I can’t think of anyone I’d rather read on health care reform than Betsy Newmark, a frumpy high school teacher and quiz bowl coach from an overwhelmingly white charter school in North Carolina. For those who may not hold the same interest in reading Ms. Newmark’s musings on health care, here’s the executive summary: “Just like you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, you can’t have a good health care system without letting a few poor people die.”
Betsy’s launching pad for her lunatic ideas on health care is a Wall Street Journal article that she selectively quotes to suggest that the French health care system is on the verge of collapse. In particular, she latches on to this statement:
The problem is that Assurance Maladie has been in the red since 1989. This year the annual shortfall is expected to reach €9.4 billion ($13.5 billion), and €15 billion in 2010, or roughly 10% of its budget.
Let’s put that into some needed context, shall we, before we start peddling disaster scenarios. Here’s a chart on the evolution of Assurance Maladie’s deficit straight from la bouche de cheval, i.e. Assurance Maladie itself:
As you can see, the deficit of the French health care system began to be systematically and significantly reduced starting in 2005. So why the sudden increase to 9.4 billion euros in 2009? Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or even a quiz bowl coach to guess: the economic crisis and the unemployment caused by it. Duh. Of course, in France, unemployment doesn’t result in more uninsured people as it does in the United States, but it does mean less payments to Assurance Maladie et, voilà, a bigger deficit for Assurance Maladie. To project these deficits, caused by current increases in unemployment, to increase indefinitely into the future is une montagne of merde de taureau.
More context: the French deficit for 2008 was 65.9 billion euros or 3.4% of France’s GDP. Assurance Maladie’s deficit is only 14 percent of the entire deficit or 0.47 percent of the GDP. Those are not numbers, even were they to continue, that would force France to choose between hocking the Eiffel Tower or throwing old ladies with cancer out onto the cobblestones.
But, oh no, Ms. Quiz Bowl Coach thinks that providing 100 percent coverage will be the end of the space-time continuum as we now know it:
And once we start down that road, we’ll find that, like France, it becomes politically impossible for a democracy to cut costs. Too many people will become accustomed, as the French have, to seeing low-cost health care as their right and scream bloody murder if politicians try to trim costs.
That’s all well and good for the recipients of that 100% coverage, but it is not economically feasible in the long run.
Bzzzzzzzzt. Wrong answer, Ms. Newmark. Your team loses 50 points. Nothing in your figures warrants any conclusions about what is economically feasible in the long run.
More importantly, our quiz bowl whiz is saying straight out that the problem is having everyone insured. Health care, she thinks, is a zero-sum game, and every Viagra pill given to an unemployed person is a Viagra pill taken away from her husband (although I suspect that more than a blue pill would have to be involved to convince him to roll over in the marital bed and have at it with Betsy).
Once again, the only argument that these wingnuts have against health care reform and universal coverage boils down to this: “I’ve got mine, bitchez. Sucks to be you.”
Above: Herr Oberstleutnant Gerard von Scheissderleun
Exact Same Length Gerard Vanderleun, American Digest Sidelines Untitled POS
Obama wants his network of informants to send him emails so he can use his top secret Internet juju* to geolocate all the critics of health care reform. Then he will send his stormtroops to drag them all out of their hiding places and take them to be exterminated in the gas chambers at his secret FEMA concentration camps.
Sonia Sotomayor won confirmation Thursday afternoon as the nation’s 111th Supreme Court justice and the first Hispanic on the court, a historic moment for the nation’s fastest-growing minority group.
On a 68 to 31 vote, the Senate confirmed Sotomayor, 55, after roughly 18 hours of official debate spread across three days this week, a show of support that included nine Republican ‘aye’ votes and 59 from the Democratic side of the aisle. All 31 votes against Sotomayor came from Republicans.
Sotomayor becomes the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court, following Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Thankfully they finished confirming her before this puppy saw the light of day:
Conservatives led the way in denouncing the left-wing “birther” movement. [pauses, grins expectantly] Because get real! Which side contains 99% of the people who believe in Wicca and the so-called Iran-Contra scandal? [lifts Christian Dior dress and tries to urinate on carpet, hangs there dryly for a moment, then lowers dress and pretends to have been doing a little shuffle-off-to-Buffalo dance the whole time. A man wearing a headset leans into the frame holding a cue card marked 'FOO!' The sprinklers come on.]
The single-payer lobby’s wealthy, Astroturfed ground troops, who are thuggishly disrupting town hall meetings, have resorted to projection against ordinary Americans’ impromptu anti-health-care rallies.
ABOVE: Ann Leary, enough to drive a kitten to pee in a toilet bowl
Slightly Shorter Ann Leary, Backward Conservative About That Cake
The darkey in the White House can’t even do his own birthday cake right. His cake was all ghettoed up like some pimped-out Cadillac filled with playahs and hos. White presidents (and the white people that voted for them) eat simple white cakes with white icing and, maybe, a strawberry or two for decoration.
From the Empire Lounge high atop the Boulder Hilton, we bring you Anne Lieberman and her one-woman show “Boker Tov, Boulder.”
Seven Steps to a Happier You
1. Open a new/ empty file in your computer.
2. Name it ‘Barrack Obama’.
3. Send it to the Recycle Bin.
4. Empty the Recycle Bin.
5. Your PC will ask you: ‘Do you really want to get rid of ‘Barrack Obama?’
6. Firmly Click ‘Yes.’
7. Feel better? GOOD!
The point to be made on the Clinton visit is that the knee-jerk impulse for negotiations above all inevitably brings more costs than its advocates foresee. Negotiating from a position of strength, where the benefits to American interests will exceed the costs, is one thing. Negotiating merely for the sake of it, in the face of palpable recent failures, is something else indeed.
North Korea announced Tuesday that it had pardoned two detained American journalists, hours after former president Bill Clinton met in Pyongyang with reclusive dictator Kim Jong Il as part of an unannounced and highly unusual diplomatic mission to win their freedom.
Kim issued an order “granting a special pardon to the two American journalists who had been sentenced to hard labour in accordance with Article 103 of the Socialist Constitution and releasing them,” the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
I don’t get how these guys get away with being wrong all the time. Nor do I get why Fred Hiatt feels he needs to publish everything they write.
So the teabaggers have apparently made it their personal jihad to preserve our inefficient and substandard health care system. As is their wont, they see health care reform as an effort to help give freebies to illegal immigrants rather than to Real Americans:
In a sane country, people would laugh these nutters off as fringe kooks. But we don’t live in a sane country. That means that our side needs to have boots on the ground at these town hall meetings to counteract wingnut madness. And hey look, the good folks at Health Care for America Now have a page where you can search for events in your own area.
Oh, and the good folks at FireDogLake have provided us with this frequently-updated list of town hall meetings where you can tell your congressman that you want reform:
Here’s why this is important, peeps. If the Dems actually flub health care, the GOP could take back the House in 2010. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not willing to see the Terri Schiavo Resurrection Act of 2011 pass just yet. So let’s get on this nonsense and kick the wingers to the curb.
UPDATE: Via Knights in White Satin, an instructive post on how to mitigate teabag events in your district.
Bill Maher nailed it when he said that Birthers couldn’t be convinced even if you
hand them in person the original birth certificate with the placenta, and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background.
Although some of the Freepers are having a troubling encounter with the fact that they’ve been duped by an elaborately transparent fake, the truly insane among them have concocted an awesome explanation: the real Kenyan birth certificate of Obama was used to Photoshop the fake Australian birth certificate of David Bomford and then inserted on the Bomford family genealogy site by Obama’s team of expert hackers.
Some favorite comments:
[104] Is This the Source of Obama’s the “Kenyan” Birth Certificate?
Nope, doesn’t appear so. The folds are in different places, so that kills it, IMO.
It being impossible, of course, for someone to print out the photoshop and refold it.
[144] [W]e are assuming that Taitz has a paper copy. Its [sic] one thing to build a photoshop document that looks almost identical to another. Its [sic] another thing entirely to produce that onto paper that looks to be almost 50 years old.
Ooh, yellow paper!
[157] I have read criticism of Orly. But…Geeze! She’s an inexperienced attorney with an on-line degree. Naturally, she is not going to be polished and will make naive mistakes. She [sic] likely doing many things for the first time.
Apparently there should be a handicapping system for lawyers so that those with on-line degrees have a fair chance of beating better lawyers in court. That way, even if Orly loses, the Birthers win by virtue of Orly’s incredibly high handicap and Obama must step down.
[160] Further, if the Kenyan BC were a fake, why is Hillary going to Kenya?
Why indeed? Presumably to track down the guy that signed the Kenyan certificate and do a Vince Foster on him. That’s why.
Even if Obama was “actually” “born” “in” the United States,2 I still want to see the vault copy of the birth certificate because it could prove once and for all that Obama is a Muslim Socialist.3 It will also tell us how his parents described themselves, which I imagine is “Kenyan Muslim terrorist” and “Hawaiian atheist skank.”
1McCarthy now gets his monthly wingnut welfare check from the National Review Institute as its only “Fellow.” McCarthy’s NRI bio says he used to be at Cliff Mays’s Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. We don’t know the exact reason for McCarthy’s decampment from FDD but it would be irresponsible not to speculate that he was too crazy for Cliff May, which is somewhat like being too doped for the Red Sox.
2McCarthy has been the resident birther at America’s Shittiest Website™ for quite some time, apparently relying on such rock-solid sources as Pam Geller and Michael Berg. Now that even some of the craziest right-wing cranks have conceded the utter insanity of the birther conspiracy theories, McCarthy is trying to re-package this manure in a foil-wrapped box and pass it off as gourmet double chocolate fudge.
3Fun contest for Sunday: find the block on an actual “vault copy” of a Hawaiian birth certificate where you might be able to discover that Obama was a Muslim, a socialist, or a citizen of another country!
But they leave a few basic things out, which we’ll get to.
Klein accurately breaks down the McArdle position:
Megan has two primary concerns. The first is that national health insurance would succeed in reducing health-care costs, and that would limit the rewards available for medical innovation (drugs, devices, etc), which would in turn reduce medical innovation and prevent future generations from enjoying wonder drugs. “If you worry about global warming,” she writes, “you should worry at least as hard about medical innovation.”
Second, national health care gives elites license “to wrap their claws around every aspect of everyone’s life.” Her primary example is obesity. Megan believes that national health insurance will give the government license to decide that we can never really want a second chocolate eclair. She also believes that the real reason most every epidemiologist in the country is worried about obesity is because they hate, and are disgusted by, poor people.
McArdle’s second point is standard wingnut scare-mongering over a government takeover of our lives — not really worth spending much time on. Suffice to say that Big Insurance already does plenty to penalize that second chocolate eclair, and Domenech credibly fingers Big Pharma as the culprit in our redefining of obesity downward:
As a side note: If you want to understand why in 1998 the medical community suddenly decided that you were overweight at a body mass index of 25 instead of 27.8, taking the WHO view (based on the BMIs of Africa and other developing nations as opposed to the long-held U.S. definition) and suddenly making 30 million Americans ‘fat’, just look at the makeup of the advisory panel — Pharma pushed this decision through, which had the effect of instantly adding millions of customers. But again, it’s nothing personal, just business.
But it is McArdle’s first point that is the glibertarian landmine, that long-standing trope that government provision of goods and services necessarily destroys innovation, which can only ever be fostered by the good old invisible hand. Again, Domenech (!) makes an excellent point about one particular peril with the worship of the market — big profit-making entities are not incentivized to produce better products or products that would benefit more people if doing so would possibly cannibalize or otherwise jeopardize their existing revenue streams.
Now robust competition in the marketplace can force the big companies’ hand in this regard. But there isn’t always robust competition and even if there is, the sheer size of a market leader can often delay the development and penetration of the better product for quite a long time. This is why Microsoft and Oracle continue to sell tons of expensive boxed software products despite the growing realization that hosted ’software-as-a-service’ or ‘cloud computing’ is probably a cheaper and more efficient application delivery system for most of the market. Cloud computing is almost certain to win out in the end, but probably not before your company sinks a ton of capex into Windows 7 licenses.
McArdle also shows her bias by presenting innovation as purely the development of the next generation of wonder drugs. She rightly notes that innovation is not normally due to some Eureka! moment ‘by a mad scientist somewhere’ but rather ‘more often a matter of small steps towards perfection.’ Which is fine, but McArdle is wholly blind to an entire category of medical innovation — one that many other countries have hands-down achieved in superior ways to the United States, and it is this:
The delivery of better health care to more people at less cost.
Is this not a medical innovation? Is it not, perhaps, the most important medical innovation? Wonder drugs for future generations are great and necessary, but the delivery of better outcomes to people today must be considered equally important, if not more so. And just like the development of wonder drugs, delivering better health care to more people at less cost requires smart people and incremental steps and means-testing and a competitive ecosystem and all the criteria that McArdle might use to characterize ‘innovation’.
It’s a bit ironic, too, that McArdle chooses Wal-Mart’s supply chain management as a shining example of American free-market innovation. Because a centrally administered, regionally operated distribution network that leverages economies of scale and serves a national market is so totally opposite to what a national health care system would look like.
But perhaps McArdle is correct and wonder drugs would disappear if we were to expand national government-run health care beyond the very successful programs we already have for seniors, veterans and, with S-CHIP, children. If so, it seems clear that countries that already have such expansive national health care programs would necessarily have little or nothing in the way of wonder drug production.
A point to McArdle, but as Columbo might say, there’s just one more thing that’s bothering me:
Johnson & Johnson USA 53,324
Pfizer USA 48,371
Bayer Germany 44,200
GlaxoSmithKline United Kingdom 42,813
Novartis Switzerland 37,020
Sanofi-Aventis France 35,645
Hoffmann–La Roche Switzerland 33,547
AstraZeneca United Kingdom 26,475
Merck & Co. USA 22,636
Abbott Laboratories USA 22,476
Wyeth USA 20,351
Bristol-Myers Squibb USA 17,914
Eli Lilly and Co. USA 15,691
Amgen USA 14,268
Boehringer Ingelheim Germany 13,284
Schering-Plough USA 10,594
Baxter International USA 10,378
Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 10,284
Genentech USA 9,284
Procter & Gamble USA 8,964
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Israel 8,408
Astellas Pharma Japan 7,850
Daiichi Sankyo Japan 7,158
Novo Nordisk Denmark 6,520
Eisai Japan 5,583
Merck KGaA Germany 5,175
Alcon USA 4,897
Akzo Nobel Netherlands 4,694
UCB Belgium 4,426
Nycomed Switzerland 4,264
Forest Laboratories USA 3,442
Solvay Belgium 3,268
Genzyme USA 3,187
Allergan USA 3,063
Gilead Sciences USA 3,026
CSL Australia 2,788
Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 2,787
Biogen Idec USA 2,683
Bausch & Lomb USA 2,292
Taiho Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 2,069
King Pharmaceuticals USA 1,989
Watson Pharmaceuticals USA 1,979
Mitsubishi Pharma Japan 1,945
Shire United Kingdom 1,797
Cephalon USA 1,764
Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma Japan 1,763
Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Japan 1,698
Shionogi & Co. Japan 1,640
Mylan Laboratories USA 1,612
H. Lundbeck Denmark 1,552
Freedom of speech is dead in America.
Posted by John Freeman July 29, 09 05:31 PM
32.
I think this is a free speak issue if he wasn’t acting in his official capacity as a P.O.
Posted by pia3 July 29, 09 05:31 PM
Got it: Freak peen issue (very serious cookie) — Freep speak, not officially a previous owner or Post Office. Welp, here we go: Read the rest of this entry »
ABOVE: Pat Boone (Click here for the uncensored NSFW version).
Pat “Junk in a Box” Boone has a new column up at Wingnut Daily about waterboarding. I don’t know about you, but when I have questions about waterboarding and other forms of torture I think there is no better expert than a washed-up pop singer.
Until a couple of years ago, “waterboarding” sounded like some kind of fun at the beach.
Unless, of course, you had ever read a book about the World War II war crime tribunals.
Thanks to much media exploitation, politically motivated accusations, certain criminally leaked classified information and of course some actual facts, the word “waterboarding” became synonymous with heinous, barbaric torture.
If you suspect that Boone is going to say heinous, barbaric torture is a good thing, well, you’ll be half-right. It’s a good thing when done to Muslims.
Almost ignored in all the anti-American clamor was the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, confessed mastermind of the World Trade Center carnage, as a result of being “waterboarded” 130 times – with no lasting damage at all – finally divulged information that thwarted the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and saved an estimated 10,000 innocent lives! So the technique, harsh as it is, proved effective.
Sadly, of course, no! Iyman Faris, the person convicted of the Brooklyn Bridge plot, had, according to Bush’s own DOJ, abandoned his plot at the end of 2002, after deciding that his scheme to collapse the bridge by using a blow torch on the cables was unlikely to succeed. This was before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had even been captured, much less waterboarded. Another difficulty with his plot would have been luring the “estimated 10,000″ people to stand on the bridge while the terrorists tried to melt the suspension cables with a blow torch.
But what’s good for the Muslim is bad for the Amurikun.
And now, whether expressly intended or not, America is being waterboarded!
The nation – its economy and political body – has been strapped down, blindfolded and hosed. A new administration, empowered by control of both houses of Congress and the most liberal president in history, is immersing us all in a torrent of debt. While we gasp for breath and try to cry “Time out!” we continue to be flooded with staggering commitments neither we nor our children have approved or will be able to fulfill
That may well be most preposterous extended metaphor since Britney Spears’s “Circus,” and Boone is only just getting wound up.
And now, while we’re strapped down by the Democrat-controlled Congress, gasping and gulping beneath a flood of strong-arm tactics, the “health reform” bill taking shape outlines a “minimum-benefits package” that will be universal – that is, required of every American’s insurance plan, whether provided by a private firm or by the government.
No! Please, stop! Don’t inundate me in more health care! I’ll say anything you want, just don’t pour anymore of the elimination of preexisting condition exclusion down my nose! I can’t breathe!! Oh, God, no! I’m choking on keeping my health insurance when I lose my job. I confess. I’m part of a cell that wants to change the name of Reagan National Airport back to National Airport and turn every Dunkin’ Donuts store into an abortion clinic. Just stop! I beg you. I’ll say anything.
This just in, Red Sox fans. Manny and Big ‘Skin’ Papi (Big, Bigger, Biggest Papi?) tested positive for performance enhancing drugs in 2003. Tainted championships. Bury your heads in shame, etc.
O’Reilly is trashing those commie drug-lovers in Yurp again. One of his Dutch viewers hits him with, you know, reality:
It’s amazing how quickly right-wing arguments lose validity the minute you start looking at actual facts. If only our media would do the same.
UPDATE: Looking at my bestest friend NationMaster, I also see that the United States has more prisoners per capita than Russia. Yes, Russia. The country that has made imprisoning people a point of national pride for centuries.
