Yaron Brook Drifting Towards State Socialism

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Berlin Wall Interview November 2009 part 2

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Rigged, as is natural

David Davis

Glasgow North-East

58% of 30%: that’s about 17% of the electors on the list. The GramscoFabiaNazis would almost certainly have got in anyway, so why they needed to rub the point home by stuffing all the boxes and issuing 12,000 postal votes is a mystery. Maybe they needed to show the sort of support for Brown that’s characteristic of the régime of the late Kim Jong-Il.

Quick Links

Some useful reading… 

 

• George Will on America’s debt

 

• Stephen Spruiell on the SEIU

 

 and viewing…

 

•  Bill Whittle being excellent and sharp as always.

 

Health-care…

 

• faulty figures

 plus

• tax increases

 equals an

• historical achievement

 that will prove

• ultimately disasterous

 

 

Paging Dr Fine...

Let me tell you what happened to me on this last Monday. My blog was very late that day because I was at an Urgent Care center. I got there at 11am.

I was taken into exam room at 1pm.

Doctor came in at 1:45pm

I was out the door by 2:30pm because it was a lot serious in the end that I thought it was.

But what I am focusing on is that an “Urgent Care” facility had this long wait because they were short staffed for doctors I heard. They only had 2.

And waiting room full of people.

Then I started to hear about doctor shortages and the Health Care reforms that will short Doctors on their payments and making no less bureaucratic than it is now. Probably even more so.

I have already said one of the real reforms need is Tort Reform, where the doctor doesn’t run unnecessary and expensive test just to be pararnoid that if they don’t run it somewhere down the line they’ll be sued for not running them

This drives up the costs.

Then I ran across this article about Canada’s health care and the long wait times due to doctor-patient ratios.

The Hill: After more than a decade of public healthcare with mandatory coverage, so many Canadian doctors have left the practice and so many young people have entered other fields that Canada ranks 26th of 28 developed nations in its ratio of physicians to population. Once, Canada ranked among the leaders in the number of physicians, but that was before government health care drove doctors out of the practice in droves.

The fundamental fact is that we cannot cover 36 million new patients without more doctors and nurses, much less with the declining census of medical professionals the Canadian experience points to. A recent survey of doctors by the Pew Institute found that 45 percent of all practicing doctors would consider retiring or closing their practices if the Obama healthcare bill passes. This scarcity of medical personnel heightens the likelihood of draconian rationing, lengthy waiting lists and lower-quality medical care for all of us, particularly for the elderly.

This physician shortage leads to massive and never-ending waiting lists. In 1993, for example, there was an average wait of 9.3 weeks from the time a patient got a referral from a general practitioner to the time he could see a specialist. By 1997, the wait was up to 11.7 weeks. Now it’s 17.3 weeks — over four months just to see a specialist!

In Canada, unions control the entire healthcare process. In Manitoba, for example, there is an eight-month wait for colonoscopies, yet the unions do not permit weekend or evening procedures, thereby extending the waiting lists. The unions are doing to health care in Canada what they have done to education in America: stifling creativity, reinforcing bureaucracy and extending waiting times.

Because of these long waits for colonoscopies, there is now a 25 percent higher incidence of colon cancer in Canada than in the United States. And because the leading drugs that we routinely use to treat the malady in the U.S. are banned in Canada because of their high cost, 41 percent of Canadians who get the cancer die of it, compared with only 32 percent in the United States. Overall, the cancer death rate in Canada runs 16 percent higher than in the United States. Cancer does not wait for waiting lists to clear.

The proposed $400 billion cut in Medicare raises the probability that more and more of those doctors who do practice will refuse to accept Medicare patients, aggravating the doctor shortage among the elderly, the population that needs them the most.

Utopia awaits!

UK Telegraph 4/2009: “We’re not producing enough primary care physicians,” Mr. Obama said at one forum. “The costs of medical education are so high that people feel that they’ve got to specialize.” New doctors typically owe more than $140,000 in loans when they graduate.

And paying them less, and leaving malpractice insurance and paranoia of law suits, not to mention a Bureaucrat in Washington making decisions for them, sure sounds like a good career path to me.

Miriam Harmatz, a lawyer in Miami, said: “My longtime primary care doctor left the practice of medicine five years ago because she could not make ends meet. The same thing happened a year later. Since then,many of the doctors I tried to see would not take my insurance because the payments were so low.”

So that where the so-called “doctor fix” comes in. You bribe them with an “off the books” bribe of $250 million dollars so that it’s not counted in the 1 trillion plus accounting legerdemain that both houses of Congress are engaged it.

If we don’t count it, it won’t count. Magically disappearing debt!

Simple, right?

Democrats plan to make ObamaCare “deficit-neutral” by moving nearly a quarter-trillion dollars off the books, one of the great fiscal deceptions of the century.

In January, doctors fees are scheduled to fall by 21.5%, and 40% over the next five years. That would force many doctors to stop seeing Medicare patients, so Congress intervenes every year and temporarily overrides the cuts.

But now they are going to cut as much as $500 million from Medicare to pay for the new Albatross on the block. But to do that means even more cuts, so very likely, less Doctors to treat you.

So we have the fix of the century. And it doesn’t count.

And it’s not their fault.

Self-interest is more important than principles.

Hill: The drug industry backed ObamaCare and, in return, got a 10-year limit of $80 billion on cuts in prescription drug costs.

WSJ: The American Medical Association’s asking price for supporting ObamaCare is scrapping the SGR (Created in 1997, the SGR slashes Medicare reimbursements if costs rise too steeply, as they always do).

So now Democrats are simply going to “untether” this spending on doctors from ObamaCare, hiding even more of its true costs. At a meeting on the Hill last week, Mr. Reid and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made the quid pro quo explicit, telling the AMA and about a dozen specialty societies that in return for this dispensation they expect them to back ObamaCare, no questions asked.

The AMA does support Obama. As does AARP.

The Hill: The AARP got a financial windfall in return for its support of the healthcare bill. Over the past decade, the AARP has morphed from an advocacy group to an insurance company (through its subsidiary company). It is one of the main suppliers of Medi-gap insurance, a high-cost, privately purchased coverage that picks up where Medicare leaves off. But President Bush-43 passed the Medicare Advantage program, which offered a subsidized, lower-cost alternative to Medi-gap. Under Medicare Advantage, the elderly get all the extra coverage they need plus coordinated, well-managed care, usually by the same physician. So more than 10 million seniors went with Medicare Advantage, cutting into AARP Medi-gap revenues.

Presto! Obama solved their problem. He eliminates subsidies for Medicare Advantage. The elderly will have to pay more for coverage under Medigap, but the AARP — which supposedly represents them — will make more money.

Feel those bus tires on your back yet? Or are the knife wounds getting in the way?

It turns out the AMA is a cheap date. President J. James Rohack now looks ready to embrace whatever else Democrats offer up, even though the new bill only delays the SGR cuts for 10 years instead of doing away with the formula permanently. Never mind that the AMA’s other legislative priority—tort reform—is dead on arrival. ObamaCare is stocked with other provisions that punish doctors, such as a Medicare commission tasked with cutting spending but barred from raising the eligibility age or reducing benefits. In practice, this means it will only be allowed to crank down Medicare’s price controls on providers.

This doctor maneuver is such a cleverly dishonest solution to their many contradictory promises that we’re surprised Democrats didn’t think of it sooner.

So these endorsements are not freely given, but bought and paid for by an administration that is intent on passing its program at any cost.

Evil Capitalism Alert: When the supply goes down and the demand goes up– What happens to the price?

Ironically, just a little more than a decade ago, there was a doctor surplus. In 1996, a committee of the Institute of Medicine warned that the United States had a surfeit of doctors caused by foreign-trained physicians coming here to work and recommended freezing med-school class sizes and limiting first-year residency positions. A year later, Slate ran an article on an alternative strategy for reducing the number of doctors approved by the federal Health Care Financing Administration. Under the Graduate Medical Education Demonstration Project, 41 teaching hospitals received $400 million in exchange for not training between 20 percent and 25 percent of the medical residents they would otherwise have trained over the next six years.

According to some estimates, the demand for doctors will rise to between 1.09 million and 1.17 million by 2020—many tens of thousands more than we’ll actually have.

So, Paging Dr Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard!

“Sorry they can’t see you”

You’ll just have wait for Dr. Gov-Cheap N. Easy.

How does February sound?

 

 

Two Decades

Who is the strongest
Who is the best
Who holds the aces
The East
Or the West
This is the crap our children are learning
But oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning
~Roger Waters

Twenty years ago I was in Monterrey watching the evening news, they were talking about some nonsense, when a cable came from Berlin.

People were gathering around Brandenburger Tor.

The soldier were pointing their weapons at them.

The people were yelling Wir wollen raus! Wir bleiben hier! (We want out, we are staying here).

At 22:30, Berlin Time, The Wall was open.

People not longer have right to a free ride, to free food, to employment security.

But they have the right to pursue happiness.

And that is worth dying for.

20 years from the Fall of the Berlin Wall

East Germany, October 1989. The newly elected leader Egon Krenz helds his first speech, promising continuity and some changes. The party’s role will remain the same, but he promises to open for a dialogue with the opposition. The next day he meets with the representatives of the Church. The Dresden Synod of the Evangelic Church questions the leading role of the party and asks the party leaders to apologise for the previous days’ brutalities. On October 23rd, the number of demonstrators reaches 300.000. Starting November 1st, Honecker’s decision to cancel trips in the eastern european countries is revoked. The exodus grows once again. On November 1st, Egon Krenz goes to Moscow, where he states that he doesn’t regret the past. He says that Poland and Hungary are no models for him. On November 2nd, on return from Moscow, Krenz tries to comply more with the protesters’ wishes, but it is too late: concessions that would have been favourably received one week ago are not convenient for the demonstrators anymore. The crowds have become more and more radical starting October 9th. The demonstrations are practically continuous. In East Berlin, November 4th is a peak, a strong signal for the power. Nothing can stop the people to express their discontent anymore, to fill the boulevards and squares in growing numbers. They are now over one million! The power is disintegrating. On November 7th, prime minister Willy Stoph resignes. He had been in office for 25 years, since 1964. Four days later, all members of the Political Bureau resign. Willy Stoph is replaced by Hans Modrow, a reformist economist, Dresden’s political chief and a favorite of Gorbaciov. But the demonstrations go on. In Berlin, one million people are marching. The police refrains from intervening. The protesters ask Egon Krenz to step down. Krenz phones Kremlin and talks to Gorbaciov. “What should I do?” he asks. The soviet leader advises him to open the borders, to avoid an uprising at a huge scale. Bu November 9th, 300.000 people have crossed the border. In the afternoon of November 8th, East Berlin’s political chief, Gunther Schabowski, announces that starting next morning the Eastern Germans may leave the country through whatever border they choose.

At midnight, the Berlin Wall opens. It is a symbolic fall, similar to that of the Bastille. An era is ending. The police, the frontier guards watch, disconcerted, not knowing what to do. Then they fraternize with the crowds. “Open the gate!” is the overwhelming shouting of the people. “Tor auf, tor auf!” The people from both sides of Berlin, tens of thousands of people, storm the wall. They sing, they chant, they dance. All of Berlin, East and West together, is on the streets. It is a magical night. A dark period of history is at its end. The Berlin Wall has been one of the strongest symbols of the dividing of Europe. Thousands of people have tried to get through it since it was constructed. Official figures say 252 people were killed by the frontier guards. In 1991, statistics speak of other 216 dead. The real number of those who have tried to cross the wall between 1961 and 1989 is unknown. And now, after 28 yers and 91 days, the wall falls. The people of East Berlin rush in the Western Berlin. 2 million visitors in the first weekend, only to see with their own eyes what they had only watched on tv. The Wall has frustrated a whole people, keeping it on its knees. The obsesion has grown slowly, until the November 1989 explosion – a true catharsis, a true liberation! Those days are marked with a magical intensity, similar to the one that Poland had experienced in the fall of 1980. Ordinary people are regaining their voice, their courage, their joie de vivre – Lebensmut… There are moments in which you feel that, somewhere, an angel has opened its wings…

Everything has happened so quickly that everybody is taken by surprise. Chancellor Helmut Kohl is in an official visit in Poland. The visit is interrupted. All political leaders of Occidental Germany, opposition leaders of the Eastern Germany, many personalities take part in spontaneous meetings everywhere. It is a great celebration! The members of the Bundestag, Bonn’s Parliament, rise at the news and sing their anthem. Chancellor Kohl arrives in Berlin. He states: “The wheel of history is spinning faster”.

(adapted from the book “The History of the Communist Regimes’ Fall”, by Stelian Tanase)

November 9th, 1989 – the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, Romania has yet to go through a bloody Revolution to feel the happiness, the light, the unspeakable joy of becoming Free! The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and Elena Ceausescu will go on paranoidally clinging to power, ignoring all the signals that the end of dictatorships had come for Eastern Europe, blind to the reality and to the truth. 36 days will pass until the people of Timisoara will take the streets shouting for Freedom! They will receive bullets in return, from the dictator who has ordered fire into its own people! Between December 17th and December 20th, blood is spilled on the streets of Timisoara: tens of courageous people are shot, guilty of having shouted for Freedom. 44 bodies of martyrs will be stolen in the night from the City Hospital morgue, by the Securitate people, and taken to Bucharest with a frigorific car, where they will be burned at the crematorium, their ashes thrown away in a drain. On December 20th, in the Balcony of the Opera, The Democratic Romanian Front will be born: the first organized form of protest of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. In the Opera Plaza one hundred thousand people will continue their protest against the Ceausescu regime. On December 21st those protests are in print: the first manifest of the Revolution, issued by The Democratic Romanian Front, will address Ceausescu’s regime with the revendications of the demonstrators: their dead back, the arrested be set free, democratic reforms for the achievement of a democratic society, Ceausescu’s regime to step down from power. Ceausescu will send an answer (the only one he is capable of sending) and shoot again: in Cluj and Bucharest. Other martyrs will fall on the altar of the Liberty they have dreamed for and had fought for! Their innocent blood will stain the streets where the Dictator has called his armed forces: the Army, the Securitate, the Militia. The repression will continue on the night of December 21st, in Bucharest. The morning of December 22nd will find the Dictator’s forces washing away the blood from the streets of Bucharest. But it will be useless. They won’t be able to hide their crimes anymore. In the morning of December 22nd, hundreds of thousands of people will be marching on the streets, in Bucharest, Timisoara, Cluj, Brasov, Sibiu, Craiova, Lugoj, Arad, calling for the criminals to leave the power. For the Ceausescu regime, it is the end. He could have stepped down like his eastern comrades did. Instead he chose the Repression. He chose the murder. He will remain in history as the eastern-european tyrant who has ordered shooting in his own people.

Today, 20 years from the fall of the Berlin Wall, a tear and a thought for the innocent Romanians killed in the Romanian Revolution…

DT-019 Daily Thoughts - Independence Day

Todays reflections are about: Independence Day. Let me finish todays short session with just one chapter of the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Daily Thoughts by Mon Rasz 07/2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwjitmZibWg

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9woht_dt019-independence-day-daily-though_people

Tags: change, daily, declaration, democracy, discussion, freedom, independence day, liberty, life, pursuit of happiness, reflections, society, thoughts