Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)

Texas' first "secular camp". Where, as animals ourselves, we can really get back in touch with our roots. But we're not going to push our beliefs (or lack thereof) on anyone.

As an American, I'm obliged to say, you're welcome to believe as you like. As a Christian, I'm obliged to say, I hope you and God can come to some kind of understanding before you die.

18.5%

That's the July unemployment rate for 16-21 year-olds. Why? Three words: minimum wage increases. Basic economics, people. Increase a business' costs with no corresponding increase in output or revenue, and you have a problem. In that kind of environment, the easiest short-run solution for business owners is to lower employment costs (ie. fire existing employees or, alternatively, not hire additional employees), which means more teens (and other lower-wage workers) get left on the sidelines. Those jobs were neither created nor saved.
It's not rocket science.

The C4C results are in, and the winner is...

TOP SELLERS

1. Toyota Corolla
2. Honda Civic
3. Toyota Camry

and

TOP MANUFACTURERS OF NEW VEHICLES SOLD

1. Toyota, 19.4 percent of Cash for Clunkers sales
2. General Motors, 17.6 percent
3. Ford, 14.4 percent
4. Honda, 13 percent
5. Nissan, 8.7 percent

Is anyone shocked by this? Besides the idiots who came up with this program, I mean. By the way, even Hyundai (7% of sales) beat Chrysler (6.6%).

The Amazing Castro

Welcome one and all to Circus Crapus. Step right up boys and girls and peer into the dark corners of this cage. Oh, that stench? Oh that's the sweet smell of liberal dung. Amazing! A new and completely intelligent argument against being conservative and caring about the USA: "You must be a racist!" Never heard that one before. More on this ignorance at a later time.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/686078

Not sure whether to be scared or sad

But I wonder if he got a free-flight voucher or something for being so helpful.

Welcome to Obama's House of Czars!

See this PJTV video on Obama's czars.

This wouldn't be funny even if it were a sitcom. But having this many people (almost three dozen) in "charge" of so much of our country - health, drugs, terrorism, information technology, automobiles, science, etc. - when none of them are elected officials accountable to the citizens...it's just a tad scary.

Also...really? Can you not come up with a less communist/imperialist word than "czar"?

If you close your eyes, they aren't really there

The party of "do-nothing" has done something, but it's not being talked about.

Obama and the democrats constantly deride Republicans as opposing liberal schemes over nothing more than *gasp* politics, but then say they "just want the status quo" and don't actually provide legislative alternatives. What a crock.

The latest in a line of proposals from the right side of the aisle, HR 2520, the Patient's Choice Act, was introduced May 20, 2009, but has languished in the House Ways and Means Committee ever since and will never see the light of day.

For one thing, it introduces tort reform, something Sarah Palin talked about yesterday. For a taste of what the 300 page bill includes (as well as a few more reasons why it won't ever be brought to the floor for a vote) see this article at The Moderate Voice.

Storm Over - Wreckage Remains

This is an excellent interview with Wharton professor, Peter Linneman, that I wanted to share. It's not too long. It's about the economy and government, and it's actually quite fascinating. Here you go: click here.

Who Represents Me?

Maybe you know them by name. Find out more by going to VoteSmart.org which is a non-partisan resource for factual data on political candidates and office-holders. Find out who contributed to the campaign, voting records, and more. As an interesting primer, here is a link to our president's campaign info: http://www.votesmart.org/finance.php?can_id=9490

Competition: Who Cares?

I've read quite a bit of our more liberal brethren's so-called "Affordable Health Choices Act", and you can too by clicking here. What you won't find in the bill is an explanation of why that fat/white/conservative/filthy rich/dirty phrase "free-markets" is so important to all Americans, especially the poor, and why a single-payer system is downright frightening. And we know from video that Mr. Obama supports the idea (or at least said he did at one time) of a single payer system.

Before we get practical, let's be theoretical. Theoretically, a single payer (that essentially means one insurance company instead of several) will be government run and will have the means and organization to fairly and justly meet the health needs of all Americans. That means that instead of mostly older people having to deal with fun things like Medicare A, B, C, D, D 1/2, whatever, you too will be able to enjoy the bureaucratic vagaries of filling out forms and talking to a machine on the phone. But no matter...remember, theoretically, this system will work and work very well. It will be very efficient...much like Medicare/Medicaid/and Social Security are now. It will be well-thought out like the Cash For Clunkers idea that ran out of money in something like 4 days. Theoretically, you'll go to the doc for what you need, get what you need, and pay what's fair, within a reasonable amount of time. If you buy into that, I have a slobbering dog that can predict movements in the stock market in the design of his saliva drippings. I'll sell him to ya for a mere pittance.

Now let's get practical. Free-markets preach competition is good for us. With a little time, competition drives prices down and usually drives quality up as well. This is not theory. This is what happens every time you go into a bank to negotiate a rate on your home loan, purchase insurance, go on vacation, buy something on EBay, or try to win a plasma flat screen in a donkey-tipping competition (I'm just sayin'). WalMart is one of my favorite examples of this. WalMart competes big time. Why? Not because it likes to offer you lower prices out of the goodness of its heart. It competes because other options exist. Target, Costco, etc. are nipping at its heels and trying to win over customers. And what happens because of this? Prices go down, products get better, and the poorer among us can afford more. The standard of living goes up, and it's not because of what any politician has done. What about the $4 prescriptions you can get at WalMart's pharmacy? The government cannot offer a deal like that without taxing the hell out of somebody and hurting some special needs group in the process.



So what's my point? And what about the poor? The point is this: someone almost always gets hurt or left out. Fair? No, often, it isn't. But the free-market solution is far superior to a socialization strategy or welfare from the government. As for welfare, I believe there are some folks truly in need, but you can't help wondering how many simply choose to fall off the high wire because they know there is a net below to catch them. Do some get left out? Perhaps. And I'm trying to wrap my head around the ideal solution for those that actually need the help. But I would argue that far more people get hurt because of too much government interference than if they were left alone...and I've got real life examples to prove it.

I'll give you a very practical example of this. Minimum wage. The theory behind minimum wage is that it will cause people to have a higher wage and therefore a better living situation. Simple enough. Or is it? A business, which has to stay profitable to live (don't give me that crap about profit being evil - you don't work for free, do you? - neither does the guy that took the risk to hire you, your sister, and your sorry brother in-law and put you in charge of managing rotary girder quality control). If I, the boss, have to pay you, your brother, and your sorry freakin brother-in-law more money now because minimum wage went up, well, guess what? That black kid I was about to hire to inspect cogs just got his resume chunked in the trash because I can't afford him anymore. Wait!!! [Little Timmy raises his hand] You mean the black kid doesn't get a higher wage! Um, no, little Timmy, that's correct. In fact, he gets no wage. He gets jack, you might say. As in squat. As in, maybe he stays unemployed another month and loses his apartment and has to pay extra to get his phone turned back on later. Wow, thanks liberal policy-makers. You're my best friend. Maybe you can come over and bring Nancy Pelosi and Elijah Cummings over for a Bush Bashing sleepover. I'll make cucumber facials and peanut butter and banana sandwiches!!! We can watch a scary movie...like "Wall Street" or anything with Jon Voight!

But seriously, the heath care bill that is being debated so hotly right now doesn't appear all that scary in print. In fact, I didn't even find the phrase "death panels". But when you look at it for what it is...typical bureaucratic meddling...why would you think that America's Affordable Health Choices Act would be much different than minimum wage? When you are unsatisfied with the service you receive from your banker, insurance agent, grocery store, hotel, etc., you go somewhere else that appeals to you better or competes harder to win your business. Who will you go to when government runs health care? Single payer, no options, no competition...not good ideas. Who will you complain to when your liberal saviors have hung you out to dry and they are the only ones doing laundry anymore?

Modern Noah

Click here for the story.

What drives health care costs up?

Being the free-market enthusiast that I am, I decided to sit down and take a look at what the medical field says are the primary drivers of health care costs. What I've discovered has been an interesting revelation: I know that the health care system (providers, insurers, patients, government) is complex, but until I actually started looking at what makes up the individual pieces of the complex puzzle, I did't really appreciate what makes it tick.
So, for a quick-ish summary of the relevant factors, let me refer you to a study done in 2003 by the National Institute of Health Policy and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (.pdf). Yes, the study was from 6 years ago, but the factors will be the same today.
Here's how the NIHP saw the health care industry's cost drivers:

A) Provider Costs
- Physician compensation. Related to type of provider (GP vs. specialist, inpatient vs. outpatient) and productivity (# of patients seen annually)
- Malpractice premiums and so-called Defensive Medicine (i.e. doing multiple tests "just to be sure" so the doc isn't sued for "not doing enough").
- Supply and Demand. What you would expect. Demand for physicians is dependent in large part on the demographic of the local area (old, young, rich, poor, ethnicity, etc). Also, a larger supply of physicians (specifically specialists) can increase the client demand over time. One point that was made in this section had to do with the doctor's preference for "Evidence-Based Medicine" vs. "Consensus-Based Medicine", which was an interesting point to me.

B) Hospital Costs
- Wage pressure. A shortage of health care professionals (say, the ongoing nursing shortage) will create an upward shift in price (i.e. higher salaries) to attract the workforce.
- Technology and pharmaceutical costs. Self explanatory, and obviously high cost drivers. We must be aware of what are called "outliers". Think of the "million dollar babies" or patients with rare or complex disorders. These outliers will eat up a disproportionate amount of hospital resources relative to the general population.
- Hospital Competition. This one I found interesting. Again, being the free-marketeer that I am, I am pro-competition, viewing it as the best path to cost containment, innovation, and business success over the long term. What this paper suggests, however, is that in the health industry, one result of competition is a sort of health care "arms race", wherein competing hospitals "will employ more capital and equipment, produce more expensive medical care and incur higher costs than hospitals operating in monopolistic markets." Essentially, competing hospitals want to show prospective future customers that they have the better technology, the better specialists, and can handle the harder cases than their competition, even though a broad market for same is not necessarily there. Result - high up front expenses for the hospital not matched by consistent cash flow from those resources. Thus, those costs must be subsidized elsewhere (i.e. patients who don't use those high tech resources will pay the hospital's premium anyway just by virtue of being a patient there).
- Consolidations. They don't always save money, though they are a fact of business life. This is true in any industry. *ahem*TimeWarnerAOL*ahem*
- Capital Improvements. This is driven primarily by two factors: the age of the facility as a whole, and the local patient demographic. New facilities need to be upgraded, both for new technology and for appearances. Who wants to give their money to a dilapidated hospital with poor lighting and few windows? As far as the patient demographic, older patients have different needs than younger ones. Hospitals in retiree-laden Florida probably should all have state-of-the-art cardiology and orthopedic centers.

C) Pharmaceuticals
- R&D, legal, marketing, and government compliance are primary cost drivers for the pharmaceutical industry. I don't even want to get into the pros and cons of the drug industry or pharmaceutical drugs in general. Save that debate for somewhere else.

D) Consumer Behavior
- The paper stresses the demands of consumers for the newest technology, drugs, procedures, etc as a huge cost driver, saying, in effect, if the consumer didn't want these high-cost procedures, there would be little to no push by the health care industry to provide them. Which is true, taken by itself. That's economics 101. It's simplistic, but true. But remember that consumer behavior is driven, in large part, by industry advertising. It's a sort of vicious circle.

E) Insurance Costs
- The Insurance Payment System. The vagaries and complexities of the health insurance system lead to inefficiencies, confusion, overpayment, underpayment, delay in payments, and other problems.
- Administrative costs. This includes government regulation and coverage mandates, which impact consumer costs directly. A 2008 study (.pdf)by the Council for Affordable Health Insurance found almost 2000 insurance coverage mandates nationwide, which adds between 20-50% to the cost of health insurance premiums depending on the state you live in.
- Cost Shifting. This innocuous term includes one of the most controversial topics in the politics of health care: the uninsured (which includes illegal aliens). Medical personnel are required by law to provide some basic level of care to those who cannot pay for the service. There are direct and indirect costs borne by the provider that are not offset by payment from the patient. These costs must be recouped elsewhere. That "elsewhere" is you and me.
- Risk Pool Instability. Another vicious circle. Higher medical costs mean higher insurance premiums. Which means some will opt out of the insurance system in favor of self-insurance. Typically, these will be younger, healthier people. This skews the pool of insured upward with regard to age and overall health. From an actuarial standpoint, this pushes the future costs of the risk pool up, which means premiums will rise further.

F) Other Costs
There are other significant cost drivers in the health care system that this paper does not touch on, but should have.
- Personal medical device cost and prevalence. Including pacemakers, hearing aids, oxygen machines, mobility devices, etc.
- Hospital Operations. The efficiency vs. quality debate of medical care.
- Demographics. The aging (and increasing longevity) of the population.
- Health System Capacity.
- Preventative Care. Cost vs. Benefit.

Not that this list is particularly exciting, or even complete, but it does give a sense of the complexity of the situation. What I'm going to try to do, or find someone else who has already done it well, is to come up with free market reforms that would improve (i.e. reduce the cost of) as many of these points as possible. If someone can come up with the easy-but-wrong government "fix" for health care/insurance reform, the case for free market reform should be put up right next to it as a counter argument.

Public Health Care

Ronald Reagan's thoughts on socialized medicine. Hard to argue with the man. I welcome anyone to give me their thoughts... especially if they find a way to disagree with Reagan... or the "anti-health care bill" movement in general.

To Victory...and beyond

Slide, slide, slippity slide

ObamaCare

If the election of Barack Obama didn't open your eyes to possible loss of the freedoms we as Americans take for granted, the new health care bill the democrats are proposing should.



I, an honored guest poster on Quaestor Fidelis, am not going to waste your time lecturing you on why you shouldn't agree with the proposed health care bill. I would just like to provide links and news clips, and let you come to your own conclusion.



So which is it, Obama?



Why the need to eliminate private health care? Oh, I get it... because there are people out there who are uninsured, I shouldn't be able to have the private health care that I work my butt off for every day? Makes perfect sense. I'm so glad we have a government who can ration health care to be "fair."



Hey Obama, where's your faith in government-run business?



So, if the post office is failing, why in the world do we think that government run HEALTH CARE will succeed?



A man with a legitimate concern



I ask you to read the bill and think about how it will affect you, your kids, your parents, grandparents, etc. Contact your congressman by phone, email, or letter, and let them know what you think. Remember, they work for US, and this is YOUR tax money going into this ingenious
plan.

Regret

Roe v. Wade - a life of its own. As with so many bureaucratic policies, sometimes there are no takebacks. Read this article.



Fear and regret are powerful motivators, especially the fear of the unknown. But love is stronger. Why not let yourself love something other than yourself? Let the love for an unborn child conqueor the fear of an unwanted pregnancy? Love what is important. The life of a child is important even if politicians don't want their daughters to be "punished with a baby".



50,000,000. Lives.

The Quest for Truth That Matters

This article is as good a summary of why it's important to look at both sides of an argument and not just pay attention to what your side is saying.

Today, conservatives and liberals can join vacation tours attended by only their side of the debate or join dating services to court only the like minded. At night, one side watches only MSNBC and the other side only Fox News. And when people are around likeminded individuals, one study found, their viewpoints only become that much more extreme.

And this:

We are ever more polarized today and so may be the conspiracies. The less each base understands the other side perhaps the more outlandish the theories become, in order explain the hold of the other side.

There was a good post up at Behavior Gap the other day about the folly of single-factor decision making. It applies here thusly: people are complex. This is easy to say, out of context, but oddly it's very hard to say when talking about people with whom you disagree strongly. Humans have a tendency to reduce the behavior we find distasteful in others down to one single characteristic: "oh, he's just a drunk", "oh, she's just a bitch", "oh, democrats just are stupid, they just want to take over the world with their socialist agenda". What's wrong with this?
Well, it takes away everything that makes a person a person, for one thing, their history, their family experiences, their religious beliefs, their lifetime of love, hate, hurt, anger, remorse, elation, and sanguinity.
He is not just a drunk. He's manic-depressive because he's gone through more crap in his life than you will ever dream about, and he can't handle it very well anymore. She's not a bitch. She's a single mother, insecure about her position at the company, and she wants to be liked, but she's afraid to be seen to fail lest she lose her job and have no money to feed her children.
As I have said before, the closer you get to someone, the harder it is to demonize them. Throwing stones only works when you stay at a distance. No one of us wants to be seen as one-dimensional. So why, just because you disagree with something someone else believes, would you reduce them to labels like "stupid", "power-hungry", or "elitist"? Because you don't want to take the time to get to know them more fully. Because if you did, you might find that they aren't easy to label at all. You might find that you will change your mind, or at least your attitude.

That's a pretty daunting concept, isn't it?

Bread and circuses

This is an interesting comment to a very sad reality.

Axis of Awesome

The name says it all:


And then there's this (which, oddly enough, is the exact same song I hear in the background whenever Nancy Pelosi is talking):