…even though they are. Arizona can’t get anyone in DC to tell the truth about their laws, but they can get help with what’s really important: squirrel bridges.
Yep. Squirrel bridges.
If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go try to forget that liberals exist for a few hours.
Charles Lane, in the Washington Post:
By now, you’ve probably heard about the urgent teacher layoff crisis that threatens public education across America. Due to shrinking state and local budgets, up to 300,000 teachers could be laid off, with devastating educational consequences for our children, such as burgeoning class sizes. The only cure is $23 billion in fresh federal deficit spending, rushed through Congress as part of a bill to fund U.S. overseas military operations. “The urgency is high,” President Obama warned congressional leaders in a June 12 letter.
Don’t believe the hype.
Start with that scary number of 300,000 teacher layoffs, which has been bandied about in numerous newspaper articles. The sources for it are interested parties: teachers unions and school administrators, whose national organizations counted layoff warning notices that have already been sent out this spring and extrapolated from there. Notably, however, even these sources usually describe the threatened positions as “education jobs” – not teachers. That’s because the figures actually include not only kindergarten through 12th grade classroom instructors, but also support staff (bus drivers, custodians, et al.) and even community college faculty. And 300,000 is the upper end of a range that could be as low as 100,000. Nationwide, there are about 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers.
Moreover, springtime layoff notices are a notoriously unreliable guide to actual job cuts in the fall, because rules and regulations in many public school systems require administrators to notify every person who might conceivably be laid off — whether they actually expect to fire them or not. As the New York Times recently reported: “Everywhere, school officials tend to overestimate the potential for layoffs at this time of year, to ensure that every employee they might have to dismiss receives the required notifications.”
Given these facts, it’s unclear how the bill’s supporters came up with its $23 billion price tag. It works out to about $77,000 per job saved in the 300,000-layoff scenario, but $230,000 per job if only 100,000 jobs are at risk. Maybe that’s why the bill’s fine print allows states to spend any excess funds left over from education hiring on other state employees. By the way, the bill distributes funds to states according to how many residents they have, not how many threatened layoffs.
Read the rest here.
Mona Charen’s recent column on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is well worth a read:
At a New Jersey town meeting, Gov. Chris Christie, the newest YouTube star for the limited government set, was reproached by an unhappy teacher. The governor, facing a budget shortfall of $11 billion, has proposed, among other economies, a one-year salary freeze for New Jersey teachers. Her voice raised in anger (that’s a normal speaking voice in my home state), Rita Wilson protested that she should be paid $83,000, the only reasonable compensation in light of her “education and experience.” Christie’s reply got an ovation: “Well, you know what? Then you don’t have to do it.”
Meet the newest conservative hero: The Trenton Truth-Teller!
That exchange with the teacher, along with other greatest hits available on YouTube of the blunt yet friendly governor’s first five months, highlight a political opportunity for Republicans.
First, the problem: How can smaller-government Republicans win elections when more and more Americans are receiving government benefits while fewer and fewer are paying taxes? In 2010, 47 percent of Americans paid no income taxes at all. Among those who do pay taxes, most pay comparatively little. Both parties have agreed to make the tax code more steeply progressive in the past two decades, to the point where the top 20 percent of earners, those with incomes above $100,000, pay 70 percent of all taxes. Accordingly, the tax issue has lost some of its political purchase.
But as Christie is demonstrating, voters are open to a new fairness argument.
Read the rest here.
When we last left Self-Defeating Left-Wing Zealot Scott, he was making an ethically-challenged fool of himself over abortion. This evening, while browsing Boots & Sabers (which I really need to get back in the habit of reading more often – sorry Owen!), I came across the following comment from our pal:
Many conservatives eschew expert opinion in the first place, so what’s the big deal? Everything from CBO reports to scientific opinion—it just doesn’t matter because you can’t trust those eggheads. Me, I’m a big fan of learning. I like to acknowledge someone else’s expertise and learn from it.
Again, the only proper response is:
For good measure, background behind his bull about the CBO can be found here & here, and about “scientific opinion” here.
Via Power Line, here’s a list of 20 Ways ObamaCare Will Take Away Our Freedoms, and an op-ed on The Real Arithmetic of Health Care Reform (also, here’s a handy summary of what’s in the bill, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, and for you masochists out there, the bill’s full text, courtesy of Open Congress). Read ’em, print ’em out, and have ’em ready for the next time your lefty friends spout disinformation from the White House or MSNBC. This recap of the states’ experiences with government meddling in healthcare is required reading, too.
Also, check out my latest NewsReal post for where we go from here. The short version: we can, and must repeal this bill, but the GOP is really gonna have to bring their A-game. And for a great explanation of what should actually be done to improve American healthcare, Ann Coulter’s got you covered.
Followers of healthcare debates are well aware of the dark side of government healthcare in countries like Canada and Great Britain, but what’s about its track record when it’s been tried here in the United States? As it turns out, we have plenty of examples.
Department of Veterans Affairs
It seems like there’s a new horror story about VA medical care every week. Exposing “10,000 veterans to the AIDS and hepatitis viruses” and a Pennsylvania facility giving “botched radiation treatments to nearly 100 cancer patients.” “Often fail[ing] to provide adequate medical care to female military veterans.” Walter Reed. “More than 600 veterans wrongly told they had ALS.” And, of course, a “death book for veterans” which was reinstated by the same administration that insists we have nothing to worry about from death panels for the rest of us. It’s bad enough when anyone suffers due to bad policy, but that we treat those who take up arms to defend our country this way is especially disgraceful.
Indian Health Service
Things aren’t so great on the Indian reservations, either. There, federal government’s IHS provides care “in one of two ways. It runs 48 hospitals and 230 clinics for which it hires doctors, nurses, and staff and decides what services will be provided” or “contracts with tribes,” in which “case, the IHS provides funding for the tribe, which delivers health care to tribal members and makes its own decisions about what services to provide.” Predictably, the disastrous effects of the former method (“the common wisdom is ‘don’t get sick after June’”) are leading tribes to turn toward the latter, which is a step up but “still frustrated by funding constraints.”
Maine
Maine has a plan not unlike ObamaCare. How’s it fared? “The program flew off track fast. At its peak in 2006, only about 15,000 people had enrolled in the DirigoChoice program. That number has dropped to below 10,000, according to the state’s own reporting. About two-thirds of those who enrolled already had insurance, which they dropped in favor of the public option and its subsidies. Instead of 128,000 uninsured in the program today, the actual number is just 3,400. Despite the giant expansions in Maine’s Medicaid program and the new, subsidized public choice option, the number of uninsured in the state today is only slightly lower that in 2004 when the program began.”
Tennessee
Launched in 1994, TennCare was supposed to “save the state money, reduce costs, and increase coverage. Instead, in a decade, the program went from a budget of $2.5 billion to nearly $8 billion, became mired in litigation, and was forced to make major cuts.”
Massachusetts
Cato’s Michael Cannon writes that “Massachusetts reduced its uninsured population by two-thirds — yet the cost would be considered staggering, had state officials not done such a good job of hiding it. Finally, Massachusetts shows where ‘ObamaCare’ would ultimately lead: Officials are already laying the groundwork for government rationing”…“ The Legislature also plans to leverage its power under the individual mandate to require ‘evidence-based purchasing strategies,’ which is another way of saying government bureaucrats may soon be deciding who gets medical care and who does not.”
Further Resources
Please take the time to read these reports in their entirety, especially the full profiles of the three state healthcare plans. For further resources in the healthcare debate, please see:
The YouTube page and Telegraph blog of British MEP Daniel Hannan
Independence Institute: Patient Power
Consumers for Health Care Choices
Ann Coulter’s latest is well worth a read:
(1) National health care will punish the insurance companies.
You want to punish insurance companies? Make them compete.
As Adam Smith observed, whenever two businessmen meet, “the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” That’s why we need a third, fourth and 45th competing insurance company that will undercut them by offering better service at a lower price.
Tiny little France and Germany have more competition among health insurers than the U.S. does right now. Amazingly, both of these socialist countries have less state regulation of health insurance than we do, and you can buy health insurance across regional lines — unlike in the U.S., where a federal law allows states to ban interstate commerce in health insurance.
U.S. health insurance companies are often imperious, unresponsive consumer hellholes because they’re a partial monopoly, protected from competition by government regulation. In some states, one big insurer will control 80 percent of the market. (Guess which party these big insurance companies favor? Big companies love big government.)
Liberals think they can improve the problem of a partial monopoly by turning it into a total monopoly. That’s what single-payer health care is: “Single payer” means “single provider.”
It’s the famous liberal two-step: First screw something up, then claim that it’s screwed up because there’s not enough government oversight (it’s the free market run wild!), and then step in and really screw it up in the name of “reform.”
You could fix 90 percent of the problems with health insurance by ending the federal law allowing states to ban health insurance sales across state lines. But when John McCain called for ending the ban during the 2008 presidential campaign, he was attacked by Joe Biden — another illustration of the ironclad Ann Coulter rule that the worst Republicans are still better than allegedly “conservative” Democrats.
(2) National health care will “increase competition and keep insurance companies honest” — as President Barack Obama has said.
Government-provided health care isn’t a competitor; it’s a monopoly product paid for by the taxpayer. Consumers may be able to “choose” whether they take the service — at least at first — but every single one of us will be forced to buy it, under penalty of prison for tax evasion. It’s like a new cable plan with a “yes” box, but no “no” box.
Obama himself compared national health care to the post office — immediately conjuring images of a highly efficient and consumer-friendly work force — which, like so many consumer-friendly shops, is closed by 2 p.m. on Saturdays, all Sundays and every conceivable holiday.
But what most people don’t know — including the president, apparently — with certain narrow exceptions, competing with the post office is prohibited by law.
Expect the same with national health care. Liberals won’t stop until they have total control. How else will they get you to pay for their sex-change operations?
(3) Insurance companies are denying legitimate claims because they are “villains.”
Obama denounced the insurance companies in last Sunday’s New York Times, saying: “A man lost his health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because the insurance company discovered that he had gallstones, which he hadn’t known about when he applied for his policy. Because his treatment was delayed, he died.”
Well, yeah. That and the cancer.
Assuming this is true — which would distinguish it from every other story told by Democrats pushing national health care — in a free market, such an insurance company couldn’t stay in business. Other insurance companies would scream from the rooftops about their competitor’s shoddy business practices, and customers would leave in droves.
If only customers had a choice! But we don’t because of government regulation of health insurance.
Speaking of which, maybe if Mr. Gallstone’s insurance company weren’t required by law to cover early childhood development programs and sex-change operations, it wouldn’t be forced to cut corners in the few areas not regulated by the government, such as cancer treatments for patients with gallstones.
(4) National health care will give Americans “basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable” — as Barack Obama claimed in his op/ed in the Times.
You want to protect consumers? Do it the same way we protect consumers of dry cleaning, hamburgers and electricians: Give them the power to tell their insurance companies, “I’m taking my business elsewhere.”
(5) Government intervention is the only way to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions.
The only reason most “pre-existing” conditions aren’t already covered is because of government regulations that shrink the insurance market to a microscopic size, which leads to fewer options in health insurance and a lot more uninsured people than would exist in a free market.
The free market has produced a dizzying array of insurance products in areas other than health. (Ironically, array-associated dizziness is not covered by most health plans.) Even insurance companies have “reinsurance” policies to cover catastrophic events occurring on the properties they insure, such as nuclear accidents, earthquakes and Michael Moore dropping in for a visit and breaking the couch.
If we had a free market in health insurance, it would be inexpensive and easy to buy insurance for “pre-existing” conditions before they exist, for example, insurance on unborn — unconceived — children and health insurance even when you don’t have a job. The vast majority of “pre-existing” conditions that currently exist in a cramped, limited, heavily regulated insurance market would be “covered” conditions under a free market in health insurance.
I’ve hit my word limit on liberal lies about national health care without breaking a sweat. See this space next week for more lies in our continuing series.
Pajamas Media’s own Steven Crowder takes a trip up north to get an up-close, undercover look at Canada’s nationalized health care to answer the big questions: Is it cheaper? Is it more efficient? Does it help people?
Er…not exactly.
His findings aren’t pretty, to say the least. There’s a reason that, as Crowder pointed out, even “the father of Quebec medicare” has changed his views and now says the system is in a “crisis,” which he believes requires “a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice” to alleviate.
Every American needs to see this video. Share it with friends, family, anyone you can. It’s accessible, comprehensive, and eye-opening—just what we need to cut through the Left’s spin and the media propaganda on the joys of socialization before they demolish health care on our side of the border.
Fox News has a few videos from last night’s special, “Waste 101,” in which Sean Hannity highlights 101 examples of wastefully-spent taxpayer dollars from the stimulus bill Barack Obama is so very proud of (and is so wonderful that new restrictions on criticizing it are in order). It’s more of the same crap that groups like Club for Growth and Citizens Against Government Waste have been sounding the alarm on for years—bridges named after politicians, useless government make-work jobs, gifts to lobbyists and special interests, obscure scientific research, et cetera. It puts the lie to the claim that Obama and the Democrats have any interest in fiscal responsibility.
Two points, though. First, this is from the guy who not only claimed to be different (which all politicians do), but based his entire campaign on the concept. Second, not only does Obama reflect all the problems of the status quo, but he amplifies them: Hannity’s rundown totaled over a billion dollars, out of a $787 billion bill, meaning it barely scratches the surface of the waste this administration has already spent in less than half a year in office—and there’s more where that came from.
Cleaning up the mess the 44th president is making is not going to be a fun task.
PS: Wisconsin Dems are no better.
Calvin Freiburger Online 