Tackling the Cost of Healthcare Reform
In the healthcare debate, everyone seems to agree, at least at a lukewarm level, that universal healthcare is a good thing. While I find the term “socialism” to be an absolute misnomer when applied to a government-backed group package for the uninsured (because strictly speaking it’s only an alternative insurance policy, not a complete takeover of the entire health system), universal coverage will be insanely expensive. The Congressional Budget Office estimates $1 trillion. Where will we find the funds?
In both the California budget and the healthcare debate, something’s got to give. We cannot have the programs without the funds, at least not without overleveraging like irresponsible hedgefund managers. Either taxes must go up, or benefits must come down.
In the healthcare debate, an industry-supported initiative proposes measures to reduce the growth of costs. Apparently not the costs, but the growth of costs:
“The savings would come from standardizing and simplifying all sectors of the health care system; implementing measures to reduce overuse and underuse of health care; investing in effective treatment and prevention; and reducing costs by developing technology and regulatory reforms.” Certainly money will be saved by offering increased preventative care and increasing efficiencies. But it won’t begin to cover the costs of universal healthcare.
So what would?
We could save huge amounts of money and increase coverage by rationing healthcare services to remain within a targeted budget. Translation: maybe terminal cancer patients would be offered fewer options near end-of-life so that more prenatal care could be offered. Would this be devastating? Yes, sometimes it would. But we need to leave behind a mindset that we’re entitled to every ounce of care available when it’s a government administered program. There would still be two tiers: those who could afford to pay privately for extreme measures and those who couldn’t. At least basic healthcare could be had by all.
The Wall Street Journal ran a Democrat-bashing opinion piece entitled How Washington Rations – ObamaCare omen: a case-study in ‘cost-control’. The article argues against a government-funded insurance program by detailing a long description of a “virtual” colonoscopy procedure (a CT scan) which will no longer be covered under Medicare. In an effort to contain costs, Medicare has stopped covering the scanning procedure, though the more invasive traditional colonoscopy is still covered. According to the author, “This is precisely the sort of complexity that the Democrats would prefer to ignore as they try to restructure health care. Led by budget chief Peter Orszag, the White House believes that comparative effectiveness research, which examines clinical evidence to determine what “works best,” will let them cut wasteful or ineffective treatments and thus contain health spending.” Precisely. And everyone will have to stop whining about getting “less than the best.” Unless you’d like to pay for it yourself. Insurance companies, public or private, are not under any obligation to provide services that cost too much for their business plans.
You know what else could cover the costs of universal healthcare for US citizens? Reducing military expenditures ($700 billion per year) and aid to foreign countries (another $34 billion per year). We give billions in aid to Israel (or Pakistan or Albania or Russia) or build more fighter jets ($300 billion) while Americans in poverty go without basic healthcare benefits. Will Obama and the Democratic congress reduce the military budget to reduce the deficits? That remains to be seen. If we are to become a country that spends within its means, we’d better.
Cheney Claims No Connection Between Iraq and al Qaeda, You Silly People
Old Happy Face, Dick Cheney, is reminding us that – duh! – there was never any connection between al Qaeda and Sadam Hussein. Wow, to think we were sharing a public hallucination all that time! Cause I believed it! Every word… that Dick Cheney, er… never said.
First, let me begin to dissect this befuddling illumination by pointing out that every time I see Old Happy Face is on the news, again and again, and NOT Bush, it reinforces the strange intuition many may have shared: that Mr. Bush was never REALLY the president at all! Now that Old Happy Face is trying to clean up his presidential story, it becomes more and more obvious that Bush was faking it the whole time. The whole time! THAT’S WHY HE NEVER KNEW ANY OF THE ANSWERS. HE WASN’T ACTUALLY PRESIDENT. Whew! Glad that’s cleared up.
Moving on to the story of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Here’s the money quote from CNN’s story entitled Cheney: No link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11:
“I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11.”
From the same story:
The former vice president said in 2004 that the evidence was “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and that media reports suggesting that the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks reached a contradictory conclusion were “irresponsible.”
“There clearly was a relationship. It’s been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming,” Cheney said at the time.
Condoleeza Rice has backpedaled from asserting that their were “ties going on between al Qaeda and Iraq,” to “No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11.”
Bush’s quotes: From this extensive list from the BBC of Bush’s assertions of a connection bewtween al Qaeda and Sadam Hussein to “No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.” September 17, 2004.
And here we find a quote from McClatchy News Service in which Cheney asserts that waterboarding at Gitmo was worthwhile because it did in fact turn up the OBVIOUS link between al Qaeda and Hussein:
Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq , asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn’t true.
Cheney’s 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.
And more from an extensive chronology:
“Vice President Dick Cheney’s repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration’s claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed.” Additionally, CIA officials “charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president’s office had ‘pressured’ agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam’s capabilities and intentions.” [Sources: Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03; Newsweek, 7/28/03]
And even more:
Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney’s office kept close tabs on the questioning. “Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda,” Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.
So, wow, now I’m confused. Cheney badly needed a connection so that he could, uh… deny there was a connection.
To sum up, Condi Rice, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and a gigantic Senate Intelligence report all say there was never a link between al Qaeda and Sadam Hussein. Oh yeah, and George Tenet says he was pressured to come up with any evidence linking the two so that someone, not these people, but someone elsecould invade Iraq, someone who very badly wanted to.
And not for their oil.
Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged
There was a time when I thought the worst thing about pro-choice activism was the irrational, and what I thought at the time was extreme and unnecessary, support for late-term abortions. It’s a gruesome scenario, a barbaric practice, and I thought that only horribly selfish people would insist on an abortion that late in the game. I thought these people were making right-wing extremists crazy and threatening the loss of the much more reasonable first-term procedures.
I was wrong. There’s a reason it’s called pro-choice.
I have recently read the painful and tragic accounts of the many couples who chose late-term abortion after learning at the earliest medically possible time that their unborn child, their fetus, had horrible abnormalities. From a 2006 account published in the Boston Globe (worth reading in its entirety):
I don’t remember much from those three days. Walking around with a belly full of broken dreams, it felt like what I would imagine drowning feels like — flailing and suffocating and desperate. Semiconscious. Surrounded by our family, I found myself tortured by our decision, asking over and over, are we doing the right thing? That was the hardest part. Even though I finally understood that pregnancy wasn’t a Gerber commercial, that bringing forth life was intimately wrapped up in death — what with miscarriage and stillbirth — this was actually a choice. Everyone said, of course it’s the right thing to do — even my Catholic father and my Republican father-in-law, neither of whom was ever “pro-choice.” Because suddenly, for them, it wasn’t about religious doctrine or political platforms. It was personal — their son, their daughter, their grandchild. It was flesh and blood, as opposed to abstract ideology, and that changed everything.
Another, from Andrew Sullivan’s Blog:
At 17 weeks gestation our baby had been diagnosed with major heart defects requiring a minimum of three risky open-heart surgeries beginning at birth, and would later require a heart transplant. At 19 weeks we were finally given our amnio results which revealed our baby also had Trisomy 21.
A surgeon at the major teaching hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram informed us that even if our baby somehow survived his palliative surgeries, this latest diagnosis meant he would not ever be eligible for a heart transplant. As we sat talking quietly in our living room, our priest shared with us that he’d spent time at the same hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram and where our son would have had surgery.
He was there to support the family of a three-month-old who was having heart surgery. In the three weeks or so that he tended to this family, he also met 10 other families in the waiting room, each of whom also had young babies undergoing heart surgery. Sadly, within the short space of time our priest was there, every single one of those babies died.
I did go to Wikipedia to find some statistics. They were not encouraging:
In 1987, the Alan Guttmacher Institute collected questionnaires from 1,900 women in the United States who came to clinics to have abortions. Of the 1,900 questioned, 420 had been pregnant for 16 or more weeks. These 420 women were asked to choose among a list of reasons they had not obtained the abortions earlier in their pregnancies. The results were as follows:
* 71% Woman didn’t recognize she was pregnant or misjudged gestation
* 48% Woman found it hard to make arrangements for abortion
* 33% Woman was afraid to tell her partner or parents
* 24% Woman took time to decide to have an abortion
* 8% Woman waited for her relationship to change
* 8% Someone pressured woman not to have abortion
* 6% Something changed after woman became pregnant
* 6% Woman didn’t know timing is important
* 5% Woman didn’t know she could get an abortion
* 2% A fetal problem was diagnosed late in pregnancy
* 11% Other
Of the 420 women who chose to undergo a late-term abortion, the biggest reasons were ignorance and fear. “A fetal problem diagnosed late in pregnancy” accounted for only 2% of the 420, or approximately 8 of the 420 procedures. How is this issue to be dealt with? I am so sad for those who underwent this procedure because they were far more pregnant than they realized (obesity? ignorance or neglect of your own body? lying out of fear?), or because they were afraid of parents, husbands, friends, pastors, ministers, God, or whomever. The solution for all of those people would have been preventative. Birth control should be raining from the skies. Everywhere. So that the “choice” happens before the baby. Preventative.
And for those 2% with fetal abnormalities, I’m sorry I doubted you. I’m now more pro-choice than ever. George Tillman was a man who did a job that no one else wanted to do. He was not a hero, exactly, but a man who stood up for what was legal and in his mind, and the thankful hearts of couples who just wanted to end the pain, ethical. It was so, so wrong that he was shot and killed. I still cannot support late-term abortions when the babies are completely healthy. It seems like it should be possible to word a very specific law to provide for exceptional cases. It would be nice to get to a point where the debate became reasonable so that extremists and murderers ceased to rule the day.
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