Enjoy the videos to the right. Christmas carols with two versions of the 12 Days of Christmas, Jingle Bells, and Jingle Bell Rock. I’ve changed the Template though I would like to celebrate the holidays with more New Year’s Eve flare. We’ll see about that. Enjoy!
Archive for December, 2007
Health-Care Reform, New York Style
I found this article via one of my new favorite blogs, Newsalert. Just like I found that earlier article about Will Smith looking for the best in Adolf Hitler from Newsalert…
Reforming American health care has been front and center in the 2008 presidential campaign. But even as Democratic and Republican candidates offer federal prescriptions for fixing things, some states compound our problems with needlessly bureaucratic state health-care systems that inflate costs and resist reform. New York State is a prime example.
New York has long had one of the nation’s most expensive, heavily subsidized state health-care systems, thanks to years of unwise government intervention. Starting in the early 1980s, New York began a misguided effort to control costs by fixing the price of every procedure performed at every hospital in the state. But the prices varied from hospital to hospital; to help financially troubled hospitals, as well as those with excess capacity, the system rewarded them with higher rates. Over time, the system grew bloated and expensive. It also encouraged hospitals and their workers to become politically powerful allies—lobbying for ever-greater government subsidies and extra spending on public programs like Medicaid, and against reform efforts that might slow the relentless rise in costs. As a result, the state pays for about half of all spending on personal health care in New York; other states pay an average of about 40 percent. One big culprit is the state’s Medicaid program, which spends more than twice the per-capita national average.
In 2003, trying to rein in state health-care costs, then-governor George Pataki appointed a bipartisan commission chaired by investment banker Stephen Berger, a Manhattan Democrat, to recommend ways to shrink the system and make it more efficient. The Berger commission called for, among other things, a modest state push to downsize the hospital and nursing-home industries by eliminating about 20 percent of excess capacity. When new governor Eliot Spitzer endorsed the commission’s recommendations early this year, the state finally seemed on the path to reform.
But not so fast. Several hospitals have gone to court to block closing orders, and only a few small institutions have actually seen their doors shut. Meantime, major commission-ordered consolidations and mergers haven’t happened. For instance, after two Elmira hospitals, St. Joseph’s and Arnot Ogden Medical Center, claimed that they couldn’t reach a merger agreement, the state let them remain separate. At the same time, even though the state has a hospital-bed surplus, some hospitals have actually been expanding to take advantage of other institutions’ potential closings. Thus, far from shrinking, New York’s hospital industry actually grew this year by nearly 6,000 jobs, or 1.8 percent, the seventh consecutive year that hospital employment has risen in the state.
The most recent Medicaid-spending data (from 2006) show that New York continued to hike spending, even as 22 other states were actually lowering outlays. New York now spends about 128 percent more on Medicaid, per capita, than the average state does. With 6 percent of the U.S. population, New York now accounts for 15 percent of nationwide Medicaid spending on hospitals and 19 percent of spending on home health care.
Smith: ‘Hitler was a good person’
Will Smith, what is up with you? I would like to believe that you wouldn’t say something like this. I mean damn!
Will Smith has stunned the world by declaring that even Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was essentially a “good” person.
The Men In Black star, 39, is determined to see the best in people, and is convinced the former German leader did not fully understand the extent of the pain and suffering his actions would cause during his time in power in the 1930s and ’40s.
He says, “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today’.
“I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.”
Well that third paragraph makes sense, that still not to say that what was said shouldn’t have been said. If this gets more and more publicized this could cause a backlash against him. Perhaps for the sake of his career in Hollywood he should stay away from these subjects.
More from InstaPundit!
Maggy Delvaux-Mufu: The African Woman Who Set Herself on Fire
Last month I wrote about some pictures I saw of an African woman who burned herself alive to protest racism. I found out here that this wasn’t even a recent story and that one has to go back 3 years to see this story. The woman in question died from her injuries.
Wow, spread the Christmas cheer if you don’t mind because this story does not fit in with this Christmas theme! 
Merry Christmas to our troops!!!
Courtesy of Fred Thompson. Holiday political commericals have been overanalyzed this week. With Sen. Hillary Clinton’s commercial, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani getting the most scrutiny.
Thompson’s ad is the most touching.
Flaws may ground older F-15s indefinitely
From MSNBC…
Air Force inspectors have discovered major structural flaws in eight older-model F-15 fighters, sparking a new round of examinations that could ground all of the older jets into January or beyond, senior Air Force and defense officials said.
The Air Force’s 442 F-15A through F-15D planes, the mainstay of the nation’s air-to-air combat force for 30 years, have been grounded since November, shortly after one of the airplanes broke into large chunks and crashed in rural Missouri. Since then, Air Force officials have found cracks in the main support beams behind the cockpits of eight other F-15s, and they fear that similar problems could exist in others.
Current and former Air Force officials said that the grounding of the F-15s — on average 25 years old — is the longest that U.S. fighter jets have ever been kept out of the air. Even if the jets are cleared for flight, they add, it could take six months to get the pilots and aircraft back to their normal status.
