Of course he is — it was obvious to me all through the 2008 campaign, and the more I learned, the more clear it became (the Joe the Plumber incident was a huge tell). Now Paul Mirengoff makes the case that he was at least through 1996, and even up until the election. So why would he suddenly not be one upon entering office? The next installment will address that question. I think I can guess the answer.
[Update in the afternoon]
With regard to the comments about how the GM bailout somehow (illogically) proves that Barack Obama isn’t a socialist (as though simply having a political belief completely relieves someone from being politically pragmatic), the GM IPO isn’t as big a deal as some might make it:
Look, no one is rooting for GM to fail, or for thousands of autoworkers to be laid off, or for the taxpayers to lose their entire stake in the company. But it is just ridiculous to start popping champagne corks left and right over the fact that an industrial problem child like GM managed to put its pants on today without falling on its face. Let’s hope the company continues to see sustained profitability and that the losses to taxpayers from the auto bailouts end up being small. But the defenders of those bailouts who are now calling them a “success” haven’t even come close to proving their case.
There’s a lot more at the link.
Marcel, the military is the one essential element required to preserve a country. A person can only wonder why you through any means would want to weaken it?
There’s always diminishing returns. Just because spending a certain amount is good doesn’t mean that spending more is better (or for that matter, spending less is worse).
For me, the US spends a lot of money on things that don’t have that much value, such as expensive, brittle hardware. It also spends a lot for immediate use capability (for example, the old standard of having enough force on hand to fight two regional scale conflicts at the same time).
Who here is going out to buy a Chevy Malibu?
I get one occassionally as a rental on business. When it happens, it’s a reminder of why I haven’t purchased a GM product in over a decade.
“The irony of course is that Republicans tend to support the largest socialist organization on Earth, the US military industrial complex which cost the tax payers about a trillion dollars annually.”
You mean the one that defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan and kept Communism from taking over western Europe for 50 years? That one?
Well, I buy GM cars and have for decades.
Marcel’s point about the “military-industrial complex” is a restatement of Eisenhower’s point. Basically, we have a large military that directly and indirectly subsidizes a large “private” industry. This “private” industry hires ex-military types, who are used to influence the military and civilians in ways that are beneficial to industry.
“Well, I buy GM cars and have for decades. ”
Then I stand corrected for any criticism or snark I have offered. I mean this sincerely as I live where a sea of Obama bumper stickers adorn Subarus, Audis and Prius’.
My lifetime new car purchases over the last 30 years have been a German-made Ford Fiesta, a Chevy Celebrity, a California-made NUMI-Nova, and a Chicago-made Ford Taurus. I currently own a small fleet of Toyotas, purchased used from an unrepentant Obama voter.
Given the international nature of cars — Indiana Subarus, Ohio Hondas, Mexico Fords based on a Mazda “platform” — the decision to buy GM cars, and presumably to continue to buy them, is a vote of confidence in American labor unions. The Celebrity, NUMI-Nova, and Taurus are all UAW-built.
My next car purchase would more likely be a Ford rather than a GM product, influenced by my father working for Ford long enough to receive a pension, although my “Toyota relation” had a summer internship at GM that jump-started his career as an academic scientist, so go figure.
I really lust after a Chevy Volt as I once lusted after having a Prius, before it became a political statement that the recommendations of Consumer Reports trumps support for the American labor movement. But to purchase a GM car? It is like my dad who was more a “natural conservative” because he had “bad feelings” about certain things rather than me as more of a Movement Conservative, who read all of the political magazines and had those bad feelings codified as debating points.
I hear that the Chevy Volt is turning out to be a well-engineered car and the wingnut rage against the thing is just wingnut nuttery, and I suppose Health Care Reform may prove to be an OK thing in the end, and maybe Cap-and-Trade won’t bankrupt our economy. But I just have “bad feelings” right now about all of those things whether they have the label of Socialist or not. Gas mileage of 38 MPG on a highway trip? My 13-year-old Camry with 120,000 miles will do 35 MPG.
There was the little part in the State of the Union when he faced the Democrat side of Congress and said, “…to my progressive friends…” Every couple of decades the attempt to repackage the progressive label and foist it on the public again. It’s like a litmus test to see how far along they’ve progressed on their slow road to remolding the world closer to their heart’s desire.
Obamacare is more of an example of this incrementalism toward socialism then it is an exception. Obama has repeatedly been video taped as saying that he is a proponent of a single payer healthcare system. He’s even been caught saying that they can’t just switch it on overnight and that another reform will be needed to get us there. Hillary learned from her fight in the late 90’s that the insurance industry would put up the biggest resistance to the single payer transition. Obamacare is simply the effort of destabilizing the insurance industry. He bought off big pharma with a sweatheart deal to divide and conquer the two industries that would unite in opposition. He then appeared to naively fold to the insurance industries first offer. But then as the legislation was worked over in Congress they quietly watered down the deal that was struck with the insurance agencies as a part of various “cost controlling” amendments to the bill. That’s why you didn’t see any attack ads funded by the insurance lobby until just a couple of months before it was rammed through Congress. The hasty deal that Obama struck with the insurance industry early on was just a ruse to get them to stay quiet and out of the debate.
For me, the US spends a lot of money on things that don’t have that much value…
True beyond any question; however, considering how few true friends we have and the ambitions of our enemies… the military isn’t socialist any more than it’s a democracy. The military is a force. An unfortunately needed force.
The M.I.C. might be considered socialist but the foxes in congress are supposed to watch that particular hen house for us.
“In my opinion, government should only do those things that private industry either cannot do, or refuses to do, or simply cannot do as efficiently as government can in order to enhance the prosperity of the American people.”
In my opinion, the government should first of all do what it is legally obligated to do, and not do anything that it is legally prohibited from doing. Otherwise, you wind up with a de facto feudal nobility, sans the direct hereditary transfer of power. It may be able to do certain things “more efficiently” than private individuals or industries, but what grants it the power to do so, without the explicit consent of the governed?
Start there. It took a Constitutional Amendment to allow the taxation of income. It took another one to prohibit the manufacture and sale of most forms of alcohol (and another to repeal that one). These days, a simple majority vote–or, in many cases, an executive order or even just a regulation created whole cloth by an unelected bureaucrat–is apparently sufficient for doing what used to require the explicit vote of a supermajority of state legislatures, acting in concert.
We spend too much on the military because we insist on zero collateral damage. Nukes are cheap, dumb bombs are cheap, it’s cheap to level a city or destroy a civil structure. It’s expensive to buy and use smart bombs, have complicated ROE that make sure no bystanders are hurt, no matter how stupid or dubiously innocent, and to otherwise do targeted chemotherapy on a civil society to remove every trace of some evil cancerous elements without harming the rest.
In short, the modern military is expensive precisely because it has heeded the criticisms from the Left of its prior “brutal” and “uncilvilized” nature — that same Left that now complains about the expense!
Yet another example of the curious unsurpassed ability of Leftist ideology to short-circuit and derange common sense about the unwanted consequences and byproducts of actions. It’s like a stupid pill.
@ken anthony Says:
“Marcel, the military is the one essential element required to preserve a country. A person can only wonder why you through any means would want to weaken it?”
You weaken a military my borrowing trillions of dollars of money to fight unnecessary wars. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 and was only a threat to one its neighbor, Iran. Now Iraq is nearly a puppet of our enemy Iran, an Iran that is now a serious threat to Israel.
Wasting tax payer money on totally unnecessary wars is very bad government!
@Bill Maron Says:
“You mean the one that defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan and kept Communism from taking over western Europe for 50 years? That one?”
I believe in a strong military. And Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan attacked and declared war on the United States. However, Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. So there was no reason to spend nearly a trillion dollars of tax payer money on that adventure. And I don’t think we need a trillion dollar a year military in order to remain safe. We could easily do it for half that amount and still easily have the highest military budget on the planet.
“However, Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. So there was no reason to spend nearly a trillion dollars of tax payer money on that adventure.”
The last I heard a civilian authority made that decision and 9/11 didn’t enter into it. So explain to us, after enumerating your expertise, the difference between expensive and effective.
Wow. I go away for about twelve hours, and about 50+ comments later, the discussion is about 9/11 and the Iraq war. I see the threadjackers have been busy here.
Getting back to the original topic, it is interesting the importance the State-fellators seem to attach to denying the facts of Obama’s career and the political philosophy he has spent his adult life promoting and proselytizing. Besides providing comedy relief here, Chris Gerrib is, if nothing else, a useful bellwether on what the current Hive party-line is; and Marcel seems even more of a mindless party-liner than Gerrib, if that’s possible. As I said before, if a libertarian, or even a libertarinish conservative, got elected president, I’d be crowing and doing an in-your-face victory dance; but with this crowd it’s obviously some kind of strategic point to deny what everything in Obama’s biography clearly indicates that he is. Do the rest of you think that maybe denial has become such an ingrained habit with the Hive that they almost automatically deny anyone of the pro-freedom persuasion asserts?
@Bill Maron Says:
November 19th, 2010 at 11:47 am
“However, Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. So there was no reason to spend nearly a trillion dollars of tax payer money on that adventure.”
“The last I heard a civilian authority made that decision and 9/11 didn’t enter into it. So explain to us, after enumerating your expertise, the difference between expensive and effective.”
Most Democrats were, wisely, against going to war in Iraq. And most of the world thought we were crazy to do it.
Expensive is wasting nearly a trillion dollars of tax payer money on a country that was not a threat to the United States– and had no weapons of mass destruction.
Expensive is going to Afghanistan and not properly training the Afghan army to defend itself until recently. This will mean hundreds of billions of dollars wasted doing a job that should have been done during the Bush administration.
Expensive is spending $30 to $70 billion annually protecting the Persian Gulf Oil routes (a titanic annual tax payer subsidy for the Oil companies) for a fuel that is severely damaging our environment and the US economy. If those funds had been used to build nuclear and renewable energy power plants for the production of carbon neutral electricity and synfuels, the US would probably be one of the largest– exporters of oil– on the planet instead of the largest importers of oil and, eventually, the largest exporters of clean carbon neutral synfuels.
Expensive is spending billions supporting bases in Europe, a group of nations wealthier than the US and fully capable of defending themselves– except Europe is cutting their military budgets!
@Bilwick1
Mindless is calling a millionaire who sends his kids to an elite private school– a socialist!
And anyone who has observed Obama knows how much he loves socializing with millionaires and billionaires. He totally ignored the folks at NASA after his speech in Florida in order to talk to his rich friend Elon Musk before going to visit another rich friend, Gloria Estefan, for a fund raiser.
Mindless is calling a millionaire who sends his kids to an elite private school– a socialist!
And anyone who has observed Obama knows how much he loves socializing with millionaires and billionaires.
How are either of those things inconsistent with being a socialist?
Rand Simberg Says:
November 19th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Mindless is calling a millionaire who sends his kids to an elite private school– a socialist!
And anyone who has observed Obama knows how much he loves socializing with millionaires and billionaires.
“How are either of those things inconsistent with being a socialist?”
Exactly how socialistic is a guy who saw nothing wrong with becoming a millionaire and buy an expensive house and who likes to hang out with millionaires and billionaires rather than be with the Federal workers who sent us to the Moon.
Of course, since the right wing’s definition of socialism is “anyone whose not a Republican”, I guess you consider most people in this country– socialist!
Exactly how socialistic is a guy who saw nothing wrong with becoming a millionaire and buy an expensive house and who likes to hang out with millionaires and billionaires rather than be with the Federal workers who sent us to the Moon.
As socialistic as he wants to be. Have you ever taken a course in logic? Is so, you should ask for your money back.
Of course, since the right wing’s definition of socialism is “anyone whose not a Republican”,
Not being of the “right wing,” I don’t know what the “right wing’s definition of socialism is.” I doubt if you do, either. But if you follow the links in this post and read for comprehension (something you apparently haven’t done, and are perhaps incapable of doing) it is explained quite clearly why the president seems to be a socialist.
Well, I’m not convinced “Marcel” is an actual person, Bil. I know I could easily write a Perl script that would duplicate his postings.
Mindless is calling a millionaire who sends his kids to an elite private school– a socialist!
Blatant hypocrisy is typical for the breed. As to whether Obama is a socialist or not, I think his stance on health care demonstrates that he is socialist. Sure it doesn’t get nationalized to the extent that occurs in other countries. But in an age of very high health care costs, Obama thought increasing insurance coverage, even though it would increase the overall cost of health care, was more important. Note that Obama will never be subject to his health care “reform”.
Marcel,
Since Rand didn’t spell it out, I will: Vows of poverty have nothing to do with being a socialist. There have been many, many, many socialist millionaires who send their kids to elite private schools, etc.
Your contention that socialists and rich people are disjoint sets shows that you have failed to observe conspicuous repeated reality. Observe it now, think about it and get back to us with more accurate statements, please.
Yours,
Tom
I bet Marcel never even heard of a dacha by the lake.
Whenever power is centralized under a government, even under the most altruistic or utopian premises, somehow a select few always seem to gain power and wealth far beyond any ordinary man.
You can call them nobles. You can call them Party members. You can call them career bureaucrats. Some of the details (such as the direct hereditary transfer of power, the mostly-mythical droit de seigneur, or the mandarins’ power of regulation) vary from example to example. But, they always show up, and misery, fear, and death often follow them.
The French Revolution was founded upon utopian ideals (liberty, equality, fraternity). It turned into a bloodbath, and ended in an empire. Communism was founded upon utopian ideals (the New Soviet Man and equality amongst all men), but every government in which it took root, there emerged a class of “nobles” by other names who had all the money and power, at the expense of the majority.
So, I don’t see how you can possibly say that palling around with millionaires protects someone from being called a socialist. In practice, socialism has very little to do with actual equality, and very much to do with the centralization of power and authority that supposedly will “lead” to equality… and yet, somehow, never does.
Maybe it just hasn’t been tried by the right people yet.
Mindless is calling a millionaire who sends his kids to an elite private school– a socialist!
Since when have socialists been against making lots of money for themselves?
They just like telling everyone else how much money they can make and what they can do with it, but they always exempt themselves.
Your hyperbole aside, I’ll reiterate, “So explain to us, after enumerating your expertise, the difference between expensive and effective.”
As commenters above have indicated, Marcel is indeed ignorant of both the nature of socialism and its history. But to add to my last post it has occurred to me that not only does the Hive have such a long history of denial that it may have become ingrained habit, but it also has a long history of deception stemming at least as far back as the 1920s and 1930s, when socialists, realizing that the “s” word would only scare away American voters, hijacked the honorable term “liberalism” and repackaged themselves as “liberals.” Obama is only following a long and dishonorable tradition of untruth-in-advertsing.
Perhaps the right question should be “to what degree is Obama a socialist?” The mildest socialists (in American terms) support socialized education; Obama is certainly among that camp. He also long supported single-payer; support for socialized health insurance is representative of a much higher socialism quotient score.
Is Obama a socialist, is a test. Once answered yes or no, the test is over.
I know I could easily write a Perl script that would duplicate his postings.
I especially like the exclamation points. It’s like there’s a routine stipulating they should be added, but is clueless as to where. So they end up randomly replacing periods. I keep waiting for something like this:
@Karl Hallowell Says:
“Blatant hypocrisy is typical for the breed. As to whether Obama is a socialist or not, I think his stance on health care demonstrates that he is socialist. Sure it doesn’t get nationalized to the extent that occurs in other countries. But in an age of very high health care costs, Obama thought increasing insurance coverage, even though it would increase the overall cost of health care, was more important. Note that Obama will never be subject to his health care “reform”.”
Obama’s health care plan is just Hillary Clinton’s health care plan which was an idea originally conceived by the Republicans. Of course now that Obama is for it, now its suddenly called socialism.
But forcing people to join the private premium based US health care system that is inherently inflationary and is a cancer that is killing the ability of US businesses to compete with the rest of the world is definitely the wrong approach. That’s why I’m against Obama’s health care plan and the premium based system.
Here’s my alternative:
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html
@Bilwick
Sorry! But anyone nutty enough to label Obama a socialist is either a fascist, a neo-Confederate, or is simply trying to avoid being captured by black UN helicopters or mental hospital personal:-)
Obama’s problem is that he’s a weak president who appears to be intimidated by both the left and the right which is why he can’t seem to make any hard decisions or get anything done.
Obama’s health care plan is just Hillary Clinton’s health care plan which was an idea originally conceived by the Republicans. Of course now that Obama is for it, now its suddenly called socialism.
I’ve heard this talking point innumerable times, I haven’t seen any evidence for it. And I think it takes a special kind of delusion to ignore that the bills in question were 2,000 pages long and chock full of many things. This is a lot more than just a rehatched Republican bill.
“@Bilwick
Sorry! But anyone nutty enough to label Obama a socialist is either a fascist, a neo-Confederate, or is simply trying to avoid being captured by black UN helicopters or mental hospital personal:-)”
Well, after that brilliant, well-informed and tightly-reasoned rebuttal, what more can I say? Except:
When are you actually going to refute the actual evidence presented, Doctor IQ? Are you saying that Obama’s history of involvement with socialist groups and advocacy of socialist ideas is simply inventions on the part of those of us who value our liberties? Why would we do that? If Obama does have pro-liberty leanings himself, why wouldn’t we praise them–and why has he so assiduously concealed them?
What is amazing Marcel is that you write this…
The Business Roundtable, which represents the largest U.S. corporations, released a study showing that for every $100 spent in the United States on health care, a group of five of our leading economic competitors (Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France) spend only 63 cents!
Yet it seems to have no impact on your suggesting another government solution. You would demonize private insurance companies without any consideration of how they could bring down cost.
Insurance companies in a free market compete. This is the most powerful and beneficial regulation possible. The only thing the government can do is muck it up.
My latest visit to the hospital for a few hours cost me $3002.90 What would it have actually been in a free market? Let’s take a look.
Infusion.. Saline $144.20, Hydration $288.50 so $432.70 for three bags of salt water which also includes a minute of a nurses time, tubing and a needle. What do you think it would cost in the free market for three pints of salt water? If you say there are other considerations, then you haven’t read the rest of my bill. At $0.63 per hundred that would be… $2.73 which seems pretty much right to me.
On my bill is an item for $1411.90 What amazing medical service is this for? Showing up for a few hours. I bet I could get a nice hotel room for a whole day, with room service and have enough left over for other ‘services’ as well. That’s because hotels have to compete in a free market.
I pay a little bit over a hundred dollars a month for my insurance which seems reasonable. However, it’s reasonable to me because others are also making monthly payments. That’s what a risk pool is. On the other hand, if my medical bill were subject to free market pressure it might only be… $18.92 Meaning I could pay it directly and would only need catastrophic insurance. But you keep telling me that socialism works and insurance companies competing against each other for my business are evil.
I think the reason liberals and socialists are so shy of owning up to their labels is they know how poisonous those labels became to the American public. So of course they will try to reject the evidence surrounding Obama. It’s pretty astounding to think the deniers could sway the audience here though with the typical evasions.
I think the evidence is fairly clear Obama is the first post-American president. He would be much more comfortable as an EU bureaucrat than he is as POTUS. But Obama knows how the game must be played and getting around the “bitter clingers” by pulling the wool over their eyes is the price that must be paid to advance the “progressive” agenda.
Since I have followed the modern controversy over gun-control with great vigor since 1989, it’s particularly laughable to me if anyone claims Obama isn’t anti-gun or claims that Obama is not doing great injury to gun-rights. In fact Obama is one heartbeat away from destroying the 2nd Amendment. The two justices he has appointed are rabidly anti-gun (and they lied about it during their confirmation hearings). Sotomayor has already definitively proven so by her vote in McDonald v. Chicago, and I bet Kagan will do the same when the next big gun-control case comes before the court.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/29/sotomayor-targets-guns-now/
As for the expense of the U.S. military, though too much is due to pork, most of the cost is due to mission and the expense of an all volunteer military service. The cheapest way to reduce the cost of the military is to bring back the draft. Let’s see how the progressives react to that one!
The other method of cutting back the cost of the military is to reduce it’s mission. But the progressives have proven so horribly awfully wrong in judging the true intentions and capabilities of America’s enemies over the last 65 years it would be madness to accept their advice today. As a living breathing example I give you Senator John Kerry who has been wrong about everything concerning national security as far back as the Vietnam War. That’s forty years of failure.
@ken anthony Says:
Please! A system that includes health care savings accounts is superior to the premium based private system in the US. Singapore uses health care savings accounts and spends nearly 7 times less per capita on health care than the US does even though Singapore ranks above the US in income per capita.
No rational country in the world would adopt the US health insurance system!
“Exactly how socialistic is a guy who saw nothing wrong with becoming a millionaire and buy an expensive house and who likes to hang out with millionaires and billionaires rather than be with the Federal workers who sent us to the Moon.”
A number of years ago, I was surprised (and amused) to find Fidel Castro’s name on what was then a short list of the world’s billionaires. I think it was in Forbes, but am not sure.
So, Marcel and Chris, get ready to rant even harder. For I believe that Fidel Castro is a Communist!
> Please! A system that includes health care savings accounts is superior to the premium based private system in the US. Singapore uses health care savings accounts and spends nearly 7 times less per capita on health care than the US does even though Singapore ranks above the US in income per capita.
Love health savings accounts.
> No rational country in the world would adopt the US health insurance system!
No rational country would think that Obamacare does anything but make our system worse. McCain’s plan was far superior.
Yours,
Tom
Marcel, ken anthony says no such thing.
What I do say is government involvement makes things more expensive than they have to be. $432 for three pints of salt water being one data point.
Private health insurance is a business. Like every business that isn’t shoved down our throats by government they have to compete for business. Meaning they either provide a service to people that they want for a reasonable price or they cease to exist as a business.
Hospitals are a business. However, they are a corrupted business because the users of their service do not directly pay for the service in most cases. In many cases it’s difficult for customers to shop because often an emergency condition limits it but doesn’t entirely prevent it. You can still choose which hospital most of the time.
The bastards that demagogue the situation are doing it for themselves and not the people they hoodwink. You may be able to come up with a government program less objectionable to other possibilities but you will never outperform a free market solution.
The U.S. healthcare system….. So bad it’s only fit for a king.
Obama’s problem is that he’s a weak president who appears to be intimidated by both the left and the right which is why he can’t seem to make any hard decisions or get anything done.
Ah yes, the fascism always lurking not far under the modern liberal’s mask emerges. We need a Strong Leader to get things done, dammit! Just make the stupid peasants stop smoking, clinging to their guns and religion, eating trans fats, or raising their kids to think being a Marine is a more honorable profession than being a community organizer.
Also, ken, you do realize, I am sure, that the bulk of the cost of your being in the ER is the cost of having a huge team of trained professionals and amazing medical equipment on instant standby in case you needed it. Had you come in with chest pains, they would have had you in the cath lab within 30 minutes, threading a fat wire up through your femoral artery and into the tiny arteries of your beating heart to stop a heart attack in its tracks.
In short, a miraculous intervention, conducted by a team with man-centuries of expertise and training, was standing by at Defcon 1 just in case you needed them. Thank God you didn’t, of course, but having that kind of firepower on standby alert costs beaucoup — and it gets partly recovered by charging you $100 for a bag of sterile salt water. In essence, you subsidize the folks who need the whole nine yards.
Why it should need to be done in such a silly way is beyond me, but I’m pretty sure it involved dumbass government intervention by people who think you can reduce the cost of wheat merely by legislating its price.
Why it should need to be done in such a silly way is beyond me – the answer is simple – it’s the only way for the hospital to recoup its costs for the uninsured. Our choices are:
1) Leave the uninsured to die in the streets
2) Create some mandatory system / subsidy to get them insurance
3) Overcharge those who have insurance.
Pick one.
the bulk of the cost of your being in the ER is the cost of having a huge team of trained professionals and amazing medical equipment on instant standby
Sure I’m aware Carl. I’m also aware that the $1411.90 is supposed to be the part of the bill that reflects that. But the discrepancy of paying a few dollars for water and thousands for showing up would be too embarrassing even for these institutions to pull off. Transparency needs to be part of the equation for lowering costs and they are trying to do just the opposite.
The other problem is the lefts insistence that people should get services without paying for them. Services they could easily afford by spreading the risk over a risk pool.
Now responding to Chris regarding choices…
1) Leave the uninsured to die in the streets… We have never and will never do this… quit lying about it.
2) Create some mandatory system / subsidy to get them insurance Not at all required.
3) Overcharge those who have insurance. Not at all required.
Choice 4) Make insurance so cheap anybody could afford it by a free market approach.
Do you understand how insurance works? Any problem you can identify has a free enterprise solution. The suffering of the irresponsible is how we disincentivise irresponsible behavior. Every ‘solution’ the left comes up with only makes problems get worse.
Well….ken, I have no intention of defending the byzantine and undoubtedly corrupt practices of the medical-industrial complex. But let us bear a few other facts in mind:
1. Your bag of saline was sterile, and the companies that made it, transported it, and stored it had to have very high reliability in guaranteeing that sterility. Imagine how outraged you’d have been had you gotten a blood infection from a little staph bacteria colony growing in the water! Considering how many bags of saline are shipped, they probably need 4 or 5 nine’s of reliability. That’s expensive, as NASA can tell you.
2. The bag, the tubing, the clips and valves, and the injection apparatus itself was all also sterile, also needs very high reliability, and was thrown away after its single use on you. It’s great we don’t have to re-use needles like they do in most of the Second and Third World, but — it does cost.
3. The stuff was injected by a licensed RN, who earns $30-60 an hour, or $50-100 an hour counting benefits and overhead. If she spent 3 or 4 minutes starting the IV, another 5 to 10 minutes reviewing your history and monitoring you during the drip, plus another 5 minutes charting — absolutely everything has to be written down, to avoid being eaten alive by lawyers — then there’s 15-20 minutes of her time, or maybe $20-30, right there.
4. You were probably also evaluated by a triage nurse at the front desk, and your case was certainly reviewed by at least one MD. Even if they spent mere minutes on this, it still probably adds up to another sawbuck.
5. Let’s not forget that the room you were in was cleaned and the surfaces on which you lay sterilized before and after you were in it. There were people who had to do that. And what time did you go? The ER is open 24/7, 365 days a year — but they don’t charge like airlines a big premium if you want service on Christmas Eve, so that the ER doc and nurses have to hang around in the hospital drinking bad coffee while their families open presents without them. Of course that extra expense gets spread out to other times and days.
In the end, I think one of the problems with modern life is that we are bemused by what is really the astonishing cheapness of goods. At my hourly wage, I can get a cell phone — an amazing miniature combination of computer, 900 MHz transceiver, and satellite receiver — for 2 to 4 hours’ work. I can get a decent laptop for 10 hours’ work. I can get a freaking car for less than 300 hours, less than 8 weeks’ work.
This is only possible because spectacular advances in technology allow, in the production and distribution of goods, amazing leverage of human labor. Clearly there must be less than 300 hours of the labor of reasonably-paid human beings in every car, from iron ore and crude oil still in the ground through steel and plastics and on to a sleek assembled product — which is astonishing, if you think about it, and a real tribute to the power of machines and mass production.
But unfortunately that means the price of service — the direct 1-for-1 exchange of your labor for someone else’s — has got to inevitably climb and climb, relative to the price of goods. There’s no real prospect that any advance in technology is going to reduce the amount of MD/RN time you need in the ER to minutes or seconds, and thus allow the price to fall in the same way the price of cell phones, cars, and computers can fall.
I think there is an inevitable component of this (sometimes called “Baumol’s Cost Disease”) to the current medical care debate. I think the plain facts are that medical care necessarily involves lots of one-on-one human service interactions, and it is inevitable that it will benefit sufficiently slowly from technological advances that we are simply going to be spending a larger and larger fraction of our incomes on it, period. Government can and will, if allowed, make it worse. But there is no way to go back to the 1950s cost of the best medical care, measured as a fraction of one’s income.
Ken – actually, the requirement that every emergency room treat whoever walks in came from emergency rooms refusing to treat uninsured people who then died. So, yes, we have left people die in the streets.
How exactly you expect to make insurance “so cheap everybody can buy it” is beyond me. Saying “free market” is not some Harry Potter-ish incantation. This also neglects the fact that, absent a mandate, some people just won’t buy it no matter how cheap.
When all else fails, keep repeating the lie.
Leland – your historical illiteracy is showing. The “free emergency care” law was passed in 1986. It was to ban a practice called “patient dumping” of sending sick patients to other hospitals. See the history of the law here and read of a doctor convicted of violating the law here.
Again, the facts are not on your side.
You’re confused, Chris. What happened — and I recall, because I lived through it — was that by very long tradition county hospitals were the hospitals of last resort, they indeed always have, and always did, treat all comers, in particular the indigent. Private hospitals, however, used to require proof of insurance or ability to pay before they took you, even in the ER, provided you were conscious and not actively in danger of your life at the time. If you were indigent, they used to stabilize you and transport you to the county hospital.
However, in the 1980s the Kids On A Milk Carton Issue O’ The Day was (along with the fierce moral urgency of apartheid in South Africa) “patient dumping,” in which private hospitals were suspected of transporting patients before they were really “stable” and some patient deaths were attributed to this. Accordingly, anti-patient-dumping laws were passed that prohibited even private hospitals from requiring payment or solvency up front.
It’s interesting that since this government intervention in the free choice of people the great OMG Uninsured In The ER Are Costing Hospitals A Fortune scandal grew, necessitating (of course!) still more government intervention. But that’s the way it always works.
How exactly you expect to make insurance “so cheap everybody can buy it” is beyond me.
The same way cell phone service is cheap enough that everybody can buy it? Or food? That is, some people buy the iPhone and a fancy data plan, and others, with less means (or less need) buy a paygo cheapie clunker phone. Some people buy fresh caviar every Friday, and some eat meat only on Friday, and chow mac ‘n’ cheese the other days. In short, to each according to his own personal needs and abilities.
Given that most of the “uninsured” are young, healthy, single people (particularly men) who don’t see the urgency of a massive plan that covers pregnancy, well-child checkups, cancer and high-blood pressure meds, you could very likely fold them into the system (if that really was the point) just by allowing insurance companies to sell cheap catastrophic trauma coverage that would pay for their costs over $5000 in the event of a car crash or something, but very little else. (How do I know that would be cheap? Look at the cost of accident insurance, e.g. when you fly.)
But of course that’s not possible, because government intervention has said you can’t sell an insurance plan like that. It’s not “fair” because it doesn’t cover 3 days in the hospital for a pregnancy, or mammograms. Brilliant!
Carl:
1) Well, food isn’t “so cheap everybody can buy it.” That’s why we give poor people food stamps.
2) Many areas, including DuPage county, the place (and half-a-million others) live in, don’t have a county (taxpayer-subsidized) hospital. Making people drive 50 or 60 miles to Cook County General can be life-threatening. Especially if the patient is not stabilized, which was exactly the patient dumping issue.
3) So those “young, healthy males” can’t get non-lifestyle cancers? Lou Gehrig’s desease? I could go on.
1) Well, food isn’t “so cheap everybody can buy it.” That’s why we give poor people food stamps.
No. I doubt many poor people couldn’t afford food. The real reason is that it’s less scandalous than giving poor people money and having them buy alcohol and drugs with the money.