The Liberal Fallacy Of Health

Your health is the number one thing in your life. Any number of parables will support that statement. When someone is dealt an unbelievably bad string of luck, invariably they will say "At least I have my health."

In his blog, Dilbert creator and self styled "philosotainer" Scott Adams has postulated a "happiness formula" that is excerpted here:

Happiness = health + money + social life + meaning

I like this theory because it suggests priorities, but is open to interpretation. But again, health is the first priority. Without health, you can't go out and make money. Without health and money, you don't have much of a social life. But what is health? Adams says health can be broken down into another formula: Health = sleep + diet + exercise. I think this is overly simplistic. Having had kidney stones that were not caused by my diet, I know that you need to have access to health care.

That brings me to liberals and their plan for the nanny state. If you buy into Michael Moore and his cause, socialized health care is the answer. On Jay Leno recently, Moore related a story about a man who had accidentally cut off the ends of two of his fingers. According to Moore, he wanted to have them reattached but was told that one of them would cost $60,000 to reattach, and he would have to go somewhere else for the surgery. The other would cost $12,000 and could be done at that hospital. Being a hopeless romantic, Moore said, the man chose the ring finger costing $12,000 while the other finger was thrown away. He then made the claim that if this happened in Canada, both fingers would have been attached for free. He went on to state that the US is the only country where this kind of thing happens.

Moore is great at stringing things together but leaving out the context. The $60,000 finger may have had much more extensive damage requiring more complex surgery to reattach it. If the surgery were that much more complex it's highly likely that a specialist was needed and therefore it could not be done at that particular hospital. Universal health care would fix none of that.

As for it being done in Canada for free, one of the largest trade offs you experience with UHC is that non-life threatening issues do not get preferential treatment (see my last post for an example). Losing the ends of one's fingers does not constitute a life threatening injury. Even a hopeless romantic can wear a ring on a shortened ring finger. And the US is far from the only place where this happens. The example in my previous post happened in France. I also am aware of a case in the Utopian Canada where a woman in labor was put on a plane and flown the equivalent of San Diego to Denver to deliver the baby because no delivery rooms were available anywhere near her home. Most people in labor have a hard enough time just making it to the hospital; she had to fly across half a continent just to find a bed!

I recently saw a bumper sticker that read "I love my country but fear my government." Another sticker said "Universal Health Care Now!" (A third one said "Voldemort Votes Republican" - which is just plain silly because as an Englishman, he can't vote here at all). I wondered if this person even realized that their own choice of stickers was contradictory. They fear the government, but want the government in control of their health care. I fear the day that I need help with something at the emergency room and I'm told to come back when it's life threatening.

And in Canada, Moore says, the $72,000 worth of operations would have been done "for free." Free meaning that if you live in Toronto and make $100,000 you will pay 29.2% in federal income tax alone. Add in regional taxes, payroll taxes and health and prescription taxes, and a married couple with two kids will pay almost 10% more in taxes than the same couple in the US. Single with no kids? You'll pay more too, but not as much (about 2% more). Still, that's a difference of $2000 to $10,000 on a $100,000 salary. I'll pay $216 in premiums for my health insurance this year. In my worst year (damn kidney!) I paid $2600 for all medical services and that included three days in the hospital and a surgery to remove the kidney stone. My total expenses over the last 10 years would not add up to more than $5,000. Under Canada's system it would be, at a minimum, four times that much. So no, the surgery Michael Moore was talking about would not be "free" in Canada.

This is not to say that our health care system is flawless. I think prices are out of control. A couple of itemized charges on my bill were $8 for two Advil; $120 for compression socks; $58 for a cup of juice, a blueberry muffin and cream of mushroom soup (which was horrible tasting). Without health insurance my tab would have run over $20,000 and I would have been bankrupted. But then again, I do have health insurance. And my provider paid significantly reduced prices vs. what was being charged, leaving me to pay a mere fraction. That's what competition does in a capitalist society. It drives prices down. Get on the government teat, and the competition goes away. If you look at the level of pork in our government spending, you would be foolish to think that health care would be immune to the same abuse.

And don't think that the quality of care will get better. The VA hospitals are quasi-socialized, and you don't hear much good about the quality of care given there. Anyone who has tried to figure out how to get a question answered about a misfiled income tax return will tell you that the level bureaucracy in a government institution is unmatched in nature. And we want them in charge of our health care?

As I said, I have health care insurance. I work my ass off to maintain it too. I don't want to pay for someone elses health insurance so they can sit in Starbucks and work on their novel while I grind out 40+ hours a week playing it safe with my benefits. We live in a country where people can do what they want, including not paying for health insurance or a health care savings account. I know that there are situations where people have the deck stacked against them, but I would be willing to bet (and there are always exceptions) that somewhere in their history they've made choices, by action or inaction, that led them down this path. For those that are truly destitute we have medicaid. When my ex-brother-in-law, who doesn't have a pot to piss in, rolled his truck driving while drunk (2nd DUI) and required surgery to repair damage to his spine, he paid next to nothing for the surgery, the stay in the hospital while in a coma, or the physical therapy that followed. He went from being nearly paralyzed to being so fit he could go out and get DUIs 3, 4 and 5, all while paying for whatever medical fees he was responsible for with his Social Security Disability Income. I think the Nanny is doing enough already, thank you.

So back to the happiness formula: Happiness = health + money + social life + meaning. Your health isn't a given. But there are things that you can do to stack the odds in your favor; like applying Adams' health formula of diet, exercise and getting enough sleep. The number one killer in this country is cardiovascular disease, and these three things can help or hurt your odds. So now I'm off to bed so I can get up and go for a run before eating my oatmeal. Here's to your health!

The Nannystate - Coming To A Country Near You!

I've been reading a lot about the so-called "Nanny State" concept (think France, or Canada, or any highly socialized government) where the state, not the individual, makes all of the choices for you. You can't decide which doctor to go to, or where you want to send your elderly parents for their nursing care. The state tells you the best place to send them. Just pray that the quality of that health care is better than that in France. In 2003 over 14,000 people died in August due to heat and entitlement (USA Today, 9/25/2003). The 104 degree heatwave coincided with the state entitled and virtually sacrosanct August holiday. Witness this assessment from John Lichfield, reporting for the The Independent in London, England, Aug. 22, 2003:

"In the first half of this month [August], thousands of ordinary French people—not all of them already sick or close to death—died because one of the most expensive and well-regarded health and social protection systems in the world failed to cope with 10 days of exceptionally high temperatures.

All over France, hospital wards were closed down this month to allow staff to go on holiday. Trolley beds containing dehydrated old people piled up in hospital corridors while large wards, filled with expensive resuscitation equipment, were locked and inaccessible, until the government belatedly declared an emergency.

Old people’s homes, where 50 percent of the casualties occurred, were operating with reduced and, sometimes, temporary staff. At one home in the Paris area, visited by French TV, there were two auxiliary staff members to cope with 60 residents during one of the worst nights of heat. Seven people died that night. Those old people’s homes, which were unable to cope, were discouraged from sending patients to hospitals, which were also unable to cope."

Is that unthinkable? Imagine that - you call the hospital and they tell you not to send someone who is in a life or death situation. Fran Drescher makes a better nanny.

So, what does that have to do with us? A lot, if the wrong people have their say. You may think this will never happen here, but it's already happening in increments. Here's an excerpt from a recent article from the New York Times by Thomas Friedman:

"Imagine a day when you will go online and buy a pass to drive into any major urban area and the price of your pass will be set by whether you are driving a hybrid or a Hummer, the time of day you want to drive, the road you want to use and how much carbon your car trip will emit...

Well, that day is pretty much here for London, Stockholm and Singapore -- and New York City could be next. In a few years, the notion that you will be able to get into your car in the suburbs and drive downtown for free will be as old-fashioned as horses and buggies. "

Buy a pass to drive? We already pay for the privilege to drive in congested areas - it's called TAXES. We pay taxes to maintain the roads we drive on. We even pay tolls to gain access to special lanes that suffer less congestion.

But that's not enough. Never satisfied, the green bandwagon wants to tell us where to drive and what to drive. So the concept here is to charge additional money to gain access to downtown areas that are congested, and they want to penalize those who have a larger "carbon footprint" so that they can even further rub their noses in it. This is despite the evidence that the number one producer of carbon emissions in congested urban areas, call it carbon bigfoot, are the operations of the buildings themselves. Rather than go after the biggest problem, lets focus on the guy in the Hummer. If you have to pay to drive on a congested street, maybe it would sweeten the deal if you got a hummer.

I understand the motivation to reduce congestion. But congestion is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Most major cities have a robust public transit system that is good at moving people around the city, but not as good at bringing people to the city. If there were a few things in place on public transportation, I think it would help reduce congestion and the size of carbon feet. Such a system would have to be:

• Convenient - access points that are easy to get to, free WiFi on board
• Clean - no sticky seats, no BO smell stuck in the seats
• Safe - no muggings, park-n-rides at which suburbanites can leave their cars and expect to find them in one piece at the end of the day
• Comfortable - enough room to spread out, a fold down tray for a work surface

I won't deny that if there were fewer cars on the road we would be better off from a pollution standpoint and a traffic safety standpoint. Making people pay for the privilege of visiting a downtown area will reduce traffic, yes. But if you have fewer people driving downtown, it makes sense that fewer people will be going downtown. That means fewer shoppers, fewer restaurant patrons, fewer bar patrons. The only ones driving downtown will be the ones who can, or are willing to, afford the cost. But the Nanny state doesn't look that far down the road. Says Lichfield: "In the last Easter holidays, a close friend had to have an emergency operation on her eye. No state hospital in Paris could take her in during the holiday weekend. Admissions were allowed for life-or-death cases only. Saving the sight of an eye did not qualify. She had to have her operation done in the private (and expensive) American Hospital in the Paris suburbs."

This traffic idea is a far cry from denying someone emergency care, but every inch given is an inch we'll never get back. Today it's your car, tomorrow it's your eye! 20 years from now we'll wish we had the vision to see that.

Fantasies Come To life

Here's how I think a lot of movies get made. I'll set the scene:

In the office of a Hollywood movie production house a meeting is taking place. The head of the production company is fuming because no one is coming up with any fresh ideas. Greg Schmeckel, a 21 year old intern, is sound asleep and dreaming.

Production head (PH): "Dammit, people, we need something big! Something that hasn't been done a hundred times by Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer!"

Female staffer: "How about a buddy picture with several girls going through coming of age issues all linked together by something, like the travelling pants..."

PH: (Interrupts) "I said NEW! And we want this picture to make money, not make estrogen. Dammit, people, think! Hey....SCHMECKEL! Are you ASLEEP!!??"

Schmeckel: "Guh?"

PH: "Since you have so many winning movie ideas that you can sleep through my meetings, tell me one now or you are FIRED!"

Schmeckel: (Hiding morning wood, thinking about the dream he was having) "Um...well...I don't have the full plot fleshed out yet, but it stars Lindsay Lohan as a stripper."

Female Staffer: "Ugh. I think the world has seen ENOUGH of Lindsay Lohan and her antics."

PH: "Hey, Gloria Steinem, zip it! This might work. I can see the image now! Schmeckel, you're a GENIUS!!"

Look for I Know Who Killed Me hitting theaters July 27th.

What Are They Thinking?

In this installment of "What Are they thinking" I have a driving issue. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a low tolerance for anything blatantly idiotic. This is because I am very judgemental. On the Meyers-Briggs personality type I am an ENTJ (Extroverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging). My J score was as far to the J side as it could be. So when I encounter someone like I did yesterday, it just sticks in my craw.

I was behind a gold colored sedan on the drive home. The guy was driving in a really erratic fashion - hitting the brakes when no one was near him, stopping at railroad tracks for no reason, driving 10-15 miles UNDER the speed limit. I finally had a chance to get around him and looked over - I'm sure with a disapproving glare - and saw the reason he was so distracted. He was READING A FRICKING BOOK! He had it propped on the steering wheel and was very focused on it and not the road. At the next intersection, where he stopped about 4 car lengths behind the next car, he pulled out a pen and began underlining things and writing notes in the margins!!


Here's his car. I'm really disappointed that this picture didn't come out better, but as I was actually driving, I couldn't get a picture until I was stopped in a turn lane. I was hoping to get a clear picture so you could see all the detail, but this is the best you get with a cell phone camera and moving traffic. The white blob you see in front of the door jamb is the book. I was hoping to get his licence plate too, but again, cell phone camera.

So What Was He Thinking? Here are some possibilities:

• "Must...finish...'Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix'...before it comes out on Wednesday..."
• "This 'Driving For Dummies' is really a good read!"
• "It just doesn't get any better than Penthouse Forum."
• "'The Assault On Reason' is Al Gore's best work yet!"
• "But Officer, the review says 'you can't put this book down!'"

Your turn - What was he thinking?

Sheehan's Shame

Cindy Sheehan is making the news again, with a demand that Nancy Pelosi introduce articles of impeachment against President Bush, or else she'll run against her for her seat in the house in 2008. She also said she's left the Democratic party because they haven't done enough to end the war. She's so far out there the Dems are probably glad to get rid of her; they probably wish she'd take Michael Moore with her.

Rather than look at her reasons behind the impeachment blibby-blabby, it's more fun with people like her to find other people they resemble. Maybe this is all a ruse to take attention away from the fact that she may very well be the biological mother of Carrot Top. You heard it here first, folks. Oh, the shame of it all.


Is there a connection? It's just as likely as her being elected to the house! Then again, she does live in San Francisco, and as the land that reason forgot, it's a place where anything goes.

Mark Twain is the smartest man alive.

"There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press." -- Mark Twain

I make no secrets about the fact that I am a conspiracy theorist about the media. They plot and scheme and collude to print things that meet their agenda. What is their agenda? To report the truth? To expose corruption? Hardly. Their agenda is to destroy America. How do they plan on doing it? Easy.

1. Act sincere
2. Lie (as Costanza says - it's not a lie if YOU believe it!)
3. Deny

The media routinely report things that are false, one sided or inaccurate. Here's how they do it. I have a friend. For the sake of argument, we'll call him Kurt. When he doesn't want you to know something he won't lie to you. He just won't tell you the truth. He'll leave out details, or side step pointed questions. That's what the press does. They present portions of a story. They present data, but leave out the context. They use absurd scales on charts to make them look more powerful. They use statistics but not statistical methods. And the more controversial something is, the better. If it bleeds, it leads.

Here's a recent example of a subtle deceptive move. Playboy (hardly a bastion of balanced reporting) had a box headed "Dumb Like A Fox." The statistic was that 54% of Daily Show and Colbert Report viewers "passed" a quiz about current events by answering at least 66.67% of the questions correctly. Only 35% of Fox News watchers passed. They then had pictures of Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly. It's a shot across the bow of O'Reilly, who those on the left love to hate. Colbert is the host of - stay with this - the Colbert Report. There's a direct correlation there. O'Reilly is the host of about 8% of Fox News Channel's programming. Why not show Brit Hume, Greta Van Susteren, Sean Hannity or Alan Colmes? They're not the blowhards that O'Reilly is, or are female, or are not conservative. No, putting O'Reilly's picture in there was done to associate his image with the phrase "Dumb As A Fox."

That was a minimalist example. The discovery of car bombs in London was called "a criminal act" not a terrorist act by the New York Times and NBC. Why? They want to believe, and want everyone else to believe, that the jihad doesn't exist. Why? It undermines the President, that's why.

The New York Times also ran coverage of the 5 terrorists who were captured plotting to blow up the jet fuel pipelines that run from New Jersey to JFK International Airport....on page 37. It didn't even rate page one news that a terror plot was disrupted in the city the paper claims as it's home! Why? It was a successful example of intelligence gathering and multinational, multi jurisdictional cooperation in the apprehension of the suspects, which reflects well on the the President. So they didn't lie about it, they just buried it.

Even Michael Moore is on the band wagon. He recently received some press that he didn't agree with (specifically that his new "documentary" is misleading. Saying Moore's work is misleading is like saying guns shoot bullets, but that's beside the point). In a clear example of how the left will turn on itself, just before he launched a personal attack on Wolf Blitzer, he bloviated about the media, shouting that he wished the "mainstream media" would "just for once" tell the truth. Without even pausing to appreciate how delicious the irony of the comment was, he said "you guys have such a poor track record.."

At last, Mike, you said something I can agree with.

Stop Global Whining

In general , I think that most people get a little bit more patriotic around July 4th. Conservatives, liberals, progressives, atheists, scientists...heck, even scientologists (probably) all agree that the founding fathers started something very bold when they signed the DoI back in 1776. Everyone of a differing political ideology has a different opinion of what the founding fathers would think of today's version of the USA, but I definitely think that they got it right way back then. A new system of government was born, one that didn't just guarantee freedom of religion, but freedom FROM religion, that guaranteed the rights of the populace to peacefully assemble, to freely voice their opinions and to do pretty much whatever they needed to do to keep the king of England out of their face. 231 years later, for good or bad, we still enjoy those rights.

So why do so many high profile Americans turn their back on America? There are 115,000 orphans in the United States, but Angelina Jolie had to outsource her adoptions to Africa and Asia and became the modern day Audrey Hepburn for the UN. Not to be outdone, Madonna jumped in the fray and adopted and African of her own, but she had to blaze a trail in Malawi, a country with no laws on the books regarding adoption. She and husband Guy Ritchie helped set the course for the country, so up yours, Angie! I have to believe that their actions are sincere, not driven by the need for publicity, or they're both worse than The Simpsons' Troy McLure, because they actually went through with it. Of course I realize that there are horrible problems in Africa; of course I realize that the number of orphans in Africa outnumber those in the US by a factor of 100. Of course I realize that America has a robust, if flawed, foster care system that isn't present in Africa. But that may matter surprisingly little to a child in an orphanage here in the US.

Oprah Winfrey has opened a new school for 152 underprivileged girls...in South Africa. This has become her passion, at a cost of $40 million, with 4 more in the planning stages elsewhere in Africa. In undertaking this endeavor she said "What I wanted to do is give an opportunity to girls who were like me, girls who were poor, who had come from disadvantaged circumstances." But these girls aren't like her - they're South African; she's from Mississippi. Why not 152 American girls? Apparently Oprah can't find girls poor enough here. Ours is a consumer based society, and our economy depends on consumerism. But when people buy into the "gotta have it" mentality, Oprah turns her nose up at them, saying "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school." So education is the most important thing, right? Sure it is, that's why Oprah dedicated 2 shows to the problems that are persistent in the American education system in 2006. I guess all of them wanting iPods (damn you, Steve Jobs!) or shoes turned her away from American issues and into South Africa. Probably didn't hurt that Nelson Mandela asked her to help out, I'm sure. How can you say no to Nellie? If it's about the education, what's up with the beauty parlor and the yoga studio that are included in the school? "I understand that many in the [South Africa] school system and out feel that I'm going overboard, and that's fine," she said. "This is what I want to do." Of course Oprah made her empire having started with absolutely nothing; of course she has spent $260 million on other causes (if you're wondering, she's currently worth an estimated $1.5 billion), including putting 7 black men through college (though I'm sure none of them owned an iPod or shoes); of course it's her money to do with as she pleases. I'm sure that I'm committing heresy by not agreeing with the actions of one of the most influential women in the world, but of course that's my prerogative.

What I'm trying to get across is that there is something wonderful about this country. In Hollywood it's become fashionable to have an opinion (left leaning wears best), and it's in vogue to point out how many problems there are with this country. This is only important insofar as celebrities occupy a very high strata in our society, and there are a lot of people who put a lot of stock in what they say. So with all the finger pointing, you would think that some of this time and these resources would be spent domestically. Then again, if they worked at fixing issues, the cynic in me says that they wouldn't have anything to bitch about, and it's more fun to bash our government and then go global with your goodwill.

And that's what is so great about America. You're free to bitch about your government, you're free to adopt kids from where ever you want, you're free to make an absolute ass load of money and spend it however you want, where ever you want. And you're free to put the needs of others in foreign lands ahead of the needs of your own people. Whether I agree with their actions or not, that quirk - trying to give other people a shot at a better life - isn't just what's great about America, it's what's great about Americans.

Happy Birthday, America.