Thoughts on Health Care

The biggest problem with this whole debate is that we're now only talking about Health Insurance which is NOT the point. The point is health care costs. I find it notable that there don't seem to be any non-profits in health care anymore when a little more than 20 years ago it used to be dominated by them. [Is that a result of Medicare? IDK]

So here are my thoughts on the problems with health care:

Fraud - We need to return to our ethical/religious roots. The best way for us to reduce fraud, is for us to have every church in the county preach that insurance fraud as stealing and to emphasize personal integrity and the evils of the LOVE OF money. [Note: Money is not bad, just the desire to get it unethically.] This will only reach a minority of americans directly, however, I think that the influence of this will be felt much farther than that.

Tax status - Currently employer paid health insurance is not taxed, but private plans are. This allows business to offer more competitive insurance and also allows the government to mandate that all employers offer insurance. The tax status should not be dependent on who or how many are paying for the insurance - whether a company, a co-op, an individual or just some random group of people, they should all be taxed the same. [Note that I am not say whether they should be taxed or not].

Defensive medicine - Tort reform. Enough has been said about this.

Consumer Oversight - The federal government (for some unknown reason, probably political payback) promoted HMO's and PPO's as the preferred method of insurance. This has had the effect of reducing the individual consumer's ability/responsibility to monitor health care costs. This allows practitioners to drive up costs through fraud (billing for work not done) and extra/unnecessary tests (defensive medicine +/- increasing revenue per patient). The first and BEST line of defense in holding down costs is the consumers. HMO's and PPO's provide convenience and the cost or eliminating this necessary check.

Medicare/Medicaid - The payouts for these services are so low that they are driving up the cost for everyone else.

Emergency rooms - Another unreimbursed cost is the inability of emergency rooms to refuse treatment to people without insurance. This again drives up the cost of treatment for everyone else as the cost of these ER visits are spread out over every other patient.

Bureaucratic waste. The medical insurance burden has increased massively as the insurance companies try to cut down on fraud and the government adds additional regulation as well as its own red tape due to Medicare. [I don't know how much this is exacerbated by individual states' regulations.] It should be relatively easy to come up with a universal health care form/format that can store all records electronically. Standards will have to be developed for exactly what information should be collected, how it can be stored (for both privacy and retention), and how it can be disseminated. These are not difficult problems.

Looking at this list tells me that we have a *very* broken health care system. I'm sure that it will be impossible for most of these issues to be addressed because people will get too upset about you "destroying the health care system". This system probably *needs* to be destroyed.

P.S. The democrat's plan doesn't solve or diminish ANY of these problems. And it would add more, most likely a whole lot more.

Evan Bayh's REAL message

As usual, the MSM is reading what they want to into Evan Bayh's decision not to run for re-election. They decry the partisanship, while silently including Republican in front of every mention.

There is too much partisanship and not enough progress – too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving.

But he doesn't say Republican partisanship. He is decrying the Democratic ideologues as much as the Republicans. Indeed, he is certainly complaining more about them seeing as how the Democrats have an overwhelming majority. This is not surprising seeing how the uber-liberal democratic leadership has been bullying the more moderate members into passing their increasingly unpopular legislation. They do this by threatening to withhold committee chairmanships, oppose district spending, and even withholding reelection support.

I see this as a win by exposing and isolating the increasingly strident liberalism of the democrats which is leading to their repudiation by the overwhelming majority of americans.

UAW targets Toyota - NTSB forces recalls. Coincidence?

The recent spate of recalls of Toyota cars is curious. Toyota has about 19% of all cars on the road in America, but comprises only ~6% of the complaints in the NTSB database. The following 2007 editorial sheds some light on this curious situation:

In the face of this diminution of their bargaining power, the UAW has tried to open a fourth front: Toyota. This morning, members of [a UAW invention called] the Kentucky Workers' Rights Board submitted a list of "recommendations" for improving working conditions at ToMoCo's KY factory. Needless to say, company executives refused to meet with them. Toyota spokesman Rick Hesterberg stated, "If they have recommendations or proposals for us, they can leave them here for us to review."

It's notable that these recommendations were accompanied by a press release and that the KWRB stated that they would release another one ofter the proposed meeting - thereby insuring that Toyota would reject their proposed meeting. Except for the NUMMI plant in CA which it formerly shared with GM, none of the Toyota plants in the US are unionized.

To say that President Obama is a friend of the unions is like saying Taylor Swift likes Romeo and Juliet. The unions were major contributors in both money and manpower to Obama's campaign; union chiefs have been the most frequent visitors to the Obama White House; Obama even excepted the unions' overly generous medical insurance plans from his "cadillac" medical insurance plan tax.

So now that we have the union-boss-in-chief in power, his administration has attacked the biggest obstacle to the auto unions in the biggest non-union auto company in the world. And he has attacked them in their area of greatest popularity - their reliability - using the only organization able to do so: the NTSB. But the data that is being used to do so is questionable at best. As mentioned above, Toyota has about 19% of all cars on the road in America, but comprises only ~6% of the complaints in the NTSB database.

The original complaints about enhanced acceleration were traced to FLOOR MATS! Are you kidding me? Are these actually real complaints? This reminds me of the "spontaneous acceleration of Audi's back in the 80's that was traced to elderly ladies who confusedly pressed the gas instead of the brake pedal! So now they have a world-wide recall because there have been what? - less than a dozen cases of accelerators sticking open. How many Ford Pintos would that have been worth?

And now they want to recall Prius's (the poster child for Obama's "green" revolution) because the brakes sometimes fail - but they have a hard time reproducing it. [I guess Obama is more concerned with supporting his political friends than his political agenda - or maybe unionism better supports his socialist agenda than private companies' successes (even "green" ones).]