As planned, President Obama gave his speech to schoolchildren nationwide, on September 8th.

And as was widely reported, many parent’s (and conservative pundits) across the country expressed concern for the event.

And, as I expected, many people, liberal and conservative alike, are now gleefully reporting that President Obama’s speech was all about education and nothing about indoctrinating our children into Socialism (e.g., here and here).

Of course, these writers completely miss the point!

No one in their right mind would ever have considered pledging to serve Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush, the two other presidents, we’ve been reminded, who also gave speeches to schoolchildren across the nation. Yet, since last year, we have had to wallow through incessant hero worshiping genuflections to the one who brings his historic presidency to fruition, embarking upon a worldwide tour, delivering orations worthy of all the grandeur of our long lost savior returned, at last, to unite our land, our people, our globe. This cult of Obama is just that, sending tingling chills up people’s legs and causing others to liken him to “god”. Shouldn’t such adoration bestowed upon an elected leader at least give one, especially the Christian, cause for concern?

Others of us, the blind ones, have missed it completely, not unlike Aunt Eunice, who never gets the jokes at the family get-togethers. We could only see a pro-abortion Senator, with barely a measurable amount of negligible service, unpublished in the legal journals, who had previously organized… communities.

But I venture towards reality.

Needless to say, since his inauguration, we have watched Obama attempt to make good on his promise to “spread the wealth around”, what with his trillion dollar economic extravaganza and plans for government run healthcare, expanding the federal government’s reach into the private sector.

The man is socialist through and through, and desires to increase the role of government in our lives.

So when he decides to speak to the children of America, I’m not expecting him to try and win the war; but I am on alert, and wary of each battle.

Christians: pray for President Obama

Two provocative excerpts from Eric Chevlen, in an article at First Things.

It’s a mistake to think of health care as a right. It is not a right; it is a good. Freedom of speech, by contrast, is a right, as is freedom of religious belief. They are privileges that inure to individuals as a consequence of the primordial right, free will. That is why we see them as inalienable. The exercise of these rights does not depend on any action of government, but rather on its inaction. Government may not legitimately interfere with their exercise, but nothing mandates that the government provide us with printing press or chapel.

Health care is different. It is more akin to the other goods which sustain life: food, clothing, and shelter. A well-ordered society exists to protect its members from the unlawful taking of life, and is structured to facilitate its members’ acquisition of these goods.

And then,

To claim that Congress will devise a new federal health care plan that will not involve rationing is like claiming that it will invent a triangle that doesn’t have three sides. Currently, within the private sector of health care, we have a large number of private insurance companies vying for the business of their customers. They ration health care on the basis of evidence-based medical necessity. The Obama health plan, the details of which are still being worked out, will also ration health care. The alternative to that is an accelerated escalation of aggregate health care costs. But the single-payer system to which Obama’s plan will lead will have no competitor and no pressing financial incentive to please its customers. No competitor for the single payer means no alternative for the patient. We can reasonably expect that a single-payer system of rationing will be largely implicit rather than explicit, and governed as much by cost and political considerations as by medical evidence. Such a system would likely combine the fiscal responsibility of the Postal Service, the customer friendliness of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and the smooth efficiency of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

A major speech on health care reform from President Obama is coming.

WASHINGTON, Sept 3 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will lay out specifics of his proposed healthcare overhaul when he addresses Congress on Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden said, as the administration sought to regain control of the debate.

"Stay tuned for Wednesday," Biden said in a Thursday speech to a Washington think tank a day after it was announced that Obama would make a rare speech to the joint houses of Congress as he seeks to boost flagging support for healthcare reform.

"It’s going to be a major speech laying out in understandable, clear terms what our administration wants to happen with regard to health care and what we’re going to push for, specifically," Biden said at the Brookings Institution.

Back in July, Obama urged Congress to pass a reform bill before the August recess.  Isn’t it a bit late to be telling us — in September — what he wants?  "Understandable, clear terms" would have been helpful 2 months ago.  Today, it’s damage control.

What is happening to the Left, the One, and their cherished socialist agenda? In Townhall meeting after Townhall meeting, we see the people voicing their opinions – and their opinions are decidedly against the moves the Obama administration are attempting to make (ref. here).

How has this come about?

From Richard Fernandez,

Somebody believes the left is losing the public policy debate because they’ve got all the flagship institutions. And that’s a liability. Umair Haque, writing in a Harvard Business Publishing article, argues that the right, like al-Qaeda has mastered the art of “5th generation warfare” and is swarming all over the left. He notices that liberals have been losing the debate lately and tries to analyze why. The problem with the left, he seems to think, is that they are responding from a center, sending talking points out to a periphery, whereas the right has discovered how to attack swiftly, from a plethora of directions and in depth. The right is inside their OODA loop and Haque realizes that if this goes on long enough, the left will lose…

Is the swarm simply a swastika-laden Astroturf tactic of the Right, per Nancy Pelosi? Fernandez doesn’t buy such conspiracy theories,

The Republican leadership was in fact the first victim of the revolt from below. Only after the “5th generation” war had ripped through the comfortable assumptions of business as usual did it break out to face the left. To think that the current unrest is the creation of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck would be to make a fundamental mistake. Those figures are simply its beneficiaries — and its beneficiaries by accident. If Haque really wants to fight 5G, I would like to propose a different set of rules.

1. Listen to the people;
2. Believe that truth is something to be discovered in dialogue with the public; that the debate is never “over” simply because the great and good say so;
3. Consider it possible that all men, including small businessmen, plumbers, rubes from Alaska, cleaning women who say their prayers at mealtimes — are in some fundamental way the equal of graduates of Harvard Law School and know as much about life and death as Dr. Zeke Emmanuel;
4. Accept that facts do matter because reality is authored by something larger than government, greater than the Congress and more lasting than any administration;
5. That all efforts to “attack the base” will ultimately fail because a government by the people, of the people and for the people will never perish from the earth; and
6. Realize that these precepts are obvious on the face of it though there are none so blind as they who will not see.

I would add that the Republican leadership had also better realize the following:

1. The revolt from below does not necessarily indicate that the people support Republicans vs. Democrats;
2. If they attempt to travel down the same spend-easy path, as liberals tend to rush into, they too will find themselves under harsh criticism (aka peaceful revolt);
3. The people, by and large, are repulsed by any political party’s attempts to increase government intrusion into their lives.

Fr. Jake offers a rhetorical question that nevertheless deserves a response.

I must admit to being simply astounded that anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus Christ would be against providing health care for every child of God.

Unless you cut out the 25th chapter of Matthew, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the year of Jubilee, and various other big swaths of scripture, it is simply impossible to refute the clear message that God has a preferential bias for the poor.

This is dishonest rhetoric. It is true that the Christian eschatological hope is exactly, in part, what Fr. Jake yearns for here, that everyone have succor and find their peace. How could a Christian be against that? [An aside: The Good Samaritan? How is that about poverty? Who is poor in that story?]

Well, first of all it isn’t charity. It is charity when I give to the poor and for other causes. It is not charity when, by force, I take money from my richer neighbor and give it to the poor. The revenue gotten from taxation, while the IRS is in now way anywhere nears as corrupt or likely as rapacious as the average 1st century Middle Eastern Roman tax collector, is not my nor anyone else’s charity. If a person does not pay, like then, that person faces a jail sentence. Charity is a principal virtue for the Christian. Charity cannot be given when there is no choice.

Fr. Jake continues with some statistics, the origin which he may be unaware, which are dishonest as well. “46 million” in this country are without healthcare. If you take out the millions who can afford healthcare but, because they are young and/or foolish and choose to spend their money elsewhere, don’t avail themselves of it … are not part of the crises as is normally considered. They are not the “poor” to which the church fathers sought to aid and of which the Gospels preach. The 46 million figure also includes the illegal residents … which Fr Jake notes “are not covered under this bill.” so then why include them in the 46 millions? Why not use a more accurate figure, which has been estimated elsewhere but is far less than 46 millions. Or “It will not raise your taxes” … which (so far) remains true … unless you consider your employer’s provision of your current healthcare part of your remuneration for your services (which it is) … for that will in fact be taxed. So not raising your taxes requires a particularly narrow evaluation of what “your taxes” means.

Thus while he notes that “a lot of disinformation and likes” have been spread about HR3200. Well, well, a lot of disinformation has been spread in favor of the bill as well. The (pseudonymous) Czar of Muscovy blogging at the Gormogons, has read the entire bill … and found it lacking in many respects, i.e., has quite a number of unmet criticisms. In fact, one might offer, that there is enough here that is objectionable that one might offer that while anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus Christ might like to see everyone receive the aid and succor for which their heart yearns … HR3200 is not in no way shape or form the sort of bill by which that goal might be reached.

Furthermore, while yes, detachment from material things is seen as a virtue. I would offer this post from long ago on healthcare in the more abstract. Or here where I wrote:

Fr. Schmemann suggests that counseling and care (of Christians by Christians) at the end of life is incorrectly motivated. What he calls for is that instead of looking at quality of life and extension of the same, the priority of a Christian as he nears the end of his days in this life should be martyrdom. Now martyrdom doesn’t mean dying spectacularly in defense of the faith. It means, essentially witness. In this context, martyrdom means that the end of your life should be sign, a witness of your life in Christ. Extension of life, for a Christian, should be the highest priority, after all there is the life to come. Your life should be an expression and witness to that fundamental ontological freedom.

Ever since former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made her “death panel” remarks on Facebook, President Obama has repeated as often as he can that the government in the proposed health care reform plan would not “pull the plug on granny”.

However, there is one agency responsible for healthcare of a certain segment of the population  whose actions directly contradict the President’s rhetoric (Hat tip: The Corner):

If President Obama wants to better understand why America’s discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.

Last year, bureaucrats at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, “Your Life, Your Choices.” It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA’s preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated “Your Life, Your Choices.”

Who is the primary author of this workbook? Dr. Robert Pearlman, chief of ethics evaluation for the center, a man who in 1996 advocated for physician-assisted suicide in Vacco v. Quill before the U.S. Supreme Court and is known for his support of health-care rationing.

“Your Life, Your Choices” presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political “push poll.” For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be “not worth living.”

The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to “shake the blues.” There is a section which provocatively asks, “Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘If I’m a vegetable, pull the plug’?” There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as “I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being,” “I am a severe financial burden on my family” and that the vet’s situation “causes severe emotional burden for my family.”

When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?

This just goes to show in judging where the President stands on different aspects of health care reform that it might be better to pay more attention to his actions than his words.

During the primaries and the general election campaign last year, the most potent argument made for not supporting Barack Obama was his lack of experience. He had never managed anything. He did not have any leadership experience. And with only two years in the U. S. Senate, he lacked sufficient knowledge of how the legislative process worked in Washington. In other words, he didn’t know how to lead or to govern. Although the debate over Obamacare is far from over, this fatal weakness has been laid open for all to see in the debacle over how health care reform has been handled so far.

President Obama’s first mistake was that he did not lay out a vision for what health care reform should look like. He relied on the same nonspecific campaign rhetoric that led to victory last November in the election when talking about health care reform. He had convinced the public something needed to be done about health care but he hadn’t made the case for specific steps that needed to be taken. Even his New York Times op-ed doesn’t contain a single tangible proposal on how he will achieve the reform goals he wants to meet. By contrast, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey laid out a very sensible proposal for reform in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. The President could have taken a cue from someone like Mr. Mackey by providing specific proposals of what to accomplish with reform legislation.

The President’s second mistake was not practicing what he preached when it came to bipartisanship. At the beginning of this debate, President Obama made it clear he wanted support for healthcare reform to be bipartisan. But instead of bringing Republicans into the process of drafting the reform legislation, he outsourced the writing of the bill to Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic caucus. As a result, he got a bill that was chock full of goodies for their liberal supporters and controversial proposals that no one in their right mind could defend. The President then squandered precious political capital having to play defense on issues such as “death panels” and single-payer programs and flip-flops on the public option.

Now the President finds himself in a bind. His approval ratings are plummeting. The public is growing skeptical about whether they can trust him on this issue. Getting Republicans to come to the table at this point seems unlikely. Despite having supermajorities in both houses of Congress, he probably won’t be able to get anything passed anytime soon as he can’t keep his own party in line.

So what does the President do? Is it time to hit the reset button as some have suggested? You can’t erase the past but you can move forward, can’t you?

The first step for the President will be the most difficult. He has to come out and publicly admit that he has made mistakes in how he has handled health care reform. He then has to tell Congress to start over from scratch. He should bring leaders from both parties together and lay out a plan of what he wants to accomplish and be willing to listen to and incorporate ideas from both parties. There are an abundance of proposals being tossed about. The President needs to be willing to cull through them and working with Congress incorporate the best of them.

President Obama has a difficult task ahead. If health care reform is to be enacted it’s going to require him to do something he hasn’t had to do nor has the experience to do: be a leader. The chances of reform being enacted are directly tied to his ability to demonstrate leadership. If the President’s plan does fail he has no one to blame but himself.

And here we have Obama attempting to salvage a concern about the track record the government has with regards to mis-managing just about anything it lays its hands on. In his own words, “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems” (emphasis added).

One thing is becoming increasingly evident, as more of Obama’s impromptu exchanges surface – he has a most difficult time presenting himself in a coherent manner. Perhaps the Left was correct in their concerns about Sarah Palin’s lack of experience, because we’re certainly seeing Obama demonstrate his.

In a short exchange discussing my incomprehension of a leftist blogger’s claim that management was unnecessary. I have come up with a possible answer as to why a person might consider this reasonable and it ties in with notions of why the left might find government healthcare more palatable than the right. The offending quote, as a reminder was as follows:

It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn’t simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn’t even understand me. I remember us discussing a scene in Invisible Man where a factory worker brags he’s so indispensable that when he was out sick the boss drove to his house and begged him to come back, agreeing to put him in charge. When I suggested Ellison might be implying that labor, not management, ought to run workplaces, the other students (and the teacher) didn’t just disagree—they found the idea incomprehensible. How could you run a factory without managers?

As I pointed out in my original essay a realistic business that employs more than two to five people requires management. Many firms, HR service companies and general contracting firms for example, in fact are nothing but management. One way out is the model implemented by the Leninist implementation of Marxism, i.e., the state solution. Government, somehow, is seen as the organ supplying the management functions. A kinder, more modern, way of phrasing that term is that the left prefers statist solutions. Mr Swartz, I suggest, doesn’t suggest that management not occur. But instead prefers that all of management, namely HR, sales, procurement, and capital management be done by the state. This, I suggest, was why he discovered, he was the only one “remotely” on the left. Most on the left I presume in the US would balk at having the state take up all of these roles for all private industry. The eastern bloc experiment showed that giving that much power to a state, ignoring the asymmetries of the locus of information, and removing personal incentives to personally garner the fruits of one’s labour was a recipe for disaster.

Public healthcare moves us further in this direction, increasing the power of the state, ignoring asymmetric of information pools, and lessens the already too weak personal incentives in the medical industry complex replacing it with even weaker political incentives (which it might be added in actuarial situations never reliably calculate risk always preferring diminish risk to lessen costs today pushing the burden of the payment to the future). Public healthcare is not, by definition, socialism nor communism. It is an explicitly a big government, statist, solution, and shares that feature with the assumption of management by government noted above.

The “public option” version being touted by the Democrats right now isn’t even single payer. However, it is disingenuous to argue that is ultimately what many of them, including the President desire and in fact likely feel that this step will move them closer to their goal. The “keeping the private insurance companies honest” rhetoric is merely cover for what, I suspect, is their aim and the likely result. That is that the public healthcare option, which will receive much of its funding from a levy on private contributions to healthcare, will be in a position to provide unfair competition that will ultimately force the private healthcare industry out of the market and to eliminate them and thus arrive at single payer via acquisition of a monopoly.

Ultimately, if there is to be a solution to the healthcare cost situation it is my belief that it will in fact require large scale changes in how healthcare is provided. Increased bureaucratic and state involvement is not the route which will lead to more flexible and innovative approaches to how medicine is practised. Instead it will more likely entrench those practises which are now in place. Right now, medical insurance and practise is heavily regulated as it is, which in turn stifles innovation itself. It is unclear how cementing and fixing the processes more tightly to bureaucratic reigns will spur innovation, which should be a primary goal.

Things got a little testy at today’s White House press briefing when Fox News’ correspondent Major Garrett asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about unsolicited e-mails being sent to people who about healthcare reform:

The e-mail itself is not problematic. The White House is using this means of communication to get its message out to concerned voters. But the problem is somehow the White House is getting a hold of people’s e-mail addresses. I don’t have any idea how David Axelrod got my e-mail address. I don’t publish the address anywhere on purpose. I don’t want just anybody to have access to my e-mail address. I’ve never e-mailed the White House or sent anything to their flag@whitehouse.gov address because I don’t want to give that information to them. But it appears they managed to get it somehow anyway.

The irony here is that if David Axelrod paid any attention to anything I’ve read so far about healthcare reform he would quickly figure out that I am opposed to the President’s proposals.

So the question remains: how is the White House getting folks e-mail addresses and is the privacy of individuals being violated? Just how much information does the White House have and, more importantly, what are they going to do with it?

I agree with Glenn Beck that we haven’t reached the point where eugenics is being implemented as a matter of policy. However, when you look back at history, you understand the dangers that lie ahead in the health care debate. Click on the video below to see the whole story:

Buried deep within the 1000+ page healthcare bill is a confusing and vague provision that mandates “advanced care planning consultations” for Medicare recipients. What exactly is intended by these consultations is open to interpretation.

The provision originated from an earlier bill that was designed to encourage patients to consider hospice and pallative care as they near the end of their lives. But make no mistake, this is also about money. According to one estimate, Medicare spends $100 billion a year for care of patients in their last year of life.

Many critics are rightly concerned that the government will be dictating to patients what care they can and can’t receive. The Bioethics Defense Fund is going so far to suggest that this provision is government endorsement of euthanasia.

As a matter of fact, such arguments about the cost of caring for the eldery and infirm as an endorsement for euthanasia has been tried before:

This poster appeared in Nazi Germany during the 1930’s. The message reads: “60,000 Reich Marks. This is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the Community of Germans during his lifetime. Fellow Citizen, that is your money, too.”

The arguments being made for mandatory “advanced care planning consultations” seemed to be eerily similar to the poster above. Critics of the President’s health care plan have very legitimate reasons to be worried about what this provision means. Voters should be concerned also.

Two different headlines from the same day illustrate the fundamental issues of the healthcare reform debate:

Blue Dog Democrats Announce Deal on Healthcare Reform

Key Senate Aide: Healthcare Reform Deal Not Imminent

The real reason that there is no quick solution coming is threefold: no one can agree on what exactly needs to be reformed, no one can agree on a solution, and the government is trying to provide the solution.

First, what needs to be reformed? It all depends on who you ask. Talk to a liberal Democrat and they will tell you that we need to have universal health insurance. Or that we need to do something about the uninsured. Or that we need to reduce the influence that insurance companies have over medical decisions.

Talk to a conservative Republican and they’ll tell you we need to get the government out of the business of providing health insurance (or at least streamline the current programs). They’ll tell you that we need to eliminate waste in Medicare. They’ll also talk about reducing overall costs.

Who’s right? There’s an element of truth in both sides of the argument. But there is no consensus on exactly what issue(s) need to be reformed thus the wide disagreement on how to solve the problems.

This brings us to the second point which is that without agreement on the problems you can’t find consensus on solutions.

To make matters worse, President Obama is running around pitching a plan without specifics. No one really knows what his proposed solution might be or what he thinks the extent of the problem really is because he doesn’t come right out and tell anyone. He’s been acting as if people will just do what he wishes because he asks them to. Perhaps he would be better served to slow down, listen to all sides in this debate, and figure out what the right steps are to take rather than trying to cram his agenda down the throats of voters. If polls are any indication, voters do not like what they are hearing from the President.

Finally, there is the issue of government involvement in the delivery of health care. Despite the fact that it has been proven repeatedly that government cannot fix every problem, Democrats still want to have government take over health care. Voters do not like that idea and understand what a disaster such a system would be. Most of the proposals so far make the government bureau overseeing health care look like the Office of Circumlocution from Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit:

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving–HOW NOT TO DO IT.

While the news channels may drone on about how healthcare reform is about to be passed it doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. The longer the debate drags on the better as it is far better to stick with the current system we have no matter how flawed it may be rather than to rush through a package that will only make the situation far, far worse.

There is an aspect to public healthcare that doesn’t get much discussion. The likelihood of it being yet another way in which we willingly give up yet more and more of our freedom to make personal choices is a clear and present danger. Here is how the process would likely work:

1. The first thing that happens is seemingly innocuous from a liberty perspective. The government gets involved in the actuarial responsibilities related to healthcare.
2. Step two is that costs become difficult to control.
3. Step three is that some bright knucklehead in Congress or more likely in a regulatory agency in a matter unrelated directly to healthcare realizes that some policy changes in his or her purview might be made and his reason for pushing it is that it will aid the financial burden pressed on them by healthcare. And consider the nature of policy chances which have an affect on health. Are these changes liable to increase or decrease your ability to make free choices?
4. Then others will notice that worked … and the process will little by little erode the range of reasonable choices left to the non-wealthy.

And this avenue, not really pushed today by those who oppose government healthcare actually gives a big opportunity for a conservative opposition leader to get a big start. The Democrats have come a long way from their populist roots. In their eagerness to push back and distance themselves from the evil “big corporate interests” (in favour of big government interests it might be noted), they’ve also made a mistake. They’ve also distanced themselves from all business, including the small ones. Populism and independence from government was in part the card that Ron Paul played. And he got some mileage with it, which says something because he’s well, something of a flake.

It seems progressives have it ingrained that private healthcare insurance are not healthcare services or products that I’ve purchased. This is a lie. It is the essential lie that is wrecking the current debate on healthcare. From Tuesday’s comments here are to remarks to this assertion which I take as typical:

Actually you’ve ‘paid for’ a bet. You’ve betted that you will require certain expensive healthcare over the term of your policy. Your insurance company has bet that you will not. If it wins, they keep your premiums and make a profit. If you win, they pay for your healthcare.

and

As Boonton points out, you haven’t purchased healthcare per se, but healthcare coverage. And I’m not sure who “on the left” “forget” that.

Let me start with a little analogy.

Two men are neighbours. Their families both regularly have a Saturday evening barbecue at which sometimes they chat. One day they both start remarking on a very large boulder uphill of their properties. The way it is propped up it looks like it could hit one or the other of their houses. One of them suggests that every Saturday each one will put $20 a kitty. When (and if) erosion or other processes loosen the huge rock to crack into one of their houses … thy guy whose house is hit gets whatever was in the pot.

Imagine that rock was above a town … and the town agreed to a similar deal … and that contributions were fixed, contributors were voluntary, and that only contributors would be splitting the funds collected funds when the rock released. And that the funds getting large enough needed to hire an accountant to manage those funds … and that some rules needed to be established to apportion that sum in a equitable manner when rock caused damage to various houses in differing degrees. And voila … one has established an insurance company (not healthcare … but that is a distinction without difference).

This essentially the “bet” in the first quoted remark above or the “coverage” vs “product” in the second. What is the status of that money. When the person who’s house is struck has to pay for repairs … is that paid for with his money? It seems obvious that the answer to that is yes, he is paying with his money.

Healthcare coverage today is quite expensive. I don’t have the figures [note: I might ask at my employer for a rough estimate of what our companies healthcare costs per month run.] but I’m guessing offhand that $6k to $12k per year easily is being put to my healthcare insurance for my family of four. The first objection insists that this is a “bet” (which is an odd way to put actuarial calculations). Actuarial evolution is the means by which insurance companies make money. But the amount above the co-pay for medical services and medicines that are purchased on my families behalf is money from the “kitty” above. It is mine. It comes from my participation in the pool. The quantity that must be put in is related directly to mathematical statistical models of our population and our behaviour. Yet it is my money in exactly the same way that the money that money belonged the gentleman above with the damaged house. The movement from the two men to the town is pretty clear. When the money is spent is it still money belonging to and deriving directly from the people benefiting. That there is a “bet” involved is an unimportant detail. That this is “coverage” vs “payment” is a syntactic dodge.

Calling the health insurance that a person earns and receives as on of the means of  remuneration for services rendered to an employer not a thing for which he has bought and paid is rhetorical thievery. The left will tell you today that these actuarial services are stealing from you. They will also deny that the private insurance company benefits are your money. And furthermore, that replacing these with greater government efficiencies will save incredible amounts. One wonders at the naivete at that sort of thinking. Greater. Government. Efficiencies. From what planet do these people originate? Medicare is a public healthcare program. There are private companies that exist solely for the purpose of navigating the arcane and Kafkan intricacies of Medicare paperwork on your behalf. Yep. More efficient indeed. Savings indeed. Mr Obama is indeed a great politician, that is if the term ‘great’ is a measure of the size and frequency of the the lies you tell.