Category Archives: Socialism

UPDATED: GOV.CON Is Working As Intended

Communism, Economy, Government, Healthcare, Socialism, The State

Delay it, fix it, tweak it, get Amazon’s computer programers to redesign it; and, boohoo, the poor president—a pox on Obama!—is so poorly served by it!

Republicans and Democrats alike have made these specious, irrelevant, mealy-mouthed points about the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” That includes those “pig-ignorant panelists” who turn the Sean Hannity Show into such a zoo. (My apologies to all animals, who are far and away superior in intelligence and manners to Sean’s panelists.)

You can no more mend Government.Con than you could have tweaked Stalin’s Gulag.

Read “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work” at the preeminent libertarian site, Economic Policy Journal:

…In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off. “We don’t have profits and losses in the civil service. Success in the civil service is measured by the size of our staff and budget. A bigger department is more successful than a smaller one,” smiled the marvelously sardonic Sir Humphrey Appleby, superstar of the satire “Yes, Prime Minister.”
Since it “manages” money not its own, government has no real incentive to conserve resources, ensure a job is properly done, or deliver on its promises. Entrusted with the administration of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of people you don’t know and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement—how long before your on-the-job performance mirrors that of the government? …

MORE.

UPDATE: “Some health insurance gets pricier as Obamacare rolls,” concedes the LA Times. But what would an LA Times article be without floating a foolish theory, blaming business for a law that has mandated extended coverage?

Guaranteed, exhaustive coverage is driving up rates:

Individual policies must also cover a higher percentage of overall medical costs and include 10 “essential health benefits,” such as prescription drugs and mental health services. The aim is to fill gaps in coverage and provide consumers more peace of mind. But those expanded benefits have to be paid for with higher premiums.

Justice demands that people who scoffed at the right analysis (see “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured,” August 7, 2009) of this law and cheered it on should suffer. They deserve to suffer. But I fear the future for all. Be afraid.

The No-Good Obama Has Altered American Medicine For Good

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Regulation, Socialism, Taxation, Welfare

Dr. Ramin Oskoui spoke extremely knowledgeably, on the Laura Ingraham Show, about the precise connection between curtailed medical care and ObamaCare. These are a few of the many ways in which the creep-in-chief’s signature legislation will degrade American medicine:

* Cancer: The concept of personalized medical care and the use of specific, state-of-the-art drugs that work with the individual’s genetic make-up—these will diminish considerably. ObamaCare puts access to “crucial medical progress at great risk.”

* PET scans, for example, will be limited to three in a lifetime, although cancer patients often have that many during initial diagnosis.

ObamaCare aims to control costs, explained Dr. Oskoui. For cancer patients this is achieved by blocking the patient’s ability to seek out specialized doctors. Because insurance provides cannot adjust premiums and benefits, the only thing they can do to control costs is to limit access and care—they must limit the network of providers with which they contract.

Bundle payments: doctors get lump sums of money to care for patients with particular conditions. This coerces them to cut down on the use of costlier, newer drugs and tests. It also pits what the doctor earns for caring for these patients against his payment, reducing his incentives to offer the best of remedies if these are more costly.

After all, doctors in private practice are small businessmen. They cannot provide a service for less than it costs them to provide.

Even if ObamaCare collapses under its own weight, warns Dr. Oskoui, it has “already changed the medical landscape.” Many specialists have migrated to the hospital system because, as “favored providers,” hospital-based medics are allowed to bill more than they would when working for themselves.

Both the host and this intelligent cardiac surgeon have concluded that ObamaCare is not about the practice of medicine, but about wealth distribution.

It is a tax bill.

“The entire medical landscape,” observed Ms. Ingraham, “has shifted to help the few who didn’t want healthcare or couldn’t afford it. (A point made back in 2009 in “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured.”)

Dr. Oskoui: ObamaCare has transferred financial risk to the providers of healthcare and away from Big Pharma, the insurers, those receiving healthcare. The latter, and the electronic health-records manufacturers, profit.

Again: it’s a wealth-transfer program; an entitlement program.

The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology

Barack Obama, Government, Healthcare, Socialism

“The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The message that greeted future Obamacare patients who logged on to Healthcare.gov was as follows: “Please wait. We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience.”

Healthcare.gov is the deluxe version of Obamacare.

The interminable waits on Healthcare.gov are a harbinger of things to come under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This so-called “Health Insurance Marketplace” is using the good name of the marketplace in vain. A healthcare cauldron of Obama’s creation, government-run exchanges constitute a planned economy, not a market economy. As such, they will result in long lines precipitated by the inevitable inability of central planners to bring demand and supply into balance.

Like Canadian, Cuban and British nationalized healthcare, Obamacare’s motto will become, “We have boatloads of patients, too few doctors, supplies and equipment and not nearly enough of your money. Don’t like it? Go jump in the lake.”

Like me, you must know Obama-heads (doctors included) who shrugged off the idea that a further centralization of healthcare by Obama’s politburo of proctologists—a modest expansion totaling $2 trillion—would cost them anything at all. (Doctors for Obamacare ought to revel in the 140,000 added codes into which they’ll have to categorize care rendered. These include nine new codes for injuries sustained from the common macaw! You’re more likely to be felled by an Obama-guided drone than by that gentle hook bill.)

I’m already feeling the care. How about you?

Mitt Romney was not “lying” when he told stupid voters that the cost of their healthcare would rise under Obamacare by about $2000 to $3000 annually. Before Obamacare, this household enjoyed 100 percent coverage. Shortly after Obamacare became law, we were notified, like millions around the country, that healthcare experts were hard at work hammering out the details of how to continue caring for us under current conditions (and keep operating).

Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It has already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.

Perhaps like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself. In this case, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute has more bad news. On the individual-market, “Obamacare will increase average … insurance premiums by 99% for men, 62% for Women.” Middle-class Americans Obamacare subsidies will not protect. They “face the double-whammy of higher insurance premiums, and higher taxes to pay for other people’s subsidies.” …

Read the complete column. “The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology” is now on WND.

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Listen Up Furloughed F-cks!

Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Propaganda, Socialism

It has to be clear that the US government is a government for the benefit of certain factions alone. Members of the productive, private sector—they support the entire exercise in futility—got up and went to work as they do day in and day out, while the parasites who live off their avails whinged about lost wages and lost vacations (I can’t recall when last my better half has taken one). Since the oink sector sets its own salaries, the same people will award themselves backpack on the backs of the workers who carry their dead weight. Of that you can be sure.

So listen up furloughed f-cks and do us all a favor. Get a real job so we don’t have to carry the weight of your hefty salaries (on average double that of the average wage in the country), the liability of your healthcare and retirement benefits the likes of which we can only dream of, and your general sanctimony about your value.

“More than nine out of every ten employees,” reports Bretibart.com, “at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are considered ‘non-essential.'” You can be sure that the trend obtains throughout the “oink sector.”

From what Ed Krayewski at Reason.com writes rather unclearly, it would appear that “about 800,000 out of the 2.1 million strong federal workforce are “non-essential.”

Never one to mince words, Thomas DiLorenzo does, however, make mince of these parasites and their media advocates:

The “media” have finally destroyed what tiny bit of credibility they had as a “news” source with their “coverage” of the government “shutdown.” This of course is good news for all producers and non-parasites in American society. They have done so with their ridiculous claims all over tv and radio of a supposed “increasing backlash” against the “shutdown” of a few government offices. Americans are experiencing “Frustration Coast to Coast,” shouts USA Today in the dumbest headline of the day. Among the “horror stories” discussed are a woman who may have to postpone her “fantasy wedding” in a government-run park; a possibly cancelled marathon in New Jersey; various vacations in government-run parks; and a family that may have to delay “the dream of home ownership” for a few days. Oh, the misery of the poor booboisie!

No one I’ve been around gives a crap. No one is talking about it but the “media,” who are worse propagandists than any who worked for PRAVDA under Soviet communism. This morning, for example, ABC News picked two or three parasites/public dole collectors to whine about how “upset” they were that government-run national parks thousands of miles away were shut down. Then they covered the entire screen with Obombya’s mug and with his annoying, bellowing, preachy voice saying “the Republicans had better reopen the government.” That’s the Official Party Line of the day, faithfully repeated in the title of a USA Today editorial: “Blame for the Shutdown Falls Squarely on the GOP.” Nice lapdog. Nice lapdog.

This is all good, because it will hopefully lead to the same thing that eventually happened in the former Soviet Union, namely, no one believed anything the government and its media propagandists ever said. Once this becomes a reality, the days of the regime are limited.