Saturday, May 23, 2009
Freedom Watch Coming To The Eastern Shore
Friday, May 22, 2009
Friday's 2nd Amendment Quote
"Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins."
Libertarian Quote of the Day
"Intaxication:
Euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with. "
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Constitution Class Starts Monday
Libertarian Quote of the Day
"If the Tenth Amendment were still taken seriously, most of the federal government's present activities would not exist. That's why no one in Washington ever mentions it."
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Wednesday's Hump Day Bonus Quote
"All the fiery rhetoric of the Founders was directed at a "tyrant" who taxed his subjects at a rate of about three percent. Today, we in "the land of the free" are taxed at about 50 percent when you add federal, state, and local taxes. What kind of government would do this? A dictatorship would. "Doug Newman
Obamacare: Medical Malpractice
Obamacare: Medical Malpractice
by Edward H. Crane
Edward H. Crane is the founder and president of the Cato Institue.
The columnist Robert J. Samuelson had a perceptive piece in the Washington Post recently in which he stood back from the policy trees to look at the Barack Obama forest. What he saw was disturbing. He suggests that Obama is advancing a "post-material economy" designed to "achieve broad social goals" that will end up spending more to get less. The president proposes to radically restructure America's energy industry through massive tax increases ("cap and trade") in the name of fighting the problematic notion that mankind's miniscule addition to greenhouse gases will create crippling global warming. But as the world-renowned scientist Freeman Dyson points out, "Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now and substantially richer in carbon dioxide."
Obama also proposes to make the failed public school model available to even younger children and make liberal arts college more accessible to hundreds of thousands of students who, as American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray points out, would be much better off going to vocational schools or junior colleges. Obama would escalate George W. Bush's efforts to essentially federalize education in America. Never mind that the word "education" in not to be found in the federal Constitution.
But perhaps most threatening to most Americans is Obama's determination to nationalize health care in America. It's a truly bad idea. But that is what the president has made clear he wants. Obama has publicly declared his preference for a single-payer system "managed like Canada." His initial proposal, part of an ill-defined $634 billion "down payment" on health care reform, would create heavily subsidized federal insurance that would put private insurance at an unhealthy disadvantage. Some estimates suggest that private insurance would be reduced by more than 60 percent, leading ultimately to its collapse. Speaking of the Canadian system, Obama says of his approach that "it may be we end up transitioning to such a system." Ya think?
That, of course, would be a tremendous mistake, a fundamental mistake. America is a land of free individuals. Socialized medicine is not what we as a nation are about—and with good reason, both philosophical and practical. Consider:
- Eight out of ten of the most recent major medical innovations, ranging from MRIs to hip replacement, have come from the United States.
- Americans have access, on a per capita basis, to three times as many CT scans as Canadians and four times as many as Britons. Had the actress Natasha Richardson had her skiing accident in upstate New York rather than in Canada, she might have had a chance of survival.
- According to Vancouver's Fraser Institute, the average wait for treatment by a specialist in Canada is 18 weeks. As the Canadian Supreme Court ruled when eliminating the national health care monopoly in 2005: "The evidence shows that in the case of certain surgical procedures, the delays that are the necessary result of waiting lists increase the patient's risk of mortality... The evidence also shows that many patients on non-urgent waiting lists are in pain and cannot fully enjoy any real quality of life."
- According to a Cato study British women face nearly double the mortality risk from breast cancer that American women face; British men face six times the mortality risk from prostate cancer than that faced by American men.
Really, does it make any sense whatsoever to change our health care system to a nationalized system? None of which should suggest that we can't improve on our employer-based, third-party payer approach. And we seem to be moving away from that. Cato published the first book on Health Savings Accounts, which bring about a major improvement by individualizing and making portable health insurance. The next great innovation is from University of Chicago finance professor and newly minted Cato adjunct scholar John Cochrane. His Cato Policy Analysis (no.633), "Health-Status Insurance: How Markets Can Provide Health Security," is a brilliant solution to high insurance costs and issues such as preexisting conditions.
While left-wing coalitions like Health Care for America Now gear up to do battle, and more traditional opponents of socialized medicine like the business community and the American Medical Association prepare to essentially capitulate, all parties should pay attention to a recent front page story in the New York Times, headlined "Doctor Shortage Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals." You don't suppose that shortage has anything to do with the prospect of nationalized health care, do you?
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2009 edition of Cato Policy Report.Libertarian Quote of the Day
"An inevitable consequence of socialism is the division of society into two groups: those who are consuming government "services" and those who are paying for them."
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Libertarian Quote of the Day
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist."
Monday, May 18, 2009
Monday's LP Message from Donnie Ferguson
Well, it’s already happening in Oregon.
Sarah McIntosh reports in this month’s “Health Care News” “the Oregon Health Services Commission has drawn up a formal procedure for rationing health care services available to recipients of taxpayer-subsidized coverage.”
McIntosh reports, “the commission listed 680 common medical procedures and treatments and ranked them in order of priority. Beginning in 2009, the commission will reimburse physicians only for procedures and treatments ranking in the top 503 of 680. This means a Medicaid recipient in need of a procedure the commission decided to rank 504th would be ineligible for the procedure.”
If you think that’s just a problem for poor Oregonians, you’re wrong. That is precisely what the Obama administration promised to do to all Americans in an April 19 Meet The Press appearance by White House advisor Lawrence Summers.
Claiming health care is becoming more expensive; not because government regulations drives up costs, but because too many people get health care, Summers flatly stated the White House wants to begin “coordinating” your doctor’s decisions so they cut the cost of health care by 30% by simply denying people possibly life-saving procedures.
Along with their plan to invade the health care market with taxpayer-subsidized insurance and prohibit any private health insurance plan not rubber-stamped by the government, the intent is the eradication of private health insurance and total control of health care.
Illinois Democrat Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky even openly admitted that in a speech to cheering left-wing activists that was captured on tape.
Once Obama gets control of health care, you will have no choice in your health coverage. You will be forced to accept rationed care.
The March 27 Wall Street Journal calls it “the Bay State bait and switch,” referring to Massachusetts, where Republican Governor Mitt Romney launched the government health care invasion.
“First, create vast new entitlements that can never be repealed, then later take the less popular step of rationing care when it’s their last hope to save the federal [government’s fiscal situation.]…The real lesson of Massachusetts is that reform proponents won’t tell Americans the truth about what ‘universal coverage’ really means: Runaway costs followed by price controls and bureaucratic rationing,” the Journal writes.
To quote Ted Knight in one of his greatest roles, “You’ll get nothing, and like it.”
It’s the same kind of rationed care you’ll find in nations like France and the United Kingdom, where waiting lists for lifesaving procedures are sometimes years-long, and the death rates from breast and prostate cancer are twice to three times higher than in the United States.
If you think you can count on Republicans to stop it, you’re wrong. In states like Utah, it’s the Republican governor expanding government-run health care. Here in Washington, The Politico newspaper reports that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is meeting with nearly a dozen Republicans to secure their support of Obama’s socialized medicine takeover.
And as the Wall Street Journal just showed us, they’re looking at a Republican governor – Mitt Romney – for their inspiration.
If Obama and the Republicans are successful, they will have not only nationalized one-seventh of the economy, but they will have made millions of Americans dependent on government for their very lives – and dependent on a system built on rationing and substandard care that requires drastically higher taxes to maintain.
Skyrocketing taxes, bigger government and more dependency are precisely why millions of Americans oppose the Obama health care scheme – and the Libertarian Party is the only party that represents them.
Only Libertarians can oppose the Obama health care scheme, because Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats. Their Medicare prescription drug entitlement, the biggest expansion of the welfare program since Lyndon Johnson created it, simply laid the pavement for Obama’s road to socialized medicine.
And only Libertarians believe in the real solution to rising health care costs – opening up the health insurance market, knocking down regulations that delay and drive up the costs of developing new medicines and treatments, and repealing protectionist regulations installed by connected lobbyists to force more competition into the system.
Government-run and rationed health care, responsible for skyrocketing taxes and higher death rates in other countries, is already here. You can thank both Democrats and Republicans for that.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can provide affordable health care to all. With your support, the Libertarian Party can continue to fight for a vibrant marketplace of affordable, quality care.
With optimism,
Donny Ferguson
Monday's Prohibition Quote
"The War on Drugs is a price support system for terrorists and drug pushers. It turns ordinary, cheap plants like marijuana and poppies into fantastically lucrative black market products. Without the War on Drugs, the financial engine that fuels terrorist organizations would sputter to a halt."
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Sunday's Libertarian Sermon
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."
Libertarian Quote of the Day
"It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."