Showing posts with label Healthcare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Healthcare. Show all posts

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Real Men of Congress: BullSchip!

 
Pork Lite presents... Real Men of Congress.

Real men of Con-gress...

Today we salute you, Senator Socialized Medicine Expander...

Senator Socialized Medicine Expander...

Your generous proposal to expand the SCHIP program covers illegal immigrants...

...and families who make as much as $83 grand a year.

But I can't afford a Rolex...

You want to expand the SCHIP socialized medicine program by $35 billion dollars over five years...

...and cover "children" who are as old as 25...

My son's a linebacker in the NFL...

Never mind that programs like Medicaid and Medi-cal already cover poverty-stricken kids...

Your campaign sound-bites make it sound like your opponents hate tots...

OwwwWWW, the Republicans broke my leg...!

In fact, nearly half of the old SCHIP programs' funds went to adults...

...and your expansion would be funded by cigarette taxes that hit the poorest Americans hardest.

Can I bum a smoke?

So crack open an ice-cold box of Pork Lite wine, oh Senator Nicotine Healthcare Tax. We know that no matter what your constituents want, you'll vote to increase our taxes and run the healthcare system right into the tarmac.

Senator Socialized Medicine Expander...

Real Men of Congress, Washington DC, 20001.

Linked by Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities. Thanks!


Brother (or sister), can you spare a vote? Nominations for the 2007 Weblog Awards are now open. If you have a spare second, click on over.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Know anyone living with a disability or functional limitation?

 
You may want to point them at an intriguing portal site called Disaboom.

Disaboom aims to build a community of like-minded individuals and family members who are affected by severe disabilities. Covering health issues, inspiring stories, careers, discussions, and everything in between, it looks like a great set of resources for those touched by a disability or functional limitation.

Monday, October 15, 2007

The reasoned and rational thought processes of the left

 
I happened to notice a few referrals from His Vorpal Sword the other day. HVS is a lefty blog, which -- truth be told -- is a relatively popular site. HVS is fairly well done, albeit suffering from the predictable bouts of BDS (Bush as Alfred E. Neuman? Why, that's rip-roaringly funny and original!).


I like the heart! It's all about love at HVS.

In scanning the blog, I noticed a curt comparison of Graeme Frost -- the young accident victim who was tagged by Democrats to pitch expansion of SCHIP -- with General David Petraeus. HVS asked the question:

I wonder why it is that so many who sputtered with righteous indignation about their perception of a slight to General Petraeus’ character in the MoveOn ad… are the same people attacking a 12-year-old child over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and saying that he’s “fair game”?

Aside from the obvious flaws in the analogy (e.g., the conservative and centrist blogs I read questioned the choices made by Mommy and Daddy Frost), I saw literally no attacks, that's none on the child. HVS would be hard-pressed to find an example of character assassination on Graeme Frost.

Wondering about the bizarre analogy, I posted the following question:

Is it fair to question why the Frosts have a $50,000 vehicle, a $40,000 vehicle, and a $30,000 vehicle?

As an aside, I believe Graeme Frost has been treated by all with sympathy.

It’s the parents’ odd choices — combined with their ownership of multiple properties and expensive vehicles — that most have questioned.

The Frosts are an odd family indeed to hold up as the examplar for SCHIP.

The respondent -- a Mr. Williams -- offered an incisive, reasoned response that demonstrates a commanding grasp of debate combined with an awesome historical perspective. Think Doris Kearns Goodwin or Will and Ariel Durant:

Mr. Williams responds: F*** you, troll.

Having lost the debate on the particulars (i.e., was the Frost family eligible for SCHIP assistance? YES. WHY do you think he was the “poster child”? Random pick? Dumbass.), Michelle Malkin, the Kewpie Doll From Hell™, proceeds to put up photos of the vehicles in question (BRAND NEW ’showroom’ pictures, which no car ever looks like new, let alone used), THEN comes up with this horse****, which you mindlessly repeat, and use to grafitti MY blog with? (I’ve removed your link, but retained the reference so that folks can find the source of your attempted propaganda disbursal.)

You have no debating point.

BTW: Who gives a f*** WHAT you “believe”? (You probably believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church.) The idea that some brainless p**** like you is so f***ed up in the head about making an a** of himself in picking on a severly injured 12-year-old kid — and THEN is so far up his own a** that he has to travel around the ‘net repeating what Malkin gushes out of her orifices — pretty much says it all. You and your ilk made a huge mistake, and rather than admit defeat, you pretend civility and try to come up with another bulls*** “debating” point to muddy the waters.

No: You’re a brainless sadist who gets off on abusing crippled children. That’s the bottom line, and why my response isn’t couched in any “polite” terms. You deserve my boot up your a**, minimally, and no courtesy whatsoever, Monster.

You are not-very-cordially invited to view the subsequent postings — which you’ve conveniently and tellingly ignored, “Lost In A Sea Of Hate” and “The Worst Thing I Could Say” — the latter of which has a nice picture of your goddess, Malkin, that you can masturbate to.

Why didn’t I spike your little ‘turd in the punchbowl’ comment?

Because I wanted my readers to see your “How To Be A Monster And Get Away With It 101″ technique.

First, you do something monstrous: attack a 12-year old, severely injured child (without ever stating your true agenda, which was, if his parents couldn’t afford medical attention he should have DIED), rather than debating the merits of SCHIP.

THEN, when caught being a loathsome a**hole, a nazi-like monster, a crypto-Spartan “Put them on the hill to DIE” f***wit, you PRETEND to be reasonable, and suddenly civil, and EXPECT progressives to buy your line of s***.

I have to hand it to you. Some moron pulled the ‘weepy conservative’ crap on a blog I cross-post, and a resident brain-dead twit APOLOGIZED to him for his having been “censored.” Sometimes, you manage to pull this con off, which is, I suppose, why you repeat it.

But, really, F*** YOU. There has been no civility in this debate from your side for a long time, and whenever you’d like to jump the fence back into Realityland, I’ll be there with a lei to garland you with flowers. In a democracy, reasoned disagreement is a necessity. In your dream of a fascist state, whatever will “catapult the propaganda” is the point: whether monstrous, like attacking a helpless child, or “civil” in pretending that the child DESERVED to be attacked, you are the problem, not the solution.

Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time.

Whoa! Did I just wander into happy hour at a Tourettes convention?

Perhaps someone could interpret this response for me, but has Mr. Williams mistaken me for a "weepy conservative" who comments on blogs to which he cross-posts? No idea, but -- for the record -- my original post on SCHIP is still available un-edited. Its single reference to Graeme Frost is, "Frost was badly injured an an auto accident and, thanks to SCHIP, was able to recuperate."

Quite an attack. In truth, my post concentrates on two aspects of SCHIP: (a) why the Frost family was chosen for the Democratic address, despite their formidable personal assets and seeming ability to game the system; and (b) why the funding mechanism for expanding SCHIP is levied upon smokers, who are generally more poverty-stricken than non-smokers.

The point being: if the program can't prevent fraud and waste by treating the truly needy, why on Earth would any taxpayer advocate its expansion?

I await your thought-provoking response, Mr. Williams. Ironically, one of Mr. Williams' posts is entitled Lost in a sea of hate. Indeed, my friend. Indeed.

I recommend yoga, Mr. Williams, or breathing exercises. As for inserting a boot into my nether places, well, consider me a poster-boy for Bushitler-Halliburton-Likkud-Neocon-Blackwater, Inc., -- with all that the phrase entails.

p.s., as an aside, my real Al Gore posts include The UN's IPCC Global Warming Bunko Scam, Al Gore's 2nd Annual Carbon Offset Going-out-of-Business Sale, and Is Al Gore's Inconvenient Fiction a $250 Billion Scam?. Read the first or third one if you want the real background on Al Gore, the IPCC, and the carbon offset trading business. Read the second one if you want a snicker.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Line o' the Day: When is a fatality a convenience? When you're in the UK

 
Don Surber quotes Charles Moore, a UK columnist on the British health care system.

Each new patient is just an added cost and each dead patient is an administrative convenience.

The NHS is, with our state school system, the last major survival in this country of the idea of the 1940s that government can decide what is best for us and make sure that it is done... A colleague of mine, who investigated alternative healthcare systems when the extreme dirtiness of many British hospitals first became an issue, went to France to compare. In hospital after hospital, he found floors so clean that you could have eaten your lunch off them. Did the Health Minister order them to clean them, he asked an administrator.

He was met with a look of incredulity. “Of course not. We run ourselves. Patients have a choice of hospital. If they do not choose us, we get no money. No hospital can survive if it is not clean.”

In France, hospitals compete. In the UK, people die because there is no competition. Go ye therefore hence, and read it all.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Hillary: don't call socialized medicine 'socialized medicine'!

 
Say Anything reports:

Hillary goes off on a reporter at the National Association of Black Journalists Presidential Forum for daring to call socialized medicine... well... socialized medicine. [Video here]

What do you think she’s angry about more, that she’s essentially being called a socialist or that a black man dared wander off the liberal plantation to question her “we liberals know what’s best for you” policies...?

...the audience question came from a freelance writer named Kiara Ashanti, who wanted to know why the Democratic White House hopeful was pushing for, what he called, “socialized medicine... Why are you still insisting upon moving that system in here when particularly it will hurt African American communities more than anyone else?”

“...Oh, man – that was a string of misrepresentations about me and the systems in other countries,” Clinton began her response. “Number one, I have never advocated socialized medicine, and I hope all the journalists hear that loudly and clearly because that has been a right-wing attack on me for 15 years, and it is wrong.”

But, it’s not wrong. The health care system Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats support consists of taking wealth from everyone (or, more accurately, the top 50% of wage-earners who pay all the taxes) and redistributing it to everyone in the form of medical care. Wealth redistribution, put simply. And what is socialism if not wealth redistribution?

Regarding the original version of HillaryCare, the Mises Institute wrote (July 1996):

What was the core of Clinton's "Health Security Act"? Let's look at Health Security: The President's Report to the American People. "Every American," wrote Clinton, "must have the security of comprehensive health benefits that can never be taken away.... We must--and we will--outlaw insurance company practices that discriminate against consumers and small businesses and make care available to all Americans, no matter where they live or how old or sick they are."

Is that socialism? Of course. If insurance companies aren't allowed to take into account how sick a person is, or is likely to be, there is no way to compute risk, assess profits and losses, cut costs rationally, or otherwise allow a market to work the way it should. The voluntary market system, in which medical services are delivered on a free enterprise basis, is pushed aside by a command-and-control system that ends up creating more problems...

By every reasonable definition, the initial version of HillaryCare was socialized medicine. And when Hillary denies it, she's spinning fairy tales -- again.

It's a canard, to be sure, but here's how you call tell when Hillary's lying: her lips are moving.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

SCHIP for Dummies and Self-Employed Woodworkers

 
I know, I know, SCHIP isn't a very interesting topic. It's the childrens' healthcare program that Congress wants to expand using an additional $35 billion of our money. SCHIP, if memory serves, stands for Socialized Childrens' Healthcare Insurance Program. President Bush vetoed the expansion on Wednesday, stating that it would grow the program beyond low-income families into a subtle form of socialized medicine for the middle-class.

For yesterday's response to President Bush's radio address, the Democrats trotted out 12 year old Graeme Frost. Frost was badly injured an an auto accident and, thanks to SCHIP, was able to recuperate.

Using complex tools available only to real journalists (or perhaps it was just Google), freeper Icwhatudo discovered some intriguing background information on the Frost family.

The Frosts live in a 3,000 square foot home; the parents own their own design firm, and the kids are attending private school at $20 grand apiece. In addition, the family appears to not only own their home but also the building in which their business is located. But somehow they qualify for SCHIP?

Mark Steyn has the definitive linkage and savages Paul Krugman in a manner reminiscent of, --er-- well, Genghis Kahn. Gonna put some ice on that, Paul?

Thurber's Thoughts explains why SCHIP makes about as much sense as naming Hillary Clinton as Senate Ethicist.

Congress has chosen a source to pay for the bulk of their proposed $35 billion increase in the State Children's Health Insurance Program - cigarette taxes.

According to numerous reports, expansion of the program (which would allow families with income up to $82,000 to qualify) would be financed with a 156 percent increase in the federal cigarette tax, taking it to $1 per pack from the current 39 cents.

And this tax will impact recipients of the SCHIP program more than others. Low-income people smoke more heavily than do wealthier people in the United States, making cigarette taxes a regressive form of revenue. Nearly one-third of all U.S. adults living in poverty are smokers, compared with 23.5 percent of those above the poverty level...

So we allow expansion of the program to those who are not 'low income' or in poverty by imposing a tax that impacts low income and the poor more than others. Where's the logic in that? [Ed: it's a Democratic idea. 'Nuff said?] ...Rep. Jack Kingston [said] during the House debate,

"...in order to get enough money to pay for this, it would require 22 million new smokers"

In other words, Democrats want to pay for a childrens' healthcare program by expanding the percentage of poverty-stricken smokers.

In a word, brilliant!

Update: Gauis offers his plea - Why my family needs SCHIP!

Hat tips: Bizzyblog and Larwyn

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Scientists discover purpose of human appendix

 
The AP reports that scientists may have discovered the true purpose of the human appendix:

...For generations the appendix has been dismissed as superfluous. Doctors figured it had no function, surgeons removed them routinely, and people live fine without them... [but] when infected the appendix can turn deadly...

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most of it is good and helps digest food.

But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

The appendix "acts as a... safe house for bacteria," said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location — just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac — helps support the theory, he said... Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts like a bacteria factory...

....before dense populations in modern times and during epidemics of cholera that affected a whole region, it wasn't as easy to grow back that bacteria and the appendix came in handy...

In unrelated news, Ted Kennedy was named Appendix of the Senate.

Recently, officials have grown concerned that the Appendix of the Senate is ready to burst.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Why did Canada's member of parliament cross the road?

 
Answer: To get to the better health-care on the U.S. side.

Canada's CTV reports (hat tip: Texas Rainmaker):

Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report... Stronach's spokesman, Greg MacEachern, told the Toronto Star that the MP for Newmarket-Aurora had a "later-stage" operation in the U.S. after a Toronto doctor referred her.

...He said speed was not the reason why she went to California.... Instead, MacEachern said the decision was made because the U.S. hospital was the best place to have it done due to the type of surgery required...

Our thoughts and prayers are with Stronach, who faces a grave medical crisis.

But the lesson learned is a simple one. As in the UK, it appears government elites often opt out of the public health-care system in order to pursue private health-care solutions. Advocates of HillaryCare v2.0 would do well to ruminate on that fact --- long and hard.