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Showing posts from March, 2010

Doc Zero strikes again

Happy St. Patrick's Day! For your reading enjoyment (this has nothing to do with St. Patrick's Day), please see the latest Doctor Zero piece. The entire thing is just too damn good to pull a quote from, so go read it all. Right now. I guarantee satisfaction or your money back. Concluding paragraph is fantastic. It definitely makes me long for a politician who can think on his feet with this kind of command of language, and this level of clarity of principle. He (or she) would make an utter fool of anyone in the next chair on Meet the Press.

With friends like these...

How many times did Obama say he's a "stalwart ally of Israel" on the campaign trail? He sure has a funny way of showing it : Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has told the country's diplomats there that U.S.-Israeli relations face their worst crisis in 35 years, despite attempts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office to project a sense of "business as usual." Apparently, the crisis is due to the Obama administration taking grave offense over a "diplomatic gaffe" that occurred while Slow Joe Biden was visiting Israel (they announced construction plans for new settlements while he was in the country). Really? Do we need to start listing all of the diplomatic offenses that "The One" has committed toward our allies in a scant year in office? You know what they say about people in glass houses. How about the Falklands and throwing the Poles under the bus for starters? But Barack has been offended, s

Cutting out all the middlemen

Great post from "Captain Capitalism" about his $38 visit to the doctor . No, that wasn't the co-pay. That was the cost of the visit. As he points out, it was less than an oil change. It's funny how cutting out layers of paper-processors can save money. Everyone who touches your insurance claim needs to take a slice. And so does their boss, and their boss' boss, and every executive. Oh, and the government expects to get their portion of each of  those portions, plus a nice chunk of the overall profits. And not one of those people in the long line of people getting paid actually provides a service to you the patient. Well, except for the doctor, who is increasingly becoming an afterthought. After all, the government is ready to slash "reimbursements" to doctors as a way of controlling the costs of this monstrous new bureaucracy, designed, without irony, to make health care affordable. What would car insurance premiums be if oil changes and other routine ma

No shame

The Democrats are pretty amazing. Now that they've got this "reconciliation" bill on health care that could pass without going back to the Senate and getting 60 votes, they're seeing what else they can stuff in there. Like taking over the student loan industry (a natural extension of health care, obviously). Really. http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1201

Questions on Health Care

Yesterday, Barack Obama railed against big insurance companies and their "greed" as he publicly pushed for health care reform to be passed through reconciliation. There are so many things to say on this topic but I will limit myself to just a couple. First is the continued Orwellian language Obama has been relying upon in so many instances over the past year. His new mantra is that health care reform deserves "an up or down vote." What he means, of course, is a simple majority vote, which can be achieved via the reconciliation process. But he can't say "simple majority," due to the election of Scott Brown in the most liberal state in the union. Brown's election was in no small part a referendum on health care reform, and a referendum on the public value of the filibuster. It was Massachusetts, a state that is discovering its own woes with an ambitious health care system, standing athwart history, yelling "Stop!" So to say "simple maj