“We are among the biggest fools in history if we keep on paying people to make us hate each other.  Whether it is called by pretty names like ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘diversity’ or ‘gender awareness,’ that is what it boils down to.”

…Thomas Sowell

Gillette has recently come out with an ad that is either supposed to make me more woke, or offend my conservative sensibilities.  Before I knew how I was supposed to feel about the ad my reaction was that it was encouraging men to stand up for the little guy or the woman put in an uncomfortable position.  These are things I have always believed in and I am glad to see them get support. 

But then some conservative commentary helped me to realize that…..what? 

I have long believed that racism is amplified and made worse by those minorities who look for racism.  And sexism it amplified and made worse by women who look for an excuse to call a man, or men sexist.  This is tribalism.  Is there anything in that Gillette commercial that is offensive?  Do conservatives have to defend bullying and gauche behavior because progressives cheer a commercial that defends values we hold in common?  Do we have so few enemies in the world that we have to defend the indefensible because the “other side” got there first?

Am I supposed to be offended because in the opening lines of the commercial there are fleeting references to “Me too” and “toxic masculinity”?  Just as Rush Limbaugh used to refer to “feminazis”  there is such a thing as taking “masculinity” to a unhealthy extreme.  Should I be defending bullying or sexual harassment because the left is also opposed to those things?  Or is it a better strategy to agree where there is any opportunity for common ground and make the world a better place when and where we can, then negotiate on how to make things better were our strategies diverge.

I am struck and disappointed every time I see a conservative commentary that ridicules the left.  That is a form of bullying too.  And rather than serving any useful purpose, it makes making any kind of progress more difficult.

Would I have done the Gillette commercial in exactly the same way Gillette did?  No, but close enough.  Do conservatives have so little to work for that we have to create contention where none needs to exist? 

So, every conservative that is in favor of the bullies and inappropriate sexual behavior depicted in that commercial, stand up and be counted.  If you are still in your seat, stop looking for excuses to be offended.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

…Thomas Jefferson

Why did I vote for Trump and why am I likely to vote for him again?  It is not because I trust him.  I am disappointed and surprised when I see so many who I believed to have had principles of decency and consistency of political philosophy, enthusiastically support this man.  He is a bad example and appears to be running the administration like a corrupt New York union dock yard.  The reason I voted for him and may vote for him again is because the alternative further jeopardizes the Republic.

During the American revolution the cry went up, “no taxation without representation”.  When the constitution was drafted it was designed with the knowledge that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely".  So, it pit conflicting interests against each other.  There is the House of Representatives that is elected by the people for two-year terms.  The Senate is elected by the states for 6-year terms.  The Presidency is elected nationwide by a weighted average so as to limit the threat of tyranny by the majority.  The Supreme Court is appointed by the President but confirmed by the Senate.  Supreme Court justices serve for life, and therefore do not need to campaign or curry favor.  The Federal government was given limited law-making power and all other law making power was reserved to the states and the people.  Each branch had its area of authority and they were to have to work together to get things done.  

That's the way it was designed.

That is not the way it has been working, and because that is not the way it has been working the Republic has been being diminished and a bureaucratic state run by special interests and the power hungry has been gaining ground.  It has been gradual, and we the people, are the proverbial frog in the pan of hot water.  

The best check against that is a Supreme Court that reads and applies the Constitution to the cases brought before it.  But when the court applies a "living constitution" interpretation to its deliberations, it invalidates the Constitution that was actually written.  The Supreme Court then, substitutes its judgement for that of the Presidency and the Congress.  There is a provision in the Constitution for amending it.  It is cumbersome and hard to do by design, but we have done so several times in our history.  Living Constitution justices amend it from the bench using their own judgement and values.  Originalist justices look at the Constitution, as written, and apply to it the meaning that it was understood to have at the time of writing.  It is those originalist justices that have some hope of slowing, and ideally reversing the devolution of our republic into just another nation ruled from the top down instead of the bottom up.

The Democrats in the Senate and the left wing throughout the country announced it was going to oppose, by any means necessary, whoever Donald Trump nominated to the Supreme Court.  I won't go into the fine details here, but the attack on Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be timed to delay the confirmation vote until after the mid-term elections, it was based on an accusation of something that had supposedly happened when he was a teenager and was unsupported by outside evidence.  With no evidence to support the claim every Democrat, but one, voted not to confirm him.  The way in which the left moved as a monolith to oppose an originalist judge was nothing but an attempt to control the court which, in turn, would allow the left to concentrate more power.  

Does Donald Trump want power?  Boy howdy does he.  But no more so than the Democrats.  He is just less artful about it.  Did everybody in the country who opposed Brett Kavanaugh's appointment do so because they had bad motivations.  Of course not.  Was Kavanaugh guilty of the accusation?  Probably not.  There was not only no evidence to substantiate the claim but there were several who testified or swore of knowledge that he was not the perpetrator, but I was not there and cannot say with certainty.  

When we elect Senators, Representatives, and the President, we are putting men and women in a position of great power and great opportunity to make decisions in their own self-interest that we will, often, never know about, but decisions that will impact the rest of us for the rest of our lives as well as the lives of our children and grandchildren.  Then they tell us what to think and believe and it is often difficult to know how much of what they are telling us is the truth.  Our best protection against that is an originalist Supreme Court.  

So, I don't like or trust Trump.  But as long as he appoints Supreme Court Justices who will uphold the Constitution that was written, and not some imaginary Constitution that the Court thinks should have been written, it is a bargain I have to make.  

Why We Are Angry

Why are conservatives so upset about the Obama health-care bill? Don’t they want medical care for the uninsured? Don’t they want to control the escalating costs of health insurance? Don’t they want people to be able to count on their insurance to be there when it is needed? Well, I am a conservative, by some definitions at least, and I want all those things. And it is pretty close to home for me. I have just undergone a very expensive medical procedure which is supposed to keep me alive. That is a pretty big deal and I didn’t have the money in my checking account to pay for this procedure. I will be paying a small fraction of the cost because I have a good health insurance plan. But I was and am bitterly opposed to the newly passed legislation. Am I a hypocrite? I don’t think so. Let me explain my opposition.

The United States is, more than anything else, an idea. Men sat down and talked about how a nation ought to be run. As they hashed out their ideas, they realized that this nonsense of governments ruling people was a false concept perpetuated by those in power. People are born with an inherent right to live their own lives. There are legitimate reasons to band together and form governments, but the power of that government comes from the people. The corollary is that people can’t legitimately give government power they do not have themselves. That idea created the most powerful and wealthiest nation in history. It also created a nation that evolved to eliminate slavery, insist on civil rights for all people, regardless of race, religion or sex and has been the most magnanimous toward conquered foes of any the world has ever seen. That idea has enabled power, wealth and compassion to spring up from the raw material of a new land and the hearts of a free people in a short period of time, in historical terms.

An integral part of that formula that has worked so well is a free market economy. Men and women have been able to utilize their resources to invent and create. It is a free wheeling process that produces some winners, some losers, and some incredible jackpots of success. There are medical treatments available today because people have been able to invest money in an idea, the idea has worked and made them fabulously wealthy while saving and improving the lives of countless others. That kind of thing can’t work without the possibility of profit to match the risk. Philanthropists can’t do it alone. When you invest money in a mutual fund that invests in a biomedical firm you are part of that process. The risks are high. More drugs fail the screening process than succeed, and each failure is incredibly costly. You invest your $100, or $1,000, or $10,000 because there is a possibility of a medical breakthrough that will cure cancer, or diabetes, or enable the paralyzed to walk again. And if it works, your investment will be returned to you several times over. You are contributing a small fraction of the cost, but your small fraction is pooled with thousands of others and that enables medical breakthroughs to happen. It is expensive, but the payoff is incredible. In the new health-care bill, this is going to be harder to do. The government is going to levy taxes on medical device makers that will make those devices more expensive and less available and therefore less profitable. They are going to have more control on what insurance can cover and how much it will pay. That will negatively impact the cash flow that allows medical breakthroughs. That is one problem.

Insurance companies have been demonized during this process because the Democrats needed an adversary to rally the troops. But the villain is not the insurance companies. It is power. Outsized power is always the problem. The ironic thing is that it has been a powerful government that has been persuading people to give them more power in order to remedy an inequity. That doesn’t work, because power is the problem. Power concentrated anywhere is a problem. But power concentrated in government is, perhaps, the worst kind, because it is so hard to take power away from government once it has it, and government already has the power of law and vast resources of institutions to enforce that power, and to do so violently. What the government should have done was not to take more power upon itself, but to give more power to the people to overrule the insurance companies.

One of the biggest problems with the current system is that it removes the patient from the cost equation. So employers, insurance companies, and drug companies are the only players with a significant financial stake in medical decisions, but the patients are the ones that are utilizing the benefits. There is a disconnect here. The government could have given the power back to the people, by allowing anybody who pays a health insurance premium to deduct it from their taxes, and encourage the use of high deductible medical insurance plans in conjunction with health savings accounts. Remove barriers to cross state purchase of insurance (a version of this is in the bill) and implement tort reform to minimize the incentive for doctors to perform defensive medicine.

The bill requires everybody to buy medical insurance. As I have written before, that is an understandable requirement if you are going to mandate that insurance companies take all applicants regardless of health. But this is the government in charge approach, not the freedom of choice approach. What if we incentivized people to buy high deductable medical plans with health savings accounts? What if instead of fining people who do not, or can’t afford to, comply, we provided a tax incentive to those who do comply by buying an inexpensive form of insurance that makes them more aware of the cost of their care? Why does the government opt for compulsion and control instead of freedom and incentive?

Then there is the cost. Any government entitlement has an inherently unknowable cost. The bill, as passed, utilizes some tricks to control the costs as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. One such trick is that the bill includes a takeover of student loans from the private sector. This has nothing at all to do with health-care, but because it is part of the bill, the profit from student loans is included in the accounting. The bill does not address the “doctor fix”, which is an annual dance congress goes through because Medicare & Medicaid underpay severely for medical care. In the case of primary care the underpayments are so drastic that physicians often lose money on Medicare patients. As a result congress regularly makes an adjustment to the built-in reimbursement cuts to primary care physicians. It is still not profitable for them to treat elderly patients, but the “doctor fix” keeps the losses at a more modest level. Because this routine practice is not addressed in the bill, it is using inaccurate revenue savings to come up with its numbers. These are two of several sleights of hand the bill uses to give the impression it can be fiscally responsible. We have a national unemployment rate of 10%, we are clawing our way out of a long and painful recession, and the Democrats have added to our economic burden.

Conservatives aren’t and have never been opposed to health-care reform. We have been opposed to government taking more control of our lives. Several individual bills that addressed the shortcomings in the existing system could have made a significant difference without undermining a system that has worked well for most Americans and damaging an already damaged economy.

Criminals & Terrorists

Is a terrorist a criminal or is he an enemy of the state. The answer to that question depends. Timothy McVeigh, William Ayers and Ted Kaczynski were and are criminals. They committed acts of terrorism, but they either acted alone or as a part of a small, domestic group. We may want the world to see the American spirit of fair play and civility, but there are other issues at play when we deal with Islamic terrorists.

Osama bin Laden has declared war on the United States. It is a bit absurd that a religious fanatic in the wastelands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (apparently depending on the day) can declare war on the world’s only superpower and be taken seriously. He doesn’t represent a government, so on whose behalf is he declaring war? It helps to understand that you and I think in terms of national identity. I am American. My grandparents came to this country from Italy, so it appears that Italy considers me to be Italian (it’s complicated). That is how I think of myself, as an American who is proud of his Italian heritage. My religion, family and political beliefs describe some of my characteristics; but I identify myself as an American.

Not all cultures think in those same terms, and we are ill served by insisting that they do. For Muslims in the Middle East, that identity is reversed. Their primary identification is with their religion or tribe first and their country is the modifier. So for us to say that radical Muslims can’t legitimately declare war on us is to insist that they see themselves as we see ourselves. But national boundaries in the Middle East are largely arbitrary, it is tribe &/or religion that is primary. As long as radical Islam has leaders who are willing to wage war on us, and followers and resources enough to carry out that threat, we are at war. At a time when the only entities capable of waging war were nations, it made sense to brush aside such a self-important claim. But when the world changes, if you don’t change with it, you get run over.

What about the rule of law and the justifiable U.S. pride in protecting civil liberties? Both President Obama and Eric Holder have made comments that sounded an awful lot like the conviction and execution of terrorists was a certainty. Those comments themselves go a long way toward harming the image we want to present to the world. Governments that know the outcome of trials before they take place are generally described as totalitarian. Apart from the P.R. harm that kind of rhetoric causes, it is inaccurate. Our system of justice is based on the theory expressed in the 1760s by William Blackstone, that, “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”. Hence our judicial mandate that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty (does that negate my earlier inclusion of Bill Ayers as a terrorist?). That principle frustrates justice and us at times, but there is a reason so much effort is made in our judicial system to protect the rights of the innocent, even if that means some guilty are protected as well. Government, by nature, will tend to be abusive. It was such abuse that motivated 13 colonies to reluctantly declare their independence from Great Britain. Most of us know of examples of people who have committed crimes but were never convicted. Our law enforcement officials are even required to warn people upon their arrest not to say anything that would incriminate themselves. In matters of criminal behavior, those safeguards are important. Criminals typically harm individuals or finite groups of people. War is focused on the submission of the enemy. As such the international community recognizes that different rules apply to war.

In war the need is not to get a conviction in a court of law, but to gather intelligence about the enemy’s plans and strategies. Miranda rights don’t apply here. In war the point is to keep enemy combatants out of the fray so they can’t continue to fight you. Bail, and potential acquittal, don’t apply here. The rules are different. We are not dealing with citizens that may or may not be guilty. We are dealing with an enemy caught in the act of waging war.

There are, admittedly problems with treating the war on terror as a true war. Because of the nature of the enemy, this war can go on for decades. That is a long time to maintain a state of war. Particularly when enemy attacks are intermittent and often comparatively small in scope. We need to figure out a way to be the best of what America is and still protect ourselves from organized attack by religious zealots. We need to be vigilant that we only apply warlike standards to those who are actually waging war on us. But we need to make sure that we take them seriously enough to put an end to their grandiose visions of toppling us. If we don’t, as ridiculous as it may seem, they may succeed.

Health-care in 3,200 Words or Less

The Democrats still have the upper hand. If they don’t support a bill it can’t pass, but their total control over the legislative process has been broken by the election of a Republican senator from Massachusetts. So those we elect to represent us now have a choice. What we have had for the last year was World Wide Wrestling. Now it is time for chess. My question is, are the Democrats and Republicans going to play politics or statesmanship?

Both parties acknowledge we need health-care reform. There is a legitimate issue as to whether now is the time to pursue it. We have an unprecedented budget deficit, severe unemployment and a shaky economic recovery to deal with. All three of which are arguably more urgent than health-care reform, unless you don’t have health insurance and are or become sick. On the other hand, health-care is on everybody’s mind now. This may be the time to pass a reasonable plan to improve the health-care environment. But are the members of either party willing to set aside extreme positions and pass something reasonable, at the risk of giving the other party a partial victory? I have a few suggestions.

First of all, there needs to be some kind of tort reform. Between malpractice insurance premiums and the need, whether perceived or real, to practice defensive medicine, the cost of litigation drives up the cost of health-care. Actual damages certainly need to be covered, but there ought to be a limit on punitive damages.

Drop the barriers to cross-state purchasing of medical insurance. Let the money flow to where the best coverage, services and prices are. The market will reward those who do well and punish those who don’t.

Make all health insurance premiums tax deductible to the payer of those premiums.

Make it illegal for an insurance company to drop somebody for other than non-payment of premiums, or to deny coverage.

People need help in paying for medical care, but if they are responsible for the cost of care, they will make better health-care decisions. Therefore, make it easier for anybody to buy a high deductible health insurance policy in conjunction with a Health Savings Account (HSA). For those below a certain income level have the government make an annual deposit into their Health Savings Account equal to the premiums plus a portion of the annual deductible. As their income increases above a certain threshold phase out the government paid deposit into their HSA at the rate of $1 lost for every $4 earned over the threshold. Mandate that health-care providers accept payments at low or no interest from patients below some specified income level. These provisions will address the adverse selection problem posed by the mandate to take all comers, as well as eliminate the need to force people to buy insurance that is in the current bill.

Allow insurance companies a reasonable and generous profit, but require that they pay out a certain percentage of revenue in benefits in order to participate in the cross-state sale of their products.

Get rid of the absurd taxes that have been proposed on health-care devices and insurance plans. If you want to hold the cost of something down, you need to lower the cost, not increase it.

There you go. In less than 3,200 words I have just written a comprehensive health-care plan that addresses cost and availability. It does not put the government in the health-care business and it does not gut a system that has produced many of the greatest advances in health-care anywhere in the world. I don’t know what the cost of this would be. It is possible that it could not be implemented until we get the economy rolling better, but it is a whole lot better than what has been proposed to date.

Politically Correct Racism

In January, 1988, Jimmy the Greek Snyder said, "The black is the better athlete. …and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes way back to the slave period. The slave owner would breed this big black with this big black woman so he could have a big black kid. That's where it all started." The comment, which was supposed to have been off the record, stirred up a great deal of controversy and got Jimmy the Greek fired from CBS.

In December 2002 then incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, speaking at Strom Thurmond’s 100^th birthday party said that the United States would have avoided "all these problems" if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. Thurmond had been a supporter of segregation, though that was clearly not one of the problems Lott was assuming would have been avoided. Despite Lott’s apologies to Jesse Jackson and the black community, and the fact that few people, if any, really thought that Lott was referring to racial issues when he made the statement, his career was effectively ended because of a kind remark to an old man.

In 2003, Rush Limbaugh worked briefly for ESPN on their NFL pregame show. He gave his opinion that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated. He expressed his belief that McNabb’s status was due to the fact that there were those in the NFL and the media who wanted to see a black quarterback succeed. An uproar developed and, under pressure, Limbaugh resigned his position with ESPN. Last year Limbaugh was part of a group seeking to buy the Rams, and was swiftly chased out of the hunt.

In February, 2007 Joe Biden said, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that's a storybook, man.” The statement was labeled as racist because Biden, it was argued, meant that it was unexpected for an African-American to be articulate. Biden was forced to apologize for the insensitivity of his statement.

In 2008 we learned that for the past 20 years Barak Obama had been attending the church of a racist minister who has uttered innumerable anti-American and anti-white sermons. Obama told us that his minister, Jeremiah Wright, was a close friend and like a member of his own family. When confronted with the views of his pastor, Obama told us that he never heard those things said. Wright sells video tapes of his sermons in which, among other things, he blames white Americans for committing acts of terrorism and of creating the AIDS virus to kill off blacks. Obama continued to support and defend him until Wright accused Obama, on national television, of doing what he has to do as a politician; At that point, Obama severed ties with Wright. Obama was elected President later that year.

A few days ago we learned that Senator Harry Reid has written that among Barak Obama’s political strengths are the facts that he is a “light skinned “African-American who does not speak with a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Senator Reid’s remarks are being characterized as racist and some, particularly on the right, are asking for his head on a platter.

We see an interesting pattern here. Except for the behavior of black men, each example here is not actually racist. Senator Lott said nothing about race whatsoever, but because he said a kind thing while talking about a man who had had racist ideas a generation earlier, he was accused of being racist himself. Jimmy the Greek, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Biden and Harry Reid were merely acknowledging the elephant in the room.

Jimmy the Greek was commenting on the obvious fact that slave owners had treated their black slaves like animals. He was not condoning this despicable practice, but acknowledging that it existed and expressing his, not illogical, view that those practices of slave owners a century earlier resulted in certain physical characteristics in the decedents of their slaves.  Rush Limbaugh acknowledged that there are those who want to see black people succeed. Is there something racist about noticing that? Wasn’t that what affirmative action was all about?

If somebody refers to me as articulate, I assume I have been paid a complement. Characterizing Joe Biden’s comment as racist is racist in and of itself, because it presumes that we need to be sensitive to the lack of good speech present in the African-American community. Well, some black people speak well and some don’t. Much like every other group of people. Calling Ronald Reagan the “Great Communicator” was a compliment. What is the difference? The difference is that Barak Obama is ½ black and we have to pretend not to notice, except in the most glowing and least stereotypical terms.

Senator Reid was guilty of three things. One was to notice that Obama is a lighter skinned black man and to further notice that that will make a difference in the way some people see him. Do we not know that to be true? Is it racist to notice? Second was to notice that Obama does not, generally, speak like a black urban man from the streets. Third was to use a term that is no longer in use. When I was growing up, calling a black man a Negro was the polite way to refer to him. There are plenty of reasons Harry Reid should be replaced in the Senate, but his remarks, if dated, don’t sink to the level of racism.


 How careful do we have to be? Are we not allowed to notice what we all see and know? How does that help anybody? Why does it offend anybody? I am overweight and I stutter. I neither pretend nor assume that people don’t notice those things about me. If they are pertinent to a conversation about me, I expect them to be brought up.

Now the example of Jeremiah Wright and Barak Obama is another matter. We have previously looked at overreactions by the hypersensitive to innocent remarks or factual comments about a state of affairs. Wright, on the other hand, repeatedly made inflammatory remarks apparently designed at class warfare, while a future President used him as a spiritual leader. I was asked a while ago if I thought Obama was racist. I don’t know what is in the man’s heart, but when I see the people he surrounds himself with and the policies he espouses, and his rhetoric, it doesn’t look good.

In a climate when a white man can’t observe that some people might want to see a black man succeed in the NFL, how in the world did we elect a President who has so thoroughly immersed himself in a sea of racial divisiveness? Has political correctness brought us to the level of fulfilling George Orwell’s prophecies in “1984”?

Muslim Protesters

A group of Muslims gathered outside the federal courthouse in Detroit Friday to demonstrate as the Christmas day airline bomber was arraigned. They were there to demonstrate against radical Islam. They carried signs saying that Islam is a religion of love not hate. One demonstrator went on camera for a national news organization to say if the terrorists want to kill him, he is there and available.

Every news outlet in the country needs to make note of these brave Americans. They know, maybe better than most, the risk they take to speak out against the desecration of their religion by jihadists. The silence from Muslims has been a concern to me and a source of condemnation of the entire religion among many. If they haven’t been silent, if it has been the lack of news coverage that has made us unaware of their protestations, then the news media is largely to blame for much of the anti-Muslim sentiment in the country. Nobody thinks that white supremacists represent Christianity. We all know enough about the teachings of Christianity, and we know enough Christians (if we aren’t Christian ourselves) to know that the ideals of white supremacy are anathema to Christians. But that same distinction isn’t as clear for Muslims. It is people like these demonstrators that will isolate radical Islam from Islam as much as white supremacists are isolated from Christianity.

These brave people should be heralded and encouraged. Their being there to proclaim to the world their opposition to the use of their faith to promote hatred and murder will give others the courage to stand up and be counted. I thank them for letting me know they are out there.

Democracy As Mob Rule

For all of its virtues, democracy can be a dangerous thing, which can easily deteriorate into mob rule. That is the genius behind the constitution. The founding fathers were concerned about a majority abusing their power at the expense of the minority. That is why we have two houses of congress which are elected in different ways. It is why we have three distinct branches of government, which are chosen differently. It is the reason behind the, often misunderstood, Electoral College, and it is the reason some states refused to ratify the constitution until the Bill of Rights was added. As brilliant as the constitution is, it is not bullet proof. It can still be abused and used to allow a majority to assert their superior numbers and impose injustices upon the rest.

This isn’t as hard to understand as we may like to think. Most of us try to live according to our belief system. That belief system may be skewed by self-interest, but skewed or not it is what we believe. Thus there was a time when many white men and women believed black men & women to be lesser humans, and as such, it was as acceptable to use them as slaves as it was to keep beasts of burden. We may look upon that now and decry that belief system to be barbaric, but people believed it and acted on that belief. The fact that it was believed primarily by people that profited from that belief, only serves to warn us to examine our motives for accepting what we may claim to be obvious truths.

The same holds true of those who believe that it is the government’s role to take care of us. If your belief system is that people can’t be trusted to make responsible decisions, you may logically believe that it is the responsibility of government to make those decisions for them. The obvious pitfall that government decisions are made by people and people who can insulate themselves from the more negative consequences of their decisions is overlooked.

So, here we are with Democrats running both the legislative and executive branches of the government ramming through a health-care bill without regard for the rights, beliefs or protests of constituents at home or Republicans in congress. The arguments originally were that we had to curtail the escalating cost of health-care and provide benefits for the nation’s uninsured. In the headlong race to get something past, we seem to have forgotten the goals.

Republicans wanted to make insurance more affordable, and therefore more available utilizing several methods to achieve that goal. And this without undermining what is arguably working right with the present system.

Much of the cost of medical care today can be attributed to litigation. Between the cost of malpractice insurance, and the need for doctors and hospitals to practice defensive medicine resulting in unnecessary tests and procedures, we are all paying for the jackpot jury awards of the few that call 1-800- SUE-SOMEONE. So it has been proposed that laws be enacted to control outsized medical lawsuits. The Democrats refused to include any such provision in their health-care bill.

Because of an anomaly of wage controls imposed during WWII, medical insurance in our country today is considered largely an employer benefit. This has been codified by the fact that an employer gets to deduct the cost of providing medical insurance as a taxable business expense, without the employee having to declare it as income. Smaller employers often find it difficult to afford to provide health insurance. Even those that can afford it, find that the options available to smaller employers are less attractive than those available to a large employer. So it has been proposed that all health insurance premiums be tax deductible, whether paid for by an employer or an individual or family. The Democrats refused to include any such provision in their health-care bill.

Different states require different provisions in health insurance plans sold in their jurisdictions. The tighter the provisions the more insurance companies have to charge to cover the cost of those benefits. Also, because insurance companies have to apply to each individual state for the right to sell insurance in that state some insurers may decide to market their products in some states and not others. So it has been proposed that we be allowed to buy any insurance policy offered by any insurance company anywhere in the country. This would cause the money to flow to those policies and companies that offered better costs and services, increasing competition and lowering costs. The Democrats refused to include any such provision in their health-care bill.

Democrats have been claiming that they want a bi-partisan bill, but what they apparently mean by that is that they want Republicans to support their bill without using any of their ideas. Their solution is to mandate changes from Washington D.C. Studies have concluded that instead of lowering the cost of health-care, their provisions will increase insurance costs. The Democrats want to provide coverage for all Americans, but they are raiding Medicare, which is already going broke and underpaying for benefits. The Democrats have been vilifying insurance companies, who we can replace with another company if unhappy. Can we expect better from the government which we can’t change and who has the force of law to impose their decisions? The Democrats claim that their bill will not increase the deficit. However, they are using tricks of timing and hiding expenses in other bills to cover their deception.

The majority in congress and the White House are about to take away from us our right to control our health-care. They, aparently, do not think any idea put forth by the minority party worthy of considering. Power does indeed tend to corrupt. Not even the constitution can protect us from all abuses of power if the majority we elect are hell-bent on imposing their rule on the rest of us.

Rumors

Remember when senators, congressmen and celebrities stood up and declared that President Bush had lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? I was not a fan of President Bush, but I remember how angry I was when liberals claimed that he lied about WMD. He was wrong. He may have been more eager to go to war against Iraq than he should have been. His idea of spreading democracy in the mid-East may have been naive, arrogant or both. But he had not lied about the weapons. Many in our intelligence agencies, as well as intelligence agencies around the world, let alone Saddam’s own generals, believed he had WMD. And Saddam did nothing to dispel that impression. Those that claimed he lied were lying themselves. It convinced me that they were not patriots, but partisans. They were willing to say or do anything for political expediency. They let their hatred for the President dictate what they chose to believe, or say about him. They knew, or should have known, the difference between lying and making a mistake. They seemed to be so blinded by partisanship, that they deemed the Bush Administration unworthy of either honesty or critical thinking. The way President Bush was treated was unfair, and won few, if any converts.

I have been getting emails for some time now showing President Obama standing with his hands folded in front of him, while men and women in uniform around him are saluting. The email accuses the President of showing lack of respect to the flag. If you watch a video of that scene, you will see that the President has just taken the stage to the band playing “Hail to the Chief”. It turns out his behavior is absolutely appropriate.

That is one example of many accusations circulating on the Internet. When I get these I usually do some research before passing them on. I often find them to be ill-founded and they go into my deleted files folder. I can give a litany of things I believe the President has done and is doing badly. With all that ammunition, why do we bother with accusations that he isn’t an American by birth, or that he is a Muslim. When these or other hate filled accusations are circulated, it may fire up the converted, but only puts the more provable and substantial arguments in a bad light. Let’s assume that he is a Muslim, communist, who was not born in the United States. If you don’t have multiple credible sources, which cannot be impeached by his defenders, circulating those accusations just gives those who are on the fence less reason to believe the other, more mundane arguments against the President’s policies. You know…those things that would sway the undecided.

When Senator Kennedy stood up in the senate & called President Bush a liar, he only proved to me that he was not honest in his criticism. Michael Moore may get something right every now and then, but I will never know it, because his bazaar accusations keep me from ever giving him an objective hearing. He past that point in 1989 when he produced “Roger & Me”.

If you think that President Obama is bad for the country, stop spreading rumors that only inflame his defenders and damage your own credibility. You may be right, but if you are too quick to pass on rumors and emails that don’t pass the smell test, you hurt your cause.

The Ecology of Economy

In my college days I learned how a hunting restriction on a deer herd in Southern Utah resulted first in a spike in the number of deer and then the collapse of the population due to overgrazing and starvation. It turns out that people had eliminated the natural predators and than eliminated man as a predator. We had thrown that ecosystem out of balance. By trying to do a good thing, people had caused more harm.

The economy is much like a natural ecosystem. When we try to tamper with it, we are more likely to mess it up than help. There are just too many moving parts and too many unknown nuances to keep track of.

That is why attempts to manage the economy so often backfire. Whereas minor tweaks designed to influence it can help, efforts to control it often end in disaster. There are just too many variables, and therefore too many things to go wrong when we get involved in the minutia.

When the financial system teetered on the brink, the proper response was to cut taxes and let the freed up money flow to those who would use it to buy goods, pay down debt, and invest in projects that would produce jobs and rescue the system. Directing the flow of money by the federal government, is subject to political favoritism and ideologically motivated efforts to send the money where the politicians think it will do the most good. But where it will do the most good is, as often as not, unknowable. Before there was a Microsoft or an Apple, nobody knew these companies would emerge to revolutionize the computer industry.

When trying to remedy the health-care system, the proper response is to facilitate the competitive pressures of the marketplace to determine the best use of health-care dollars. Demonizing insurance companies, as the administration and many in congress have been doing lately is political gamesmanship. Of course you can find examples of abuse by insurance companies. What makes us think that the government will be more beneficent? Does anybody think the IRS is full of virtue and light? The answer is to regulate the abuses (i.e., an insurance company ought no to be allowed to cancel coverage on somebody undergoing treatment), and permit more insurance companies to compete for the business by removing barriers to buying medical insurance across state lines. When you do that, more creative solutions to the problems will be found because there will be more people and companies looking for ways to compete for the business.

Those that want government to solve economic problems want to cure inequity. But we can’t. There will always be inequity. Government isn’t a scalpel. It is a chain saw. It is big, unwieldy, and loud. It is a fine tool for what it does well. But surgery is not what it does well. We should let the government do the work of freeing up markets. Allow money to flow to the entrepreneurs who will think of ways to employ it that the beurocrats and politicians won’t. Not that they aren’t smart enough. I’m sure some of them are, but we limit the opportunities to succeed when we try to use the government to manage the economy. Bill Gates developed software, a politician didn’t. Henry Ford developed a way to mass produce cars, a bureaucrat didn’t. The government’s job is to provide very broad rules and free up money, then get out of the way

Shades of Things To Come

Like me, you may have thought it was about better statistics on breast cancer detection and survival. It wasn’t. It was a cost benefit analysis. Stay with me on this, because this article is not about breast cancer or mammograms, but we need to go there to get to the point.

It turns out the U. S. Preventative Services Task Force, which had recommended in 2002 that all women over 40 receive screening mammograms decided last week that only women between 50 and 75 should receive the tests unless there is an underlying history to indicate otherwise. Routine mammograms have reduced the incidence of breast cancer in women by 30%. According to the Wall Street Journal, 40% of patient years saved by mammograms are for women under 50, but it takes 1,904 mammograms to detect one case of cancer for women in their 40s and only 1,339 to detect a case in a woman in her 50s. Of course the number would decrease for a woman over 75, but the task force decided that she was so close to the end of her life that we would be wasting money on her. According to the op-ed article in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, the task force has no oncologists or radiologists, but they decided that the cost was too great to have women in their 40s or over 75 undergo the tests.

We should all make medical decisions based on our own cost benefit analysis. There are a whole host of tests and procedures that we don’t do because the cost and inconvenience of going through those tests doesn’t compute for us. But we make those decisions with our own lives and our own money. What we have here is a panel whose decisions are generally accepted by Medicare making that decision.

President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats in congress have been assuring us that there would be no rationing with their version of health-care reform. But there will have to be guidelines adhered to. It may not be unreasonable to weigh the cost of a procedure against its potential benefits, but when we put an impersonal government agency in charge of determining costs, benefits and eligible recipients of care, we are putting our vary lives in the hands of a government that does not know us personally. When that happens, you can count on sacrificial lambs as budget deficits increase and resources become scarcer.

War and Peace

"Ronald Reagan once said “history teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap”.

Walk alone down a dark alley in the wrong part of town and you are asking for trouble. Walk down that same alley with ten of your well armed friends, and you are likely to be left alone.

There was recently an article in a popular news magazine that posited the idea that nuclear arms make the world safer because nobody with them is willing to confront anybody else that has them. That was behind the MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine of the cold war. If both the Soviet Union and the United States had enough nuclear capability to wipe each other off the map, and no effective way of stopping incoming ICBMs, nobody would launch a first strike. While arming the world with nuclear weapons is not a safe or sane approach to world peace, we can learn something from that period of history.

There are bullies in this world who run governments as well as school yards and organized crime. Seeking peace is a good thing, but we must be aware that the bullies only respect and believe power. If you are overly reluctant to demonstrate your power, or if you sue for peace too anxiously, these bullies will interpret your behavior as weakness. Convinced of your willingness to avoid war at all costs they will be inclined to push you to the point where you have no choice but to capitulate or respond with force. If, for example, you are unwilling to allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, you can’t let them put you in a position where you will have to react with more force to a larger threat and cost more lives than would have been the case if you had clearly drawn your line in the sand at the beginning of the exchange and reacted with targeted force the instant that line was crossed. You will face anger at home and abroad, but you will have saved lives, money and, ironically, preserved the peace more effectively, by using force sooner rather than later.

The longer you wait to address hostility in the Iranians, North Koreans, Al Qaeda or even the Russians, the more egos are in play on the side of those aggressive regimes, and the less they believe your threats and ultimatums. You are enticing them to push you as far as they think they can, and that is likely farther than you are, or should be, willing to be pushed. The result is a much larger scale war than would have been the case with a sterner position and reaction in the beginning.

A clear example of that is Saddam Hussein. After the Gulf War there were terms set down for Iraq to follow. Saddam agreed to those terms, but repeatedly violated them. Little of consequence was done in return. The UN and the USA wagged their fingers and gave them stern looks. Then came September 11, 2001. President Bush was in no mood for a repeat. An ultimatum was given, allow UN weapons inspectors unfettered access to your country, go into exile, or be attacked. There are reports that tell us that Saddam’s generals believed he had weapons of mass destruction, because he believed giving that impression gave him cache’. Those reports indicate that he was convinced that the United States would not launch a major assault on his country. We see the results of those miscalculations.

We want peace. The United States does not seek war for conquest. We have not occupied or annexed a vanquished foe since the Indian wars of the 1800s. But we must realize that we value human life more than our adversaries do. We can’t let that desire for peace allow them to back us into a corner. We can’t give up weapons systems without getting something meaningful in return, and we can’t use fewer troops than is necessary to get the job done in Afghanistan, and we can’t wag our finger and talk sternly to Iran. We can’t wait until the cost of waiting is capitulation or more massive devastation.

Power Corrupts

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."...Lord Acton

We all have ideas that we believe to be important. For example, here I am writing a blog with the hope that anybody will read it and that if they do, I can change something. I, however, am pretty harmless. I will write what I think, and a few people will read it. Some may agree with me and others will not. There is an outside chance that my thoughts will reach somebody with some influence and power, but even if that happens, they are the ones with the power, not me.

But when we elect people to public office, we empower them to act on our behalf in ways that effect all of us. By electing them, we give them immense power. The higher the office, the more power they obviously have. And they have ideas that they think are important too. The difference is that they are in a position to do something about it.

When our economy was on the brink of collapse, those that we elected rushed to pass a bill to pull us back from the edge. That is what they should have done. But they had some important ideas about how government should run. They thought that as long as they had to pass a bill, they would spend $800,000,000,000 on a lot of things that had nothing to do with rescuing the economy.The economy appears to be recovering and only a fraction of that money has been spent, but it will be spent anyway. Most economists expect a slow and tenuous recovery, and many would attribute that, at least in part, to the policies in Washington.

There is little doubt among those in the financial world that something had to be done. But last November we gave Democrats something they had not had in decades. We gave them the Presidency, a large majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. I am not a big fan of the two party system, but that is far superior to a one party system. A one party system is what we gave the Democrats. We gave them more power than any political party has had in a very long time.

Among other things, we have had imposed upon us, in rapid succession, an economic bailout bill that goes far beyond bailing out the economy. The House has passed a Cap & Trade bill that, if passed by the Senate, many believe will not resolve the problems it was purportedly designed to remedy, but will hurt the economy that the bailout bill was intended to fix. Now there is an emergency to pass a health care bill that will give government unprecedented control over our lives and a large chunk of our economy.

Washington DC has a habit of making a mess of things as it is, but when we give one party such unchecked power, we can expect unchecked corruption.

Is Medicare a Good Model for National Health Care?

It is a rhetorical technique to state a debatable issue as if it were fact. It puts opponents at the disadvantage of having to play defense, and those who may be less well informed will have a tendency to assume your statement is true.

I keep hearing proponents of a government option in health care use Medicare as an example of how well it will work. The President did this Wednesday night. So, just how well does Medicare work?

Many doctors will not take new Medicare patients because the program underpays so severely as to make it impossible to earn a living if they see too many patients. Not impossible to earn a good living. Impossible to earn a living. Some Medicare reimbursements are so low that, depending on the doctor's overhead, each patient visit can be a few dollars either side of break even. It requires those of us with the kind of insurance that the administration and some in congress are villainizing to pay our doctors enough for our visits that they are able to afford to see Medicare patients at all.


Medicare is due to start bleeding money faster than it is taking in money in just a few years.


The President thinks there is so much "waste and abuse" in Medicare and Medicaid that cutting it out will fund nearly all of his new plan. If there is that much "waste and abuse" in Medicare, why not cut it out now?

Part of the reason is that in any bureaucracy there will be waste and abuse. The larger the bureaucracy, the more waste and abuse there will be. That is just the nature of the beast. Nothing runs perfectly and the larger and more complex the organization, the less perfectly it will run. It is fantasy to think you will eliminate waste and abuse any more than you can eliminate gravity. In order to get money out of Medicare he is going to have to cut payments in a system that already underpays to the extent that health care is now being rationed to the elderly by virtue of doctors not accepting new patients.

The President promised that a government run plan will be self-funding. That is the way the Postal Service works.

How long did you have to stand in line the last time you went to the post office? Postage rates have been increasing annually for the last few years and still the Postal Service is losing money. Rather than resolving the problems by being more competitive and customer friendly, they are talking about cutting delivery services to 5 days a week and closing some post offices. This is what happens when the government runs something. There are no competitive forces at play to compel creative thinking. It doesn't become a matter of providing better services to the customer. Do we really want to replace what is arguably a good health care system in need of improvement with a government monopoly similar to the Postal Service or Medicare?

Presidential Speech on Health Care

He may not be succinct, but The President does deliver a good speech. As was true for his campaign for office, he articulated many positions most Americans can agree with. Who wants to see a woman denied coverage in the middle of her cancer treatments? Who doesn't agree that everybody should be able to obtain affordable health care? Who would object to a government run health plan that was completely self-funding, did not compete unfairly with the private sector, and only covered the poorest 5% among us? Who would not want all of those things and have it not cost any money? Who doesn't want there to be a Santa Clause?

The goals the President laid out Wednesday night are accepted by Democrats, Republicans and independents. The debate has always been about how to get there from here. He threw in something of an olive branch on torte reform, though it was either so vague, or I was so stupid that I'm not sure what exactly was being offered.

To continue to demand a government option in the face of the public opposition to it is either dogmatism, arrogance, or political expediency. Expediency being the least objectionable of the three. After all, if he can't get enough votes in his own party to support a bill without a public option, he can't get the bill. He did leave a crack in the door but it is a narrow one. Some think he insisted on the public option then threw it out. That is not the way it sounded to me, but we will see.

Libertarians will have a difficult time with the idea of compelling people to buy insurance. I am among them, but I am a libertarian with a small "L". I am practical too. There are likely three purposes for the mandatory insurance.

First of all, in practical terms everybody is insured now, since it is illegal to deny medical care to those in need. So those who are uninsured can show up in an emergency room and get taken care of without paying for it. So even these people are receiving a minimal level of care now and paying no premiums. Although they may see the doctor less often, when they do see one, it is under the most expensive circumstances.


The second purpose is likely the fact that in order to prohibit insurance companies from denying or canceling coverage, you have to deal with something called adverse selection. That is the tendency of healthy people to postpone buying insurance until they need it. That gaming of the system destroys the concept of insurance as a risk pool, where we all contribute now because we don't know who will need the pooled money (premiums) we have all contributed or when that money may be needed. If we allow people to do that I don't know how we are going to be able to keep premiums at an affordable level.

The third reason is related. That is the additional healthy insureds are a carrot to get the insurance companies to support the program. Thus, this provision may actually be a means to keep the government option out of the final bill because insuring everbody means lower premiums for everybody, thus keeping down health care costs. So I am conflicted about this provision of the plan. There are practical reasons to support it, but their are philosophical reasons to oppose it.



For the sake of brevity, I will only deal with these items for now, but there will be more to come.

Don't Let Politicians Divide Us Into Opposing Teams

Why do we insist on choosing up sides in order to decide what we believe? During the last Presidential campaign somebody sent me a You Tube link that showed several Obama supporters interviewed on the street, being asked questions like, "What do you like most about Obama, the fact that he is pro-life or that he selected Sarah Palin for his running mate?". I'm sure there were plenty of people who caught on & were therefore edited out of the video, but there were certainly enough who supported both of his supposed positions to make an entertaining several minutes. These people didn't support Barak Obama because of his positions on the issues. They supported him because he was a Democrat, or because he was a liberal, or because he was black, or because he was articulate, or because their friends supported him. These people went along & allowed other people tell them what to believe about Obama and, presumably what to believe about McCain.

The most recent example is the healthcare debate. People are lining up on this, and stridently defending positions outlined by what appears to be their party of choice. A few days ago several people on Facebook had posted, ""No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. We are only as strong as the weakest among us." If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day." This is a sentiment most if not all of us can agree with. But this quote seemed to be being used, by and large, to promote a particular version of healthcare & to imply that those that don't support provisions in the bills now before congress are opposed to healthcare. But pay attention. Republicans have advanced several proposals to make healthcare both affordable and available to all Americans.

We can agree on many things that political teams in Washington DC want us to believe we cannot agree upon. If we refuse to let them set the agenda for us, we will be able to come up with something reasonable and bi-partisan.

Obfuscation

Why do we need 1,013 pages for a healthcare bill? Maybe for the same reason we need to hurry up & pass the bill yesterday, before there is opportunity to debate and improve it. The more that is in the bill, the more you can get passed what couldn't stand on its own.

If you can frame the argument as opposition to this bill is equal to opposition to healthcare reform, while putting everything you could possibly want, but never get passed on its own in that bill, the better your chance of getting things passed that the American people would never allow if they knew they had a choice.

Why not pass those provisions in the bill we can agree on, see how it works and go from there?

We Aren't Enemies

I was debating politics with my step-father several years ago, when part of his argument rolled around to the fact that Barry Goldwater had opposed Medicare. This was meant to be an indictment to prove that Senator Goldwater was opposed to providing medical care for the elderly. The fact of the matter was that the senator from Arizona was in favor of another bill that he believed did the job in a better way.

Recently another relative asked me how families were supposed to afford health insurance if not by the passing of the healthcare bill now before congress. So I gave her a list of things that could be done without gutting and undermining our current system.

In an effort to win votes and support for their side, politicians and interest groups often paint their solution as the only solution to a problem. The corollary is that if you oppose their solution you are opposed to solving the problem. Don't let this hocus pocus fool you. Many, if not most, politicians and Americans want to address inequities in our society. They want to protect us from terrorists, and preserve our civil rights. They want to encourage prosperity for all and provide for a social safety net. The arguments, for the most part, revolve around the methods of resolving problems and ranking priorities. The demagoguery comes into play once a proposal is made by one side or the other and then both sides begin a game of deceit and gamesmanship in order to preserve power and prestige for their party or ideology.

We forget that we are all on the same side. Remember the mood of the country on September 12, 2001? You can argue about some of the decisions that came out of that mood, but we recognized that more important than whether we were Republicans or Democrats, labor or management. we were Americans & there were real enemies out there whose quarrel with us wasn't the methods of achieving our goals, but the goals themselves.

When somebody holds up a banner that says "Healthcare for All", we can all agree with that goal. Just don't get confused and begin to think that if we oppose the present legislation we don't want anything done. That is just a ploy to scare you into supporting something that you may not understand, or with which you may not agree. It is an effort to make you believe that those who oppose this bill are against quality healthcare for all Americans. Be assured, that isn't the case.

We Can't Afford Another Entitlement

Within days of his inauguration President Obama asked Congress to pass an economic stimulus bill. He said that it had to be done quickly and he wanted it to be bi-partisan, but left the details up to the Democrats in the House of Representatives. When Republicans offered to confer on what should be included in the bill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "we won, we'll write it". The result was a bloated bill, filled with virtually everything on the Democratic wish list they have been wanting for years. Most of the spending in that bill would not take place until long after the immediate crisis was expected to end. Because of the perceived urgency in the economy, the bill was passed without most in congress reading it in its entirety.

In the midst of what has been called the worst economic crises since the Great Depression, The President asked that a cap and trade bill be passed by congress. The house has passed that bill which, if passed by the Senate, will reduce greenhouse emissions in the United States, and move those emissions to other countries who will get the jobs we will lose with less regard for the environment than what we have here in the United States. So global warming will not be helped & a weak economy in the USA will be weakened further.

Now the President wants us to pass a healthcare bill that will establish another entitlement in our system. We are facing the bankruptcy of both Social Security and Medicare, and he wants another, more pervasive and costly entitlement. He says it will help our economic predicament, as if his saying so will make it true. It will not.

Each of these bills deal with goals that most Americans can agree need to be addressed. But they can be done in a way that is reasonable rather than partisan. The healthcare bill before congress is something we can't afford. Remember when we didn't buy things we couldn't afford? This is one of those times. There are things we can do to improve the healthcare delivery system without creating a universal entitlement. Because the Democrats won large majorities in both houses and the Presidency does not mean they ought to rule as despots. They can try ruling as statesmen.

Do We Want Government In the Healthcare Business?

Where do people go to obtain cutting edge, state of the art healthcare? More than any other country, the answer is the United States. That healthcare is expensive. Not everybody can afford the most sophisticated care or the newest drugs. That makes some of the rest of us feel that we are being treated unfairly. But the medical care and medicine we get today was cutting edge & state of the art several years ago. Where would we be if those technologies & drugs had never been developed?

There will always be inequities in the world. Some of us will always have less and some of us will always have more. That isn't fair, but that is life. The trick is to address the needs of those who need help without inhibiting the system that develops the kind of medical treatment people come from around the world to get.

The biggest thing you can do to inhibit that innovation is to make the government an insurer. As Lord Acton said, "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Making government both the rule maker and the provider in the medical care arena, gives government all the power with little opportunity to check it. With government in the game as an insurer, private insurance will, over time, be crowded out of the market. That would leave you and me with only the government as our insurance company. When the government is in charge they will have a conflict of interest. On the one hand, they will be providing benefits for the country's healthcare, on the other hand, they will be responsible for all the costs. We are already doing this with Medicare, and Medicare underpays to the extent that many doctors will not take on any new Medicare patients. I heard one doctor recently say that his net profit on each Medicare patient is $4 per visit. that kind of profit will not permit the innovation that will cure cancer or diabetes.

There is much in the healthcare system that needs fixing. But the current bill before the House is not the only way to fix it. Don't let anybody convince you that it is their way or the highway. We can fix healthcare without a government option.