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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.

------------
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 3, 2011

Titanic

Director:  Our new carbon regulations go into effect today. A great day. All of those old power plants will either clean up or shut down.

Assistant:  With permission. Many of them say these regulations go too far. They don't want to invest more when the Agency is suing them. They will probably shut down.
Director:  Good riddance.

Assistant:  What will their workers do?
Director:  Anything they do will be better than working for evil. Anyway, that is the business of the Department of Labor.

Assistant:  By chance, do you know where our building power comes from?
Director:  No, why do you ask?


Consider these scenes from the movie Titanic.

Ismay  (imperious president of White Star Lines):  So you've not yet lit the last four boilers?

Captain:  No, I don't see the need. We are making excellent time.

Ismay:  The press knows the size of Titanic. Now I want them to marvel at her speed. We must give them something new to print! This maiden voyage of Titanic must make headlines!

Captain:  Mr. Ismay, I would prefer not to push the engines until they've been properly run in.

Ismay:  Of course, I'm just a passenger. I leave it to your good offices to decide what's best. But what a glorious end to your final crossing, if we were to get to New York on Tuesday night and surprise them all! Make the morning papers. Retire with a bang, eh E.J.?

Captain:  (nods reluctantly)

Ismay:  Good man.

- -
(The Titanic has hit an iceberg. The Captain reviews the damage.)

Ismay:  Most unfortunate, captain!

Captain:  (perspiring and trembling) Water fourteen feet above the keel in ten minutes. In the forepeak, in all three holds, and in the boiler room six.

Ismay:  When can we get underway, damnit!

Captain:  That's five compartments! She can stay afloat with the first four compartments breached, but not five!

(pause)  Not five. As she goes down by the head, the water will spill over the tops of the bulkheads at E deck from one to the next. Back and back. There's no stopping it.

Smith:  The pumps... if we opened the doors...

Captain:  The pumps buy you time, but minutes only. From this moment, no matter what we do, Titanic will founder.

Ismay:  But this ship can't sink!

Captain:  She's made of iron, sir! I assure you, she can and she will. It is a mathematical certainty.


Many people see the prosperity of the US as a given. They think many things. That we float on air because of luck, or location, or whatever. That one person earns more money than another because he is only lucky or privileged. That this lucky and undeserved wealth should be taken in taxes and redistributed. That businesses can be restricted at will, and can be made agents for the social good, in detail.

They believe that our country can't sink, no matter what laws or policies are implemented. But, the iron laws of incentive, energy, and economy cannot be abolished. People will not work hard if their income is taxed away. Investors will not risk their money if they cannot make more money. Great doctors will not work in a profession that requires half of their time to be devoted to paperwork at no benefit to the patients.

Our great ship can sink. It is kept afloat by well organized effort and private initiative. It will float for a while as damage increases. We are floating now at a tilt, after reckless government policies created more housing than people could pay for. Now we are all paying. How much more arbitrary and wishful policy will the government impose? Flood the fifth compartment, and our country will sink. It is a mathematical certainty.

- -
Caring and Reality

A conversation in San Francisco.

[edited]:  I pointed out that California and San Francisco were both hemorrhaging money, destroying jobs, and were fundamentally unsustainable systems.

She said “I know, I know. I’ve heard all that. But, you know, I just love it here so much and I don’t want anything to change. Something will come up and it will get fixed. I just have to believe it.”

- -
And, Best of All, It's FREE
01/01/11 - Insure Blog

The government has declared that certain unproven treatments for autism are now covered by health insurance, up to $40,000 per year in each case. But, care is not free, and the providers will be paid. All people buying insurance will pay the providers through increased premiums and taxes.

This is just one cause for insurance premiums to go up. If you think that insurance benefits are free, to be mandated by the government, then you might think anything. You might think that iron will float regardless of the damage to the ship.

- -
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
01/27/11 - A Brief History
Video (6:38) and song by Gordon Lightfoot.

The S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was an ore carrier, 729 ft long, 75 ft wide, weighing 13,632 tons empty. That is big. It broke up and sank in a storm on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975.  All 29 of its crew were lost.

Large, stable, systems can be broken by the chance forces of nature. You never know. Prudent men manage with a wide margin of safety; even then, it may not be enough. So, it is troubling that our politicians are managing our country at the edge of stability. We are currently in a storm, and we don't know what will be lost.

By Andrew_M_Garland - 1/03/2011
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