Unconventional Wisdom

This cartoon was made in 1948. Perhaps a bit ahead of its time especially with the mention of racial division. The nation was segregated back then, but the point stands even today as racial division is an issue.

Of course that’s not the only issue involved therein however the messages contained here is as important today as it was then. Especially since America was about to enter a cold war with the Communist block.

Via The Bench!

Working with Small Business to Drive Recovery

Steven Crowder puts the gangsta rap genre on its head!

Courtesy of Reason. Talk to Whole Foods employees about their health care plan and those people who protest Whole Foods because of the company health care plan and their CEO John Mackey’s opposition to the government option.

LA Times:

Excessive praise can be unwelcome and embarrassing. Just ask President Obama, who awoke Friday to discover that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he had completed even a year in office. Obama managed to be both abashed and appreciative in his response, but no amount of self-effacing spin can obscure the oddity of this award.

You know what this award was an oddity for certain. It’s an award with an agenda, but let’s just see what he does with it.

Not sure how he earned this honor!

Have I really stopped posting here since last month? I really got to fix that!

Ynet News:

The State Prosecutor’s Office filed official corruption charges against former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Sunday. This is the first time in Israel’s history that a former PM will face a criminal indictment.

The indictment includes charges of fraud, breach of trust, falsifying corporate records and tax evasion, as well as a charge of fraudulently obtaining benefits to which the State attributes aggravated circumstances.

The indictment spans three of the scandals the former prime minister was entangled in: The Talansky case, the Rishontours double billing case and the Investment Center case. The indictment does not include bribery charges, despite police recommendations in the matter.

I understand that most of these charges does not revolve around his time in office as PM. I saw that in another article on this case. It seems political corruption is everywhere. I just so happen to live in a state where it’s certainly expected.

Boston Globe:

Massachusetts has the most expensive family health insurance premiums in the country, according to a new analysis that highlights the state’s challenge in trying to rein in medical costs after passage of a landmark 2006 law that mandated coverage for nearly everyone.

The report by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care foundation, showed that the average family premium for plans offered by employers in Massachusetts was $13,788 in 2008, 40 percent higher than in 2003. Over the same period, premiums nationwide rose an average of 33 percent.

The report did not break out how much premiums have increased in Massachusetts since the 2006 changes went into effect, so it does not show whether the law affected the rate of price increases. Still, with the state’s law often cited as a model for a national health care overhaul, advocates on various sides of the issue said the report underscores the urgency of including cost controls in any large-scale federal or state overhaul.

“While expanding coverage was the logical first step in Massachusetts, cost control is equally as important,’’ said Andrew Dreyfus, an executive vice president at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state’s largest private insurer with 3 million members. “And if you don’t face the cost issue directly, then you can jeopardize the progress you’ve made in expanding coverage.’’

Via Newsalert!

NY Times:

Central bankers from around the world expressed growing confidence on Friday that the worst of the financial crisis was over and that a global economic recovery was beginning to take shape.

“The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” declared Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, offering optimism both about the United States and the worldwide outlook.

Though the Fed chairman repeated his warning that the economic recovery here was likely to be slow and arduous and that unemployment would remain high for another year, he went beyond the central bank’s most recent statement that economic activity was “leveling out.” Speaking to central bankers and economists at the Fed’s annual retreat here in the Grand Tetons, Mr. Bernanke echoed the growing relief among European and Asian central bankers that their own economies had already started to rebound.

Politico:

Former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Wednesday that he loves watching the White House and Democrats in Congress struggle to control the health care debate.

“I love their arrogance. They just keep digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper,” DeLay said of Democratic leaders during an interview on conservative host Sean Hannity’s radio show.

“I love what the American people are doing to the Democrats,” he said in reference to the recent raucous town halls. “I’m sitting back and watching, and it’s just amazing.”

DeLay insisted that Republicans are winning the health care debate and urged GOP leaders to use momentum on the issue to make a broader appeal on conservative values.

NY Times:

Senator Max Baucus can be hard to decipher at times, and not just because he talks fast and is prone to mumbling. He was trying to discuss health care in an interview, but kept having to compete with a loud TV set over his left shoulder in a hotel coffee shop — two Fox News anchors speaking about (what else) health care.

“I wonder if they could turn that down,” Mr. Baucus said, exposed to exactly the kind of noise he was hoping to escape in Big Sky Country after a claustrophobic Washington summer.

As he traverses the state he has represented in the Senate for 31 years, Mr. Baucus, the Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, never seems far from being buried under some rhetorical avalanche.

After speaking at a preventive-care conference here last week, he was swarmed by protesters. Or, in Mr. Baucus’s words, “agitators, whose sole goal was to intimidate, disrupt and not let any meaningful conversation go on.” There were a couple of people in the crowd “with YouTubes,” Mr. Baucus added (meaning cameras), and he posited that the agitators were paid and probably from out of state. (“I could just sense it,” he said.)

Montana has become an unlikely center of the donnybrook over health care. The proportion of its residents who are uninsured — 16.4 percent — exceeds the national average of 15.5 percent, and health care is one of the state’s biggest industries. But it is Mr. Baucus, 67, a fifth-generation Montanan who comes from a rich ranching family, who has made the state a mountainous magnet for protester and president alike — most recently at a town meeting that Barack Obama held Friday in nearby Belgrade.

NY Times:

The White House, facing increasing skepticism over President Obama’s call for a public insurance plan to compete with the private sector, signaled Sunday that it was willing to compromise and would consider a proposal for a nonprofit health cooperative being developed in the Senate.

The “public option,” a new government insurance program akin to Medicare, has been a central component of Mr. Obama’s agenda for overhauling the health care system, but it has also emerged as a flashpoint for anger and opposition. Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, said the public option was “not the essential element” for reform and raised the idea of the co-op during an interview on CNN.

Mr. Obama himself sought to play down the significance of the public option at a town-hall-style meeting on Saturday in Grand Junction, Colo., when a university student challenged him on how private insurers could compete with the government.

After strongly defending the public plan, the president suggested that he, too, viewed it as only a small piece of a broader initiative intended to control costs, expand coverage, protect consumers and make the delivery of health care more efficient.

Does anyone have any ideas? I feel like I’m using a trademark name anyway. I see that Real Clear Politics, who’s site I have been perusing often has a site called Unconventional Wisdom. So expect a name change soon!

NY Post:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with one company earning a large market share, but the lack of significant competition helps contribute to higher insurance costs and poorer service. Moreover, this market concentration hasn’t necessarily flowed from consumer preference in a free market, but results in good part from barriers to entry erected by state insurance regulation.

Obama’s answer to this problem is to set up a new government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers. But such a plan will ultimately result in less competition, not more.

A government-run plan would have an inherent advantage in the marketplace, because it ultimately would be subsidized by taxpayers. The government plan could keep its premiums artificially low or offer extra benefits, because it could turn to taxpayers to cover any shortfalls.

Plus, the government plan also could use its market power to impose much lower reimbursement rates on doctors and hospitals — Medicare and Medicaid do that now, to the point where they often pay less than cost. Providers would be forced to recoup the income lost thanks to the “public option” by raising what they charge to private insurance — driving up premiums and making private insurance even less competitive.

Real Clear Politics:

People who didn’t vote for Barack Obama will hoot how obvious it was to them, and should have been to their Obama-ga-ga friends, that he was always a stalking horse for a steroidal government. Maybe so, but there’s a lot of political complexity in 129 million votes.

For many voters, he appeared to be the Most Reasonable Man in politics. Obama enveloped and absorbed them. He could articulate an opponent’s point of view better than they could themselves. He knew, and that made people think their beliefs would always have a seat at his table.

He was moralistic, too. He made his agenda sound like a moral imperative. This worked. People here are attracted to a moral argument. The Rev. Wright mess could have been fatal. That he floated away from it with a grand moral speech on race in America bespoke a kind of unique personal magic. People thought they hadn’t seen anyone like Barack Obama stand for high office in a long time, so they voted for him.

But some are falling off the train. The president’s approval rating has dropped close to 50% from just over 60%. It’s early in a presidency to be dropping fast toward 50. Part of this is health care, but something else is going on here.

Big as the health-care proposal is, the White House might have gotten it easily as a standalone piece of legislation, given the congressional majorities and Obama’s reservoir of goodwill. But health care arrived in late May as a trillion-pound federal elephant in an Obama house that was looking like a Noah’s ark of every known species of federal spending: the $800 billion public-works stimulus, the deficit-busting $3.5 trillion budget (and now Treasury’s Tim Geithner wants Congress to lift the debt limit above $12.1 trillion), the grandiose cap-and-trade bill that foundered when Democratic coal states rebelled, the U.S. engulfment of the auto industry, the tax time bombs.

NY Times:

A vast majority of the nation’s small employers — those who have 25 or fewer workers in the Senate health bill or annual payrolls of $500,000 or less in the House version — would likely be exempted from the mandate.

An analysis by Jonathan Gruber, a respected health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded that those small businesses that are not exempt would see little impact on employment or profits, although employers would reduce wages to compensate for providing added benefits. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the chief arbiter of the impact of legislation, has come to similar conclusions.

What’s been most lost in the furor is how much most small businesses would benefit from provisions that should make insurance more affordable — for businesses that already provide coverage and for those that have been deterred from providing coverage by cost.

Small businesses that currently offer coverage often pay significantly more per worker than larger employers do for the same coverage. Under all of the current bills, the smallest employers would gain quick access to new insurance exchanges — where plans would compete for their business with rates comparable to those enjoyed by large employers. (In subsequent years, slightly bigger firms and possibly even medium-size firms would likely gain access to the exchanges as well.)

And many small businesses with low-wage workers would be eligible for substantial tax credits to subsidize their coverage.

Real Clear Markets:

Monetary policy is hardly a science, so a good central banker must be humble. He must appreciate the limits of his understanding and of the efficacy of the tools at his disposal. Yet he cannot afford to be perceived as indecisive, which would only invite destabilising financial speculation.

Indeed, as important as their functions are, in recent decades central banks have become even more significant as a consequence of the development of financial markets. Even when not formally designated as such, central banks have become the guardians of financial-market sanity. The dangers of failing at this task have been made painfully clear in the sub-prime mortgage debacle. Under Obama’s proposed new rules, the Fed will have even larger responsibilities, and will be charged with averting financial crises and ensuring that banks are not taking on too much risk.

This is a job at which former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan proved to be a spectacular failure. His blind spot on financial-market excesses – the little “flaw” in his thinking, as he later termed – left him oblivious to the dangers of Wall Street titans’ financial innovations. As a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors under Greenspan during 2002-2005, Bernanke can also be faulted for having played along.

The Fed chairman exerts global influence not only through monetary policy, but also through his words. He sets the tone for policy discussions and helps shape the belief system within which policymakers around the world operate.

What hampered Greenspan and Bernanke as financial regulators was that they were excessively in awe of Wall Street and what it does. They operated under the assumption that what is good for Wall Street is good for Main Street. This will no doubt change as a result of the crisis, even if Bernanke remains at the helm. But what the world needs is a Fed chairman who is instinctively sceptical of financial markets and their social value.

Real Clear Markets:

For decades now, would-be health care reformers have claimed that if we just invest more in preventive care we will cut big chunks of spending out of our health system. In the early 1990s, for instance, Medicaid administrators and hospital executives argued that if we built more satellite health clinics in poorer neighborhoods, residents would get check-ups more often and visit hospital emergency rooms, where care is expensive, less frequently. So hospitals built the clinics, often with government grants, and we got more clinics but just as many emergency room visits, and Medicaid costs continued to spiral upwards.

Still, politicians have remained undeterred. In the 2008 presidential election, John Edwards told us that “study after study shows that primary and preventive care greatly reduces future health care costs,” while Barack Obama claimed that “too little is spent on prevention and public health.” Recently, President Obama claimed at a town hall meeting that by adding preventive care to health reform we’ll cut down on costs, including costs for emergency room visits.

But I would be skeptical of any health reform legislation that projects big savings from preventive care or, even worse, requires new government programs to boost preventive care. As a report issued by the Congressional Budget Office last week reminded us, there are no widespread savings to be expected from increased preventive care. In fact, the report concluded, most preventive care actually adds to health care spending. What a shocker to learn that spending more money actually costs more.

Telegraph:

If Stephen Hawking had been treated in Britain, he would not have survived to be awarded his Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama yesterday, because the NHS “would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless”. That was the thundering verdict of the Investor’s Business Daily on our National Health Service and Mr Obama’s plans to introduce what Republicans term “socialised medicine”.

It was, as scientists sometimes say, a beautiful hypothesis destroyed by a single ugly fact. Professor Hawking, who is completely paralysed by motor neurone disease, has been treated by the NHS throughout his 67 years, and points out indignantly that he would not have lived without its care.

Much of the conservative contribution to the health care debate raging in the United States, which is dominating a long, hot summer, has been as misguided as that newspaper editorial. With the battle lines drawn, and President Obama staking his credibility on achieving a comprehensive reform that delivers health insurance to the tens of millions without it, Democratic members of Congress are facing the wrath and anxiety of their constituents – who are being urged on by opponents of reform.

Larry Kudlow:

It’s hard to know why President Obama said what he said at Tuesday’s health-care town hall in New Hampshire. He actually stated: “If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”

Oops. Freudian slip? Subliminally speaking, was the president inferring that private health insurers are doing just fine?

Government insurance is what’s in trouble today. Medicare is in the hole by about $40 trillion on a discounted present-value basis over the next 40 or 50 years. And if we’re going to equate government care to government mail, according to Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard, the U.S. Postal Service is going bankrupt with a $7 billion net loss this year. With 633,000 career employees, the Post Office won’t be able to make $5.4 billion in retiree health-benefit payments. How many of these federal employees will populate the new government-backed insurance plan if it passes?

So it’s something of a mystery why the president went down the FedEx/UPS/Post Office turnpike. Perhaps the inner Obama is a free-enterprise guy. Maybe in the heat of battle, his private-sector FedEx/UPS endorsement kind of, well, slipped out unconsciously.

Seattle Times:

PRESIDENT Obama’s return to public meetings on health-care reform elevates a debate that had spiraled dramatically downward. He has been on the defensive. The challenge for Obama is to move from defending reform to selling it.

Vitriolic discourse is as American as apple pie, but the president shouldn’t allow himself to get sidetracked from the promise of extending health-care coverage to more than 45 million Americans without it and streamlining this country’s unwieldy and unaffordable medical-care system.
…
To the New Hampshire protesters, Obama said: “Where we do disagree, let’s disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that has actually been proposed.”

That was the president at his best, using calm, nondefensive language to pull citizens back from the brink and to the reality of health-care legislation on the table.

Detroit News:

Fears that nationalized health care will lead to rationing of services and denial of life-sustaining treatment for the elderly are ludicrous.

Congress ultimately will be the health care decider if the government takes over, and Congress never says no to anybody, least of all a voting bloc as potent as senior citizens.

What we ought to be worried about is an explosion of services and treatments extended to every advocacy group that wheels a sob story before a congressional committee. Congress will have no will to contain costs at the expense of votes.

Universal government health care will work just like Social Security and Medicare.

Congress has known for decades that both programs are hurtling toward a cliff. Social Security has an unfunded liability of $100 trillion — a number impossible to get your mind around.

By the time I’m eligible to get my spoonful of gravy in a dozen years or so, the program will require 25 percent of all tax dollars to stay afloat.

Almost looks like a backhanded slam!