast this to physicians, who spend half their lives learning diagnosis and complex, delicate procedures, with the intent of charging sick people for these services.

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Romney/Obama CareLink to Cato at Liberty

Democrat Timothy Cahill was Massachusett's State Treasurer:

[edited] Implementing the MA health insurance reform nationwide will threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years.

Our experiment has nearly bankrupted MA. Only federal aid is sustaining our law. We’re being propped up so that Obama can drive a similar plan through Congress.

 

Regulatory ExplosionLink. Professor Cochrane is on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

John Cochrane - 11/07/12 [edited]

New regulation will be the big story. ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank (financial) are not specific, but are mostly authorizations such as "the secretary shall write rules governing xyz" with a timetable that starts today. A metastatic expansion of regulation is already mandated and pending.

New EPA regulations will cost hundreds of billions per year. I'm all for clean air, but there is a question of just how clean and at what cost. A funny (for non-farmers) example is limits on Farm Methane Emissions (cow farts). [See the list]

Obamacare unfolds in the next four years: Medicaid expansion, Exchanges, the insurance mandate, preexisting conditions, and "accountable care organizations”.

Dodd-Frank requires hundreds of rules. Just the three days Dec 31 - Jan 2 requires nine final rules to be published.

Who knows what this means? Certainly, hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. Industries, lawyers, and lobbyists are furiously helping to write all these rules.

We are sitting on a debt bomb. A few warned in 2004 that the huge mortgage debt could default, damaging the banks. Remember how that worked out?

That is our situation now with government debt. Who is now holding 10-30 year treasuries at slightly negative real rates of interest, bearing the risk of increased inflation and interest rates? Not me.

I really, really hope I'm wrong.

 

Under AttackLink to DiploMad

09/17/12 - DiploMad [edited]

The Obamistas are caught in a web of lies. Yes, lies. There is no other word.

If the attack in Benghazi were just a "spontaneous" eruption in response to a 14-minute video clip, then what is it exactly that we are investigating? Why are we apparently going to dispatch the FBI and drones?

What are we looking for? Do we need high-tech spies in the sky to find just "folks" who were outraged? Will our intel and counter-terror efforts now be focused on finding anything that could lead to a "spontaneous" outburst by the "folks" in the Middle East?

Are we going to be dispatching cops to haul in, say, movie makers who do something "offensive" to the "folks" in the Middle East? Nah, that's too extreme . . . we would never do that.

The Obamistas know the attack was planned; that our security in Benghazi was deplorable; that our security procedures, such as they were, were compromised; that the consulate in Benghazi should not have been open on 9/11; and that Ambassador Stevens should not have been there, especially on 9/11, especially after what was happening in Cairo.

In other words, State and NSC screwed up big time. The heads of both of those agencies should be on the chopping block, along with a host of other heads up and down the command chain at State and the NSC.

 

Fair Distribution of Life-YearsLink to Mises.org

Yuri N. Maltsev - 06/22/12 [edited]

Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health and an architect of ObamaCare. His brother is Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former Chief of staff.

Ezekiel Emanuel wrote in The Lancet medical journal Jan 2009 [edited]:

Allocation of healthcare by age is fair, unlike allocation by sex or race. Even if people aged 25 receive priority over those aged 65, everyone who is now 65 was previously 25.

It would be ageist to treat 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods. It is fair to treat them differently because they have already received more life-years.

 

‘True Science’ vs ‘Cargo-Cult Science’Link to PajamasMedia

Professor Frank J. Tipler - 07/27/10  [edited]

The great Nobel Prize particle physicist Richard Feynman defined science in bold type, in his article “What is Science?”

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Feynman: “When someone says, ‘Science teaches such and such,’ he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you should ask, ‘How does science show it?

How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’ It should not be ‘science has shown.’ And, you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments and after hearing all the evidence, to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.”

Feynman also observedFrom his 1974 commencement address at The California Institute of Technology, CalTech. that real science was a method for discovering facts about our world, and required bending over backwards not to fool others, and especially not to fool oneself. He said it was particularly easy to fool oneself, and so required the greatest dilligence and openness to criticism and disproof to avoid being that fool.

 

Daily MailLink to this British newspaper:  [edited] £30 million are available to NHS trusts (National Health Service) which put patients on the Liverpool Care Pathway. The goal is 66% of deaths on the LCP. These financial incentives could influence doctors.

The LCP withdraws life-saving treatment. Patients are sedated, and most are denied nutrition and fluids by tube. The average LCP patient dies within 29 hours.

The NHS is a model for the implementation of ObamaCare.

See InsureBlogMore about the British National Health Service for more.

 


Quote Box ArchiveGo to Past Quote Boxes

Jan 2, 2009

Write the Rating Agencies Out of Our Law

Write the Rating Agencies Out of Our Law
01/02/09 - Online.WSJ by Robert Rosenkranz

A bit wonky, it explains why the world invested in bad loans, and why we are in trouble now.

[edited] [ There are only a few government certified rating agencies, including S&P, Standard and Poors, and Fitch. ] Their ratings on bonds determine the amount of money (capital) that a bank by regulation needs to set aside for expected losses.

Ratings have a profound influence on how financial institutions invest their assets. Regulations make the rating agencies the de facto allocators of capital. Every participant in the financial system has every incentive to group and slice assets in ways that maximize their rating, not their fundamental soundness.

[ Large capital requirements (more money set aside) means owning fewer bonds and making less money on the coupon payments. ]

The $6 trillion structured finance business serves mostly to improve ratings. Subprime mortgages and all manner of other risky loans would deserve a "junk" rating if taken alone, and require high capital reserves.

The structured finance people bundled these assets and sliced the bundles into "tranches" [layers of repayment priority]. The rating agencies gave AAA ratings to 85% of the tranches by value, and gave "investment grade" to another 14%, thus turning lead into gold through ratings alchemy.

Read the rest ... A part of the story at "We Guarantee It" about the housing and financial crisis.

Learn finally what a "tranche" is, and amaze your friends at the next party.

By Andrew_M_Garland - 1/02/2009
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