As You See It: July 11, 2009

The demand for transportation is in many ways similar to the demand for health care: much of the time we voluntarily arrange for transportation, as much of the time we arrange for preventive or routine health care, but sometimes our need to get somewhere by a particular time, or as quickly as possible, is extremely urgent -- many people seem rushed all the time, in fact, just as many people seem to be continuously afflicted by various ailments and accidents. Yet who bothers to carry -- or thinks that he or she even needs -- "transportation insurance"? The idea is silly, because most people, most of the time, can find an affordable way to get around in our free market system, even though modern transportation often requires the participation of highly skilled and educated providers (e.g., airline pilots) and/or expensive, complex capital equipment (e.g., buses, trains, and airplanes). The free market has shown itself to be excellent at optimizing price vs. quality in transportation through the mechanism of competition and the incentive it provides to control costs on the one hand, and discover or develop substitute goods and services on the other hand. The same forces could produce a similar result in health care, if we simply allowed them to work. That would be TRUE reform of the system. What is being advertised as reform now is in the same class as the "energy sector reform" our California politicians shoved down our throats a few years ago, falsely labeled as "electricity deregulation." And it will lead to a similar crisis, I am sure.

"Health insurance," whether provided by a private company or by a government single-payer system, should never be, or be seen as, equivalent to "access to health care." The better vision is NOT of a nation where everyone is "insured." Rather, it is of a nation where almost nobody NEEDS insurance, because most care that most people need is as affordable as transportation, and can usually be paid out-of-pocket -- even treatment for common illnesses and accidents, or short hospital stays. The free market can make this happen.

Because we have turned our back on the free market approach to health care for going on 50 years now, a transition back to it might be a little bumpy, but those bumps will be as nothing, in comparison with the catastrophe that awaits us at the end of the single-payer/socialized medicine road. Let's not go down that dark road, especially not on the recommendations and exhortations of pols and their enablers, who keep digging us deeper and deeper into trouble with no apparent understanding or shame.

The fireworks in Santa Cruz is not about trash. It's about large drunken crowds and multiple murders.

Judy Brock - don't you know that Obama and Congress doesn't really care about you or me? As long as he/they as his own highly expensive health care that runs about $7,000 per month, free to him - that is all that matters to him. Yes, congress has very expensive health care, they do not pay into Social Security and therefore do not worry about medicare.
Don't let him pass this socialized medicine off on us. Have you seen how the VA Hospitals are run? That is how his plan will be also. Too scarey for words. Your federal taxes will double.

so tired of it wrote:

... Yes, congress has very expensive health care, they do not pay into Social Security and therefore do not worry about medicare....Your federal taxes will double.

Yep (shrug).

Congress is the problem.

Vote them all out in 2010.

Basketball wrote:

The fireworks in Santa Cruz is not about trash. It's about large drunken crowds and multiple murders.

multiple murders?

Boy, the leftists are in a big push in letters to the editors across the nation.

Socialist health care, check
Enviro falsification, check

Break out the popcorn...

Good job on the Twin Lakes fireworks ban! It succeeded in moving the show into the neighborhoods where the real danger of fire and property damage exist.I wonder what the price tag for that operation was.I also wonder who in their right mind would want to be on that beach with all the lighting and law enforcers pointed in their direction.Sure not my idea of a fun evening at the beach! Wouldn't it be cheaper to just close it completely?

Ross Patterson tells us that 46 million Americans are without healthcare insurance. Doesn't mention how many non-Americans living here are also uninsured. Non of the aforementioned are without healthcare however. They merely use the many emergency rooms across our nation as their clinics. Emergency rooms are required to treat or transport those that seek their services. Those of us who are not tax-exempt pick up the tab.
Under the universal healthcare concept, who pays for it? The gubmint?
Those of us who do not qualify for tax-exempt status, and who do not qualify for "lifeline" low rates, and who earn and save enough to support our households will be paying for those who cannot afford to contribute, much as it is under the current system. Only now it will be called "insurance" for all. What will have changed? Those of us that pay property taxes and income taxes will still be footing the bill for the gang-bangers who stab and shoot each other, the "single moms" with kids they will never be able to support, the drunks that run into each other on the roads, hoards of border crashers that can't find regular jobs but continue to have large families, the druggies that are on permanent disability, vagrants, transients, etc.

popcorn wrote:

Boy, the leftists are in a big push in letters to the editors across the nation. Socialist health care, check Enviro falsification, check Break out the popcorn...

I agree...13 letters and 8 of them are calling for the government to take over our health care and the economy with its carbon tax, etc. The letter from K. Lacey was a prime example of the mantra, saying the carbon tax will "create tens of thousands of jobs that can't be shipped overseas" without mentioning the millions of jobs in manufacturing and other sectors that WILL be lost to overseas competitors not burdened by the tax. Then closing with "The climate crisis can't wait." Yes, more panicked decisions motivated by dubious crises ...just what our economy needs right now.

Awww, C'mon Sue! Surely, you jest? You don't know why Santa Cruz is so different from other coastal communities?

"And the rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there..."

Santa Cruz hates patriots, hates imperialist America, and would love to see nothing more than the mighty (limp) blue and white of the U.N. flying over everything.

It's sort of like the Navy ship issue. Get rid of everything that makes americans proud and sooner or later all their pride will be gone.

So now you know...:)

George W Bush wrote:

<quoted text>
Yep (shrug).
Congress is the problem.
Vote them all out in 2010.

Why is it legislators have different benefits than ordinary people. If we all have the same experience, perhaps they would be motivated to cooperate and get things done (like the budget).

By the way, have the Calif legislators taken a "hit" on their salaries or benefits? I can see a lot of savings there.

Freedom writer wrote:

<quoted text>
I agree...13 letters and 8 of them are calling for the government to take over our health care and the economy with its carbon tax, etc. The letter from K. Lacey was a prime example of the mantra, saying the carbon tax will "create tens of thousands of jobs that can't be shipped overseas" without mentioning the millions of jobs in manufacturing and other sectors that WILL be lost to overseas competitors not burdened by the tax. Then closing with "The climate crisis can't wait." Yes, more panicked decisions motivated by dubious crises ...just what our economy needs right now.

The way the cap and trade regime worked out in Europe is quite instructive as to what will probably unfold here in the US. For political reasons, many more carbon allowances were issued than actual carbon output could account for, so the end result was a dramatic collapse in the price of carbon allowances right from the start; from 30 euros per ton of CO2 in April 2006 to .1 euro per ton in September 2007. The subsequent reduction is carbon emissions has been insignificant.
In view of the above, I don't think a cap and trade scheme will be the disaster for American industry that many have been predicting. I would just consider it another layer of regulation and bureaucracy.

Wow! I wanted to read the Letters to the Editor and somehow ended up on the DailyKos!

Quick question, of the 47M Americans without health insurance how many are citizens and how many are permanently without insurance? George Will recently wrote, "Although 70 percent of insured Americans rate their health care arrangements good or excellent, radical reform of health care is supposedly necessary because there are 45.7 million uninsured. That number is, however, a "snapshot" of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year. Many of them are briefly uninsured between jobs. If all the uninsured were assembled for a group photograph, and six months later the then-uninsured were assembled for another photograph, about half the people in the photos would be different.
Almost 39 percent of the uninsured are in five states -- Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, all of which are entry points for immigrants. About 21 percent -- 9.7 million -- of the uninsured are not citizens. Up to 14 million are eligible for existing government programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, veterans' benefits, etc.-- but have not enrolled. And 9.1 million have household incomes of at least $75,000 and could purchase insurance. Those last two cohorts are more than half of the 45.7 million."

But yes, keep chanting the 50M uninsured mantra...it's starting to sound a lot like "baaaaaa".

We rank near the bottom of all industrial nations in health care and yet we pay the most by far per capita and we still have 50 million WORKING Americans without any health insurance. We already tried healthcare run by mega corporations paying off their republican lackys in congress. Obama is right to work for change and Americans are ready for these changes.

James Anderson Merritt wrote:

The demand for transportation is in many ways similar to the demand for health care: much of the time we voluntarily arrange for transportation, as much of the time we arrange for preventive or routine health care, but sometimes our need to get somewhere by a particular time, or as quickly as possible, is extremely urgent -- many people seem rushed all the time, in fact, just as many people seem to be continuously afflicted by various ailments and accidents. Yet who bothers to carry -- or thinks that he or she even needs -- "transportation insurance"? The idea is silly, because most people, most of the time, can find an affordable way to get around in our free market system, even though modern transportation often requires the participation of highly skilled and educated providers (e.g., airline pilots) and/or expensive, complex capital equipment (e.g., buses, trains, and airplanes). The free market has shown itself to be excellent at optimizing price vs. quality in transportation through the mechanism of competition and the incentive it provides to control costs on the one hand, and discover or develop substitute goods and services on the other hand. The same forces could produce a similar result in health care, if we simply allowed them to work. That would be TRUE reform of the system. What is being advertised as reform now is in the same class as the "energy sector reform" our California politicians shoved down our throats a few years ago, falsely labeled as "electricity deregulation." And it will lead to a similar crisis, I am sure.
"Health insurance," whether provided by a private company or by a government single-payer system, should never be, or be seen as, equivalent to "access to health care." The better vision is NOT of a nation where everyone is "insured." Rather, it is of a nation where almost nobody NEEDS insurance, because most care that most people need is as affordable as transportation, and can usually be paid out-of-pocket -- even treatment for common illnesses and accidents, or short hospital stays. The free market can make this happen.
Because we have turned our back on the free market approach to health care for going on 50 years now, a transition back to it might be a little bumpy, but those bumps will be as nothing, in comparison with the catastrophe that awaits us at the end of the single-payer/socialized medicine road. Let's not go down that dark road, especially not on the recommendations and exhortations of pols and their enablers, who keep digging us deeper and deeper into trouble with no apparent understanding or shame.

Sounds like you have insurance so screw the 50 million uninsured. I have insurance also but it angers me that we spend more money than any country on healthcare and there's still all these people without. The profits that these companies are pocketing is just plain greedy, hospital chains, pharma ect and people like you just keep repeating the lies that Canada and other countries with socialized medicine don't have a better system. They do and it's time that we started over in this country.

Registered wrote:

Wow! I wanted to read the Letters to the Editor and somehow ended up on the DailyKos!
Quick question, of the 47M Americans without health insurance how many are citizens and how many are permanently without insurance? George Will recently wrote, "Although 70 percent of insured Americans rate their health care arrangements good or excellent, radical reform of health care is supposedly necessary because there are 45.7 million uninsured. That number is, however, a "snapshot" of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year. Many of them are briefly uninsured between jobs. If all the uninsured were assembled for a group photograph, and six months later the then-uninsured were assembled for another photograph, about half the people in the photos would be different.
Almost 39 percent of the uninsured are in five states -- Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, all of which are entry points for immigrants. About 21 percent -- 9.7 million -- of the uninsured are not citizens. Up to 14 million are eligible for existing government programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, veterans' benefits, etc.-- but have not enrolled. And 9.1 million have household incomes of at least $75,000 and could purchase insurance. Those last two cohorts are more than half of the 45.7 million."
But yes, keep chanting the 50M uninsured mantra...it's starting to sound a lot like "baaaaaa".

No Way wrote:

We rank near the bottom of all industrial nations in health care and yet we pay the most by far per capita and we still have 50 million WORKING Americans without any health insurance. We already tried healthcare run by mega corporations paying off their republican lackys in congress. Obama is right to work for change and Americans are ready for these changes.
<quoted text>

No. We quit trying free-market health care beginning in the WWII era. Not because it didn't work -- it was working fine all along -- but because FDR had already mangled the economy with wage and price controls. Turning health care into an untaxed perk for employers to offer in lieu of higher salaries was a dodge to get around those wage and price controls. It had nothing to do with making health care 1) better, 2) more affordable, or 3) more accessible. As we see now, this broken approach to health care retarded or defeated efforts in all three areas.

"Health care run by Mega-corporations" under a strict government regulatory scheme as we have today is NOT free-market health care. It is, for lack of a better word, fascism (some might say "crony-capitalism" or "mercantilism"). Surprise, surprise, fascism doesn't work, at least in the long run. Free-market approaches DO. Let's get back to them and not make the mistake of running at full speed in the WRONG direction (which would be single-payer government "insurance," or complete socialization of health care).

Nobody should ever need any kind of "insurance" to have access to and be able to afford basic, routine health care. Any plan for "reform" that aims toward consolidating or cementing the grip of "insurance" (whether privately or publicly provided) on health care is a bad thing. What we need is an approach that will naturally optimize price vs. quality of care. The free market has done that anywhere it has been allowed to work. Let's let it work in health care.

No Way wrote:

Sounds like you have insurance so **** the 50 million uninsured. I have insurance also but it angers me that we spend more money than any country on healthcare and there's still all these people without. The profits that these companies are pocketing is just plain greedy, hospital chains, pharma ect and people like you just keep repeating the lies that Canada and other countries with socialized medicine don't have a better system. They do and it's time that we started over in this country.
<quoted text>

I most certainly do not say **** to the 50M uninsured. I just question the number and the demographics within that figure. I suggest everyone read George Will's June 21, 2009 column from which I took an excerpt. The actual number of uninsured legal Americans lacking in health insurance because they can't afford it is surprisingly low. The health care "crisis" is just another example of government creating panic in the electorate so that they may institute their agenda. But, this whole debate will be rendered moot as universal health care with a public option is being exposed for the trillion dollar boondoggle that it is and will likely go down in flames just like HillaryCare.

I never even mentioned Canada so please recheck your talking points. I do have a follow up question though, who gets to define what is greedy? You? His worshipfulness Obama?

I actually used to believe this crap. Your very misinformed. How's the "free market" system working out for the financial system? The huge banks where all clamoring for our taxpayer money and we found out they are just a bunch of over rated morons like Enron. Health care is measured by things like infant death mortality and the US is ranked near the bottom but spends the most. The money is going somewhere, care to guess where? No the free market is broken and someone needs to redistribute the money. I hope the fear monger republicans can stop lining their pockets long enough to do whats right. After all we are already paying more then anyone else for crappy healthcare.

James Anderson Merritt wrote:

<quoted text>
No. We quit trying free-market health care beginning in the WWII era. Not because it didn't work -- it was working fine all along -- but because FDR had already mangled the economy with wage and price controls. Turning health care into an untaxed perk for employers to offer in lieu of higher salaries was a dodge to get around those wage and price controls. It had nothing to do with making health care 1) better, 2) more affordable, or 3) more accessible. As we see now, this broken approach to health care retarded or defeated efforts in all three areas.
"Health care run by Mega-corporations" under a strict government regulatory scheme as we have today is NOT free-market health care. It is, for lack of a better word, fascism (some might say "crony-capitalism" or "mercantilism"). Surprise, surprise, fascism doesn't work, at least in the long run. Free-market approaches DO. Let's get back to them and not make the mistake of running at full speed in the WRONG direction (which would be single-payer government "insurance," or complete socialization of health care).
Nobody should ever need any kind of "insurance" to have access to and be able to afford basic, routine health care. Any plan for "reform" that aims toward consolidating or cementing the grip of "insurance" (whether privately or publicly provided) on health care is a bad thing. What we need is an approach that will naturally optimize price vs. quality of care. The free market has done that anywhere it has been allowed to work. Let's let it work in health care.

to:Dean Oja, Boulder Creek

I think you'll find that the Govenor does not accept compensation. If you want reform, cut the pay of decision-makers to zero. Maintain term limits and quit voting for those who insist on spending what we cannot afford to give them.
Note that there is a difference in spending based on party.

Also,
Carol Migden cost the state a third of a million dollars because she did not have the brains to stay out of a car while impared. It makes one wonder about the decisions she made in Sac. I take that back... it might explain them.