Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark

Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

That sounds all well and good until you stop and think about it. Who decides what constitutes “underspending”? Ultimately, under Obamacare, prices will be driven up through inflation as outrageous hospital bills are presented as evidence along with insurance companies’s counter-proposals that they are “underspending”.

A concrete example of this would be my recent experience my fourth child’s birth.

By the fourth child you pretty much know what’s going on and, barring any complications, things generally tend to go like clockwork. Well thankfully that’s pretty much what happened in our case. Biologically the birth was seamless, labor for about 2 hours, 3 pushes, and we welcome our son into the world.

So what could I possibly say about an uninteresting birth to show how Obamacare is such a terrible idea?

Enter the nurses.

When we arrived at the hospital we were taken to the prep room where my wife was to change into a hospital gown, get checked, and wait for the room to be prepared for us. It took my wife about 5 minutes to get prepared and it was apparently somewhat of a slow day so rooms were available and already prepped. But it still took us about 30 minutes to get into one. Why? Apparently there are new regulations which call for the nurses to play 20 questions with the mother-to-be before she can be admitted into a room. This process took so long that the mid-wife, who is not considered a medical professional by the way, decided to cut in and actually check how far along my wife was. I’m glad she did, too, because my wife was basically ready to deliver right then.

We were quickly whisked into a delivery room where the nurse playing 20 questions was joined by a team of nurses whose primary focus was to give my wife an IV because she had tested positive for strep and according to their regulations the mother needed to have at least two doses of an antibiotic before giving birth, a process which they expected to take about 20 minutes. Keep in mind at this point my wife was completely ready, biologically, to give birth.

This IV was so important to the hospital staff that they called in at least 4 different nurses to try and find a vein. After the fourth my wife finally told them she couldn’t hold back anymore and would push whether they liked it or not. I passed the last nurse who had tried to give my wife the IV in the hall later and overheard her complaining to the head nurse about how she didn’t want to get written up because procedures hadn’t been followed to the letter. So all the nurses run out into the hall way to discuss the situation and how to reconcile what is happening in the delivery room to their procedures, leaving us alone with only the midwife in the room.

And that’s how we welcomed my 3rd son into the world. With the medical professionals debating their procedures in the hallway while the non-medical professionals, unencumbered by a sense of obligation to follow procedure or the threat of the loss of our jobs if we failed to follow that procedure, got the job done.

The following morning my wife was cleared to leave by her doctor about 12 hours after giving birth but the nurses wouldn’t let her go until she had been there a minimum of 24 hours because, once again, procedure had to be followed.

Two weeks later we received the bills from the hospital. All told the hospital is charging about $14,000 for about 12 hours worth of work and since its itemized we get to see that my wife was given an $11 aspirin (single pill) and my son was given a $6 passifier (we bought a two-pack of the same passifier from a store for less than $4). Thankfully we won’t have to pay the full $14,000+ bill. My employer has graciously provided me with an insurance plan I had no say in and that plan is supposed to help deflate the bill somewhat. By how much we don’t know yet, hopefully it won’t be more than what we budgeted.

And that brings be back to why the bomb the Forbes article tries to tell us is actually a good thing is not, in fact, a good thing.

You see, the insurance company is rightly going to counter the hospital’s outrageous bill with a statement of how much they think it should be and they will base their percentage of coverage on that. Under Obamacare it seems the insurance company will simply be forced to pay whatever magic numbers the bean counters at the hospital dream up. In other words, we will be moving from a badly damaged pseudo-market system to a completely centrally controlled one where the prices charged have absolutely no relation to the real world at all. The hospital can charge thousands of dollars for an aspirin and under Obamacare insurance companies will be forced to pay every cent either then or later after the customer has been stuck with the bill. Either way the result is the same, the cost of medical care will skyrocket because of their government-granted monopoly.

Of course that’s not the only change that will take place. The other part of Obamacare is, as the Forbes article rightly notes, the destruction of any “for-profit” insurance company. Meaning the only insurers who will be able to survive such lunacy are insurance companies that don’t have to operate according to the virtuous system of profit and loss. It is, as was noted before Obamacare passed, the perfect scenario for sneaking in through the backdoor a universal healthcare system.

Now you might be thinking at this point that free healthcare for everyone sounds like a great idea. But there are two catches to that notion.

One is the simple fact that nothing is free. Defenders of other socialized healthcare systems like to point to how their cost of medical care is cheaper than ours. But if the cost of medical care is fixed by the state then such a claim makes no sense since it cannot be objectively compared to anything else. Remember that $11 aspirin? We only know that such a price is outrageous because we have a much more free market outside the hospital which currently charges as little as .0001 cents per pill.¹ If the prices were fixed, as they were during World War II for many goods, we simply have no way to know whether we are being over or under charged.²

The other is that the further you remove the good or service provider from the person paying for the good or service, the less of an incentive the provider has for making sure what they are providing is worthwhile to the consumer. The insistence of the nurses to follow procedure rather than attend to the actual medical need highlights this point.

As I said in a discussion on this topic on Facebook:

It would help to drive costs down if I were the one paying for my care, even if I leveraged an insurance company who is my client and not my employers’, and if I were the one who got to determine my care, instead of merely accepting whatever the doctors and nurses dictated to me.

The answer to our healthcare problem is not more intervention. Its freedom.

1. A quick search yielded a deal on Amazon of .01 for 100-pills.
2. Consequently, this is also why its invalid for economists to claim that World War 2 brought us out of our recession

Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark

But while they march and chant and propose lists of endless demands I can’t help but wonder, are those who are so outraged clear on who their enemy really is?

Its the wedding of a select few corporations to the government combined with a lack of accountability that is the problem. The father of capitalism, Adam Smith, was opposed to the notion of joint-stock companies which enjoy limited liability, enforced by the state  (ie. the East India Company) for many of the reasons the Occupy Wall Street protesters are now upset. He didn’t believe corporations should be considered legal entities in themselves (from which we get the modern view that corporations are persons). And he was opposed to the separation of ownership and management which he rightly predicted would end up harming both the owners and managers.

So who was for this joint-stock system which has blossomed into what we have today?

Many of the Occupy Wall Street movement are openly sympathetic to socialistic notions. What those protesters likely fail to understand is that the same movement which supported socialistic economic policies also supported joint-stock companies because they believed that by allowing the common man to own stock he would have a better chance to become wealthy but in order to encourage the common man to take such a risk his liability needed to be limited. And Smith, among others, accurately predicted the problems that limited liability would produce. Its really not fair to place all the blame on CEOs for accepting golden parachutes when the real problem is that such a disconnected ownership structure provides the perfect environment in which to draft such contracts.

So if the protestors want to be consistent they need to read their history to understand that 1. capitalism is not their enemy nor the cause of the corruption they are rightly upset over and that 2. the fault does not lie solely with corporations in general (not all companies that are listed on the NASDAQ or the Dow Jones Industrial Index are evil) or even corrupt corporations but with the toxic mix of a select few corporations which enjoy government favor and protection.

What essentially needs to happen is for the Tea Party to mix their hatred of the government with the  Occupy Wall Street’s hatred of corrupt businesses. I’m pretty sure the two would be pleasantly surprised at the result.

Here’s a funny video from 1949 on “What is a corporation?”

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/GOZN92VGr_A” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Share/Bookmark

As part of my answer I mentioned the oppression of natural marriage proponents by homosexuals and was subsequently asked to provide evidence to substantiate my claim.

Here is my answer.

The issue is how, in the quest for normalization/affirmation, “gay rights” will result in oppressive laws/regimes like the Human/Homosexual Rights Commission of Canada.

Redefining marriage will certainly affect how everyone thinks about marriage and statistical data shows that in countries where marriage has been redefined to mean nothing more than two people posessing strong feelings for one another, the number of people who get married and stay married are dismal at best.

Of course the redefinition of marriage is not the only cause behind the decline of the institution of marriage, it was already sick as evidenced by the prominance of sexual promiscuity and high divorce rates. But redefining marriage in an attempt to divorce it from its biological moorings is like adding a new sickness on already diseased animal.

As for the oppression that forced normalization/acceptance of homosexuality brings, I submit the following list as examples of what is becoming known as “homo-fascism”, a term I find quite apt and not the least bit ironic.

Please note as well that these are actual cases that have already happened, this is not a “slippery slope” hypothetical scenario. The politically corerect ship of homosexual persecution has already sailed.

• Couple faces legal action for refusing to rent a room to a homosexual couple
• Couple lose ability to provide foster care for refusing to affirm homosexuality Bonus: The courts official ruling is that their religious beliefs are trumped by gay rights (the right not to be offended?)
• Prop 8 supporters harassed
• Counseling student prevented from graduating and ordered to receive mandatory sensitivity training
• Schoolboy suspended merely for disagreeing with homosexuality (Cant have this sort of bullying going on now can we?)
• Paypal refuses to process donations to groups that don’t affirm homosexuality
• Paypal freezes the funds of people who don’t support homosexuality
• Apple removes Manhattan Deceleration from its store
• Apple removes Exodus Internal application from its store
• Forced sensitivity training for Toronto school children
• A collection of offenses
• San Diego firefighters forced to participate in gay pide parade
• Florida teacher suspended for disagreeing with gay marriage on personal Facebook page
• Ireland considers law to force clergy to perform gay marriages
• Eastern Michigan Student kicked out for refusing to affirm homosexuality (she later won her case)
• Pastor convicted of hate speech because he refused to affirm homosexuality
• The entire US Army forced to undergo and affirm homosexuality
• Deleted Wikipedia page on Homofascism with a few examples
• California school district forced to affirm homosexuality
• Marine reporter fired for not affirming homosexuality
• Contractor fired for personal views on homosexuality
• Olympic athlete forced to resign because he committed the despicable crime of supporting proposition 8
• Various ways the “it gets better” campaign founder, Dan Savage, has oppressed various people for failing to affirm homosexuality
• Google removes links to sites that aren’t gay-friendly enough
• USDA considering mandatory homosexual affirmation courses
• Another example of students being forced to affirm homosexuality (and parents being stripped of any voice in the matter)
• Businessman saddled with court costs for failing to affirm homosexuality
• Elderly harassed by police for disagreeing with homosexuality
• Shop owner in the UK forbidden from displaying Bible verses because it doesn’t affirm homosexuality
• National Post apologizes for running a pro-family ad, promises to donate the money from the ad to pro-homosexual (read: anti-family) groups
• Christian hit with 40% paycut after failing to affirm homosexuality.
• Man demoted for not affirming same sex marriage.
• Toronto schools force all children to affirm homosexuality

I’ll add more as time permits, but this should prove ample evidence that homosexual fascism is not a myth as the most popular entry in the Urban Dictionary maintains but a real problem that needs to be addressed by the homosexual community if they want non-homosexuals to tolerate their views. And please note that I am using tolerance in the way it is supposed to be used here meaning someone who disagrees with homosexuals but who doesn’t want to infringe on their right to destroy their bodies as they see fit through their unnatural sexual preferences.

So it seems that the topmost rated definition of “homofascism” on the urban dictionary which is blatently false. Homo-fascism is not overwrought or hysterical. Its a real and growing trend.

Share/Bookmark

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we’re compassionate we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint. -Penn Jillette

Bonus: Here is a great interview of Penn by the CATO Institute:

Share/Bookmark