...on being opposed to government-run health care

Here are the top 10 reasons I believe the proposed government run health care is a disaster worth opposing:

10. Advocates claim government insurance will force private insurance to compete. Sounds good, but in this "competition" will private insurance be able to subsidize its bottom line with tax money and legislate the rules of the competition? It's not a competition if the game is rigged by the house.

9. Government estimates of the cost of universal health care are almost certainly wrong--and wildly so! In 1966, the government estimated that Medicare would cost only $9 billion by 1990 (adjusted for inflation). This "conservative" estimate was hopelessly wrong! By 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion. Today that number is around $900 billion.

8. According the the CBO, the trillion dollar+++ health care reform legislation being promoted by the Obama administration would achieve a net decrease of 16-17 million uninsured. Subtract that from 46 million presently uninsured and you get about 30 million STILL uninsured. So Obama wants to spend trillions of dollars to solve a third of the uninsured problem? For that price, we could purchase private health insurance for ALL uninsured citizens and still have money left over.

7. Guaranteed government health insurance will remove the incentive for employers to offer insurance at all, which will create many millions more uninsured. Think about it: If I'm a small business owner, why would I continue to pay for my employees' health care when you--I mean the government--will pay for it? Sure, the government will slap an 8% penalty on businesses that don't provide insurance for their employees, but most companies who offer their employees health insurance pay 10%-14% of payroll. So 8% is a bargain!

6. Legally and constitutionally, the government has no business in health care. But once it's in, it grows and expands like cancer. And that expansion is nearly impossible to reverse down the road when it becomes obvious that the government is wretchedly inefficient and needs to get out of the health care business.

5. Do we want to pay for health care, or do we want the government to tax us to pay for health care? Shifting costs from premiums to taxes does nothing to change the sustainability of health care, and is likely to make federal budget deficits worse. Middle men always add expense to any process.

4. According to a Census Bureau report, of the 45.6 million persons in the United States that did not have health insurance at some point in 2007, 9.7 million, or about 21%, were not U.S. citizens. Now we know why they call it "universal" health care.

3. The government proposes to add an additional 46 million uninsured people to the health care system. But will there suddenly be additional hospital rooms and doctors offices for these 46 million patients? Additional medical equipment? Additional nurses? Additional doctors? No. The existing health care system will simply be stretched beyond its capacity, which will lead to government-managed rationing and substantial wait-times for (government approved) medical procedures.

2. Remind me again why we are ramming this supremely expensive legislation through NOW when we are in the depths of a massive recession and have just doubled the national debt? We've spent all of our money, borrowed as much from China as they will give us, are printing money around the clock...and the government thinks NOW is the time to spend trillions more on socialized medicine?

1. Government-run health care already exists...and it stinks. It's called Medicare/Medicaid and it's nearly insolvent--in the red to the tune of trillions of dollars. If the government wants me to finance additional government-run health care, then I say fix the existing government-run health care first, then we'll talk about additional programs. Fix Social Security! Fix the DMV! Fix the Post Office! Fix Amtrak! They're all broke! Until then, get your filthy hand out of my pocket. I'm not willing to finance another one of your catastrophic failures.



"The President has failed repeatedly to explain how the government will provide more (health care) for less (money). He has failed to explain why increased demand for medical services without a concomitant increase in supply won’t lead to rationing by government bureaucrats as opposed to the market. And he has failed to explain why a Medicare-like model is desirable when Medicare itself is going broke."
-Caroline Baum

...on being sissified

I don't know if it's just Washington, or if it's 2009, but the Boy Scouts of American aint what it used to be.

I've talked to a few local scout masters about the scout camps in the Seattle area, and I've looked online and seen the pictures and read about their programs. Last week I got to sample it first hand. For our Lake Serene hike, we camped at Camp Brinkley north of Monroe. The camp sites each have a large bathroom hut (with toilets, urinals and sinks) in the middle of them with large Adirondack sleeping huts around the perimeter. For those not sleeping in the huts, there are platforms with tents already set-up for you. Just down the trail, there are lodges galore, including a full service dinning hall.

So basically, you're going to "camp" at a place where you don't have to camp. You don't have to pitch a tent, don't have to cook a meal, don't have to wash dishes, don't have to leave camp to use the bathroom and don't have to pack anything up when you leave. Sounds like a cross between the Beverly Hilton and Vacation Bible School!

Is this a Seattle-area thing, or a product of scout camp evolution? I'm told that the camps do all the "leg work" for the boys so that they can concentrate on earning merit badges. Um....like the Camping or Cooking merit badges??? I wonder if they have all the knots pre-tied for you at the Pioneering merit badge class? And perhaps they have one of the staff do some of the swimming for you on the Swimming merit badge. That would certainly save time and allow the boys to come home with more merit badges. Including the I'm-A-Sissified-Wuss-Who-Doesn't-Know-Squat-About-Camping merit badge.

As a young Boy Scout, we called the "leg work" camping. My troop, the Fightin' 224, went to Camp Little Lemhi every summer. It was up in the mountains, not just down the street from civilization. Going to scout camp meant getting dirty and learning a thing or two about camp craft. It meant taking responsibility. We pitched our own tents in camp sites that featured trees, dirt, bushes and not much else. We made the trip down to the commissary three times a day to get food that we hauled back to camp and cooked over an open fire. You either learned to cook or you starved. After cooking we washed all the dishes. It wasn't always fun, but we learned that it was part of camping. When the urge hit, we tromped off down the trail to the latrine (I never heard a boy complain, "Gee, I wish we had one of those stench-buckets right in the middle of our campsite"). It all took time and effort, and nobody ever came home with 12 merit badges. But we all returned with basic camping skills, a sense of what camping is all about and confidence that we could do it.

I mention all this because my son Gavin just turned one, and already I have visions of grand adventures with him in the great outdoors. But I must say that I have serious misgivings about him going to one of these sissified, artificial, no-responsibility scout camps. Maybe by the time he's 12, the BSA will have done away with camps and just hand out Eagle awards to every boy. That would save time and allow the boys to focus on other things.

...on being an ex post facto capitalist

Not that I would have before, but let me make it official now: I'll never own a GM or Chrysler automobile.

The things is, they should have been left to die, victims of their own dysfunction, decades of poor management decisions, unsustainable labor agreements, and the inability to compete. Instead, they've been bailed-out. They're like the kid who only makes the team because his dad is the coach. He may be tolerated, but he'll never be respected. Likewise, I'm not going to drive the product of a company that I don't respect; a product that shouldn't exist because the company that made it should no longer exist.

But they're an American company, you say. Nonsense! American companies compete or die, it happens every day. GM and Chrysler should be out of business. But instead, and thanks to a socialist-leaning government and hundreds of billions of dollars, free market capitalism is the only thing that has died. That and common sense. And dignity.

I've never been a Ford fan, but have recently developed a grudging respect for them. Unlike GM and Chrysler, they rejected government bail-out money and have thus far managed to avoid bankruptcy. That may change, but for now I truly admire their "live free or die" determination not to become a government lackey.

GM, on the other hand, has had its CEO dismissed by President Obama and now has a new, government appointed CEO who's first memorable quote after taking the job was, "I don't know a thing about cars." Not to worry, neither do the politicians who appointed you. Neither did the politicians who ran Yugo. Sure, the Yugo was voted "Worst Car of the Millennium," but...um...this is a new millennium.

Why on earth would anybody want to purchase a car made by people who "don't know a thing about cars?" Why would anybody want to buy a car from a company that is owned by the government and whose decisions are heavily influenced, if not outright made, by politicians? Politicians can't even run the government, much less a profitable business.

The punch line to all this is that the government claims that GM is owned by the "taxpayers." Oh really? Is that where the government got the hundreds of billions of bail-out dollars? From taxpayers? No, they borrowed it from China. So the sad truth is that GM is owned by China and is being leased by the U.S. government. And who will be paying off that lease (and several others) for generations to come? Ah yes, this is where the American taxpayer comes in...at the butt end of the joke.


BTW, if you like the pictures on this post, they came from Despair.com. Check out their hilarious website and excellent product line here.