Ebb Tide for Health Care
Obama Care does not cover all of the uninsured. What will happen to the rest of them? If it is true, as the left contends, that uninsured persons are condemned to ill health or premature death, who can be happy. And, what will we do about those millions who are here illegally? They get no insurance either. Should they? Very many on the left think they should. What would insuring all who are not insured cost? About twice as much as the current bills. If the current bills actually save us money, wouldn't insuring twice as many people save us twice as much? Of course, in order to save yet more money for non-medicare/medicaid recipients, we will have to take yet more money from Medicare, already 60 trillion dollars in debt. Oops.
Previous United States Supreme Court cases have mandated that national benefits for citizens could not be denied illegals while they were here. Doesn't this guarantee that the left will eventually argue we must do so? You bet. If we knew in advance who was coming here illegally it would be much cheaper just to pay for their health care where they are.
The OMB concludes that fewer and fewer doctors will agree to taken on patients that carry insurance which reimburses at the artificially low rate levels of medicare and medicaid. What will we do when that happens, force them to care for the patients? And how, exactly will we do that? Take away their licenses? Make the private practice of medicine illegal? Or will we be forced to build government hospitals and clinics? We probably will need to because OMB also concludes that many private hospitals will be forced to close as Obama Care makes rates go down. Surely it is obvious that both the availability and quality of health care will diminish, as it has done in Canada and elsewhere.
If health care becomes more difficult to obtain and its quality declines, what will the wealthy do? The wealth and powerful will do what the leader of a Canadian Province recently did; come to the United States for treatment and pay for it out-of-pocket. Oops! Won't be able to do that. When asked why he did the Canadian leader replied: when I began to have heart problems I was first told come back in 6 months, when I came back in 6 months my problems required immediate surgery because of the wait, but immediate surgery wasn't going to happen because I would have had to get in line, and besides, the surgery they wanted to do was very outdated and painful and required extensive rehabilitation, so I went to the US and had the best care and two days later was back to work. He did say, when asked what his experience said about health care in Canada, that he thought the Canadian system was really good for the people.
In order to support Obama Care one must be intentionally blind to both its true financial costs and its human costs. An ebbing tide lowers all boats. Will future Obamas subject their children to public health care? That is about as likely to happen as that they will send their children to public schools, rely on Social Security for their retirement or reject their upscale Government Employee Health Insurance for the public brand. But, by God, it will be fair for everyone else! Turns out that fairness really sucks if it means being equally poor and equally subjected to substandard care and have no hope of ever doing better. I know. It's not going to happen. Really?
Posted by: carl baer on 3/9/2010 at 8:52 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Obama is right on education
No President is great at everything, and greatness is in the eye of the beholder, in any event. Today I will speak only of Obama's greatness, and not his short-comings. It is useful to remember as we work with or against the policies that this or any President advances, that no Presidents are right or wrong all the time.
I have long believed that the most pressing issue facing our country is the "black-white" education gap. We have witnessed the under-education of generations of minority children and, with few exceptions, done little to change it. There has been much support among teachers and within the black community for graduating less than qualified children in order to raise their self esteem. How tragically short sighted and willfully ignorant of reality! How foolish to assume that those who were failing did not know it. How stupid not to know that ignorance guarantees low self esteem for a lifetime. While I know that the great majority of teachers truly want the best for their students, how tempting it is to believe that, in inner city schools, far too many only care about themselves. President Obama is not just talking about changing this sad and cruel and seemingly intractable problem, he is taking dramatic action to help underachieving children.
In Rhode Island, with President Obama's approval, a school board has fired all of the teachers and staff of a school that has been failing its students for many years. In Boston, all of the staff of a failing school have been told that they will have to reapply for their jobs. Obama's support for Rhode Island has teachers tearing his election bumper stickers off their cars.
Nothing is more important in America than educating our children and, given the fact that our country is becoming ever more black and brown, nothing is more important that educating black and brown children. Real educational accomplishment has many benefits: it decreases crime, it decreases violence against women, it decreases teen pregnancy, it decreases single parent families, it increases income and it builds good character.
In order to know how well we are doing in educating our children we must test them. Certainly we can and should have reasoned discussions about educational goals and the accuracy of tests to measure accomplishing them, but blanket disapproval by teachers organizations of testing is petulant, selfish and ignorant.
President Obama is due the highest praise and respect for leading this movement, so critical to the future of our nation and its citizens. Those of us who strongly disagree on principle with some of his other policies and initiatives can and should celebrate his leadership when it is deserved, as it is so richly here. To do otherwise is to be blindly partisan, and that is neither fair to the President of good for our country.
Posted by: carl baer on 3/7/2010 at 7:08 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Terror and the Utopian Impulse
Is the man who just flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin, TX a terrorist or a murderer? In record speed, the Obama administration called him a terrorist, although it took them much longer to reach that conclusion for the Fort Hood and Christmas terrorists, cautioning first to await "all the facts" and later worrying that a "rush to judgement" might give rise to wide-spread hatred of Muslims. The Left has already suggested that the white guy from Texas might be representative of the Tea Party folk about whom Madame Speaker expressed such fear. O.K. to rush to judgement here.
The white guy from Austin is a murder but not a terrorist because there is no organized threat of further attacks. Did the crash of the plane cause terror? Of course it did. But terrorism is a tactic in a larger struggle. Should a group of similar minded white guys plan and carry out a sustained war against the IRS using terror attacks against targets beyond IRS facilities, it will become terrorism.
The reason the Obama administration and the Left are willing to call an act terrorism when it is the isolated violence of a single white man is more about their world view, their self-deluded moral sophistication, and their distain for white guys and ordinary people. They think of themselves as moral revolutionaries and feel a real connection to Che, Castro, and Mao, although some are uncomfortable with the "unfortunate extremes" of their "necessary" revolutions. It is the white guy for whom they reserve their hatred, principally because of his "hypocrisy". Nothing is more irritating to the Left than proclaiming a wish to be a better person and not becoming one. The Left easily forgives the extraordinary violence of their hero revolutionaries because they killed for an ideal. That they all fell short of their ideal is not mentioned.
The Left cannot forgive American's excesses, sometimes murderous, because, according to Left doctrine, they were done for profit, pure greed. That the Leftists (Moaist, Nazis, Communists, etc.) have killed millions and yet produced only societies of poverty and repression while elevating an elite few seems not to have diminished the utopian impulse. Thus it is that to the Left terrorism without a profit motive is not just forgivable but acceptable.
Posted by: carl baer on 2/19/2010 at 8:51 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Education and Energy
Two initiatives of the Obama administration regarding domestic policy deserve praise: voucher support for education and the new energy policy of supporting nuclear energy and opening areas off shore for drilling for oil.
Vouchers allow families to make decisions for themselves about their futures and insure that poorer families are not limited in choice to public schools that have been failing inner city children for too long. The most important obligation of our nation is to enable each individual, so far as we are able, to achieve their potential. Education is foundational in this regard. Critics of vouchers who have claimed that public education is weakened by vouchers and that private schools “cherry pick” the best students have been proven wrong by a number of studies that show that all students, public and private, benefit when voucher programs compete.
Drilling for oil and advancing use of nuclear energy will decrease our dependence on foreign sources of energy while at the same time providing revenues that can be directed toward research and development of other technologies. Use of our own oil from Alaska, for example, would provide more that a trillion dollars of revenue to governments, jobs for Americans and at little or no risk to the environment. There would be no necessity to construct a new pipeline for distribution since the current pipeline is used at less that 50% capacity.
It is a political fact that either political party can pass legislation supported by the other side which the opposition could never pass were it in the majority. So it was with welfare reform passed by Clinton, with mental health care passed by Bush and so it is with nuclear power and vouchers advocated by Obama. His commitment will be tested by his own party and time will tell if he has the power and skill to succeed. If he does, he will have accomplished something good for our country and proven that he is not an inflexible ideologue.
Posted by: carl baer on 2/17/2010 at 8:33 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Blind Faith and Financial Ruin
Each passing day brings further news of the mismanagement of the financial resources of States and Nations led by the left. How is it possible that the looming bankruptcies, so easily forseen, have occurred non-the-less? Two reasons come to mind: the willful suspension of disbelief and the chilling notion that destruction of economies is less onerous to the left than achieving, if only temporarily, "fairness".
The willful suspension of disbelief often accompanies matters that are believed on faith. Perpetualtion of the belief is so important that facts which disprove the belief are willfully disbelieved. Thus it is that in spite of the wholesale discreditization of the "science" that supports global warming theory, the faith proceeds because it forms so much of the meaning of the left. In the same way, although it has been apparent for a very long time that spending by governments is unsustainbly outpacing resources, the drive of the left to create a utopian society at the expense of the successful creates a blindness to financial reality.
It is also possible to imagine that those furthest left actually dispise capitalism, exceptionalism, and wealth. In short, they dispise what have been America's values. Thus, although aware of the harm they are causing, they are willing, and even eager, to cause the collapse of the financial system that supports the American way of life. That they have no clear idea of what will replace the financially bankrupt state, testifies very clealry to the depth of their anger and suggests that at that point of analysis they revert to the willing suspension of disbelief that their more benign brothers and sisters are limited to.
It seems so fundamental that a bankrupt state harms everyone, most expecially the poor and disadvantaged, that the financially prudent believe that the left will see the error of their ways at some point in the financial decline and rethink their position. But where is the proof of this? California and Greece prove just the opposite. The most compelling proof of their total committment to the unsustainable is their unwillingness to cut spending even in the face of bankruptcy. What do they propose? That those other states or nations that have been less influenced by the left, and therefore acted with greater financial prudence, bail them out. Reality is once again denied.
Posted by: carl baer on 2/16/2010 at 8:56 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
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