The Future of American Health Care

A couple of recent news stories from across the pond paint a frightening picture of what lies in store for America. If we really wish to continue down the road toward universal health care, then we will have to get used to seeing things like an appendix rupturing after it had already been "removed" and a hospital bed shortage forcing thousands of mothers to give birth in elevators, offices, and bathrooms.

That, my friends, is change we can believe in.

Torture Is Commonplace in America

Digby, filling in for Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, discusses law enforcement's love affair with the reliably lethal Taser:

They kill people. Nobody knows exactly why some people die from being tasered, and they certainly don't know how to tell in advance which ones are at risk. But there have been hundreds of deaths ...

... Representatives of the government torture innocent citizens into unconsciousness, on camera, in United States courtrooms with tasers. They use them on prisoners and on motorists and on political protesters and bicycle riders, on mentally ill and handicapped people and on children And it's happening with nary a peep of protest.

America's torture problem is much bigger than Gitmo or the CIA or the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The government is torturing people every day and killing some of them. Then videos of the torture wind up on Youtube where sadists laugh and jeer at the victims. It's the sign of profound cultural illness.

You can view a couple of the incidents he discusses here.

The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc., lists in the Wall Street Journal "eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone":

1. Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).
   
2. Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
   
3. Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
   
4. Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.
   
5. Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
   
6. Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
   
7. Enact Medicare reform.
   
8. Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

For further details, read the full article here.

Why can't we at least give this a shot? These reforms are certainly preferable to wasting billions of dollars and turning the eventual control of our entire health care system over to a swarm of parasitic tax-feeders.

Spending more money and enacting more regulations is a strategy that has been tried countless times before, and not one problem has been fixed as a result. If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, then perhaps our leaders in Washington should try something they have never tried: just getting out of the way.

President Obama's Life Threatened

OK, not really, but listening to these ignorant fools you'd think that was the case:

They seem to forget that whenever the president makes a public appearance he is surrounded by armed men: secret service agents, military personnel, state troopers, local police. I hardly think we need to be concerned about one guy carrying a handgun in plain sight.

Of course, it isn't surprising that these statist lackeys would be shocked. Guns are something that belong only to the ruling elite. The thought of an average citizen being armed scares them. But, then again, that's the point of the Second Amendment, isn't it?

Peter Schiff for Senate

Economist Peter Schiff, one of the few people who saw this current recession coming long before it happened, is considering running for the Senate from the state of Connecticut. Be sure to check out his site at www.SchiffForSenate.com.

The U.S. Postal Service Is in Trouble

The U.S. Postal Service stands to lose $7 billion this fiscal year. So, it is doing what every government agency does when it hasn't been able to balance its bloated budget: It tries to scare us by threatening to cut services that could be provided much more efficiently by the private sector anyway. That means we could see up to 1,000 post offices close nationwide.

Bring it on. I'm sorry, but there is no reason for anyone to ever set foot in a post office. None whatsoever. You can print stamps on your computer. You can even get them from the ATM when you stop to get cash. And if you happen to be mailing anything other than a first class letter (which, by the way, is illegal for any entity other than the federal government to deliver), you're better off going with UPS or FedEx.

It's time this government-created monopoly was forced into the competitive free market. Where's Lysander Spooner when you need him?

Censorship in "Liberated" Iraq

The current Iraqi regime now wants to start censoring material it deems harmful. The New York Times reports:

The doors of the communications revolution were thrown open in Iraq after the American-led invasion in 2003: In rushed a wave of music videos featuring scantily clad Turkish singers, Web sites recruiting suicide bombers, racy Egyptian soap operas, pornography, romance novels, and American and Israeli news and entertainment sites that had long been blocked under Saddam Hussein's rule.

Now those doors may be shut again, at least partially, as the Iraqi government moves to ban sites deemed harmful to the public, to require Internet cafes to register with the authorities and to press publishers to censor books.

The government, which has been proceeding quietly on the new censorship laws, said prohibitions were necessary because material currently available in the country had had the effect of encouraging sectarian violence in the fragile democracy and of warping the minds of the young.

"Our Constitution respects freedom of thought and freedom of expression, but that should come with respect for society as a whole, and for moral behavior," said Taher Naser al-Hmood, Iraq's deputy cultural minister. "It is not easy to balance security and democracy. It is like being a tightrope walker."

It seems Iraq is becoming more like America every day.