The following is a quick aggregated review of highlighted recent posts from @Indypolitical on important issues for Independent voters.
Layers of government shackle and discourage small business across US, like Philadelphia http://bit.ly/brRBg6
Compromise to O'bama means accepting his position. #tlot #tcot
RT @TennTina: Mexican Violence May Escalate After Accused Drug Leader Killed http://bit.ly/a0HU9y #tcot #tlot #p2
Re: Atlas Shrugged, It's about those that strive to achieve, vs. those that prefer to be parasites & attempt to regulate the achievers http://amzn.to/aJIE8w
THE HEALTHCARE CRISIS A Crisis of Artificial Scarcityhttp://bit.ly/9vsNdc
RT @thehill: Pelosi move is a sign that Dems intend to fight, not cut deals http://bit.ly/bnIuxb
Escape the USA ? http://bit.ly/9rMYAw A site dedicated to the Exploration of Retirement in Ecuador
Boehner under fire: First cut should be lawmakers' salarieshttp://bit.ly/c5zRcR thumbs up !
Muslim Sues Oklahoma Over Anti-Shariah Ballot Measurehttp://fxn.ws/cxevAg
Aging in Place goes Green http://bit.ly/bbTOS6
California – The New Greece
my opinion: Obama will run to the center, if not, hiliary will take him out in the primaries.
"It's clear the Obama-Pelosi agenda's being rejected by the people," Boehner said. "I think it's a mandate to reduce government."
Man supports son, loses job http://bit.ly/9ksPbX Unions do more harm than good these days
Marco Rubio, `son of exiles,' rises as U.S. senatorhttp://bit.ly/c7bm2w
"in the know contacts" tell me exuberant & mostly useless govt. regulator reqmts significantly hindering new loans of all types
Third World America http://bit.ly/avTFiA American Independent Politics
Libertarians Against Sprawl Push Mixed Use Agendahttp://bit.ly/d4RcqH Mixed Use is Cool !
President Obama divided America and set the course for a heavy Democratic defeat http://bit.ly/cevySk
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
THE HEALTHCARE CRISIS A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity
The following is a guest post that lays out the real issues surrounding the health care / insurance debate. Primarily that there is a false scarcity, and that health care costs are the real, root issue and solutions directed at health insurance are ineffective.
Introduction. “Grocery insurance” is a popular analogy among free market advocates, for explaining why third party payments eliminate price competition and contribute to medical inflation: when your insurer only requires a small deductible for each trip to the supermarket, you'll probably buy a lot more T-bones.
Unfortunately, what we have now is a system where the government, Big Pharma, the license cartels, and bureaucratic high-overhead hospitals act in collusion to criminalize hamburger and make sure that only T-bones are available, and the uninsured wind up bankrupting themselves to eat. A lot of uninsured people would probably like access to less than premium service that they could actually afford.
And despite rising deductibles and copays—exactly the kind of incentives the libertarian “grocery insurance” critics would regard as ideal for encouraging frugality—low-cost alternatives are simply unavailable in many cases.
A central problem of all the healthcare reform proposals circulating in Congress is that they focus almost entirely on finance—giving the uninsured the wherewithal to buy insurance and otherwise increasing insurance coverage to pay for healthcare—without addressing the cost of healthcare itself. But if healthcare itself were cheap, much of the debate on finance and insurance would be moot.
Dr. Arnold Relman, in Tikkun, argued that the versions of health care reform currently proposed by “progressives” all primarily involve financing health care and expanding coverage to the uninsured rather than addressing the way current models of service delivery make it so expensive:
What are those inflationary forces? . . . [M]ost important among them are the incentives in the payment and organization of medical care that cause physicians, hospitals and other medical care facilities to focus at least as much on income and profit as on meeting the needs of patients. . . . The incentives in such a system reward and stimulate the delivery of more services. That is why medical expenditures in the U.S. are so much higher than in any other country, and are rising more rapidly. . . . Physicians, who supply the services, control most of the decisions to use medical resources. . . .
The economic incentives in the medical market are attracting the great majority of physicians into specialty practice, and these incentives, combined with the continued introduction of new and more expensive technology, are a major factor in causing inflation of medical expenditures. Physicians and ambulatory care and diagnostic facilities are largely paid on a piecework basis for each item of service provided.1
And as Reason's Jesse Walker points out, even the most “progressive” healthcare proposals, right up to and including single payer (or even direct government delivery of service, along the lines of the British National Health), leave the basic institutional culture of healthcare entirely untouched. A single-payer system, far from being radical,
would still accept the institutional premises of the present medical system. Consider the typical American health care transaction. On one side of the exchange you’ll have one of an artificially limited number of providers, many of them concentrated in those enormous, faceless institutions called hospitals. On the other side, making the purchase, is not a patient but one of those enormous, faceless institutions called insurers. The insurers, some of which are actual arms of the government and some of which merely owe their customers to the government’s tax incentives and shape their coverage to fit the government’s mandates, are
1 Arnold Relman, “Waiting for the Health Reform We Really Need,” Tikkun, September 24, 2009.
expected to pay all or a share of even routine medical expenses. The result is higher costs, less competition, less transparency, and, in general, a system where the consumer gets about as much autonomy and respect as the stethoscope. Radical reform would restore power to the patient. Instead, the issue on the table is whether the behemoths we answer to will be purely public or public-private partnerships.2
The main reason healthcare is perceived as a crisis today, as opposed to forty years ago, is the escalation of costs for actual delivery of service. The main driver behind rising insurance premiums is not the misbehavior of the insurance industry itself, but the rising cost of healthcare. Any finance reform that fails to address this will be a temporary fix at best.
read the rest of this insightful article HERE
THE HEALTHCARE CRISIS A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity By Kevin A. Carson
Introduction. “Grocery insurance” is a popular analogy among free market advocates, for explaining why third party payments eliminate price competition and contribute to medical inflation: when your insurer only requires a small deductible for each trip to the supermarket, you'll probably buy a lot more T-bones.
Unfortunately, what we have now is a system where the government, Big Pharma, the license cartels, and bureaucratic high-overhead hospitals act in collusion to criminalize hamburger and make sure that only T-bones are available, and the uninsured wind up bankrupting themselves to eat. A lot of uninsured people would probably like access to less than premium service that they could actually afford.
And despite rising deductibles and copays—exactly the kind of incentives the libertarian “grocery insurance” critics would regard as ideal for encouraging frugality—low-cost alternatives are simply unavailable in many cases.
A central problem of all the healthcare reform proposals circulating in Congress is that they focus almost entirely on finance—giving the uninsured the wherewithal to buy insurance and otherwise increasing insurance coverage to pay for healthcare—without addressing the cost of healthcare itself. But if healthcare itself were cheap, much of the debate on finance and insurance would be moot.
Dr. Arnold Relman, in Tikkun, argued that the versions of health care reform currently proposed by “progressives” all primarily involve financing health care and expanding coverage to the uninsured rather than addressing the way current models of service delivery make it so expensive:
What are those inflationary forces? . . . [M]ost important among them are the incentives in the payment and organization of medical care that cause physicians, hospitals and other medical care facilities to focus at least as much on income and profit as on meeting the needs of patients. . . . The incentives in such a system reward and stimulate the delivery of more services. That is why medical expenditures in the U.S. are so much higher than in any other country, and are rising more rapidly. . . . Physicians, who supply the services, control most of the decisions to use medical resources. . . .
The economic incentives in the medical market are attracting the great majority of physicians into specialty practice, and these incentives, combined with the continued introduction of new and more expensive technology, are a major factor in causing inflation of medical expenditures. Physicians and ambulatory care and diagnostic facilities are largely paid on a piecework basis for each item of service provided.1
And as Reason's Jesse Walker points out, even the most “progressive” healthcare proposals, right up to and including single payer (or even direct government delivery of service, along the lines of the British National Health), leave the basic institutional culture of healthcare entirely untouched. A single-payer system, far from being radical,
would still accept the institutional premises of the present medical system. Consider the typical American health care transaction. On one side of the exchange you’ll have one of an artificially limited number of providers, many of them concentrated in those enormous, faceless institutions called hospitals. On the other side, making the purchase, is not a patient but one of those enormous, faceless institutions called insurers. The insurers, some of which are actual arms of the government and some of which merely owe their customers to the government’s tax incentives and shape their coverage to fit the government’s mandates, are
1 Arnold Relman, “Waiting for the Health Reform We Really Need,” Tikkun, September 24, 2009
expected to pay all or a share of even routine medical expenses. The result is higher costs, less competition, less transparency, and, in general, a system where the consumer gets about as much autonomy and respect as the stethoscope. Radical reform would restore power to the patient. Instead, the issue on the table is whether the behemoths we answer to will be purely public or public-private partnerships.2
The main reason healthcare is perceived as a crisis today, as opposed to forty years ago, is the escalation of costs for actual delivery of service. The main driver behind rising insurance premiums is not the misbehavior of the insurance industry itself, but the rising cost of healthcare. Any finance reform that fails to address this will be a temporary fix at best.
read the rest of this insightful article HERE
Monday, November 1, 2010
America -- The Grim Truth
The following are selected excerpts from a well thought out article designed to lay out key difficencies in our country, and to encourage rational people that it is high time to bail on the USA:
via Escape From America Magazine ^ | June 10, 2010 issue | written by: Lance Freeman
via Escape From America Magazine ^ | June 10, 2010 issue | written by: Lance Freeman
Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin. If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker........
The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you........
All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.
And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.
But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.
If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.......
There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).
Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.
Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses......
(Excerpts) Read more at escapefromamerica.com ...
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