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Today’s quote is from an American satirist:
“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”
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back to top204 Comments to “Whirled Views 7.11”
Nah. I always think of the best retorts to regret long after the opportunity has passed….
I still regret many things I have said, some perhaps only yesterday. The tongue, who can tame it?
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How’s this for a rally cry for 2010 elections:
RYGF
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Very catchy.
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But what does it mean this RYGF?
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In the past seven days I have:
-Done three laparoscopic hysterectomies
-Two tubal ligations
-Roughly ten office procedures
-Removed a foreign object from someone’s vagina (requiring general anesthesia)
-Delivered or supervised nine births (three boys, six girls, six vaginal deliveries, three c-sections, three with severe hypertension, two with maternal weights over 300#, two with husbands)
-Cared for patients during 120-150 office visits
-Administered three general anesthetics
Like I said earlier, there’s something to say here regarding nationalized health care, but I’m not sure what it is. I do know that it would take three or more doctors to do this in a nationalized system, and that those additional doctors are nowhere to be found.
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Pauline, how did the interviews go?
StuBob. What is your opinion of husbands being on the birth scene? My granddaughter’s husband was at both births.
I can’t imagine wanting to be around when a baby is born.
My wife says when she takes over the country it will be illegal for a father to be within five miles of a mother delivering a baby. They only cause trouble.
I’m interested in a professional opinion.
Now, take the weekend off and go fly your plane somewhere.
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When considering our health care system, Americans need to listen to doctors like you Stubob, not the Democrat politicians who are using the healthcare debate mainly for their own selfish political purposes.
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stubob post 5,
and these exrtra doctors ould be needed because?
Certainly as described, the work would not be different.
You do do raise a point, however, that we probably need more health professionals. As we cover more presently uninsured people, the smaller simpler visits and procedures will likely increase.
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#4 “But what does it mean this RYGF?”
It’s a link. Click on it.
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STUBOB has earned some much needed time off! You’ve definitely had quite a week (must have been the full moon!).
As for husbands present during deliveries, I’d say it depends on the husband. Mine was there, even cut the cords, but some guys are too nervous or stressed. My mom was even present which isn’t something all daughters would want either.
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Musing (8) — The extras would be needed because few people would work these hours and take on this liability for government wages. Also, the more the government gets involved, the more paperwork there is. Time spent doing paperwork is time I’m not directly caring for patients, so someone else is going to have to care for them while I do paperwork.
Chas (6) — Dads in the delivery room are fine with me. I do think it’s a little weird when dad’s parents are there, along with the neighbors and their kids, the mom’s sister and her boyfriend. And I’m not crazy about video in the delivery room. If you’ve got so many people there that someone has nothing better to do than run the camera, you’ve got too many people. That’s just my opinion, though. Patients can do whatever they want as long as I’m convinced it’s safe. That, and I won’t follow a birthing plan that involves StuBob getting naked.
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I was there for both deliveries of our children. In the first instance I even cut the cord and and then vacuumed out the mucous from the first borns nose. Helps to have grown up on a farm and helped with delivery of large animals…
The kids were beautiful.
One thing I would NOT repeat was being there for the circumcision. I nearly fainted.
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Awstar, I realized it was a link only when I returned! I was half asleep earlier. Sorry about that. But it is a good rallying cry. Can we send it to Palin? (That ought to get the leftys going.)
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Only two husbands; tragic.
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Michelle,
Huh?
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stubob post 11,
excellent. It is always important to make the assumptions clear or the statements can’t be evaluated.
You appear to have added several unstated assumptions from your first post:
1) wages would go down
2) liability would remain the same
3) paper work would go up
With repsect to 1, I suggest that with medical costs rising faster than inflation and threatening to perhaps go as high as 30% of our GDP perhaps in 2050 cost reductions of one form or another will occur in the near future. Without a major change of direction one of these will be income constraints on doctors of one form or another, much as it ppresently is for most of America’s workers.
Liability is more interesting. I suggest that with increased government participation, strategic efforts to structure such liability might be possible. Such efforts will only be viable if pushed by entities who are particpating in the overall health care reform effort: it would seem if this is a concern of yours, now is the time to get on the the health care reform train.
Peper work is more interesting. We can note that if we were to see a larger involvement of the Federal government we should in principal be able to deploy a consistent paper work process accross a broader range of patients and that this has the potential to result in economies of scale.
And with possible displacement of private health insurance by government insurance, one has the potential to have a savings of between 7% and 20% on each health care dollar to invest in cost management eefforts.
But the cost containment is coming any way. It is probably useful to help craft the solution than to have it inflicted on one.
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Oh. I get it.
Stubob,
How many of these were married with husbands that didn’t show?
Chas,
) She was uncomfortable holding the little ones, but I was totally at ease. I guess she figured she’d drop ‘em or something.
My wife says she’ll give you a professional opinion. She was glad I was there. She was comforted by the fact that if we didn’t make it to the hospital, I would have taken care of her. (Boy do I have her fooled.
We did fight over how she should breathe… Lamaze and all that. The second one we didn’t have enough time to fight. She walked up to the second floor and almost literally dropped the kid in the doctors arms. The midwife didn’t make it in til 30 minutes later. I wish I’d had a camera for the look on the doctors face. For all the world it looked to me like he didn’t know what he was supposed to do.
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“That, and I won’t follow a birthing plan that involves StuBob getting naked.”
LOL!
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Re: Fathers being there. It seems to be working well. Though, I’d still leave it to the doctor. I was out working till the last thirty minutes. She was doing her part and I was doing mine.
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Musing — You’re right that cost containment is coming. The truth is that cost, not access, is the heart of the current problem. As to paperwork, take a look at any current healthcare proposal. Notice how many times they mention things like “outcome,” “evidence,” “compliance,” and “measures.” Those are buzzwords for data collection, which is paperwork. These people are addicted to paperwork. In fact, they believe, inexplicably, in paperwork as a way to cut costs. It’s “the Tyranny of the Measurable.” So far this year, I’ve spent over $50,000 on hardware and software so I can use electronic medical records. There’s an additional fee of $1.50 per “patient encounter,” which adds up to about $900 a month. Despite the claims of EMR advocates, digitizing the charts doesn’t result in any kind of savings anywhere. It only increases the time taken on each chart and presents new opportunities for fraud.
Liability? Tort reform is not just off the table, it’s out of the room. Lawyers run this country and they co-own the Democratic Party. There is no possibility that a physician’s personal liability will be reduced in the next twenty years. I’m not talking about the cost of malpractice insurance. I’m talking about the pain of being accused of malpractice and standing trial when a cocaine addict shows up with an imperfect baby and gets a John Edwards wannabe to give her a shower and put her on the stand. Go through that once and you doubt yourself and become less effective. Go through it twice and you look for another way to make a living.
Wages? One of the present proposals essentially makes everyone eligible for Medicare. Medicare pays less than $75 for a Pap and Pelvic exam. The overhead on that exam is about $100. They pay about $800 for an abdominal hysterectomy. The total overhead on that is about $700 and 3.5 hours. So, I profit less than $30 per hour. It’s reasonable to assume physician pay would decrease dramatically.
MIM — Only two were married.
I’m only on here today because of thunderstorms.
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Only two were married. That is tragic.
And my wife feels (operative word) as if she raised our children by herself. Some women truly do. Sorta. How can you “raise children” when you’re never home and always working to provide?
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stubob post 20,
so consider:
a) health reform is coming
b) cost containment in some form is coming
c) universal coverage is coming
I sense that your choices may be:
1) run a cash only business (no insurance of any form)
2) participate to ensure that the changes are ordrly and plausible
3) just take the hit
As you describe it,it sounds like 3 is untenable. Are you looking forward to options 1 or 2?
If one is not part of the solution, then in this case I suggest that the solution will happen to one.
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stubob post 20,
and I suggest that if the bulk of the short term hide is taken out of insurance companies pockets (which seems the most plausible alternatvie right now), then there is both time and money to perhaps address the concerns you are raising.
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Stubob, you’d better get onboard here.
Stop being so difficult already.
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When my doctor shifted over to computerized medical records, it took her 25 minutes to type in all my information. I volunteered to do all the typing for her–since I type 110 words a minute. Couldn’t do it. I suggested next time I’d bring in all my information on a thumbdrive and she could just upload it. She shook her head wearily. The next month she shifted over to Kaiser, I lost the third doctor in four years and I’m now with a teenage doctor who knows how to type and run the computer. Still, I liked her so much better . . .
How can it possibly be cheap to have a doctor type in informatoin? It would have been faster and far more efficient to hire a typist for $10 an hour to get the info down and the doctor moving on to another patient . . . craziness.
I would be willing to not have any health insurance and just pay the bill myself if it would be easier–certainly it would be for me. Why do I have to call two insurance companies to get them to pay their bills every time, even for routine things?
But I fear catastrophic illness–I really do–and not having enough insurance. How do you calm me down, while giving everyone else reasonable access?
One of my relatives is a surgeon. She works 80 hours a week. How do we give her a reasonable standard of living and still enable her to see patients? You can’t possibly think Stubob is overpaid and underworked given this week’s tally.
Simplifying the forms–one form; streamlining the repayment process, trusting the people who make the decisions and not second-guessing everything might help. But simplicity and logic never seem to go hand and hand with politics. Sigh.
Back to chopping down the vines trying to overcome the house.
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Anxiety attack. What am I afraid of? Success? Not doing it perfectly? Messing up a design? Not being organized?
Gah. I’m gonna waste this afternoon. I know it.
That’s one thing I’m afraid of…
I’ve already answered several emails, posted several times in WMB, uninstalled and installed Antivirus program, called someone about a workshop next week, ate a grain bar, browsed all the comics, tried to organize my files (and gave up). I’m letting distractions take over….
I’m contemplating working on some other file besides the one I’ve spent several weeks on (as I learn and learn and learn), and doing something simple that won’t take long, and just go cut it out.
Wishing for peace and productivity…
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Michelle post 25,
it woud appear that stubob admits that cost containement is coming, indeed is essential given the rate of inflation of health care costs recentlY;
http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml
Now the only question is what form it will take.
Private industry has demonstrably not contained health care costs. And if private industry has failed, the next obvious location to look for help here is the government.
If private industry on their own had:
a) ensured insurance for all
b) at a price that a middle class family could afford
c) with no games being played for exisitng conditions (and retroactvie cancellation)
d) contained cost increases to the inflation rate
e) ensured a quality of health care comensurate with our expenditures
we would not be here now.
At this point the main trajectory would seem inevitable and the only question is fashioning the solution so that it is most effectvie.
Conservatives can of course stand on the side lines and say no.
It worked so well with the stimulus and the budget.
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MIM post 26,
what are you designing?
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For those here at World Mag Blog who are born again christians…..I would like your take on the following issue that I found posted on OneNewsNow. Agree or Disagree??
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Business/Default.aspx?id=597368
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“I’m letting distractions take over….”
Sounds like intentional ADD.
BTW, how is your son doing on his own? Do you hear from him or see him much?
Oh dear Father God, please bring all our prodigals to their spiritual senses & into Your loving arms!
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Justus331, I agree that a “mantra” prayer (and that’s what the so-called sinner’s prayer too often has become) cannot save anyone. I’ve known Christians who “get” someone to recite it, then seem to feel that since that’s been done, the person must be saved.
When a Christian friend excitedly told me she led a (nonbelieving) beau of hers in the sinner’s prayer, my response was, “OK, but now has he asked to come to church with you? Is he showing any interest in learning more about Jesus or the Bible?” Well, not really she replied. The relationship ended shortly after that.
Unfortunately, “the prayer” became something of a formula and ritual over the years that some began to believe contained a power in and of itself.
If the bishop is saying, however, that there is really no such thing as an individual becoming saved or right with God, I strongly (of course) disagree on biblical grounds. We don’t/can’t ever become right with God based on our own works or merit (good deeds, or, in fact, a special prayer). It is by God’s grace alone. Then, as a result of that, we are born again into new life in Christ.
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I agree precisely with Donna J. Martin Lloyd-Jones talks in one of his expositions about the importance of making sure you are in the faith. There is a reason for that. He gives many things that one can look at to make the assessment for oneself. If there are no signs of life, there is no life.
If the woman is saying, there is only being saved by means of the church’s bestowing it on one or by works, she is wrong, biblically.
We are part of The Church. We are not all saved collectively. The Israelites were all part of Israel, however, they also were not all saved because of that.
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Musing,
I’m designing a door panel to be carved on a CNC router. It incorporates realistic oak leaves and acorns into a geometric pattern to be carved on the panel of the door.
I’ve worked on this silly thing for weeks… I’m tired of messing with it and just want to see results.
Karen,
I dunno if it’s intentional, but it’s definitely procrastinal. (If that’s a word.) It’s fear of something that I’m putting off. I’m busily editing what I know to do. I don’t know if I’ll get to carve it today or not. At least I’ll make some more progress.
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Donna and KI are correct, in that no ritual of any sort will save a person. However, a prayer from the heart and a trust in Jesus will indeed save an individual. Too many Bible references to quote.
However, Schori doesn’t say by what means a person is saved. So, I’m not sure of what to make of her proclamation. Going to her church will not save anyone either. If she is talking individual vs corporate salvation, there is no such thing as corporate salvation. Each person must trust Christ. One by one.
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Too bad we can’t post photos here. Here’s a couple screen caps of what I’m working on.
http://s110.photobucket.com/albums/n102/mudgeon/?action=view¤t=doorpanelrelief.jpg
http://s110.photobucket.com/albums/n102/mudgeon/?action=view¤t=doorpanelbitmaprelief.jpg
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MIM post 33/35,
too cool. Very very nice. My hat is off to you, you are demonstrating skills which are far above anything I can imagine.
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Michelle post 25,
it is perhaps worth considering that the only Republicans with any measurable impact on the stimulus were Snow, Collins, and Speter.
Specter is now a Democrat due apparently to conservative backlash.
Is it conservative policy to ensure that they are impotent and moot?
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“My hat is off to you, you are demonstrating skills which are far above anything I can imagine.”
Thank you Musing. It’s what I do…
Of course you have skills I can’t imagine either. I can’t imagine having a clear train of thought – even to save my life. But, that’s what you do (to my everlasting annoyance).
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Chas,
My husband isn’t sure whether to think the interview went well or not. The test was easy (mostly chemistry, not biology), and the he felt he would get on well with the woman he would be working for. He wasn’t so sure about a couple of the others. One of them just wants to get things back the way they used to be before the union went on strike last summer (still no contract, and unemployment benefits start running out this weekend; they’ve made salaried employees work a huge amount of overtime for most of a year, and brought in non-union workers from another state, and restructured a lot of processes for greater efficiency).
Thanks for asking.
Today he’s off to watch the new Star Trek movie with our older son at the IMAX theater. And younger son and I will go to the library, and maybe the park. And maybe the toy store to give me an idea of something for his birthday this month.
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I can never out-think Musing, either.
I don’t have answers on health care, nor do I really know what the government should do. I always have to explain that I’m a military dependent, and therefore spent 20 years of my life under a government health care plan. (And told my husband, “I don’t care what you do when you retire, as long as you have good health care benefits.”)
While we did not have extraordinary health problems and we’re all still healthy, military medicine took a heavy toll on me emotionally–the fight to get seen was horrible some days and with a child hacking away and a husband out to sea, I was put through way too much stress trying to get a doctor appointment.
But, ultimately, we did get in which is more than some people have going for them, and it didn’t cost me anything other than hours on the phone.
(And then of course there was the time a friend had to appear in the clinic waiting room in full medaled glory, leaving command of his ship behind, to ask why his wife had to spend eight hours on the phone trying to get a sick child in. “Yes, sir,” they got right to it, but I always want to know if that’s how they treat a full Navy captain, what are they doing to the poor E-3’s wife?)
I don’t have pull like that anymore, in fact as the dependent wife of a retiree, I go to the very end of the line with military health care–which is why we have another insurance plan.
Anyway, I don’t understand why we can’t just buy insurance like auto insurance–our own policy, we pay the premiums tailored to our needs, we take it with us when we leave the job. Or, we just have a catastrophic policy which covers major things like cancer and so forth, all the very expensive stuff I fear, and just pay our own maintence costs ourselves.
In a sense we do have that for some–those who don’t have insurance. They pay their own way (or not) and trust the ER when things get bad.
In California, one-quarter of the budget deficit is directly attributable to illegal aliens and their medical needs. Something isn’t right with a system like that. My aforementioned surgeon family member is routinely called to the ER to examine foreign nationals right off the plane with advanced gynecological cancer–and forced to give them very expensive treatment by law. She’s very frustrated–”I shoudl be able to stablize them and return them to Mongolia, or wherever they come from. The state of CA should not be paying for extensive cancer treatment like this.”
But is that fair–the woman was born in a country that can’t take care of her health?
How to be merciful, practical and not-budget busting? I don’t know. But then, no one elected me to figure that out, did they?
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MIM post 38,
I than you for your kind words. I had more years than I want to consider under a very rough apprenticeship here.
And at the end of the day my words are forgotten, but you will have produced a true piece of beauty and art!!
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Justus:
A female bishop proclaiming something is a great Western heresy?
I was hoping the article would mention what exactly it is Schori believes does achieve a saving relationship with God. I agree with everyone else that saying special magic words is not what saves us. (There are lots of beautiful and instructive prayers that have been written over the centuries, though. It could be helpful to use something like that as a framework or a jumping-off place for the prayer of one’s heart.)
MakeIt Man! Your design is beautiful; hang in there!
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MiM — those are beautiful! I especially loved the second one, imagining it in cherry wood.
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Thanks folks. Just being able to express my anxiety let me go forward. Gah. How neurotic can ya get?
Anyway, I won’t get to cut it out today, but I put into practice a bunch of things I learned yesterday, fixed the problems, and made a lot of progress. I can see light at the end of the tunnel.
Time to flip the patterns into the other quadrants! Whee!
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Those are real nice MIM.
I have a computer question for some of you experts out there. I’m sure someone knows this.
I taught SS for many years. I kept a record of what and when I taught. Years ago, I put it on my computer. I have over 21 pages of data, single spaced. When I went from Win. 3.1 to Win 98, I transferred the data, no problem. However, I can’t transfer the data from my Win98 computer, which I still have, to the XP computer via disk.
I have a HP printer that will scan. I need a yes or no answer so I’ll know whether or not to pursue this.
Is there any way I can scan the 21 pages of data into my computer and get it into my word processor?
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chas post 45,
if yo have the Optical Character Reading software for your scanning function on the printer it can “mostly” be done, but you will probably have to proofread the entire material and may have to make some manual corrections.
Can you perhaps print the file to a text file and transfer that to your XP machine?
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Musing #46
“print the file to a text file and transfer that to your XP”
can you please explain this? You’re not talking about a “print out”, but storing a document as a text file? Is that a function of an HP printer-scanner, or a generic suggestion? If so, how so?
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Chas, glad Musing had an answer for your computer dilemma. I read your question and said, “Huh?”
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Musing,I hear you saying “no”. The problem is my disk reader. It once worked, but now doesn’t. The problem is that the computer doesn’t recoginze that I have a disk reader. The pro I use kept the computer two days and couldn’t fix it.
Maybe I’ll just keep the old Win98 computer until I get a new one someday. Then try to transfer. I’m not going to key in 21 pages of data.
Thanks for the info.
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Chas,
Do you have a serial port on the Win98 computer and the WinXP? If so, then you may be able to transfer from one PC to another via serial port cable.
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Nationalized health care.
10, 20, 30 40 million people in the USA don’t have health care?
Let’s estimate low.
10,000 people per doctor.
10,000,000 people without doctors.
We will need 1,000 additional doctors as soon as the bill passes.
Where are they?
We can’t afford Democrats!
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Ha! hahahaha!
Drudge has a picture of Obama in full Jedi mind tricks mode, hand raised, palm forward, and the caption: “It’s Working” as the headline…
Waves hand:
“You don’t want private health care”
“You want nationalized healthcare”
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Musing (27) — You’ll never get me to speak out in favor of insurance companies. The underlying problem is that when you get sick you spend someone else’s money for treatment. Insurance companies make their money by minimizing care, or at least minimizing payment for it. Patients, aware that they’ve already paid in the form of premiums, expect top-flight treatment right now. Doctors, aware that patients want the latest and greatest of everything, have an incentive to prescribe treatments and procedures as recommended by Oprah and various websites, regardless of whether there are data supporting a change from older techniques.
It isn’t hard to see that the system is dysfunctional. But looking at the steps above, government-run healthcare fixes nothing.
Socialism works when the net beneficiaries are grateful and undemanding and the net benefactors are gracious and not bitter. Does anyone think this is the situation in present-day America?
I do believe in charity care, but I think it should be limited to charity cases. Achieving your 65th birthday doesn’t make you a charity case. Neither does refusal to get a job.
Employer-sponsored health insurance is a catastrophe which resulted from wage and price controls instituted during the Roosevelt administration. It has never resembled a free market in the vaguest sense. It all started as an unintended consequence of a heavy-handed government intrusion into private enterprise. Have we learned nothing? Does anyone really believe that the government, whose only tool is the sword, will be able to take over the medical system, maintain our best-in-the-world acute care, and improve the areas where it’s weak?
I don’t have a program, but every plan I’ve seen leads in the wrong direction.
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MIM, I don’t know about serial ports, but I will have my daughter-in-law look at it someday. This doesn’t have to be done now, but I do want it on the computer.
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Chase: Go outside. Stand on the front sidewalk. Look to your left. Look to your right. Call out to the first 10-year-old kid you see, offer him or her $5 if you want. But they’ll be guaranteed to solve your computer question within minutes. (And maybe you ought to take Mrs. Chas with you outdoors — just so no one gets the wrong idea about you bribing a kid and all.)
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Chas, I meant.
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Bob-
Can you show me where anyone is proposing “nationalized health care”?
As I understand it, and please correct me if I’m wrong, what is being discussed is an option for public health insurance. You would remain free to pay more to a private insurer should you choose to do so.
Additionally, the preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimates suggest that a “strong” public insurance option would save $150 billion over 10 years.
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Donna J,
I don’t know that the average kid would know what a serial port is these days. I haven’t had occasion to use the serial port on a computer in five years. Just about everything new uses USB.
Chas,
Do both computers have access to email? That’s how I ended up transferring files when I discovered that the new one didn’t have a floppy drive. It seemed silly, knowing that the file had to go to the server at the ISP and then come back to get to a computer six inches away from where it started, but it was the easiest way to go without having to buy any cables. (Using Laplink to connect computers by a serial cable was great back before networks and email, though.)
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Chas,
One other possibility – find someone who likes typing and would find it interesting to look at your records of Sunday School lessons, and have them type it for you. If I lived in your area I would happily volunteer. Twenty-one pages of typing is not that huge a job to a good typist, especially if they find the subject matter interesting. My husband used to have me type up stuff for him when he was a pastor, and I enjoyed it.
Assuming your new computer has email, I’d be willing to do it if you sent me copies of the pages, then email the file back to you.
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Chas, what Pauline said. Email it to yourself.
Don’t worry about the physical distance between the computers and how silly it is to email yourself something that’s just right over there. You’re trying to accomplish moving a file, and if you can’t do it physically on disk, do it electronically via email.
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Thanks for some good ideas. But I think I’ll take Donna’s advice.
Only – I don’t have a sidewalk and no kids live in this community. However I have three granddaughters, each of whom is computer savvy. I will get one of them to look at it. I expect my DIL could do it too.
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Chas, No kids in the ‘hood?
I have to say I love the sound (most of the time) of kids riding bikes, skateboarding, playing catch outside. And we have a new baby (!!!) next door. On the other side of my, the neighbors now have a total of 5 grandkids, all under 5, who visit a LOT.
Emailing it is probably the easiest — bring it up on the screen, copy and paste into a blank email to yourself, then voila! From there you could enter it into a word document file or whatever.
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I have to say that I find this Chicago cemetery case appalling! I can’t imagine going to the cemetery and finding that my parents or other relatives had been removed from their graves. All for the love of money.
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Chas.
Maybe you don’t have e-mail capabilities on the old Win 98?
What Mumsee was trying to get at, was: Does your HP printer with scanner have an OCR software program? (optical text recognition) Or is there one on the disk, which you could install, if you didn’t already install that part of it on your computer.
You can open the OCR program. Get/aquire your document(s). The typing appears on the computer screen and you tell it manually or automatically to convert to text. Name the file something recognizeable, save it. Your file will appear in a place reserved for OCR, unless you’ve told it to go to a different directory.
Now open the file in MS Word (or your w.p.) Change the format to “Word,” and save it. Now you ought to have an editable text. That is, you can correct the typing errors.
If it won’t open in Word, call it up with Wordpad, Notepad, or even click on the icon for the file, with the mouse; maybe it will come up in something else. Then highlight it, select copy, call up a blank Word (or w. p.) document, paste text into it, save as a Word file.
If you can’t solve it in another way, does your printer-scanner save files to disk (not just printing a copy the way you’d get a photocopy)? Then take Pauline’s generous offer!!! lol Print out a copy of your document. Scan each page of it and save each as a “graphics file”. (Whatever your Scanner is capable of creating for a saved file; jpg is a good standard). File-attach to e-mail to Pauline. But probably not all 21 pages at once, as that would be a long upload-download.
I have a similar problem with untransferred files, but mine not so simple to solve! sigh. I have an old dos machine with an obsolete w.p., and the monitor has failed. (But the fittings are different than today’s monitors.) Plus I have a Win 95 machine that can speak to the older computer via 4.5 floppy disk. But the floppy drive on that computer wouldn’t recognize the floppies, and then that computer totally failed. (It hadn’t been started up before that, for years.) The computer repairman is unable to get it to reboot and says if he re-installed Win 95 he doubts if he can find drivers for it. Dumb me, I supposed the drivers must come with the operating system disk. I do have dot-matrix printouts, some of which have been scribbled with corrections; but we’re talking 100s of pages, not just 21!!! They do not OCR at all well. I saw an ad for a CD that would boot Any Windows computer, from Win 95 thru Vista and Win7. But the sale price had expired and I don’t feel like paying $100 for what I may or may not ever use. I haven’t needed the files for 15 years, I’ve written much since then. Can’t even remember what’s in most of it!
Hope you have better luck with your project!
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Chas-
Copy and past them into Whilred Views, then copy them onto your new computer. Mickey would love that.
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My emails referred me to the following video, something I thought I share with WMB and coincidentally you are discussing health care.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv1FwOCNoZ8
Bill Moyers interviews former health insurance industry executive Wendell Potter, who left the field after almost 20 years to become a health reform advocate.
an admission by a top health insurance executive — the former head of publicity for CIGNA, one of the top health insurance companies in the country — that the disinformation and attacks on Michael and the film were extensive and well-planned. Their job was to stop the movie from reaching a wide audience (and, more importantly, from having the widespread political impact the industry feared “Sicko” would have).
Wendell Potter, former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA (which provides health insurance to nearly 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies) admits that, in fact, “Sicko” “hit the nail on the head” and told the real truth about how much better people in other countries have it when it comes to their health care.
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There’s always the TextBridge program, Chas. You can scan in a document, it reads it and turns it into text that you can work on like a normal document that you type, i.e., you could take a story from a newspaper, scan it, and it will allow you to alter it (not that you would do that!)
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HRW, Moyers is not a fundamental fair person. He has his own agenda.
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Thanks everyone. I already have it in hardcopy, and the latest ones, where I substitute for someone, on my XP word processor.
If one of my granddaughters can’t fix it, I will wait until I get another computer. It isn’t urgent, but something I’ve been thinking about.
As for keying something interesting, it goes like:
710124 Jn 4:1-14 Conversation at A Well
I don’t want to tackle that, I’m sure nobody else does.
Marilee, I’m from the old school and I just make hardcopy of everything that is important. I could even retrieve the geneology data, and that’s a lot.
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Or, I could take RPN’s advice and get banned forever.
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Note to Stubob:
The American system is the most expensive in the world. One of the contributing reasons is the higher cost of administration due to a multi-payer system. Its been estimated 19 to 23% of total cost are due to administration. In for profit hospitals it can reach 34 percent compared to 24.5% for private non-profit and 22.9 in public hospitals.
http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf
And to compare;
In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States, or $1,059 per capita, as compared with $307 per capita in Canada. After exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/349/8/768
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NJL
I know but its his guest who people should listen to.
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Okay, I admit to commenting on too much. But to be mistaken for somebody commenting on computer knowhow is over the top. That is not going to happen in this lifetime. I would just suggest shooting the thing but I value Chas’ time and input on here so won’t.
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chas 49,
got it. Cant read other media.
Check your scanning software and see if it has OCR functionality. If it does, then it will probably be between 90% and 98% effective.
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A while back I posted some links comparing physicians salaries between Canada and the US. I no longer have the links and quite frankly I think most of you should have some confidence in me by now.
According to the data, wages were fairly comparable given geographical differences and costs of living. There were two results that stood out. One, Canadian family doctors (or GPs) were better paid and secondly American OG/GYNs and anesthetists (sp?) were better paid. However, the latter is countered by a much lower gov’t run malpractice insurance program for the two specialties.
In regards to tort, I mentioned an article a few days ago in which they found it wasn’t doctor’s mistakes that caused the lawsuit but his/her personality.
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There’s a reason, HRW, that Moyers has the guests he has — and it’s to promote his agenda. His questions are carefully asked, and his guest is not truly cross-examined. That’s what good journalism is.
I approved a journalist to write a story about one of the houses being marketed in my area, and the agent didn’t like the idea that the NYT person told me, which I repeated to her, that there would be a pro AND a con side to the story. Let’s face it, no house is perfect (and this house is a buyer specific house). Why “lie” to the public by writing an article that isn’t balanced? When they go to the house, they’ll see what’s “wrong.”
It’s the same thing with Moyers. A real journalist would show the downside. Moyers does not. And the same thing happens on that NOW program on PBS, too. Your “side” always disses Fox as faux, but the truth is, the other news stations are biased, too.
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stubob post 53,
observationally as you note the situatioo is problematic.
And we can not stay with the status quo.
Therefore we will make some form of change.
The only question now is how will we do it and what will we do.
You can of course stand off on the sides and not play. But then you will be in a weak position to complain about the result latter.
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HRW,
If all you’re saying is true, then why do people in other countries come HERE to get important surgery and and treatment?
Also, why do people in other countries have to wait MONTHS for treatment that I can call my doctor tomorrow and get in within days to be treated?
I’m not saying our system isn’t broken, because I think it is in lots of ways, but I certainly don’t want it replaced with a socialist system that’s broken even worse.
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STubob:
So far this year, I’ve spent over $50,000 on hardware and software so I can use electronic medical records. There’s an additional fee of $1.50 per “patient encounter,” which adds up to about $900 a month. Despite the claims of EMR advocates, digitizing the charts doesn’t result in any kind of savings anywhere. It only increases the time taken on each chart and presents new opportunities for fraud.
And this is under a private insurance model! I fail to understand why you aren’t anger at private insurance companies for forcing you to spend money and take time away from your patients. Instead you are afraid of public health care? My family doctor’s office has one receptionist, one medical sec’y, one nurse, and three doctors. My wife’s OB/GYN had a sec’y, nurse and doctor.
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Michelle #25
When my doctor shifted over to computerized medical records, it took her 25 minutes to type in all my information. I volunteered to do all the typing for her–since I type 110 words a minute. Couldn’t do it. I suggested next time I’d bring in all my information on a thumbdrive and she could just upload it. She shook her head wearily.
Why couldn’t she use the traditional chart and have the sec’y type it up? Why waste a doctor’s time on something a sec’y can do? Who requires doctors to spend their time typing? Not a very efficient method.
The next month she shifted over to Kaiser, I lost the third doctor in four years and I’m now with a teenage doctor who knows how to type and run the computer. Still, I liked her so much better . . .
You lose your doctor because she works for a different insurance company. Isn’t she an independent professional? Can she not accept any patients and bill their respective insurance companies? So under the private health care model you can’t choose your doctor? Under my public health care model, I choose my doctor.
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#40
The British NHS used to have the same problem — people would fly in from Africa or southern Europe and receive free medical care. I’m not sure how they solved it but its no longer a problem. Once southern Europe (esp Spain after Franco) developed a comparable system I think the problem disappeared.
In Canada, you need to be a resident for three months before you get your health card.
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Mumsee, sorry I confused you with Musing.
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This link talks about the dangers of the new e-passports and other ID cards, including drivers licenses in some states, with wireless smart-chips.
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Headlines/Default.aspx?id=600514
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#51
Its not as if people are without a doctor, they just don’t have free doctor care. Hence your estimate may be too high.
By admitting that more doctors will be needed under a universal health care system, are you not admitting that the present system is rationing care on the basis of money and thus not everyone is getting adequate care.
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Stubob;
Socialism works when the net beneficiaries are grateful and undemanding and the net benefactors are gracious and not bitter. Does anyone think this is the situation in present-day America?
You have a very low opinion of your fellow citizens. There will always be somebody upset no matter what the system but this doesn’t mean we should try to institute a fair and just system and not just let the market place dictate and thereby eliminate any sense of responsibility.
Employer-sponsored health insurance is a catastrophe which resulted from wage and price controls instituted during the Roosevelt administration. It has never resembled a free market in the vaguest sense. It all started as an unintended consequence of a heavy-handed government intrusion into private enterprise.
I was always under the impression that employer sponsored insurance began as CIO-type unions demanded it and when universal health care was discussed, employer health care was left as a compromise. Interestingly, under the Polish communist system all benefits were linked to the workplace. You didn’t work — no benefits — just like America.
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You didn’t work — no benefits — just like America.
******Actually, those who don’t work DO get treatment. The people who don’t get help are the working poor. In other words, it is better to be a lazy, non-contributing person in the U.S. than it is to be a hard-working (but low wage earning) person.
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#76 NJL
Moyer never claims to be news. His program is much like a newspaper columnists and not an article. He is nice to those he agrees with but I never seen him creatively edit film in the way FOX does — see RPNs link from yesterday.
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TRS
If all you’re saying is true, then why do people in other countries come HERE to get important surgery and and treatment?
For the same reason Americans go to other countries. There’s treatment available there not available at home for various reasons. Or its cheaper — medical tourism in countries such as India is a growing industry as its cheaper to fly to India, get treated and then stay for a relaxing holiday then to be treated in some parts of America. Germans go to Poland because elective health care not covered by the gov’t is much cheaper in Poland — my wife’s hometown is a private health care center which caters to western Europeans for dental care, plastic surgery, spa treatments etc. Closer to home Americans continue to give birth in border hospitals because its cheaper in Canada.
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Also, why do people in other countries have to wait MONTHS for treatment that I can call my doctor tomorrow and get in within days to be treated?
In a market economy, price acts a rationing mechanism. In private health care then, care is rationed by money and ability to pay whereas in Canada its rationed according to time waited and need. So you have a choice ration according to money or ration according to need. When you are rationing Nintendo money is an acceptable mechanism but when you ration health care justice calls for a more equitable approach.
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TRSost 78.
now it is usually accepted that the U.S. has among the most sophisticated medicine in the world (although it appears this is changing).
HOwever it appears that American health care is among the most expensive in the world, but it woudl appear based on any number of metrics (say infant mortality) American care appears to be wanting.
Highest cost with among the lower success rate for developed country outcomes and an inflation rate which is unsustainable and you consider this a success????
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#86
Actually an unemployed Pole in the communist era would get treatment but he was at the back of the line. If you are upset that the poor working class receive less health care than the unemployed perhaps you might prefer the Polish communist method.
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TRS post 78,
and the reason pharamceuticals costless for the same pharmaceutical in Canada than in the U.S.?
The Canadian drug inspection process is not less rigorous than in the U.S. (actually we just udner went a simultaneous FDA/Health Canada inspection: FDA went smoothly and Health Canada was tough!).
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A number on both the right and left appear to agree that the present system is broken (TRS, stubob for examples).
And if it is broken, and there is the political will change will occur.
We seem to finally have the political will.
The only question would seem to be the nature of the change, and if you dont participate, you will have not impact.
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HRW: And this is under a private insurance model! I fail to understand why you aren’t anger at private insurance companies for forcing you to spend money and take time away from your patients. Instead you are afraid of public health care?
I am angry at private insurance companies. I must not be making myself understood. All I’ve ever said is that a government takeover is not an improvement. That $50K is related to data collection. Government systems thrive on data. EMR is a centerpiece of the Obama plan.
From tollbooths to park cleanup, governments are outsourcing everything they possibly can because private enterprise saves money. Somehow, medicine is different?
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To back up Musing — US infant mortality is about 33 in the world fairly close to Cuba. Life expectancy an other important measurement the US also falls behind the other developed countries. Its 30th right behind Bosnia. Canada is 10th
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The only question would seem to be the nature of the change, and if you dont participate, you will have not impact.
Arguing against the current proposals is not failure to participate.
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stubob post 94,
why we even outsourced parts of the lilitaryin Iraq, and that worked out well. Cheaper, better controlled, better handling of the challengesof insurgency.
Do we outsource the FAA?
Do we outsource the FDA? (Actually trick question).
Do we outsource the FBI?
HOw about the CIA?
And you are arguing that helath care is lessimprotant than these functions????
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From tollbooths to park cleanup, governments are outsourcing everything they possibly can because private enterprise saves money. Somehow, medicine is different?
Outsourcing tasks such as park clean-up, toll collection, etc is about union busting. Jobs that require little training yet have a strong public union will cost about $20 to $25 per hour whereas a private non-unionized firm can usually fill these jobs at or near minimum. By the time the private firm charges the city etc., the cost is nearly the same but the city saves in long term costs.
The recent fiascos in utilities and banking have shown that a strict private enterprise model is not always the right way to go. In health care, outside of a few right wing think tanks and America, its generally admitted that gov’t run systems are administratively better.
One can be ideological committed to private enterprise or nationalization but pragmatically different industries need different approaches with the ideological pure solution usually the wrong one.
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stubob posy 96,
I don’t believe I have seen substantive laternatvie proposal from you?
Fpr example, private insurance is bad, public insurance is bad, employer provided insurance is bad, are you seriously suggesting no insurance?
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Musing (97) — We have outsourced parts of the FAA to our detriment. All of your examples boil down to law enforcement and national defense, which are duties specifically allotted to the government in the Constitution. It isn’t a matter of importance, and I neither said nor implied that it was.
(99) — I don’t have an alternative proposal. When I see icebergs all around, I don’t have to be a navigator to point them out.
As I said, I do believe in charity care. I also believe that, in all other instances, medical care should cost the recipient something. If it costs you nothing, you assign it no value. I’m in favor of free enterprise and I don’t think it’s been tried since Roosevelt gave us employer-sponsored health insurance.
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100. “I also believe that, in all other instances, medical care should cost the recipient something. If it costs you nothing, you assign it no value.”
I had a cousin whose husband worked in the mines. Their medical insurance was so good that once she asked me to go to the emergency room with her, for a stye.
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stubob post 100,
but I observe that saying there are icebergs but not suggesting a course merely is abn admission on your part that we will fail.
If someone then tries nd fails, you have no gruonds to complain.
You noted that the FAA outsourcing weas to our detriment
Charity care, or more correctly care for uninsured is generally very expensive by comparison with appropriate on going care and tends to result in poor otucomes.
I am sensing what seems like a dog in the manger problem here.
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I am sensing a standard model here.
The present is not working.
The private options are failing because …
The government option will fail because …
And no I dont have an alternative.
Does one wonder why the conservative brand seems to be a little shop worn recently?
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What about VA hospitals? They are government run, but have a bad reputation.
Is that bad rep based on reality or image/rumor?
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In general, most health plans require the individual to pay something, at least up to a yearly maximum.
Medicare has a copayment unless you buy supplemental insurance.
Most private insurance has copays.
I dont think we have to worry that the provision of health insurance will result in overuse. We already seem to be, for critical groups, suffering underuse.
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Karen, some VA hospitals give excellent care, perhaps we only hear about those who don’t -
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Victoria – You’re probably right. People tend to focus on the negative & neglect the positive.
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“As I understand it, and please correct me if I’m wrong, what is being discussed is an option for public health insurance. You would remain free to pay more to a private insurer should you choose to do so.”
I am wary of such a scenario. Why? Because we remain free to pay more to a private school but still have to pay taxes for the public school. And I’m exremely wary of promises that I have a choice in something if only I’ll support the present proposed bureacracy. It always seems to wind up by being more expensive and I don’t get what I want. And I hate paying for something twice, don’t you?
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MiM
This has been a problem in the British system. The private option led to a breakdown of the public system — people, and especially the elite, lose a vested interest in a health care system if they, the elite, can opt out. Once the political and economic elites opt out, that is pay more for a private option, they being in charge generally starve the public system of funds since they have no interest in it.
About 10 years ago, when Canada was seriously debating changes, they looked into the British system thinking that allowing people to opt out would alievate the pressure on the system, instead they found that commitment to the system would be lowered. Thus, Canada continues to have a single payer system with no private pay option for hospital care.
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Meanwhile
Tasering kids
Originally tasers were to be alternative to deadly force, now it seems to be used if the cop is lazy or irritated.
http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/national/west/nat_krqe_nm_family_cop_dart_pierced_girls_skull_200907081231_2619112
a 14 year old girl gets tasered and the police chief claims he was trying to stop her from running in traffic, but as this video demonstrates there was no traffic.
http://www.cnjonline.com/video/index.php?bcpid=1155316076&bclid=1155254655&bctid=28897971001
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Stopping kids from runnng into traffic seems to be the usual excuse
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,138488,00.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/19/local/me-taser19
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Free Republic is the conserverative equilivant of Democratic Underground or DailyKos. Is this an indication of conservatism in America?
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Conservative+Free+Republic+blog+free+speech+flap+after+racial+slurs+directed+Obama+children/1782375/story.html
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I’m not saying the policeman was right but this brat seemed to have thought she could treat a policeman the same way she was treating her mother.
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112. Just a couple of remarks from Daily Kos.
“The Palins don’t seem much of a family and it doesn’t seem likely that they are smart enough to form a crime syndicate.
But they are about the level of trailer park trash.”
“Calling them a “crime family” or a “crime syndicate” gives them way too much credit. I think I’ll stick with Wasilla Hillbillies.”
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kBells, 114
So that makes the remarks on Free Republic alright?
You might think they would want to take a higher road….
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Musing (103) — I’m not responsible for the “Conservative brand.” You can play verbal gotcha all you want. I’m just a doctor working his tail off in a medically underserved urban area, who sees things daily that most people can’t imagine, and who knows enough about medicine, medical finance, and human nature to say that government-run health care is not the solution to our current problems. That doesn’t mean I’m arguing for the status quo.. It also doesn’t obligate me to have a solution. The current situation is unsustainable. So is every other option that’s been proposed. Even the much-vaunted Canadian system consumes an ever-increasing chunk of GDP every year. They’re behind us, but on the same path.
I understand that it’s frustrating to those who think they have the answers, but there’s no good answer at present.
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Stubob – God bless you for the work you do.
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I am not sure what the answer is to healthcare. I currently do not have medical insurance. I also was turned down for private healthcare insurance because I answered the questions truthfully. I received infertility treatments in 1995 and 1996 resulting in a healthy full term baby. Because I have taken Profasi and some other drug I cannot remember now, I am at a higher risk for certain types of cancer. Also private healthcare would cost me over 10% of my income. I simply do not have it in the budget. In a group plan it costs my ex-husband over $600 a month to have insurance on Chloe.
This is one area where I will have to break ranks with all of my conservative friends. They don’t want to have to pay for someone to sit around on their butts and receive free medical care. Hate to tell ya but we are already doing that with MedicAid. I don’t qualify because I make too much money…go figure. It is people like me who are caught in the middle. As much as I loathe Hillary Clinton, this was one area I agreed with her in the past.
Also I have a friend who is a medical malpractice attorney, he defends the doctors and the hospitals, and people who pay cash for their medical care actually pay more than people with insurance because the insurance company can come in and say this is how much we will pay. I, as a private citizen cannot go into a doctors office and say you are charging me too much for this procedure and I am only going to pay this much.
No, I don’t know what the solution is, but we need to overhaul our system somehow. Even down here in Lower PoDunk, I know people who are going to Thailand for hip replacement surgery. She got such good care, with a private duty nurse and everything that when her husband needed back surgery they went back.
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Thomas, I comdeamned the remarks on Free Republic yesterday, but it was HRW who compared them to Daily Kos.
112. “Free Republic is the conserverative equilivant of Democratic Underground or DailyKos.
My points both sides have jerks, but some like to pretend they have the high ground.
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They say some very charming things about Jenna Bush here.
http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2009/7/9/164711/4347/31#c31
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Kbells post 119
actually I suggest the more plausibly formulatio is that there are jerks on boht sides.
I susupect that it is probably not useful to assert that any massive group of diverse people are all jerks.
Likewise, humans being humans, there are always some jerks.
I find it saluatory to read both the conservative and liberal blogosphere. The echo chambers on both sides can at times be breathtaking and amazing.
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kbells post 121,
one kind find very favorable and very ufavorable materials on nearly everyone in the blogosphere.
Free speaech is truly amazing.
I find that perhaps the best antidote is to check for, and read, the references for the statements.
On can generally reasonably quickly determine that which is pure ideological hot air and that which has been developed from reasoned thought on solid data.
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Musing, it seems we are being held responsible for every nut with a computer or a ticket to a rally. I’m just holding the other side to the same standards.
What am I doing that is any different from what RPN and HRW are doing? Are they going to condemn these remarks?
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The only person(s) you can judge based on public comments posted to a website is the site’s editor(s). There’s not a thing in the world stopping people from flooding threads with comments that make the ‘other side’ look bad.
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Kim, are you a member of the NAR? If so, call 877-267-3752 for the Realtors CoreHealth Insurance. It’s worth looking into.
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kbells post 122.
you mean like the conservatives have tried to hold liberals for every nut in the liberal camp? This has occurred in WMB as well.
If you reread my post, I specficially suggest that this is inappropriate on both sides to hld anyone individual responsible for a group of others.
You are not responsible for what someone else says.
You are, however, responsible for what you say and for what you defend.
And I do suggest that you read both the liberal and conservative blogsophere to get some perspectvie here.
It also would probably be useful to avoid categorical judgements by groups, although this can often result in very tricky language.
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Those who are pushing hard for some kind of nationalized healthcare or government run insurance system to solve the problem will naturally try to bolster their arguments by overstating the problem. That’s the nature of the game in politics. We are constantly told that there are 45 million Americans who lack health care insurance. Is that true? Or is there a numbers game being played to stampede us into a “solution” that will be worse than the real problem? The Democrats, led by Rahm Emanuel with his infamous “never waste a crisis” strategy, constantly run this type of scam, even to the point of inducing panic to pass 1,000 page bills worth trillions of dollars that are not even debated or read.
When considering anything that the Obama gang wants, remember that we are dealing with con men of the first order. Here is an article to bring some much needed perspective into the debate. The author, Mr. Larry Elder, does the math and shows that a much more realistic number is 10 to 15 million, not the 4 times overstated number that the Democrats barrage us with. In his well stated argument Mr. Elder arrives at his smaller number primarily by subtracting those Americans who could easily have insurance but who, for a variety of reasons, choose not to. Most of them can afford it, but it is not high on their priority list. For good of for Ill, they would rather spend their money on other things. Are his numbers correct and his argument sound? I think so, but read it for yourself.
So is it the right thing to do for the “nanny-state” government to forcibly take money from me (a taxpayer) to pay for something another person just chooses not to buy? Is that the proper solution? I don’t think so.
Well, what about the 10-15 million without health insurance who can’t get it? Mr. Elder makes the salient point that health insurance is not the same as healthcare. Very few people, if any, in this country are denied healthcare.
Finally, there are the individual problems, some of which have been sincerely noted on this blog. What about those? First, it is important to be objective and remember that individual problems do not necessarily equate to national problems. Obama goes on national TV and hugs a crying woman with a cancer problem. It is, and was deliberately designed to be, a great PR show. But we are not told that she was also an Obama campaign worker—a fact that probably has Rahm Emanuel’s name written all over it. There are other solutions instead of ramming this individual problem down the throats of 300 million other Americans and possibly ruining our whole healthcare system because of it.
After church this morning I will be meeting with our other deacons and a family (who are not even from our congregation) in temporary need of rent money. We will evaluate their need on an individual basis, going over the details with both care and concern. Our congregation is generous, but their needs to be a high sense of responsibility and accountability for how we, the deacons, disburse the funds entrusted to our care. We will do that in a way that no government program could ever do. This is one solution to individual problems. There are others, involving more than just giving money. We will also be looking at ways to meet basic problems of family finances, including proper priorities and personal discipline in spending, job help, etc. Our aim will be to help this family, not just short-term with a little money today, but long-term with an improved ability to meet their needs within the scope of their own talents and resources.
In my opinion, these kind of solutions always work better than mammoth government programs that are corruption prone and oversold by political con men, such as those infesting the Obama gang.
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I was dialoguing with RPN just yesterday on Friday’s WV about this topic — I have never heard of FreeRepublic and I told him that I doubted it was representative of “mainstream” conservatism as he claimed. I did look at the site afterwards and am more convinced it is not really mainstream, though I didn’t spend a lot of time there.
Musing is right, there are extremists — and jerks with computers — on both sides. That crazy comments are posted is no surprise.
I think this comes up so often because RPN in particular posts outrageous links, as if to say (at least this is my impression): “See?? ‘Your’ side is made up of such lowlifes that say these things.” I don’t see the point of posting many of those links and I suppose I read that as trying to implicate all conservatives, to sweep us all into the nuts-o-phere, when I think none of us here would have anything to do with those remarks.
I can only imagine the things that were no doubt written about Bush and his family over the last 8 years. But I doubt (or at least I hope) none of those here who consider themselves liberal would associate with that kind of thing.
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kbells post 122,
so my favorite version of this problem was the plaint about the unfairness of the press during the later campaign in 2008: they were argued to be against McCain and in Obama’s pocket.
This was an anomolous argument on two points:
a) holding liberals in WMB responsible for the outside press behavior?
b) it actually was not supported by the facts, and I presented several different sets of data demonstrating this
But it did not seem to shut down the castigation of liberals.
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TASERS AND THE COPS THAT LOVE THEM:
A few weeks ago the question came up of the “us vs. them” idea that seems to be coming about re. the police officer and the citizen. HRW makes some very valid points above re. the almost reflexive use of Tasers by cops. Here’s a similar article from that radical rag, Car and Driver:
Several LewRockwell.com columnists — most notably, Will Grigg — have been all over the rise in itchy Taser fingers on the part of our “protectors and servers” for quite some time. Just read some of these stories — many (most?) with accompanying video corroboration — and see for yourself.
I was raised in the age when parents (with the help of Andy Taylor, Pete Malloy and Jim Reed) taught their kids that the cops were the good guys.
I’m greatly saddened that I have to moderate that counsel to my kids, along the lines of, “Don’t call the law or get the cops involved unless it is absolutely necessary to resolving the situation, because they might very well escalate otherwise routine or mundane situations beyond what is reasonable.”
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Michael Martin post 125,
now when you say:
“We are constantly told that there are 45 million Americans who lack health care insurance. Is that true? Or is there a numbers game being played to stampede us into a “solution” that will be worse than the real problem?”
do you have data to support your assertion?
Cl;early much data has been provided to support this number and it appears to be agreed to by the mainstrewam of the discussion on both sides.
If you are to challenge the data:
Unisured in America
then what is your source?
Insinuating that this is incorrect without providing alternative data to support your claim would appear to be irresponsible.
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Sorry, link failed:
Uninsured in America
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And I obviously don’t like to see it done by conservatives, either, though perhaps I don’t notice it as much.
I just would hope we could take each other somewhat at face value, without trying to assume those on one side or the other walk in lock-step with the most extreme voices on their respective side.
As for health insurance, I agree something needs to be done but I have not in the least studied the issue so I readily confess I have no ideas for a way forward.
I do know what I’ve heard from our neighbors to the north regarding long waits for surgeries, etc. I especially appreciate hearing Stubob’s perspective as someone who’s in the trenches, who deals with the issues daily.
My concern is that patients might not get the treatment they need, that the system will become even more centered around money issues with those doling out the dollars determining who gets treated (or not).
And as important as finding an answer is, I also wonder if this is exactly the right time in our nation (as opposed to perhaps a year or two from now) to launch full-fledged into a new program that will no doubt require many, many government dollars.
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So for references, In a typicall day I read the following:
A) WMB
B) Huffington Post
C) Worldnet daily
D) Talking Points Memo
E) Drudge Report
F) Daily Kos
I also periodically scan politico.com, Hanriety’s (sp?) blog and many others.
I choose to post in WMB primarily because it is among the best run blogs in the conservative sphere, and there is no point in me spending too much time in a liberal echo chamber which agrees with what I say. By comparison with other conservatvie blogs, WMB often has interesting and challenging positions which force me to rethinnk and clarify my own positions, and I have learend much as a result.
And further, I specficially appreciate the theological discussion with particular appreciation to victoria, Mr. Meaner (now gone), Vynette, savedbygrace, among many others.
I particularly would like to thank Lynn Vincent for maintaiing some level of discipline on this herd of cats. She will be sorely missed.
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Donna J post 133,
I agree with much of what you stated in your post (in particular your concenr about money centered valuation of health insurance), except for the following:
“And as important as finding an answer is, I also wonder if this is exactly the right time in our nation (as opposed to perhaps a year or two from now) to launch full-fledged into a new program that will no doubt require many, many government dollars. ”
I would only: “if not now, when”.
We are in an economic crisis. This is a key component to restructuring a major burden on our economy and if we do not do it soon, it will hinder our recovery efforts and long term growth (c.f. previous references on health care cost growth rates and its percent of GDP).
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Well, you may be right, I don’t know. It just seems that it’s an issue that requires much — and long — consideration, perhaps with an attention level that would be hard to apply as we are still teetering on the financial brink.
I’m thinking (hoping) that things on that front will be better a year from now or so. But who knows.
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Donna J post 137,
we have been discussing this in this country for perhaps 20 years or more, but have been afraid to act.
We know the basic outlines of the problem:
- health costs rising faster than inflation
- the number (now estimated at about 45 million) of uninsured
for starters.
We know that the present approach dependent on private health insurance has not managed these issues.
And there is good evidence that failure to address these issues is putting America at a major ecnomic disadvantage.
The progressive side of this argument has now produced a reasonably flushed out approach. The approach would appear to cost perhaps $600B over 10 years:
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_12812440
and the public option has the potential to save about $150B over the same 10 years:
CBO on Public Option
In short, we are beginning to see a reasonably flushed out proposal from the progressive side (and copies of this proposal as it develops are being made available for the public to read, as I have posted earlier).
We have yet to see a flushed out concervative proposal: all we hear are lets delay.
Action is going to happen. Based the present political dynamics, it can happen with the constructive participation of conservatives, or it will happen without them.
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If you are reading and posting comments on Sunday morning, why aren’t you in church? For that matter, if your church caters to your spiritual needs, why do you participate on worldmagblog?
This morning, without glasses, I shot and killed a rabbit, putting my cararact-corrected eye to the rifle scope. If I hunt and kill a rabbit on Sunday instead of going to church, will I go to Hell?
Do pastors hunt rabbits? Are there some denominations that allow rabbit hunting and others that discourage it?
My wife says if I leave the rabbit lying out on the ground, it will attract fleas. Fleas are more attracted to my wife than to me. Fleas spread plague, as does unprotected and promiscuous sexual behavior. Socialized or privatized medical systems are both unprepared for dealing with plague.
If I don’t go out and dispose of the rabbit, I will not have a wife, with or without fleas.
Go to the correct church, pray a lot, and behave yourself sexually. And post lots of comments on worldmagblog, so God will have something interesting to read.
I am going to go toss the dead bunny into the woods for the coyotes or crows to dispose of. Medical report for the week over.
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Random,
so how are you recovering from the surgery?
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Musing,
Thank you for inquiring? So far I seem to be recovering according to the schedule my doctor expected. I put eye drops on my eyes four times a day. I tend to experience intermittent bouts of slight pain and itchiness, and take one Tylenol a day (but I am careful no to pop them so I don’t destroy my liver). I sleep with a patch taped over my right eye. The doctor will check my eye next Tuesday. I am on the schedule for surgery for my left eye on May 4.
On my last job of 17 total full-time jobs (some private, some public) I worked for a public agency. I got Medicare Advantage through my retirement. The coverage, so far, is pretty good. I hope it holds up until civilization collapses and/or Jesus returns and/or I cease to exist, after which I will cease to care about the mess you (collective) are leaving for my high-IQ granddaughter to clean up.
Musing, I hope you are doing well. Victoria missed you when you didn’t post for a bit. I think she has a thing for you.
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August 4, not May 4. By the way, the surgeon put an X over the right eye (meaning correct and that side of my head, looking out).
Everyone else also checked carefully to make sure they were operating on the correct eye. The anesthesiologist said, “When this happens–operating on the incorrect eye–not that I personally have seen it happen–it causes a great deal of commotion and many discussions and consequences and we don’t stop hearing about it for a very long time. I don’t want to go through it.”
At least half a dozen different nurses came in and out during the prep and the operation and the post. They all checked with each other carefully, though it made me nervous when one referred to me with a different patient’s name. She did get straightened out.
I don’t know what the United States would do for nurses without the rest of the world. Most of the nurses seemed to be from Asia. One was blond and had an accent that I took to be Scandinavian or Eastern European. We talk about foreign workers in agriculture and construction, but what about nursing and medicine?
For that matter, should I care if my medical caretakers were Christians? Perhaps they were Muslims?
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random name post 14,
my sense is one needs to be concerned that:
a) they are competent
b) they care about your case and progress
Last I checked there was no monopoly on competence or caring.
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I realize now no one will read this.
Go to National Review dot com and read the Mark Steyn column “Dependence Day”.
Govt control of health care will forever alter the relation of the citizen and the state.
Who can name any govt program which once stood up and running actually cost as much (or even less) than what it was projected to cost?? There are none. A program projected to cost 4 billion will run $12 billion or more.
No reason to see this any different with Obamacare than it has been with Canadacare, Brit NHS etc etc
Mark Steyn has lived in Canada. He knows where of he speaks.
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Musing, you seem like a nice guy, but if you recall, my post was not aimed at you but at people who constantly post negative links about every nut with the slightest connection to conservatives in the country and who have been harping about this Obama thing. My point was they have jerks on their side too. If that was your point why didn’t you address it to one of them first.
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It seems many are talking past each other.
It is often said here on Palin apology threads that “conservatives” never attack the Obama girls, but now we know this to be untrue. That’s all. The cat’s out of the bag.
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“It seems many are talking past each other.”
Who is this “we” Quimo Sabe? We’re not talking past you at all. We’re talking directly to the ORIGINAL, the one and only, RPN.
You need to quit posting this trash insinuating that it’s only conservatives and Christians who do stupid/immoral/mean stuff. Several of us continue to ask you to quit, yet you continue to harass and annoy.
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“It is often said here on Palin apology threads that “conservatives” never attack the Obama girls, but now we know this to be untrue.”
You got a direct quote for that?
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Random Name: Glad to hear you’re doing well post-surgically, but quite sorry to hear you shot a bunny.
?
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I’m too busy today to say much, but it sounds like the President gave a good speech in Ghana.
Are you all satisfied now?
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kbells and musing I thought we were just going to carry on as if nothing ever happens. I also thought RPN was leaving us. That was a short sabbatical. Even Random couldn’t stay away from us.
I personally think all the President’s children (in the past, now and in the future) should be off limits. Ask any parent out there if they have perfect children. If you find one then they and only THEY can say anything about anyone else’s children. Mine has embarrassed the snot out of me on more than one occassion. She often dresses in what she deems the height of fashion and is completely inappropriate for where we are going. She wanted to wear a cotton sun dress to the theater at night. Once we got there and she saw how everyone else was dressed she thanked me for making sure she had on a nice dress.
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Kbells-
Sound Familiar?
BY kBells 02.18.09 AT 7:55 AM
37, 52. If he’s right, can you come up with an incident where the child of a Democrats was treated any where near as badly as Brisol Palin or Jena and Barbara Bus h for that matter.
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sawgunner post 143,
I recently posted material showing that the percent overhead cost to run medicare had decreased dramatically since its inception.
It would seem that perhaps there is one counter example.
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Musing (#131) writes:
“do you have data to support your assertion?”
What?? The larger portion of my post dealt with the assertion and a discussion of the data involved.
I don’t want to be insulting about your reading comprehension, so I can only wonder if you actually read what I wrote or used the link to the referenced article.
Go back and reread my post at #127. Use the link there and read for yourself.
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Kbells post 146,
because of course we are having the conversation. I have made it clear that both sides can have difficutlties here and you were part of this conversation.
If you do not like hearing that conservatives make such silly remarks, then I would suggest you would need to go to an alternate universe: observationally they do.
And I do chastise liberals as well when appropriate. But of course there are so few liberals in WMB to chastise.
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Micahel Martin post 125,
so you base your argument on Elder’s assertion:
“The author, Mr. Larry Elder, does the math and shows that a much more realistic number is 10 to 15 million, not the 4 times overstated number that the Democrats barrage us with. In his well stated argument Mr. Elder arrives at his smaller number primarily by subtracting those Americans who could easily have insurance but who, for a variety of reasons, choose not to.”
So in fact ou actual;ly agree that 45 million do not have health insurance and you assert that perhaps 30 million choose not to.
My argument still stands, but now your challenge is much greater: you have to have a scientifically valid statistical sample to demnstrate that these 30 million choose not to.
Which means you would have to read mindsto see that they choose not to.
There is some evidence that the yonug may at time choose not to, but even here you have to conclusively eliminate cost issues which I am stil not aware of the scietnficialy valid poll having done.
We appear to agree on the base number.
You have not provided that I can see substatiated evidence that Elder’s correctiuon is valid.
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Micahel Martin,
as I read your reference:
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=571842
the reduction apparently is based on a ser of interviews, selection process undocumented. And continualy refers to smoking with is an increasingly small percentage of our young, etc.
This is most certainly does not appear to be scientific data, or am I missing further qualificationn on how this data was developed, and certainly does not seem to allow one to make the sweeping generalizations which seem to be made in this article.
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So here is the actual matertial which Elder appears to use to reduce the bulk of his numbers:
“Nearly half of the 45 million fall in the category of my 26-year-old nephew. He smokes cigarettes, dates, eats out, goes to movies and, like all young people, lives through his cell phone. With a slight change in priorities, he could afford health insurance, the cost of which at his age and health starts at about $100 a month. Take a look at a Reason Foundation video of interviews with a bunch of non-health-insured 20-somethings.”
No scientific studies, but a sweeping argument apparently arguing that since this group interviewed were argued by the interviewer to have chosen not to get health care, that this was the actual cause.
We then go to the next group who are deducted from the study:
“Millions more can access healthcare — through SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program), Medicaid or other government programs. But for whatever reason, 11 million people simply refuse to take advantage of them.”
where “the for whatever reason” statement stands out: Elder has no idea why these people do not partake of SCHIP and there can be any number of them. In short, Elder has not justified this reduction either.
This is sloppy statistics indeed, and if this is the typical approach to argue that nothing need be done, it is indeed weakly supported and arguably unsupported at all.
We are back to all sides agreeing that the base number is 45 million.
The conservative using the tack you have p[roposed will need scientifically valid, not subjectively determined, corrections to make this part of the case.
And even with this case there are by Elder’s admission 15 million who do desparately need health care, and it did not appear that Elder was proposing any action here. In fact it apivars that his argument is:
“Do we allow a complete government takeover of the section of healthcare it doesn’t already run, for 10-15 million or so without health insurance on a persistent basis?”
without providing any viable alternatvie other than:
“What to do? Unleash the free market. Allow greater competition among healthcare providers. Decrease costly regulations that increase the price tag. Enable consumers to purchase insurance plans across state lines. Allow non-government-licensed paraprofessionals and others — currently prevented by law from offering any medical services — to provide low-cost care.”
so lets see we will force those who have poor or no health insurance use unlicensed medical professionals????
What costly regulations increase the price tag? You mean the ones which require actually providng needed services (e.g. equal treatment for both genders including ob/gyn care for women if required: women do get pregnant). Oh yes, perhaps you are referring to the non-regulations which do not prevent retroactive cancellation of coverage for preexisitng conditions even if not germane to the present tresatment.
Again it would appear to be yet another attempt to argue to take no action.
And observationally this argument has been shown to be both hollow and not accepted by the electorate.
Good try, but do you think this kind of unsupported argument will sell given the electoral dynamics which are now underway???
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So lets have some more fun.
On can go to the followng which has a number of consolidared maps regaridng this and similar issues:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/
The data for these maps is referenced back to census data.
The followng map show the uninsured distirbution in this country:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/mapfiles/insurance.jpg
as a percentage for each area.
Now look at the youth distribution by percentage in each area:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/mapfiles/youth.jpg
Interestingly, and if we stopped here, arguably supporting your argument.
But look at the estimated population in poverty:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/mapfiles/poverty_district.jpg
which would also seem to line up with the uninsured and the followng map:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/mapfiles/hpsa_primaryscore.png
which shows the area underserved by medical facilities.
An equally valid argument can be made that the reason so many of the young are underinsured is that they are poor and in areas where there are inadequate health facilities (why have insurance if there is no where to use it).
Neither Elder’s argument or mine argument have been proved by this data. The data suggests, however that either argument may be valid, and without solid study, one has no ground to make Elder’s statements.
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Musing (#155):
Now that you have actually read what I wrote and the associated article, you are coming along. Do I need to hand feed you further?
Read the Elders article, use the link there, watch the Reason Foundation video of interviews, note that the estimates were made by Economist Glen Whitman of the Cato Institute, based on research done at Johns Hopkins University.
All of this is available to you based on my post and the links provided. If you would do just a little bit of homework first, you wouldn’t need to ask senseless questions about data that has already been provided. Wake up.
The question never was about the fact that approximately 45 million people lack health insurance. The questions revolve around who those people actually are and WHY they do not have health insurance.
The Obama gang would have us believe that they are all frantic in their desire for health insurance, but because of our terrible system and their desperate circumstances, they all find it impossible to get insurance or to get healthcare. This is just a terrible crisis of human suffering that we must alleviate immediately. Source: the Rahm Emanuel machine.
Is this really true or is the larger portion of it overblown nonsense? A close look at the data suggests the later. This is not to say that we don’t have a healthcare problem. We do, but not one of the magnitude spun out by the Obama propaganda machine. There are more sensible alternatives than the massive, corruption-prone bureaucracy that they propose.
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So lets have some fun.
The following site has a variety of analyses referenced back to census data:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/
The followig is a mpa of uninsure din America:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/mapfiles/insurance.jpg
And the followig shows theyouth population distribution:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/mapfiles/youth.jpg
and if se stopped now, it might suggest that Elder’s argument is supported.
However if we look at poverty rates for the young:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/mapfiles/poverty.jpg
and for medical facility availability:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/mapfiles/hpsa_primarytype.png
an eqaully valid hypothesis is that it is poverty and/or availability of medical services at root of the uninsured.
And without a more detailed and careful analysis, neither Elder’s hypothesis nor my suggested hypothe3ses can be supported,
In short, the only thing we do know is that 45 million people are uninsured.
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Micahel Martin,
yes I see this.
I have a post of the maps from:
http://www.raconline.org/maps/
which provide alternative explanations for this AND the data as porvided is not substantIated scientifically for the Elder assertions. It seems to have been eaten, but hopefully will reappear from the filters.
And yes this is, as I have epxressed several times, the time to fix this: if we do not we put the U.S. at a continuing economic disadvantage.
The U.S. has the highest cost health care system in the world.
The U.S. has one of the poorest health outomces for developed countries
(I have posted this material previously: do we need it again?)
The U.S. has one of the highest uninsured rates iin the develoepd world (45 million which you agreed to and fo rwhich there are multple sources).
We can do all the sophistry we want, but at the end of the day this requires repairing.
The adminsitration is committed to it.
The congress in the main supports it.
The country supports it.
I suggest that this time it will go through, and you can try all you want with unsubstantiuated attempts at statistics to prove otherwise, but the country as a whole quite rightly does not believe you.
P.S. and if you note, Elder discounts anyone who has lost their health insurance because they have lost their job from his analysis: do you seriously suggest that these people are choosing not to have health care???? Elder does, but we have already seen the issues raised by his analysis.
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I didn’t pick up the mail yesterday and now I wish I had just left it until tomorrow. The bill for August health insurance premiums jumped 20%. They sent a letter recently stating they were going up, but this is ridiculous. We may soon be among the uninsured.
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Musing, I condemned those remarks when they first came out. but some people kept bringing it up in such a way as to insinuate that these were common conservative attitudes. I merely found similar remarks about similar people from (in HWR own words) a web site of similar influence.
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Only in America. Be sure to read the last sentence.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,531684,00.html?test=latestnews
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kbells et al
My intent in linking the Obama children story was not to say “your side, my side better”. I found the article interesting for the editor’s lack of response and the very few commentators who complained. I don’t read DailyKos — don’t like the format but do read the occasional DU thread – the editor is pretty quick to delete anything objectionable. The difference in editorial reaction symbolizes that the right or at least the FR right still don’t get it.
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Michale Martin,
and of course we can look back on conservative platforms here to McCain’s campaings interesting statement:
Texas INinsrued
where McCain’s campaign apparently said:
“But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. ”
which isinteresting on many points:
a) redefining what is meant by insured (no :emergency room and critical care does not fit the usual definition of health insurance)
b) admitting that the government is already the insurer of last resort. In which case, all Obama is suggesting is lets make the insurance more efficient
And with this as a starting point, it is perhpas predictable that certain conservative think tanks will yet again try to redefine the problem (those uninsured because they lost their jobs are not part of the problem??? There are 14 million inemployed in the U.S.:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
I suggest that most of them do not have health insurance since most health insurance is provided by the employer and COBRA is extremely expensive).
But of course the poltiical momentum is in place, and only by trying to make the case that there is no problem (much as the conservatives tried to argue that there was no economic crisis: c.f. comments by Joel Mark) can they hope to objectively restrain this momentum.
Good luck: but trying to redefine the numbers to make your case is probably not suitable to enhancing your crediblity.
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kbells,
so we both agree that there are jerks on both sides of the spectrum. And of course if we leave it htere the conversation is and would be over.
And the reason you keep coming back to the ocnversation?????
Perhaps the same reaosn you keep coming back to comments on Michelle Obama’s cloths in “the popes gift to Obama”?
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Michale marti,
I will say this for you, you did provide references, and indeed they are traceable back to a source which at least has the capability opf performig good analyses.
Of course t his is ponly step 1 in any such process. When the data disagrees, then one has to understand why.
IN this case it was easy: the analysis was based on effectviely arbitrarily discounintg poritions of the numbers.
NOw this in fact can be reasonable, so long as one careful;ly documents the validity of ones exclusins here.
In this case, however, the exclusion of 14 million unemployed is roughly equivalent to the netire corpus that Elder is working with.
That is an extreme case of exclusions indeed, and therefore needs to be very well vetted indeed. It does not appear that thes exclusion has been well vetted.
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#127
Michael
I read the Elder article and have the same questions Musing already listed in regards to his stats but I’d like to address a more relevant point. Is the number important. Is 10 million not serious enough to warrant a response perhaps 15, 20 or 33. How million uninsured would qualify as a crisis. If one person lacks access to health care is that not a crisis? If one person falls into bankruptcy because of a medical problem is that not a crisis?
Elder’s moralizing tone also bothered me. Apparently all smokers and all criminals don’t deserve access to health care. Granted smoking and most criminal activity tends to lead to greater health needs but at what point do we draw the line. Would you instruct ambulance workers not to assist accident victims who created the accident because of excessive speed. How about participating in risky sports, not wearing a helmet? Do we set qualifiers to our compassion and care for each other?
This leads me to the actions of the church deacons. IT is indeed noble and right to assist each other but it appears your fellow deacons are distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving poor. In Victorian England, the deserving poor were thought to be poor because of their actions and hence received no aid whereas the undeserving poor were poor despite doing all the “right” things and hence were given aid.
We will also be looking at ways to meet basic problems of family finances, including proper priorities and personal discipline in spending, job help, etc. Our aim will be to help this family, not just short-term with a little money today, but long-term with an improved ability to meet their needs within the scope of their own talents and resources.
If I understand this correctly, the family must prove they are of the undeserving poor and are entitled to aid. Although your intentions are good, do you not see this as humiliating and condescending … “yes, we will help but first lets examine your behavior”
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Michael Martin,
and when I went back to the article, I could not find the reference to the CATO Institute supporting data. Did I miss it?
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Michle Martinn,
I will follow up on W’s post with this quote form Elder:
“What about those who cannot afford it? What about those with pre-existing illnesses whose insurance applications carriers turned down? What’s wrong with charity — people helping people? America remains the most generous nation on the face of the earth. We donate more of our time and money than countries like England, Germany, and Japan.
So let me get this straight: Elder does feel we need to provide this health care, he just believes it should be provided by charity not the government.
He is kidding isn’t he? Charity for an MRI scan when you have a stroke for example?
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Michael Martin,
and to continue: wihtout insurance how does Elder suggest we manage say high blood pressure which might lead to such a stroke and the need for the MRI?
I can continue, but the fatuousness of Elder’s proposal should now be clear.
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Elder’s numbers are not backed up anywhere in the article and he apparently does agree with the 45 million number.
He also totally ignores the fact that even if there are huge numbers of “voluntarily” uninsured, when they do get sick, the burden of care will fall on all of us. (Unless they have the misfortune to have a heart attack while in jail, where Mr Elder seeks to turn every drug bust into a no regrets death sentence).
Finally, Elder seeks to have it both ways with respect to the difference between health care and health insurance. He uses the 89% number of people who are satisfied with their current , but then turns around and makes a sharp distinction between health care and health insurance when it suits his ideological purposes. I would hazard a guess that an awful lot of that 89% of eople are acutely aware of limitations of their coverage.
His numbers don’t add up, he has no methodology; it is in short an ideological hit job, perpetrated by someone whose chief qualification is that he is a radio talk show host or syndicated columnist.
Of course, it’s not surprising that Michael Martin chooses this guy; he’s obviously just as “Christian” as Michael is. Both seek to import the ideology of greed, unfettered capitalism and a really ugly form of noblesse oblige into the Jesus message of compassion and generosity.
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“And the reason you keep coming back to the ocnversation?????”
And the reason RPN keeps posting the same insinuations? is?
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What insinuations? That the Perpetually Aggrieved© remain perpetually aggrieved in spite of reality?
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Peggy Noonan vs Sarah Palin redux.
Devastating.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html
And the NYT for Monday has a pretty good story on why she quit.
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That’s been no insinuation. You’ve flat out stated it. Whether it’s true or not.
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#148 Donna J,
If you come visit us on our island and explain to the rabbits that I will not shoot them if they stop trying to sneak into our garden, we will 1) stop shooting rabbits and 2) feed you some of delicious, healthful organic peas we picked today.
Our closest neighbors a) worked for the Boy Scouts all of their lives; b) are devout Christians who go to a large active Protestant church about every Sunday; c) helped me sight my pellet rifle and learn how to shoot rabbits with it; d) used rat traps to wipe out more than twenty chipmunks who were eating THEIR peas; e) told me, “They are not ‘bunnies”; they are ‘damned rabbits.”
I shot two rabbits today with my new and improved eye. I will tell my non-profit HMO, which advertises aggressively, that they may use me in their advertisements, holding two dead rabbits, proclaiming “Random Shot two Rabbits with the new and improved eye we provided him.”
Also, I know there are quite a few hunters amongst the loyalists of worldmagblog; why are none of you springing to my defense as a novice hunter who began shooting defenseless little animals at the age of 60?
I don’t think anyone who is not a vegetarian should cavil about someone who hunts mostly to protect his organic vegetables, and perhaps not even those.
As far as the article eveyone is bickering about, I was too busy shelling peas and hunting rabbits to read it. I am sure socialized medicine and homosexuality will bring about the collapse of civilization long before Islamic terrorists and genetic manipulation of the human genome.
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Turks criticize Chinese treatment of Uyghurs
ISTANBUL, Turkey (CNN) — Turkey’s prime minister continued his outspoken criticism of China’s crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs on Saturday.
In remarks published by the official Anatolian Agency, Recep Tayyip Erdogan denouncing what he called “savagery” and called on the Chinese government to “give up efforts to assimilate” the country’s Uyghur minority.
On Friday, Erdogan went a step further, announcing to journalists upon his return to Ankara from the Group of Eight summit in Italy that “the incidents in China are a genocide. There’s no point in interpreting this otherwise.”
Many Turks view the Uyghurs of Central Asia as fellow Turkic, Muslim brothers.
At least 184 people died in last weekend’s violent protests in Urumqi, in China’s far-west Xinjiang region, according to Chinese state-run media. The violent demonstrations also left more than 1,000 injured in the capital, according to government figures. Heavily armed troops remain on the streets of Urumqi and curfews are in effect.
The violence is a result of ethnic tensions between the Uyghurs, who are predominantly Muslim, and members of China’s Han majority. Hundreds of Han Chinese were on the streets of Urumqi last Tuesday, holding sticks and pipes and calling for severe punishment of the Uyghurs, who they say committed serious crimes.
The Uyghurs say they have been victimized and many of those killed in the violence Sunday were Uyghurs. Uyghur religious leaders have condemned the violence, saying it is against the spirit of the Muslim faith and Uyghur tradition.
I am not sure what is Righteously Correct here. Although the conservative Christians at worldmagblog frequently say they are not prejudiced against Muslims as practically in the same breath they talk about how the Koran preaches violence and evil, I can’t help thinking of the word “disingenuous.”
On the other hand, China is the world’s leading abortion headquarters. Hardly anything is more evil than abortion. So when an irresistibly evil force meets another irresistibly evil force, what is a poor atheist to do ? I know, pray. Pray hard, very hard.
Also, my wife has become entranced with the word Uyghur and goes around muttering and giggling “I’m an Uygher; I’m an Uygher,” as she listens to the NPR newscasts.
She stops herself only to cheer lustily whenever she sees me shoot a rabbit.
It is hard for me to imagine that we can be any more damned than we are, but we keep breaking new ground.
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Random, Hahahaha, Can’t wait to see that commercial!
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HRW (#167):
HRW “If one person lacks access to health care is that not a crisis?”
MM No, it is not a national crisis. It is an individual crisis with an individual solution. Besides, we are not talking about access to health care. You must have missed the point that no healthcare insurance is not the same as no health care. Very few people, if any, are denied health care in this country. Furthermore, you show an abysmal lack of objectivity when you grossly magnify a problem for a few into a problem for 300,000,000.
HRW “If I understand this correctly, the family must prove they are of the undeserving poor and are entitled to aid.”
MM You do NOT understand correctly because you have purposely made a hash out of what I said. Rather than reading and taking my comments at face value, you arbitrarily attached a pejorative interpretation you had read somewhere about the poor in Victorian England. But, It always helps to impugn someone’s motives and intentions, right?
Read what I said again, with this added clarification: the aid we will offer this family goes far beyond a mere temporary handout. If they are wiling, it will also include advise and counsel on methods to improve the handling of their family finances, improving job prospects, and discovering any problem areas that may have contributed to their current difficulties. There is no condescension or humiliation in that.
Nowhere in my previous explanation can you find justification for implying that our approach will be to extract proof from them that they are worthy of our aid. That insult is a product of your own condescension, not ours. For the record, we paid this month’s rent for them after minimal questions and about 5 minutes deliberation. However, we also have a responsibility to our congregation for the disbursement of the funds entrusted to our care, and that involves some questions especially if the requests for aid become habitual and suggestive of deeper problems that need attention.
BTW, your statement carries and additional error: they are not “entitled” to anything. No one has an “entitled” claim to the assets of another person or group. We offer our assistance voluntarily, not under some form of compulsion. If someone feels that they are “entitled” to what another person has, they have taken the first step toward theft.
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The problem with so many Liberal arguments is simply that the poor are somehow idolized. They *deserve* all the help that can be taken from the rest of us regardless of any facts.
In other words, the “poor” deserve MY money even if they are perpetually and unapologetically lazy, won’t work, have a sense of entitlement, continue to make bad choices over and over again, and so on.
I am MORE THAN HAPPY to help someone get on their feet, make it through a crisis, learn better skills, find a job, and so on.
However, I am NOT more than happy to continually and repeatedly have my money — for which I worked hard — TAKEN from me to support someone who won’t work, won’t learn, and won’t change.
Perhaps, sometimes, we Conservatives appear hard-hearted. But Liberals are often just gullible. They have no problem taking from those who work and are trying and earning and giving to ANYONE just because they are “poor” — without caring why the situation exists, and without any concept of personal responsibility or effort.
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I suggest that this example of Elder’s material provides an interesting case study.
First: Michale Martin did provide references for his assertionsn and should be lauded for that.
Having said that, however, it now introduces the next level of care required for understanding data: clearly stating its source, methodlogies, and undersanding the impact of these methodlogies.
And in the case where the data disagrees, being willing to discuss the differences. The differences historically perhpas can arise as follows:
a) clear differences in methodlogy in which case we potentially have an honest difference of academic opinion and discussing the methdlogies sjhould, if sufficient supporting data is provided, resolve the issue
b) differences in definition for what is meant by the words; in which case resolving the definitional differences shjould allow one to reconcile the data. Againif adequate supporting data is provided
c) an attempt by one or both parties to misdirect the conversation
There are undoubtedly others, but these are typical of the ones we have seen in WMB so far.
In the case of Elder’s artilce this is actually a simple
discussion:
a) everyone seems to agree on the base 45 million number
b) Elder then makes a series of adjustments to this number which appear based on Elder’s article to be unsupported (neither Arcadia nor I can find any references for their basis)
- Michael Martin appears to imply a CARO Insitute reference: in which case, where is it?
- Elders writes off the unemployed with the sweeping statement:
“Several million other Americans who want insurance do, indeed, go without it — for a time. Many are, however, between jobs, and most — at some point — will find employment that either offers health insurance or pays enough so that they can buy it. ”
is extremely cavlier in that the several miullion he refers to is in fact about 14 million of unemployed which is of the same order as his remaining corpus. Such sweeping exclusions should require very careful supporting data to justify. In fact, Elder’s justifies it by suggesting they will simply get a job without addressing what happens in the meantime.
In short, Elder’s arguments for corrections are not as presented are not credible and given the nature and magnitude of the corrections we must either assume it was done deliberately or that Elder was just very misinformed. It is possible that Elder did not make an error and was using someone elses numbers which are supported (although it is hard to believe how), in which case it is incumbant upon Elder to supply th ereferences. Until then, he own responsiblity for these numbers.
And I believe it is fair to conclude, particularly in the context of the rest of the Elders article, that it was a deliberate attempt to misdirect the conversation.
Now shall we get back to business and discuss real proporals for handling the 45 million uninsured??
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TRS post 180,
what is fascinaitng is that the Elders article specficially excludes from consideration the 14 million people who are unemployed, need help to get back on their feet, and get coverage through their new employer.
In the case of health insurance at least, it would appear that your concern about the liberal argument is misplaced: most of the people needing help are by Elders’ (and presumably Micahel Martin’s) discussion are needing transient help.
The challenge is of course that as constructed the health insurance industry takes advantage of this changeing of suppliers to attempt to restrict coverage.
So I will accept your intent that:
“I am MORE THAN HAPPY to help someone get on their feet, make it through a crisis, learn better skills, find a job, and so on.”
I suggest, however, that the conservative messaging on health care shows an explicit intent not to address your concerns: see Elders articel whcih peculiarly is one of the most clearly developed conservative argument on health care coverage which I have seen.
And as such, the execution of conservative policy at least in this case belies your underlieing concern.
Consistency between strategy and operational plans is required for success. In this case your strategic statement of intent is explciitly not included in what is possibly the clearest discussion of conservatvie alternatives for health insurance.
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Michale Martin post 179,
Michael makes much of the statement:
” You must have missed the point that no healthcare insurance is not the same as no health care.”
His statement of course is only true for critical emergency care. It is not true for the diagnostic care and preventiive care, nor is it true for the long term recuprative care.
As such, and given Michales focus on the Elder article, it would seem fair to say that Michale Martin is in health care crisis denial, much as Elders appears to be.
It is understandable: the solutions being developed are very troubling to conservatives.
But if conservatives do not particpate in assisitng to minimize thier concerns in the health care reforms by cnostructively participating, then they will be frozen out of the effort.
The public appears to want health care reform.
Our economy appears to need health care reform.
Our president is committed to health care reform.
The congress in the main supports helath care reform.
It would seem then tha tth eway to bet is that it will happen. Ostrich approachs are unlikely to work, and if you doot cojnstructively participate, you will be in no position to complain.
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Amazing how long and wordy some posts can be.
Musing we are not all wanting Obamacare. To many Obamacare is an abomination.
And how dare you say….IF YOU DON”T CONSTRUCTIVELY PARTICIPATE YOU CAN”T COMPLAIN?
That is the attitude of Nazism.
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Musing:
I introduced the Elders article in post #127 in order to provide some perspective to this debate. The 45 million number constantly used by the Democrats to bolster their claims of a crisis needed a closer look and Mr. Elders provided that.
However, your immediate response in #131 was a “kneejerk” reaction of rejection and a demand for “data” when, in fact, the “data” was already right there in front of you. You had just failed to read it. Your blindness was truly astounding. Only after repeated prodding did you make the effort to read and address Mr. Elder’s points. Are you really blind or just so glued to one idea that you absolutely refuse to consider any other points of view? Your problem seems to be a combination of both.
Now you cavalierly dismiss his data and conclusions as “sweeping generalizations” and without scientific support. Nonsense! You are the one making the “sweeping generalizations” here and refusing to look at the details even when they are right in front of you, which is precisely Mr. Elders point.
The 45 million number is raw data that comes from Census Bureau statistics and it DOES NOT give us a scientifically accurate picture of the problem. Now, the precise number of truly needy below 45 million is open to debate, but the fact that they are a much smaller subset to the 45 million has been well established by Mr. Elders examination of the data. Your first tactic of refusing to look at the data didn’t work. Your second tactic of brushing it aside doesn’t work either.
Just who are the truly needy and how many are there? These are the questions that need to be asked and accurately answered at this point. We don’t need a repetition of Rahm Emanuel’s crisis tactics, where all debate and questions are imperiously brushed aside and ignored in favor of a political ideology rather than a true examination of the problem at hand.
The number 45 million is a gross exaggeration designed to produce the hysteria of a crisis. It obviously works on some like yourself and HRW who tells us that ONE person without health care is a national crisis. Wake up and take a closer look at the numbers before you let yourself be stampeded over the cliff of nationalized health care. When we fall to the bottom of that abyss we really will have problems.
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179
No, it is not a national crisis. It is an individual crisis with an individual solution.
15 million is not an individual crisis. Even if it was one person denied, the community is in crisis because the standards of civilized behavior have slipped. On the pragmatic side, lack of adequate health care is an economic drain on society.
Besides, we are not talking about access to health care. You must have missed the point that no healthcare insurance is not the same as no health care. Very few people, if any, are denied health care in this country.
Very few people are denied emergency care but preventive and diagnostic treatment is different. The gate keeper to health care is still cost and not need.
Furthermore, you show an abysmal lack of objectivity when you grossly magnify a problem for a few into a problem for 300,000,000.
The denial of treatment and poverty in my community is a reflection of my community and is a problem for the community. In the case of America, the lack of adequate health care is a reflection of America. America’s infant mortality rate is similar to Cuba and life expectancy is tied to Bosnia. In both cases it places in the low 30 range. This is a problem.
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the aid we will offer this family goes far beyond a mere temporary handout. If they are wiling, it will also include advise and counsel on methods to improve the handling of their family finances, improving job prospects, and discovering any problem areas that may have contributed to their current difficulties.
Sorry, but I find the above condescending. You are suggesting that they are, at least partly, to blame for their poverty. It may be true but attaching morals to aid is condescending.
I’ve always been a proponent of giving the poor more than adequate money. Even if they spend improperly, the money does stay and circulate in the community.
hey are not “entitled” to anything. No one has an “entitled” claim to the assets of another person or group. We offer our assistance voluntarily, not under some form of compulsion. If someone feels that they are “entitled” to what another person has, they have taken the first step toward theft.
Our shared humanity demands a shared entitlement. Society not individuals produce wealth.
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TRS
the “poor” deserve MY money even if they are perpetually and unapologetically lazy, won’t work, have a sense of entitlement, continue to make bad choices over and over again, and so on.
The above is a caricature. The vast majority of welfare receipts are temporary and with an adequate net in place, they are able to return as productive members of society. And thus I’m sure you would be more than happy to support such policies. The small investment we put into the poor should not given grudgingly as it will be repaid quite easily.
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Michael Martin post 185,
you would seem to be correct when you say:
“I introduced the Elders article in post #127 in order to provide some perspective to this debate. The 45 million number constantly used by the Democrats to bolster their claims of a crisis needed a closer look and Mr. Elders provided that.”
and I suggest you did, although not perhaps in the way you intended.
As a number of people noted, among them myself, the 10-15 million people number cited by Elders is simply not credible based on the the unemployed alone.
However, Elders introduces another perhaps even more critical issue:
- Not all the uninsured are the same
and this needs to be captured in the reform proposals going forward.
As I read Elders argument, he introduces at least three categories of uninsured:
a) youth
b) unemployed
c) core uninsured
I suggest the raca site adds a fourth :
d) those with inadequate acces to medical care typically because of location
And it would seem plausible that the solution will not be a one size fits all, but rather will need tailoring to meet the various needs (or at least tailoring of the deployoment model if not the insurance itself).
This is captured in the Massachusetts plan which has specific programs for younger insurees:
Massachusetts Youth Health PLans
Conversations are good. Even when the material is suspect, it is often useful to review.
But to accept material with no substantiation, particularly when it is so easily brought into question, is, I suggest, a risky proposition.
And no, Michael Martin, the 10 – 15 million people is the gross exageration, based on the unemployed numbers alone. The 45 million is today the best data we have. If you challenge the data, then challenge it with credible, substantive, scientifically derived data. As it stands right now Elders’ data is not substantiated or scientifcally derived.
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NOw youth insurance is an interesting case, a point raised by ELders.
To have these uninsured is to leave them open to financial ruin, inadequate treatment, and a burden to the tax payer.
They are, however, typically beginning their working careers with proportionally reduced income, are often quite healthy (Elders comments to the contrary).
A high deductible may indeed be appropriate. My observation of the Massachusetts youth plans is, however, that the very cheap plans have a maximum yearly benefit which can be easily burned through in a serious medical situation, even if such situations are rare.
My sense is that all programs need to have an unlimited maximum or we reintroduce taxpayer costs and the insured may fall into bankruptcy.
Massachusetts in my reference recognizes this and offers some
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There is also an interesting question derived from this discussion on whether focus shold be on minimizing ther numberr of uninsrued (which will probably focus on high population density areas) or should focus on regions with high percentage of uninsured (see raca data).
This would appear to have major policy implications (consider – observationally private systems prefer high density: they typically are easier to service).
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The vast majority of welfare receipts are temporary and with an adequate net in place, they are able to return as productive members of society.
******And your evidence is?
I find that human nature means that people often prefer to be lazy. If “daddy” government can reach into my pocket and use my labor to pay for someone else, then many of those “helped” will applaud the process and even ask for more.
I worked in a VERY poor area as a teacher. The vast majority of the people there were long term, generational welfare recipients. When you would try to talk to some of them about their child’s education, they literally would tell the teachers that they didn’t care, because their kid could just go on welfare like they did. They didn’t NEED an education, because they didn’t NEED a job. They didn’t have to learn (or behave) because the government was ready and willing to take care of them.
We also had a large number of working poor. I learned about their plight FROM THEM. They did not qualify for all the “services” because they worked. They didn’t make enough to have insurance or other welfare services, but those who did NOTHING were given all sorts of health care and services. Working was actually DISCOURAGED by government policy. Fortunately, many of the working poor still had a conscience and self-pride enough to work anyway, even though it was actually detrimental.
Don’t tell me about something you know nothing about and have no proof for.
If the system were designed to GET PEOPLE OFF and INDEPENDENT after some help, that is one thing (it’s not.) Liberals see the word “poor” and become slobbering, bleeding hearts. They cannot seem to make a distinction between those who are poor by circumstances and those who are poor by choice (and even accuse those who wish to do so of being horrible people…see your comments above), and they always want MY money to go to all of them in perpetuity for “the children.”
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TRS – 192 – I too would like to see the evidence you requested regarding “And your evidence is?” -
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TRS post 193,
but if Elders’ data is even clpose to correct,he argues that the unemployed, who at least form a health insurance perspectvie would seem to just need a hand until their next job, are of the same order of size as the core uninsured (again using Elders’ numbers).
And therefore these people do not deserve a hand with health insurance while they transition between jobs????
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Musing:
The Massachusetts plans will inevitably be refused by many of the youth they are intended to benefit. Why? Because it involves some out-of-pocket expense for them. Their current priorities are centered on youthful self-indulgence. They can pay for what they need, they just don’t want to because it would mean one less party, one less cigarette, one less beer, one less “snort.”
They will accept the plans only if they are free, i.e., someone else pays for them. So, there is a vast difference between the truly needy and the greed of self-indulgence practiced by those who can pay, but wont. Conservatives are more than willing to help the truly needy. Elders has helped us have a sense of their true numbers and they are NOT the inflated, unadjusted figures cited by the Obama gang and dutifully swallowed by their drones.
We will see as the legislature deals with this issue. Will it be railroaded through without adequate debate and realistic solutions as was the Stimulus monstrosity? If your brand of non-thinking prevails, that will be the case—ignore the data and/or brush it aside regardless of the consequences.
However, there are encouraging signs that some Americans are waking up to the scam. Obama’s poll numbers are beginning to drop and a growing number of Democrats are getting nervous about the election of 2010. Voters don’t like being lied to, conned and victimized by thieving politicians who promise one thing and do the opposite. The stimulus plan has not worked as advertised, unemployment is rising, taxes are going up, and inflation rates of 15-20% are forecast for the 2010-2012 period. Nationalized health care, if rammed through by the Obama gang, will only add to all of that. Democrats are drunk with power and overreaching in a big way. Naive Americans who voted for Obama, thinking they were going to get “Change” for free, are beginning to feel the cost and waking up to the deceit of those who so easily duped them.
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Michale Martin 194,
when you say:
“The Massachusetts plans will inevitably be refused by many of the youth they are intended to benefit. Why? Because it involves some out-of-pocket expense for them.”
Early indications appear to be because there is a mdnadte to have health insurance, that youth are getting insurance, but what statistics there are are still apparenlty sketchy.
The following articel apepared to be the most credible articel on the Massachusetts plan I could find:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/27/4/w285
but it does not specifically address the youth participation.
I will keep looking.
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Michale Martin post 194,
I agree with your point:
“Voters don’t like being lied to, conned and victimized by thieving politicians who promise one thing and do the opposite. ”
and as noted in the Elder article, it appears that conservatives sometiomes have trouble understanding this.
At this time the Republican brand is at a very low level (do we need statuistics here?) and Obama’s is very high. The stimulus money will be hitting in full force as 2010 begins and there appear to be a large number of Republican retirees from congress.
I suggest that it does not look good for Republicans, and by inference conservatives, in 2010.
2012 will depend, as Obama notes, on the state of the economy.
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192
I should have added the caveat “except for single mothers” but I thought most would admit that its reasonable to expect retention and recidivism.
A quick google search reveals a study in North Carolina which documents that only 17 – 20 percent remain on welfare after two years.
http://www.dhhs.state.nc.us/dss/stats/docs/chapter_6.pdf
However, looking further I only found an 1988 survey which found white women stayed on welfare 22 months and black women 45 months. Most of the other research was written in the 90s when welfare reform was a hot topic focusing on factors keeping people on welfare not length of stay.
It is interesting to note that length of stay has little input on the chance of of intergenerational welfare.
. The results show that there is no causal effect of length of exposure on future welfare dependency, nor on teenage childbearing. Conditional on teenage childbearing, there are no effects of length of exposure on adult welfare dependency either, but this dependency is almost three times larger for teenage mothers than for non-mothers.
http://ideas.repec.org/p/mia/wpaper/0715.html
My initial claim was based on research in Ontario about 10-15 years ago which had similar data as North Carolina — @ 20% stayed on welfare over two years and majority of these were single mothers.
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We also had a large number of working poor. I learned about their plight FROM THEM. They did not qualify for all the “services” because they worked. They didn’t make enough to have insurance or other welfare services, but those who did NOTHING were given all sorts of health care and services. Working was actually DISCOURAGED by government policy.
This is a problem which arises from a failure to universalize benefits of the welfare state. In the last 10-15 years both conservative and liberal gov’t in Ontario addressed that very question. One of the things keeping people on welfare was a prescription drug card and free dental for children. Most jobs offered to welfare receipts don’t include benefits so the gov’t offered to maintain these benefits for two years or more. Child benefits are universal in Canada and contingent on income. Working then is encouraged by the gov’t. What you see in your area is bad management, demand good management of the welfare system not abolition.
Like you, I teach in a neighborhood with several housing projects. However, I see single mothers returning to work part-time increasing the time as their children age; many also volunteer, others go back to school and then return to the work world — very few promote generational welfare. And I hardly think the Canadian poor are more noble than the American poor.
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HRW (#187) writes:
“Our shared humanity demands a shared entitlement. Society not individuals produce wealth.”
This “entitlement” talk is empty, Marxist-style rhetoric. Put some legs on it HRW and give me some specific examples of “society” creating wealth. Can you do that? I doubt it.
On the contrary, wealth is produced by individuals and groups of individuals banding together in productive businesses to build houses and whole cities, manufacture an infinity of products, plant and harvest food, drill for oil, mine for metals, etc. All of these are examples of individual enterprise creating wealth, not some Marxist society that illegally claims and steals what others have produced.
The important thing that our shared humanity demands is respect for each other as fellow humans created in God’s image and subject to His rules of conduct with each other. In no case does He give me the right to demand what someone else has—that’s predation and He didn’t design a predatory society. That is something produced by evil men.
On the contrary, He originally designed a society of love and cooperation where people VOLUNTARILY help one another, not demand from one another. This entitlement/demand mentality which you espouse is, quite frankly, the result of sin in the form of envy and covetousness. Marxism and socialism cloak it in counterfeit talk of “concern for the poor,” but, at it’s core, it’s just plain covetousness and theft.
The USSR and Mao’s China are prime examples of this mentality taken to its logical end—murder and theft on a mass scale that produced literal hells on earth.
“Our shared humanity demands a shared entitlement.”
Yeah, a shared entitlement to hell.
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give me some specific examples of “society” creating wealth. Can you do that? I doubt it. On the contrary, wealth is produced by individuals and groups of individuals banding together in productive businesses
“a group of individuals” = community, community = society
Society creates wealth by establish the necessary structures for individuals to operate within. Given the low view of human nature held by evangelicals, you should agree without society we would live in Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutal and short. Without contract law, law and order, and even informal agreements of common courtesy, individuals cannot create the wealth they do.
Bill Gates needs society to recognize and enforce patent laws. He needs a safe means of transportation of his goods both domestic and abroad and for that he needs society’s provision of law and order and international agreements.
is respect for each other as fellow humans created in God’s image
in secular terms this is our shared humanity. So we agree on how we should act to each other but not on the means to carry it out.
This entitlement/demand mentality which you espouse is, quite frankly, the result of sin in the form of envy and covetousness. Marxism and socialism cloak it in counterfeit talk of “concern for the poor,” but, at it’s core, it’s just plain covetousness and theft.
I’m a middle class professional making above average money. Other than universal health care and my daughter’s education, I’m not receiving anything and neither do I demand anything. I don’t covet anything either. My socialist attitude originates from two different types of motivation — one, I think its the morally responsible thing do and I gladly pay my taxes without resenting the poor who receive it. Secondly, I think the welfare state is the most pragmatic way to organize society, it allows for capitalism to thrive without its ill effects.
Quite frankly, capitalism thrives on “covetousness” and “envy”, its the motivation behind the creation of wealth. Perhaps its capitalism is the product of man’s fall not socialism.
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HRW (#203):
HRW “Quite frankly, capitalism thrives on “covetousness” and “envy”, its the motivation behind the creation of wealth. Perhaps its capitalism is the product of man’s fall not socialism.”
MM You miss the larger point. ALL people are afflicted to one degree or another with covetousness and envy. They are common sins of all men, whether you are a socialist or a capitalist. Those sins operate within both systems. I did not say that socialism was the product of man’s fall. Here is what I said (#202):
“This entitlement/demand mentality which you espouse is, quite frankly, the result of sin in the form of envy and covetousness.”
You approve of this mentality, i.e., feeling that you are entitled to what someone else has produced and owns. That has its roots in the sins of covetousness and envy. But what you and other socialists do is to dismiss that sin within socialism and recognize it only within capitalism, just as you have done on this thread. Marxist theory says It is wrong for a capitalist to claim private property because everything is “really” produced and owned by society collectively. Yet, at the same time, it is OK for an individual to demand his entitlement, his share of the community property. But the minute this claim is acted upon by an individual, what was community property becomes individual, private property. The end result is the same under both capitalism and socialism, yet in the socialist mind it is a sin only under capitalism.
A critical difference between socialism and capitalism, as practiced within the American system, is that our Christian founding fathers recognized the true nature of men and devised a system of government to allow for private property rights and competitive self-interest to both produce the maximum benefits for society and be self-regulating at the same time. It has worked wonderfully and has produced an economy that is the wonder and envy of the world. It is not a raw and unfettered capitalism, where the inherent selfishness of man is allowed to run amuck. It has internal controls in the forms of checks and balances and also the overall rule of law to protect the weak and disadvantaged.
Socialism, on the other hand, disregards private property and claims everything for the collective. It crushes personal incentive by robbing the individual of the products of his own work. The only thieves in the socialist mindset are those who believe in private property and who would therefore “steal” from the collective. Socialism turns everything on its head in contradictory and illogical ways. The entitlement mentality becomes one way of expressing the virtue of collective ownership where everyone supposedly owns everything equally. But to demand an entitlement is to demand ownership of a portion of the whole and that is against the concept of collective ownership. It makes no sense and is internally contradictory.
It also fails the practical test and just doesn’t work in real life—the economic failures of socialism are legion, not to mention the horrendous moral failures of the same. The practitioners of the Communist versions of socialism are responsible for more deaths in the last century than even the practitioners of the German brand of National Socialism under Hitler.
Yet we still have people like yourself and Obama who cling to the basic idea and dismiss all the failures with the idea that all the other socialists didn’t quite get it right, but you will. Sooner or later you will get this experiment right and then everybody will be happy. How many more wrecked economies, how many more lives is it going to take to get it right?
I think we have had enough. Socialism is not just a failure in application that will one day be corrected. It is a failure in its most basic principles and it will NEVER succeed because of it. It goes against the best aspects of human nature and cultivates the worst. It has a track-record of degenerating into the worst of tyrannies and should be resisted by every thinking human being who values life as God intended it.
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