Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

How to Fix It, Part I

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Rufus challenged me to create a Nobel-level treatise on fixing the health care system. We’ll start from a simple premise: Health care in America is fundamentally broken.

New England Journal of Medicine reports that “Health care spending represents a growing share of our national income and is projected to increase from 16% of the gross domestic product today to 20% by 2018.”

Regular readers will remember that we built our current Health Care system pretty much on the Johnny Cash model for his 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70 automobile. It is an amalgam of rubber bands, reams of forms, and television advertising all held together with sloganeering bumper stickers and Post-It™ glued dollar bills.

The President will address a joint session of Congress in prime time on Wednesday, September 9. He hopes to refocus attention on his own blueprint for ObamaCare.

There is no distinctly native American criminal class
except Congress.
— Mark Twain

Senator Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) released this statement to the president: “Our nation is closer than ever to achieving health insurance reform that will lower costs, retain choice, improve quality and expand coverage.”

Remember Mark Twain.

Everybody in this discussion, from the most fervent ObamaCare supporter to the most ardent contrarian, has a good answer for patching up the rusty old car that runs on three cylinders and has two flat tires. It might keep us going to the next exit, but it won’t carry the family across the country on vacation.

The same Democrats pushing patches on the current system want to reinvent the automobile from the ground up but all they want to do with health care is find a few more people to cover and a way to make taxpayers pay for it.

The same Republicans opposing changes to the current system want to keep that clunker but all they can to do with health care is try to divert the money their counterparts want to flow to Washington.

“Foreigners regularly express bewilderment that America may reject reform and stick with a system that drives families into bankruptcy when they get sick. That’s what they expect from the Central African Republic, not the United States,” Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in the N Y Times.

Sorry, Mr. Kristof. You’re w-w-w-w-w-w-wrong. Americans don’t reject reform and Americans don’t want the current system. Americans reject a situation that will drive the entire country into bankruptcy when they get sick.

There are a million great individual programs; most have been reported — in the news, on blogs, and by everyone with a talk show — as the ultimate savior of American medicine. They are not. No one will take on the number one issue: cost. Saving grandmama is a laudable goal but saving grandmama and using the ER as a walk in clinic and requiring nine insurance clerks for every doctor and the thousand other complaints are the reason U.S. health care will cost two trillion dollars this year or more than $6,600 per person for every man woman and child in the U.S. ObamaCare has no (nada, de zero zip) provisions to reduce that $6,600 per person for every man woman and child in the U.S. and we apparently don’t even treat 41 million of those folks. If we don’t take on the cost, health care will cost $13,000/year for every man, woman, and child in America in nine years. Nine years.

Guess what adding 41 million people to the rolls will cost.

Trouble is, programs like Oregon Health Plan ration care to hold down costs.
Trouble is, programs like Whole Foods’ HDHP ignore underlying costs by teaching patients to use fewer services.
Trouble is, programs like Medicare hold down costs by shifting them to Somebody Else.

I’m tired of being Somebody Else.

“What’s your answer?” President Obama asked in Ohio on Monday.

Remember Mark Twain.

“What’s your answer?” the president asked because he didn’t expect a response.

Here’s my answer, Mr. President. Tomorrow, before the President speaks, I will show how to redesign the system from scratch. Do not expect to hear in the hallowed halls of Congress a single word of what you read here.

Next up, How to Fix It, Part II

Labor Day? Really?

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On this day named for Laborers on which we do not Work, it is worth noting that politicians do not create jobs, no matter what they say.

The Van Jones brouhaha is about jobs.

Nancy Sutley, White House Council on Environmental Quality and Van Jones’s boss said in a weekend statement, “Over the last six months, he has been a strong voice for creating 21st-century jobs…”

Uh huh. Politicians do not create jobs.

On her site speaker.gov, Nancy Pelosi (D – CA) writes about the final G.R.A.F.T. Act, “This legislation will jumpstart our economy, create and save 3.5 million jobs.” She uses the phrase “create jobs” or “create really really outstanding jobs” 41 times

Uh huh. Politicians do not create jobs.

The site michigan.gov trumpets that, “Thanks to Governor Granholm’s 21st Century Jobs Fund, this new economy is actually taking shape… The first round of awards has already provided funding to 67 companies and projects, creating thousands of jobs…”

Uh huh. Politicians do not create jobs.

Michigan is closer to the truth. Politicians give away OPM to businesses that create jobs. “OPM” is “Other People’s Money,” something politicians think they have an infinite supply of and that We the [Other] People know is running out.

It is Labor Day and we are not laboring. Politicians will create no jobs today, either, but they will walk in parades and pretend they have.

Dead Elephants

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Q: How do you make a dead elephant float?
A: You take a dead elephant, two tons of chocolate ice-cream, a ton of bananas…

We know you can’t make a dead elephant float without bacterial action but any number of Rabid Righties thought a death scare was the way to derail ObamaCare.

Gundersen Lutheran in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, is a pioneer in the medical trend to make sure patients get the end of life they want. The hospital has been trying to force Medicare to pay the docs when they help patients with that planning. H.R. 3200 incorporated it.

Sarah Palin made that into the “Death Panels” in H.R. 3200 and it has been a rallying cry against any kind of health care reform ever since.

“It’s really distressing,” hospital official Bud Hammes told MSNBC. “These things need to be addressed.”

When you spread false information, you give up the right to thwap the other guy for propagating falsehoods.

My friend Dino sent around the Windfall Tax on Retirement Income rant a couple of days ago.

Dean “Dino” Russell is a roofer in the middle Keys where I reside. Dancing about on roofs all his life has made him the most physically fit man in the Home Depot; it also gives him an overview of life. He is the third-most conservative man I know.

“What’s neat about this is the way Snopes dismisses it with a series of rhetorical tributaries and sly spins and then tosses in billionaire Warren Buffet as a strawman. Snopes is right that Pelosi probably did not say these exact words–even though they are in quotes,” he wrote, “but that is not the point. The point is that she demonstrates it daily in her actions from the floor and prolly implied it directly in her rhetoric.”

“Pelosi probably did not say these exact words,” he wrote. “That is not the point…”

Sorry, Dino, but that is exactly the point.

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi is anything but and she has proven that over and over. Unfortunately, Dino has joined her club. Prevaricating, obfuscating, misdirecting, diverting, and pretending all add up to lying. When Liberals lie to advance their cause, it makes them liars and gives us ammunition to use against them. When Conservatives lie because they think it is for a good cause, it makes them liars, too.

Lying not only gives the other guy ammunition to use against you, it makes it impossible to believe or respect the liar.

Q: Why do ducks have flat feet?
A: From stamping out forest fires.

Q: Why do elephants have flat feet?
A: From stamping out flaming ducks.

I’ve always hoped I was the elephant but days like this I feel like a sitting duck.

Fall Cometh

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All people have the right to starve.
We ought not take away people’s rights.

A friend in the Philly area reported it was 70̊ at his home this morning. “I really LOVE Fall,” he said. Keats did, too.

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue…

I like the colors of autumn — its images take a disproportionate corner of my gallery — but I don’t like the end of the weather that keeps us alive and the beginning of weather that tries to kill us.

Autumn isn’t supposed to start until September 21 and it should stay with us until December 20 but the locust leaves started turning and dropping late last month and the temperature here won’t get out of the sixties today. Our apple tree is overproductive this year; it started dropping fruit about the same time the locusts began their seasonal death. By the end of “Autumn” North Puffin will have had at least two snowfalls and we can expect the thermometer to have kept us burning wood for weeks.

I started stacking firewood and putting up preserves last week. We heat with a combination of a modern oil-hot water furnace, a new pellet stove, and a 70s-era airtight wood stove. We’ll burn about 700 gallons of fuel oil, 4 tons of pellets, and a couple of cords of wood to keep this old farmhouse habitable for six months or so. Firewood warms us several times. I stack it on the hill in sun and wind for a year or more to dry and season it. That’s out there a long walk from the wood stove in my bunny slippers, so at this time of the year I restack the winter supply in the woodshed attached to the house. When it gets properly cold outside, we add it one or two chunks at a time to the stove which will burn around the clock.

On the other hand, I’m an optimistic, endless summer kind of guy. I know I will win the lottery, that my hair will grow back, and that (thanks to the liberal super-majority in Washington) the free ObamaFuel plan means free heating oil in our tanks, the free ObamaCare plan will instantly fix our impending loss of spousal health insurance, and that the free ObamaFeeds plan means no one will starve in America this winter.

Yay!

I still have a whole lot of summer left. I can put my feet up and rest a while!

Click here for the entire Fall collection.

Retirement Brouhaha

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Blogs, an online petition, and an email making the rounds claim that “Senators and Congresswomen do not pay into Social Security and, of course, they do not collect from it” because they voted their own benefit plan into effect. “When they retire,” the email claims, “they continue to draw the same pay until they die. Except it may increase from time to time for cost of living adjustments…”

And, of course, it is free to them.

“OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!”

On the other hand, the email claims, we ordinary folk “would have to collect our average of $1,000 monthly benefits for 68 years and one (1) month to equal Senator Bill Bradley’s benefits!”

Wrong. Interesting but wrong.

It is simply not true that Congressmen do not pay into the Social Security fund. Public Law 98-21 of 1983 required Social Security coverage for federal civilian employees. They have paid into the fund since 1984 just as most every American employee does. That means, in addition to any other retirement benefits, they get Social Security, too! (There are exceptions. Congress Critters who had participated in CSRS could elect to stay in that plan in addition receiving Social Security or elect a plan that integrates CSRS and Social Security.)

The 2009 salary for rank-and-file members of the House and Senate is $174,000 per year. Leaders of the House and Senate receive a higher salary than rank-and-file members.

It is also not true that Congress Critters “paid nothing in on any kind of retirement.” They must contribute 1.3% of their salary to the Federal Employees’ Retirement System and 6.2% in Social Security taxes up to the current $106,800 salary cap.

Snopes reports that “It is not true that Congressmen ‘continue to draw their same pay, until they die.'” Many factors go into the size of their pensions but “by law [that pension] cannot exceed 80% of their salary at the time of their retirement.”

Congress Critters are eligible for a pension at age 50 if they have completed 20 years of service. The average annual Congressional pension is $60,972 in 2009 but the most a rank-and-file member could get is $139,200. Seems like it is in their best interests to stay in office until they die.

I understand why people want to join this club. I’m not sure I understand why we pay so much to put them there.

If I spent my life as a bum, why can’t I afford to retire now?