The Whole Foods Prescription for Healthcare Reform

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey had an op-ed published in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. The piece is about his prescription for out healthcare system. It's dead on. It's also what a lot of Republican lawmakers have proposed, contrary to assertions by the Democrats that they have no proposals of their own. (Question; If a Republican with a good idea speaks up, can a Democrat hear him?) Mackey's proposal, the short version:

• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).
• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.
• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
• Enact Medicare reform.
• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

Click through and read the whole thing.

Physician Senators Talk About Healthcare "Reform"

There are two US Senators, both Republicans, who are also physicians, Senator John Barrasso MD and Senator Tom Coburn MD. They have been appearing in a series of videos, available on YouTube, talking about the Democrats healthcare reform plans. It's good to listen to senators who, for a change, actually have a clue what they are talking about.

One point they touch on that I'd like to emphasize is that when the government lowers Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors and then claims "cost savings", nothing of the kind is occurring. What is occurring is cost shifting. Costs don't go away just because the magic government unicorns wave them out of existence, they just get shifted to someone else. Either other patients pay them in higher prices for their own healthcare or the doctor's practice absorbs them. Either way, it amounts to a tax on private healthcare. The "negotiating power" of govenrment is a fiction. The government dictates and you take or leave. If the Democrats succeed in their plans for a total government takeover of the healthcare system, there will be nobody to shift the costs to and therefore the availability of healthcare will decrease. See Canada and Great Britain.

Here is the video. It's about 22 minutes, but worth your time to watch.

(via Instapundit)

What Mob Rule Actually Looks Like

The latest Democrat talking point is that the large groups of TEA Party and other like-minded people showing up at town hall meetings to confront democratic politicians on the healthcare plan are resorting to "mob rule". Michelle Malkin does us the courtesy of showing us what angry mobs really look like.

California's Morality Play in Three Acts

California 4th District Libertarian/Republican Tom McClintock gave a speech to the Competitive Enterprise Institute on July 10. In it, he chronicles how the once great state of California came to be in its present sorry condition and what lessons we should learn from it. Instead of learning though, he is watching as the Democrat controlled US House of Representatives (led by the odious California liberal Nancy Pelosi) making all the same mistakes.

I should also warn you of the strange sense of déjà-vu that I have every day on the House floor as I watch the same folly and blunders that wrecked California now being passed with reckless abandon in this Congress.

We passed a “Cash-for-Clunkers” bill the other day – we did that years ago in California.

Doubling the entire debt every five years? Been there.

Increasing spending at unsustainable rates? Done that.

Save-the-Planet-Carbon-Dioxide restrictions? Got the T-Shirt.

To understand how these policies can utterly destroy an economy and bankrupt a government, you have to remember the Golden State in its Golden Age.

A generation ago, California spent about half what it does today AFTER adjusting for both inflation and population growth.

And yet, we had the finest highway system in the world and the finest public school system in the country. California offered a FREE university education to every Californian who wanted one. We produced water and electricity so cheaply that many communities didn’t bother to measure the stuff. Our unemployment rate consistently ran well below the national rate and its diversified economy was nearly recession-proof.

One thing – and one thing only – has changed in those years: public policy. The political Left gradually gained dominance over California’s government and has imposed a disastrous agenda of radical and retrograde policies that have destroyed the quality of life that Californians once took for granted.

It's a lengthy speech, but well worth your time to read.

(Hat tip to Bob)

What the Democrats Are Up To - In the Words of One of Their Own

I've posted a couple of times now about how the Republican Party keeps trying to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Democrats bring knives and brass knuckles to the fight. The Republicans get slaughtered, every single time. David Kahane (the nom de plume of a Hollywood writer), a self-professed "man of the left", openly tells us the same in this article at the National Review. Can we please take them at their word, that is seriously, now?

Yes, my friends, it’s once again time to quote Sean Connery’s famous speech from The Untouchables, written by David Mamet — the lecture the veteran Chicago cop gives a wet-behind-the-ears Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner, back when he was a movie star) while they sit in a church pew. “You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” If you just think of us — liberal Democrats — as Capone you’ll begin to understand what we’re up to. And we just put one of yours in the morgue.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here. This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that. We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

As much as most people would like to think that everyone's intentions, on both sides of the aisle, are honorable, it ain't so. If an admission like this doesn't wake you up to that fact, I don't know what will. Read the whole thing, of course.

(hat tip to MBG)

Compare and Contrast

If you aren't convinced by now that The New York Times is completely in the tank for the Bolsheviks Democrats, read "That Was Then, This Is Now", over at Powerline for an interesting and revealing juxtaposition of how they editorialized on the early Bush administration Republican deficit spending and how they are treating the early Obama administration Democrat deficit spending now.

Why Do We Have a Budget Deficit? Look to Congress, Not the President

When it comes to budget deficits, the sitting President usually seems to get the blame for them. In fact, the President can't spend a dime of taxpayer funds that the Congress doesn't appropriate. It's true that President Bush left office with a budget deficit but the deficit President Obama has inherited is mostly the creation of a Democrat controlled Congress. At the end of fiscal 2006, when Republican control of congress ended, the budget deficit was $248 billion. That's bad enough and the Republicans lost control in large part because they forgot why they were sent there in 1994 and acted like Democrats. They spent every thin dime of tax revenue that came into the Treasury and then some. And it certainly didn't help that it took until 2006 for President Bush to find his veto stamp. Perhaps if he'd reined in the Congress, the Republicans might have held onto it.

I expressed hope after the 2006 elections that 1.) the Republicans would learn their lesson and remember that people vote for them because they profess to be in favor of small government and fiscal discipline and 2.) that the Democrats would act responsibly, now that they'd been handed the car keys. No such luck. The deficit for the end of fiscal year 2008 ballooned to $407 billion and that was before the ill-conceived and hastily passed $700 billion TARP. Now President Obama is demanding that the Congress pass an $800 billion to $900 billion "stimulus" bill that will deepen the deficit even further and leave the bill for future generations to foot. Remeber who controls the purse-strings. It's the Congress. The hole may have started under a Republican Congress, but it's the Democrats that have kept on digging. The first rule of holes states that when you find yourself in one, you stop digging.

How do we stop this hole from getting deeper? We have to stop spending more than we bring in. No matter where you set marginal tax rates, receipts to the treasury will not exceed about 19.5% of GDP. Congress is currently spending about 21.5% of GDP. Spending has to be brought into line with GDP and if we want to really increase tax revenues (not rates, revenues) we need to grow GDP and the quickest way to do that is to reduce tax rates. Leave money in the productive economy, i.e., the private sector and we will start to come back. Unfortunately the Democrats are more concerned with punishing the "evil rich" and redistributing wealth than they are with actually solving the problem. They can do a lot of damage over the next two years and the Republicans need to point this out loudly, often and stick together to resist the systematic looting of the private economy by the statist, power hungry monster that is the Democrat Congress.

Obama the Self-Absorbed Adolescent

Mark Steyn's column in this week's Orange County Register really rips the Democrats and Obama in particular for objecting to Presidnet Bush's speech to the Knesset on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel. One particular passage appears to have particularly irked them. Even though the speech makes no reference to any living Democrat Obama has decided it's all about him. Isn't that just like an adolescent to think that everythng is all about him? As usual, Steyn nails it:

"Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here's what the president said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they're talking about me. Actually, he wasn't – or, to be more precise, he wasn't talking only about you

In fact the senator who uttered those words in 1939 was William Borah of Idaho, a Republican. The Democrats should really take to heart the old adage; "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." Plus, it's harder to get your foot in there when your piehole is shut.

Read the whole thing, of course.