Rant Collection

Health care reform, a misnomer if there ever was one, seems to bring out the passion in people.  For instance, this commenter on the Reason article linked to and copied at the bottom of this post.

Of course it’s not a fundamental reform. How would entrenching the existing interests onto the government payroll constitute a fundamental reform. It’s the ultimate bulwark against reform, an unbreachable wall against reform ever threatening the powers that be again.

Here’s Zombie’s take on why many Americans principally oppose ‘universal’ health care.  Some excerpts below (bolded emphasis is Zombies’):

Now, I really don’t care if you overeat, smoke like a chimney, hump like a bunny or forget to lock the safety mechanism on your pistol as you jam it in your waistband. Fine by me. And as a laissez-faire social-libertarian live-and-let-live kind of person, I would never under normal circumstances condemn anyone for any of the behaviors listed above. That is: Until the bill for your stupidity shows up in my mailbox. Then suddenly, I’m forced to care about what you do, because I’m being forced to pay for the consequences

What I don’t like about the very concept of universal health care is that it compels me to become my brother’s keeper and insert myself into the moral decisions of his life. I’d rather grant each person maximum freedom. I’d prefer to let people make whatever choices they want, however stupid or dangerous I may deem those choices to be. Just so long as you take responsibility for your actions, and you reap the consequences and pay for them yourself — hey, be as foolish or hedonistic or selfish or thoughtless as you like. Not my business.

But if the bill for your foolishness shows up in the form of higher taxes on me, then I unwillingly start to care what you do. And, trust me on this, you don’t want me turning my heartless judgmental eye on your foolish lifestyle. Because I’d have no qualms criticizing half the stuff you do.

Do you want that? No. Do I want that? No. And that’s the point. Instituting a single-payer universal health-care system, or even a watered-down version as the government is now proposing, compels me to become a meddlesome busybody in your personal choices. And it will compel you to become a meddlesome busybody in everyone else’s personal choices. It forever douses the beautiful flame of individualism — freedom to act without interference, just so long as you are ready to accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

Unfortunately, individualism has been under assault for a long time.

Since it’s nearly impossible to sort out who is personally responsible for which ailments, the only logical solution is to let each person pay for their own care, because that way there’s nothing left to argue about. But if we share costs, we share blame, and that’s the origin of resentment and anger that the average American feels about socialized medicine.

Now, the Dialectical Playa’s latest rant.  The last time he ranted it was about David Brooks,  the neo-conservative member of Obama’s “Praetorian Guard” – he was referring, of course, to the Old Gray Mare (New York Times).

The Republic has fallen. Americans voted for Hopeandchange ™ without ever comprehending what Obama was hoping to change them into. Thus we stand before a litany of present failures and future disasters beginning with Cap-and-Trade, Obamacare, a feckless foreign policy abroad, a deliberately Kafkaesque economy at home, political corruption, incompetence, moral and ethical indifference, the circumvention of reason, the defenestration of ethics, a contempt of probity, and a servile willingness by some politicians to become reprobates in the service of an administration dedicated to cleaving “We the People” from the Constitution and the Constitution from the people.

A man who has never held a job working for others or owned a company with people working for him is now insensibly the most powerful man on earth in a job that requires him to work for over 300,000,000 citizens while managing and directing a government of almost 12,000,000 employees. How did it come to this?

When’s the last time you heard an Obama rant that doesn’t mention the 2010 budget deficit or national debt?  By the way, did you know that the national debt increases $4.05 BILLION per day?

Here’s another gem of a rant, this time by Sean Malone, at Logicology.

I can’t tell if it’s funny, or just down right depressing.  It’s definitely true, but I really can’t make up my mind as to whether or not it’s worth laughing at, worth crying about or worth breaking out the tar and the feathers.

Also from this comments thread was a link to Rep. Paul Ryan talking about his plan for Medicaid.

There are three things about this video that strike me on first viewing, especially not really knowing too much about Paul Ryan to begin with…

1. He’s created what seems to be a good idea addressing a very serious problem in an intelligent way, and he’s extremely well prepared in defending said idea.
2. House Rules Committee Chairman, Louis Slaughter is either willfully ignorant, unimaginably stupid, downright evil, or some combination of the three.  Note that she was also the one who suggested that instead of actually voting on the health care bill, the house just “deems” it to be good to go…  Cause, you know, something that’s already hated by a majority of the American people shouldn’t even really be subject to a full vote anyway…  Ugh.  And…
3. Take careful stock of the other people in the room besides Paul Ryan.  That, my unaware American friends, is what socialists sound like.

I know the word socialism gets thrown around a lot as a perjorative.  But the fact of the matter is that it is actually a defined political philosophy, although there is some debate on the specifics.  The point of it, however, is that resources are centrally controlled and distributed based not on voluntary, private exchange (as no one gets to own any private property in such a system), but on centralized, government mandates.

Here we have Paul Ryan suggesting that instead of operating in a situation where people get taxed heavily and then the government decides what benefits they shall receive, we should provide people with the freedom to choose what they want for themselves – not only cutting out the middleman and depoliticizing health care decisions for the elderly, but also reconnecting price signals between producers & consumers in the medical sector.  In essence, Paul Ryan is proposing a version of Medicaid that looks more like the Food Stamp program, which (shock!) actually works fairly well precisely because it keeps price signals intact and lets individuals make their own choices based on their own tastes & needs.

What none of the other idiots in the room seem to grasp is that if individuals were actually in charge of paying for their own care directly (even with government assistance in the form of vouchers) then there would actually be competition among producers – in this case insurance companies, drug manufacturers and doctors/hospitals – for consumers’ business. JUST doing that – even if we made absolutely no other changes at all – would result in a world where health care prices actually go down!

Yet all anyone behind Rep. Ryan can say is that his plan won’t keep up with “health care inflation” – which is something that’s 100% caused by government involvement (as it is in every other area they dominate, such as education and housing) and under his plan, the way he described it, would probably be much less of an issue… There’s that Parmenides’ Fallacy again slapping me in the face with its stupidity.  I wish it were slapping our congressmen & women in the face instead, but alas, their stupidity seems always to go unpunished.

Sadly though, every other person in the room with Ryan obviously cannot even imagine a world in which the power-brokers don’t get a say in other people’s health care decisions.  And that, my dear friends, is why they have earned the label “socialist”.

It’s positively disgusting to me… I hope it is to you.

I cannot stress enough that the essence of socialism – in all it’s various forms from the U.S.S.R., to Nazi Germany, to fascist Italy, France & Spain, to right here in the good old U.S. of A. – is central control.  A few hard core Marxists hold out on the idea that for someone to “be” a socialist, they have to advocate the total abolition of private property, but why do that when the fascist strain clearly proved that you can control the resources of the world and still pretend to leave ownership in the hands of individuals?

There is no need to nationalize everything when you can write laws which force individuals to do exactly what you want them to do anyway.

And that’s what it’s all about… Freedom vs. Control.  There is, as Ludwig von Mises said, no third way.

Paul Ryan here is coming down on the side of liberty, and for that he gets my thanks… However… All the other socialist asshats in the room can kindly die in a fire.  Surely that would be preferable to a world where each of these fools gets to wrap their grubby little fingers around the neck of the American economy and continue to throttle it to death with their idiocy.

You don’t get to hear asshat very often. Malone’s got some great commentary here too on the Parmenides’ Fallacy in Health Care.

Finally, Nick Gillespie.  By the way, epic ranting in the comments after the Gillespie article.

If you’re left puzzling over how to carry the $940 billion in spending and subtract the $138 billion in deficit reduction as health care reform is being debated, check out Tobin Harshaw’s excellent round-up of dueling scratchpads over at the New York Times’ Opinionator blog. The conclusion, after running through a pretty thorough summary of arguments claiming the bill does cut the deficit over its first decade and that it does not (Reason’s own Peter Suderman has a star turn in that section!): “Only time will tell.”

Those last four words are the saddest in an opinion editor’s vocabulary — always true and never helpful in the slightest. The additional problem here, of course, is that members of Congress have only the rest of the weekend to guess what time will reveal.

More here.

It seems to me that if that’s the best you can come up with after running through the numbers, that’s enough on its face to say no to this bill, given all the other stuff it does, from mandating insurance coverage, to expanding all sorts of control over how coverage is delivered. Given the history of other interventions into the medical industry, it’s implausible that this won’t end up costing massive amounts more than whatever figures are being bandied about.

But apart from that, this doesn’t even represent a fundamental reform, one that would radically open up the health care industry to the sorts of personalized service and market competition that have actually driven costs down and services up in every other aspect of the economy that is not subject to huge amounts of cheap government money and subsidies (read: house prices and education, which along with health care tell you everything you need to know about what happens when the government gets overly involved in a given sector).

It’s also worth noting that a hunk a hunk a burning change is not included in this bill but is surely coming down the road. That’s the so-called “doc fix,” which routinely staves off cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians in the name of propping up one of the great boondoggles of the past 45 years. As Reason alum Ed Carson writes in Investors Business Daily:

The Sustainable Growth Rate imposes automatic cuts in Medicare payment rates to doctors.

For several years, fearing a revolt by doctors — and seniors — Congress has suspended those cuts. The original draft of the House health care bill included a permanent “doc fix.” But that ballooned deficits, so Democrats dropped it, even though everyone knows Congress isn’t going to slash doctors’ rates. The CBO has estimated a “doc fix” would cost $247 billion over 10 years.

Supposed cuts in Medicare spending help to squeak this bill under the fake door titled “cuts deficit by a teeny amount over its first 10 years,” as does the inclusion of a student loan provision (yes) in the reconciliation version that cuts subsidies to private lenders for student loans. Don’t hold your breath on any of this actually happening. The feds, you see, are looking to cut out the middleman when it comes to brokering student loans; they promise $19.4 billion in savings from this, which as Carson writes, “for virtually all of the $19.8 billion in deficit reduction from the [House's] health care reconciliation bill.”

Regarding the “doc fix,” look for it to come into play soon enough if/when the health care reform passes. Here’s Speaker Pelosi talking on the record on Friday, on why the fix wasn’t in the bill that’s getting voted on today. Especially since a permanent fix was part of earlier versions of the House bill:

Well, we have been including it in legislation for a long time, because it’s not about a doctor fix, it’s about our seniors or anyone who relies upon Medicare to have access to physicians, that they be in their region and in their program.

So this is again, you call it the doctor fix, but it is really about access to health care for Americans. It’s not in this bill, but we will have it soon. And we have made a commitment to do this. This is very important.

That’s from the liberal site TPM, which notes “Leadership aides would never say that a doc fix definitely won’t happen.” Which is, of course, another way of saying they will. And when they do, say goodbye to even the fiction of deficit cuts via a $940 billion (and counting) health care reform bill. But as any number of really bad gamblers could tell you (but probably wouldn’t): You gotta spend money to lose money.

Here’s some gems from the comments:

tkwelge:

Even if they believe that they are doing good, they shouldn’t try to cram this bill down the throat of the hundreds of millions of people who are against it. Socialism can only work when large percentages of the population agree on the specifics, which is why a government encompassing 300 million people has a much harder time passing such “reforms” than smaller, more homogenous countries. How can you possibly please all interests, without picking favorites, and please all 300 million individuals concerned in a way that people can even come to a majority consensus? You can’t!

Why couldn’t we have experimented with a basket of reform options on the state level first? Could we have given deregulation a shot? What the hell!

What, you mean federalism? It’ll never catch on.  LET THE RECORD REFLECT THAT I AM BEING SARCASTIC.

Health Care, Socio-Political