Government health care, adored by the Left, has been here in the States for a very long time now. It’s called the Veteran’s Administration, and the latest scandal is simply a matter of well-known sub-standard care bubbling to the surface.

The obvious question to ask about the VA scandal is: Why? Why would a VA hospital administrator direct doctors not to perform colonoscopies until patients had three positive tests for bloody stools? Or why were VA employees ordered to “cook the books” and hide long wait times that veterans faced when seeking care from heart, cancer, or other specialists? Why did some VA administrators go so far as to create a secret waiting list to hide year-plus wait times?

There’s only one plausible answer to these questions: rationing. The VA is but a smaller version of the sort of government-run, single-payer health care with which the political left is so enamored.

As a cousin of mine observed, "if you cant offer proper medical care to those you are most indebted to (i.e. the military veterans), what can we expect our level of care to be?" Indeed.

The Associated Press is breaking news that those of us who were paying attention knew about at least 6 months ago.

The first thing Michelle Pool did before picking a plan under President Barack Obama’s health insurance law was check whether her longtime primary care doctor was covered. Pool, a 60-year-old diabetic who has had back surgery and a hip replacement, purchased the plan only to find that the insurer was mistaken.

Pool’s $352 a month gold plan through Covered California’s exchange was cheaper than what she’d paid under her husband’s insurance and seemed like a good deal because of her numerous pre-existing conditions. But after her insurance card came in the mail, the Vista, California resident learned her doctor wasn’t taking her new insurance.

"It’s not fun when you’ve had a doctor for years and years that you can confide in and he knows you," Pool said. "I’m extremely discouraged. I’m stuck."

Stories like Pool’s are emerging as more consumers realize they bought plans with limited doctor and hospital networks, some after websites that mistakenly said their doctors were included.

Now we know why her policy’s cheaper. You get what you pay for.

Wooh. Light at the end of the tunnel … one more day of silly hours (then travel and work Saturday). Ain’t life grand?

1. Unemployment measured before the thought police got put in charge of the government. Kinda like how the census just “happened” to change how it measured important Obamacare metrics so the next data set will not be comparable with past ones for judging the effectiveness of the program (or should that be programme).
2. Speaking on Obamacare, here’s how it’s bending that cost curve. First of many would be my prediction.
3. Other news on that front here.
4. Two on the Sterling kerfuffle, here and here.
5. Wonder why bike racing is awesome? Go no further and just watch.
6. Oy vey! The mountains are moving because of global warming  (Yikes! Catastrophic! Skary!)…. uhm wait. A 6000 foot mountain has a measureable .. 1-3 millimeter height variation (out of a seasonal 2cm shift) and that’s something that is …. well, move on. Nothing to see here (literally). (and by the by, the “human” cause of that  … just unsubstantiated rubbish).
7. More climate news here.
8. Country or not-country?
9. Yikes.
10. Drug tests.
11. “Russia had serfs long after everyone else had abandoned serfdom” … uhm, Russia freed the serfs concurrent with the start of the Civil War. I mean, there are lots regrettable things that you can pin on Russia in her history (see 20th century) but the mock serf thing at a time when you had slaves? That makes no sense.
12. Well, to be honest, physicists have been returning (absent evidence) to super-symmetry for 50 years so far … not because of new evidence but because it is (a) cool and (b) solves a lot of vexing problems.
13. Hmm. I thought the saying was “out of the mouths of babes … come all manner of things.”

So. I’m East of Atlanta … alas I think I won’t have time for anything but work.

1. So, I’m thinking that the missing prelude to Brave New World is how did they get to a seemingly benign completely autocratic regime … seems our rulers figure if you toss a frog in boiling water it will object (jump out) but if you slowly heat the same water …. (case in point) (and yet one more)
2. Yikes.
3. A truly weird portrait .. oh, and they ride bikes.
4. Da science is settled, just hold that thought, even if causes dissonance. Oh, and one more on climate.
5. Embarrassing for the science educator establishment. Akin to a Natural History museum putting cavemen and T-Rex in the same diorama.
6. From the loony left.
7. Calling them!? Call a spade a spade doesn’t make it a spade. It was a spade before it was called out.
8. Speech police continue. Don’t worry about actions. Just the speech.
9. This is not unrelated.
10. Corrosion resistance put to the test.
11. Leadership and culture (compare to our President and his failed ‘teaching’ moments)
12. A question asked.
13. And some of us voted for him. Who is he? Well, he (and she) is in the beltway and there are hundreds of them.
14. My #1 daughter would strenuously disagree with the message on this sign. Her sister might concur however.
15. Added to my reading inbox.
16. The end of (your) days and … a homily for those around those at the end of their life.

Charles C. W. Cooke calls it fascism. I think that may be a little overwrought, but there’s no escaping the reality that, if you think something politically incorrect these days, your job is in peril.

Another day, another witch hunt — this time in duplicate. “Twin brothers David and Jason Benham,” CNN reports, “have lost their opportunity to host their own HGTV show.” On Tuesday, the pair was gearing up for their new role; by sundown the next day, the network had announced tersely that it had “decided not to move forward with the Benham Brothers’ series.” And that, as they say, was that.

HGTV’s mind was allegedly changed by a post on the blog Right Wing Watch, where the duo was described as being “anti-gay” and “anti-choice.” That post, David Benham told Erin Burnett yesterday, “was too much for them to bear — they had to make a business decision.” How sad. Certainly, the Benhams hold some heterodox views. They are not merely opposed to abortion and gay marriage, but critical of divorce, adultery, Islam, pornography, “perversion,” the “demonic ideologies” that have crept into the nation’s “universities and . . . public school systems,” and the general culture of “activist” homosexuality, which, David contends, is inextricably tied up with a wider “agenda that is attacking the nation.” But so bloody what? They were tapped to host a home-improvement show, not rewrite the Constitution.

It matters not, however, to the "tolerant" Left, for whom that word now means "agrees with me". Redefining long-understood definitions seems to be their stock in trade, along with the word "marriage".

Future students of language will wonder at the period in our history in which it was said with a straight face that diversity required uniformity, tolerance necessitated intolerance, and liberalism called for dogma. Of late, we have been told that Brandeis University is simply too open-minded to hear from a critic of Islam, that Mozilla believes too vehemently in “freedom of speech” to refrain from punishing a man for his private views, and that a respect for the audience of a show about duck hunting demands that we suspend a man for expressing his religious views in an unrelated interview. “Never,” David Benham confirmed in an interview with CNN, “have I spoken against homosexuals, as individuals, and gone against them. I speak about an agenda.” Later, he added that “that’s really what the point of this is — that there is an agenda that is seeking to silence the voices of men and women of faith.” Say, now where might he have got hold of that idea?

When the latest memo to come out of the Benghazi investigation came out…

OK, let me back up. Actually, the memo was never given to the Congressional investigation. It took a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Judicial Watch for this memo to come out. So for starters, it really looks like the administration did not want this out in public.

The thrust of the message was clear: Protect Obama’s image (and re-election efforts) at all costs; American interests and the American public’s right to know be damned. It contained four bullet points:

–”To convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad;

–”To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy;

–”To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests;

–”To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.”

Remember, this all happened in the heat of the President’s re-election campaign. As to the bullet points, we now know that the US was not doing everything it could to protect the consulate, the protest were not rotted in an Internet video (and the administration knew that almost immediately after the incident), we did not bring anyone to justice (not even now, 20 months after the incident), which goes to show that the President and the Administration do not have strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.

But the kiester-covering was in full swing and scapegoats were worth their weight in gold.

In his congressional testimony, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell said that then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is the one who linked the video to the Benghazi attacks but that the video was not part of the CIA analysis. In other words, the administration made it up out of whole cloth to deflect blame for its policy failures in relaxing the war on terror…

Indeed, the day after the event:

An email on Sept. 12, 2012, to Rice from Payton Knopf, deputy spokesman at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, confirmed the attacks were “planned in advance” and “complex,” not spontaneous in reaction to a video.

Poor Jay Carney had the unenviable job of trying to deny that these memos had anything to do with Benghazi, even though they were provided due to a FOIA request about…Benghazi.

The fact that they, indeed, speak to the Benghazi issues specifically, but the administration hung on to these memos and did not give them to Darrell Issa and the committee, shows just how revealing they are.

But only now are the mainstream media noticing this story. The Benghazi hearings have been pitifully covered. The idea that this has been a “Fox News story” (as though they made it up) only came because they gave it the coverage it deserved, while the rest of the media sat on its collective hands. Now, even ABC news reporters found themselves amazed at the stonewalling and dissembling.

But even with that, ABC has been very reluctant to report on it. Even the President has called out Fox on this — no other network — so you know it’s been getting short shrift elsewhere. And at other networks, without coming out directly and saying it, the news executives suddenly wouldn’t find time to report on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICJQU3H06Qk

Yes, the daily interviews from the committee can be yawners, and it’s not always breaking news. That much is true. But it’s also true that the latest revelations are news, and even that is getting reported primarily by Fox.

Oh, and MSNBC? Yeah, never mind about them. If it doesn’t have a link to Chris Christie and “Bridgegate” (where nobody died), they don’t care much about it.

This is important. If you news outlet isn’t covering it, you may need to switch sources.

Hmm. Feels like Wednesday already. Yikes. Must have been a long day.

1. Ms Clinton on guns. So, what does one of these liberal chuckleheads say when asked, “So, over the last 20 years gun ownership has steadily risen and gun violence has steadily fallen. What is this thing you think you need to fix?” Seriously. Why do they push this nonsense?
2. The beltway gets the press it deserves.
3. For the dirty deed’s done dirt cheap as a long term job opportunity.
4. But here’s how not to do it.
5. Exactly. Actually the PC speech thing is an interesting paradox. Those PC speakers typically despise the Victorian and the Victorian ethos. Yet they have appropriated their methods. A primary thesis behind the Victorian emphasis on manners (and if you don’t see a parallel between manners and PC speech rules you aren’t watching) was that correct the manners and the thoughts and interior ethics will follow the habits so engendered. How many PC speech enthusiasts like those applauding the Eich/Sterling/&c kerfuffles also reject that same Victorian thesis.
6. A picture perfect illustration why “education” on contraception isn’t the fix it is pretends to be.
7. Moving on up, err, out.
8. Oh, please. Get real.
9. Freedom of speech is not (not not not not) a “collective” right.
10. Which is why laws like this likely will not stand.

G’day.

1. or go play soccer. Sounds like the right answer.
2. Foreign policy.
3. Deontology (I think) and lying.
4. So, being incredibly stupid can be illegal.
5. Sooo soo shtupid. The Palin haters probably are cringing.
6. Demographics.
7. Guess I’ve gone over to be part of the problem, eh?
8. Heh.
9. This is in the news. On the other hand, if something which occurs is easily predicted that means it’s not exactly an unintended consequence.
10. Going back the bandwidth question … it the internet faster than a station wagon of (these or 128gig micro-SD) driving to the West coast faster or slower than the Internet.
11. Booze.
12. Forgetting he murdered young girl(s?) by burying them alive.
13. Hamster fun.

So dinner was late (after the evening workout) … and subsequently my blog-read time before bed became read-a-little. Anyhow, links?

1. Some more thoughts on the NBA/Clippers kerfuffle.
2. Betcha he muffs it.
3. “Improve the current process” uhm, ever heard of a gun? They are quite reliable and inexpensive.  And, while I proposed this somewhat in jest years ago, I often think it might be the solution. Who about a federal statute limiting the applicability of capital punishment to those who profess belief in the afterlife.  (more on that here … including some background on the inmate for whom a botched execution is something of a logical consequence of his crime).
4. Speaking of legal issues. This vid has been making the rounds. And it highlights a need for caning or whipping for people who pull crap like that (see also “depends on what the definition of what “is” is”). How about a statute, you pull that crap and you get a dozen with a cat-o-nine. After you’re out of the hospital you can return to your deposition.
5. Location, location, location. Heh.
6. So. If that descriptions sounds like a job you’d love, come on in. It is in fact the job I love.
7. That looks like a very cool idea, until you realize storage/transmission losses probably are higher than mechanical ones.
8. Speaking of cool …
9. A loss of one of the great ones.
10. A voice returns to the blogosphere. In an (alas) interesting place.
11. The only thing strange is how much you liberal big government types misunderestimate how much many hate the welfare state.
12. Libertarian stupid notions (the open borders nonsense) meets the real world consequence of same.
13. Oh. Joy.
14. Against puzzles for the ageing brain.

There’s a difference between getting heath care coverage, and actually getting health care. In the US, you could always get health care. Emergency rooms had to see you whether or not you could pay them. And there were various free clinics, like one in Mountain View, California.

The Rotacare clinic was happy to help out their patients in getting ObamaCare coverage so they’d no longer need the free clinic. Months later, however, the same people are coming back. Why? They can’t find a doctor taking more patients or who are accepting the plans.

Conservatives warned that exactly this thing would happen, years ago. It was handwaved away as scare tactics. But it’s Californians who are scared now, about having to pay premiums, subsidized though they may be, and not be able to actually use what they paid for.

Millions of Californians have been added to the ranks of the insured, but 1/3 of California primary care physicians are set to retire. What are we going to do now? We passed a law that said insurance should be magically cheaper. That didn’t work. So then let’s pass a law to make doctors magically appear!

Part of ObamaCare was the PCIP, the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan. John Lott notes that, at its height, at the beginning of 2013, there were 115,000 enrolled in it. So one big selling point seems to be working.

Except that dealing with something like this on its own would have been cheaper and less disruptive of the entire health insurance industry. Clayton Cramer did the math, and if you gave those people $20,000 per year to subsidize their insurance premiums, it would cost $2.3 billion. Now, that’s a lot of money anyway, but doing it that way would also allow millions of people to keep their plan if they liked their plan; just one example of the disruption that was caused instead.

Again I note that Republicans did have their own solutions to the health care problems, but Democrats insisted that the whole industry had to be upended in order to fix it. We’re finding out just how wrong that was. We are. Seems they aren’t.

G’day. Links?

1. So. The Sterling kerfuffle moves into the second stage, here are two view (one and two). I’m a little concerned about the notion that you can have that much damage done by having a private conversation recorded, sans context, and voila. Ruination. Seems to me public actions should have those kinds of consequences, not private conversation. Just never argue a devils advocate position … ever.
2. Well, I live in Chicago .. and while I don’t follow basketball, for what it’s worth in January they were expected to finish last in the East after losing Deng and Rose. They finished far ahead of expectations. That remains true.
3. Wind.
4. How the President should not argue.
5. A public service reminder.
6. The Benghazi cover-up … and it’s a success. Why was it a success? Because, I think,  the “video” story was believed by the gullible, the tribal, and the wicked. So if you bought the video story, which were you?
7. A school to notice.

In spite of all its rollout issues, the glitches, the delays and the special privileges, the promise of ObamaCare was that, in getting more people, mostly the young and the poor, insured, that would spread out the risk and make insurance cheaper overall, even with those subsidies. By how much? Well, there were promises made, over and over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66bgpRRSDD4

Now, in some of those cases he did say “up to” $2500 dollars. And since 0 is technically on the way up to 2500, if you didn’t save anything, he can count you as a promise kept, just like anyone else trying to sell you something on TV. However, what about these folks?

A recent survey of 148 insurance brokers shows that ObamaCare is sending premiums rising at the fastest clip in decades.

“For the last, about, five years they’ve been doing this survey, so this was the largest percentage increase in any quarter since they’ve been doing (it),” said Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute.

“But at 12 percent, 11 percent increase on average across all the states — that puts it at the upper end of any increase we’ve seen for decades.”

I don’t think that “truth in advertising” laws would allow you to claim that saving negative dollars is somewhere “up to” $2500. Now, are some people saving that much? I’ll stipulate to that, but in general, on average, this is costing the American people more, not less.

And for some states, it’s really bad. Premiums in Pennsylvania went up 28 percent. In Florida, up 37%. In California, up 53%. And those in Delaware have had to deal with a 100% increase in premiums.

Oh, and this isn’t considering the higher deductibles. That’s just as much a cost as the premium. And the Congressional Budget Office projects that the premiums of the ObamaCare plans are going to continue to rise.

Of course, those paying the penalty are saving loads of cash. That defeats the purpose, but hey, savings are savings, right?

So. How about some wordy links?

1. Teh racism. Or not, eh? So, this Sterling fella. Apparently for 10-15 years, “everybody knew” he was prone to make similar remarks (source: ESPN radio Mike/Mike this morning). The recording the NBA will “announce their actions/sanctions” was illegally made. Which is apparently not important to the left. At least this time, unlike the last with the Wisconsin Sentator’s remarks, they aren’t claiming teh racism for comments which were basically exactly the same thing as the President’s own remarks. Somebody smarter than me can tell me how/why those who think taboo’s in general are bad and should be tested at the same time are busy erecting new taboo’s?
2. Speaking of making words taboo. The UK doesn’t like freedom of speech.
3. Oh, it’s not misanthropic. That’s the wrong word. It’s elitist.
4. I have to say there’s a critical flaw in Mr Martin’s thesis. He asks whether Gondor after defeating Sauron went on to kill all those “baby orcs in their baby orc cradles”. Orcs are monsters. They aren’t men. Solzhenitsyn coined the phrase that the line between good and evil goes though every man’s heart. That doesn’t hold for orcs (and other monsters). No good there. Just evil. Killing baby evil monsters isn’t morally tinged with doubt whether they will grow up to be a good orc or not. There is no doubt.
5. Here’s an example with by itself disproves its thesis. Kinda like a Barack Obama speech.
6. Mr Challies is wrong yet again. That’s both far too complicated and just plain wrong. In this book, it is recounted that Father Arseny had a vision during some torture. He could see all those around him, with a flame inside them which represented the “light of Christ”. A church which fails is one that forgets fostering that light in all around you isn’t everyone’s job is one that fails. It’s as simple as that.
7. For the Palin fans, this time with a twist as most of my “Palin fan” remarks go to reasonable things Ms Palin has said. This time, what she says is unreasonable. Recently I was part of a discussion, in which my interlocotur painted himself in a position vis a vis euthenasia in which his opposition to torture is no longer tenable. That is to say if you think dehydration of the infirm is an acceptable way to kill your beloved parent (which by the way is the law of the land), then your objection to waterboarding becomes incoherent. Unless you figure Jesus injunction that we love our enemies as a corollary means we should treat as enemies those who love and are loved by us.
8. So, up north the ice is melting … finally.
9. For the gun control crowd. The masters have different rules than us plebes, eh?
10. So, by the Gini metric income inequality has not increased apparently. So, sounds like those who find this a problem might be in the Mark Twain “lies, damned lies, and statistics” camp.
11. An interesting case to foster ethics discussions.

(This is part of the script of a recent episode of my podcast, "Consider This!" It is always 10 minutes or less, which is relevant to this piece.)

I have a suggestion for a new law and I’d like to run it by you. This podcast has a small voice in politics. It doesn’t have that much influence, if any at all. It’s just me and a microphone, talking to you out there who feel it’s worth listening to, even if you don’t agree with me. I do appreciate all my listeners.

However, I’ve noticed a rather huge imbalance, an unfairness, in the scheme of things. There are huge radio networks out there with millions of listeners, broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. How in the world am I supposed to compete with that? Why should their ideas and opinions get more influence than mine? Extremely unfair, right?

So I propose that national news networks be limited to 10 minutes or less a day. Well, they do have more equipment, talent, and money than I do, and they should be able to say perhaps a bit more than I do, so let’s be generous and make that 30 minutes or less. I mean, we want to level the playing field, right? The individual podcaster should be able to compete with the national network if we really want to stick up for the little guy and let everyone’s voice be heard, right?

What’s that you say? The networks have invested in all that talent and equipment, so they should be allowed to say what they want with it? Well then, I’d counter by saying that the CEOs running those networks didn’t oversee that success from the beginning; they are simply the latest head honcho, and while they may have made a contribution to the company’s success, they inherited most of it. I’ve built my success, such as it is, with my own, personal, hard work.

So, does this sound rather silly to you, that folks with bigger radio transmitters, or newspaper subscriptions, than I do should have a cap to how much influence they can have? Well tell ya’ what; so do I. Which is why I find it odd how many on the Left have both celebrated such caps, and are upset that some of those caps were recently removed.

The courts have said that political contributions are political speech, even though, while money talks, it does not do so literally. Of course, exotic dancing has been considered speech, protected by the First Amendment, so the dictionary definition of “speech” is clearly not what we’re talking about here. Just ask Brendan Eich. Campaign contributions are as much political speech as this podcast, and people with more means, be it more audio equipment, pages in a magazine, or cash, should not have their First Amendment protections infringed like that. But when the Supreme Court decided, in the recent McCutcheon case, that some of those limits should be removed, the liberals on the court were upset that this, “weakened America’s democracy”.

So we should shut off those printing presses and broadcast antennas, because America’s democracy depends on it? Absolutely not.