Thursday, March 18, 2010
Tab dumpification: Thursday night special
This is a tab dump in the truest sense -- items that have accumulated on my home computer's browser over the last three days. I do not know where they have come from and what will happen to them in the fullness of time, but I do know this: They will not perish from the earth without you having at least the option of clicking through. So, in no particular order...
Ann Coulter's health care reform proposal. It has the advantage of being short, among other virtues. Plus it has this passage, with its crystalline middle paragraph:
President Obama says we need national health care because Natoma Canfield of Ohio had to drop her insurance when she couldn't afford the $6,700 premiums, and now she's got cancer.
Much as I admire Obama's use of terminally ill human beings as political props, let me point out here that perhaps Natoma could have afforded insurance had she not been required by Ohio's state insurance mandates to purchase a plan that covers infertility treatments and unlimited OB/GYN visits, among other things.
It sounds like Natoma could have used a plan that covered only the basics -- you know, things like cancer.
I'm with the ACLU on this one: Why on earth ought any school administrator care if a lesbian student wants to bring a female date to the prom? It reminds us why mixing schools and government is such a bad idea.
If this were more typical many more people would want to become insurance underwriters.
Health care "reform" factoid:
Each year, the government spends an average of $927 in administrative costs per person for Medicaid and $509 for Medicare. Private insurance, on the other hand, costs only $453 per person in administrative costs.
The problem with government administration -- of anything -- is that bureaucrats gain professional prestige over increasing the number of employees that they have under their administration rather than the economic rate of return on their bureaucratic activity, whatever it may be. There is therefore no organic tendency within government to save money, and an enormous incentive to add people who are almost impossible to fire.
A fascinating article (with graphs!) about the changes in America's diet over the last 100 years.
Regarding the pricing of razors and razor blades.
WELL, HE IS AN EXPERT: Jimmy Carter actually calls Barack Obama's foreign policy "feeble." No. Really. I shit you not.
Peggy Noonan is right on:
Excuse me, but it is embarrassing—really, embarrassing to our country—that the president of the United States has again put off a state visit to Australia and Indonesia because he's having trouble passing a piece of domestic legislation he's been promising for a year will be passed next week. What an air of chaos this signals to the world. And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America's back and been America's friend.
How bush league, how undisciplined, how kid's stuff.
We await the bleating about respecting our "traditional allies" with bated breath.
And so it goes.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Mar 19, 12:55:00 AM:
TH, I think your logic is inverted: backward people discriminating based on prom date (or skin color, or religion, or whatever else) is exactly why we do need government setting standards across the United States. Sometimes, it takes governmental officials to open to school doors to all comers and drag some people into the modern era. You can't outlaw different thinking, but you can make the environment inhospitable to repulsive social policy.
By , at
Fri Mar 19, 08:58:00 AM:
Each year, the government spends an average of $927 in administrative costs per person for Medicaid and $509 for Medicare. Private insurance, on the other hand, costs only $453 per person in administrative costs.
Aren't single-payer advocates constantly telling us how bloated the bureaucracies of for-profit insurers are? Another Democrat myth bites the dust.
By 
SR, at
Fri Mar 19, 09:06:00 AM:
What single payer advocates never tell anybody. The way it would save money is to deny or yes Sarah ration care.
