Why private insurance cannot survive the public option

And no, it's not for the reasons you think.

The Republican line on the Public Option is that it will crowd out Private Insurance carriers because they won't be able to compete against an entity that can print its own money and has access to a potentially unlimited pool of tax dollars.

This is, in a word, horseshit. On this point at least, President Obama and I agree. And frankly, if the Republicans are going to push the idea that the free market will save the economy and not government intervention, then they should try to show a little more confidence in that free market... don't you think?

The American free market is the best in the world and we can compete with anyone, anywhere, anytime... sure would be nice to hear someone on the Republican side say this every now and then.

Now it IS true that the government plan will be cheaper... it will, in fact, be free (as much as anything that drains money out of your paycheck in the form of taxes CAN be free anyway). And it's pretty hard to compete on price when one side provides the service for free... but private companies will always be able to compete on quality.

We all know that when Obama says there will be no rationing and no lines under Obamacare, that he is absolutely 100% full of shit. We KNOW it. And I for one have no intention of ever turning over my health care needs to a government agency. I will always go out and pay for quality care delivered when and how I want, by a profit-driven company, on my terms...and million of my fellow Americans will join me.

We already have a precedent for this... it's called education. Government provided education in America sucks and gets suckier with each passing day. Millions of American families are willing to spend outrageous amounts of money to send their kids to private schools even though at the same time, their tax dollars are taken from them to pay for a free Public Option.

They choose quality over price every single time.

And they will do the same for Health Care.

Imagine the TV spots...

"Tired of waiting for six hours in the cinderblock lobby of the Bureau of Social Health Issues to see a doctor who graduated at the bottom of his class at the Rocko Clubbo School of Medicine? Log on to KaiserPermanente.net and take a look at all the high quality plans we offer. We guarantee you'll see a doctor within 30 minutes or your visit is free."

Which is why Obama simply cannot, and will not, allow private iunsurance companies to continue to offer high quality private plans.

Because when the stories of six hour waits and denials of procedures start to leak out, and they will, people will freak out... millions will leave the public option for private plans and those who remain will, by definition, be the poorest and sickest among us who cannot afford to leave a lower quality, though free, public service.

But in this world where quality healthcare has been re-defined as a "right", what does it mean if the wealthy can get great high quality convenient care on their own terms while the poor are corralled into cattle call waiting rooms for substandard care?

It won't happen. It CAN'T happen. It is the entire promise of Obamcare... that no one will be better off than anyone else.

And that's why private insurance companies must be eliminated. As long as they exist, Americans who work hard and are successful will refuse to allow themselves to be forced into a government definition of "equality."

And we can't have that, can we?

Ted Kennedy RIP

Ted Kennedy was probably the most influential US Senator ever, with the exception of LBJ.

However, that does not make up for his shortcomings as a human being. Ted Kennedy had a serious problem with alcohol, womanizing, and the truth. One only needs to google "Chappaquiddick Incident" and see what comes up.

But forgiveness is a hallmark of the Catholic faith, and as a fellow Catholic (probably the only thing Ted Kennedy and I had in common), I forgive him for his shortcomings. I hope that he finds some peace in the afterlife, peace which surely seemed to have eluded him in this life.

KennedyCare

Dems to America... "Ted Kennedy wanted us to pass healthcare reform, so stop raising reasonable objections to a boondoggle program, shut up, and do what we say... because if you don't it will rain... and those raindrops will be Ted Kennedy's tears as he cries in Heaven because of what you did."

Tom Ridge: Useful Idiot

So Tom Ridge becomes the latest useless government bureacrat to discover previously unknown reservoirs of courage at, coincidentally, the exact moment where they decide to try and sell a book... following in the proud tradition of "great" men like Richard Clarke and Scott McClellan

Let's all take a minute to review the resume of this completely ordinary and unexceptional public servant as he gets ready to tell us about all the awful things he saw George Bush do, even as he found himself simply unable to do or say anything about it.

After a mere 22 months (I've taken longer to read stereo instructions) on the job as the totally ineffectual head of a disaster of an agency, Tom ran off to accept a 6-figure salary to sit on the board of HOME DEPOT. Now recall that HOME DEPOT lobbied vigorously in support of open borders through the 8 years of the Bush administration... and gee, it just so happens that those of us who supported cracking down on security at the border believed that Tom Ridge did everything he could at every single turn to keep those borders open, even to the detriment of his President's popularity.

I'm sure that's all just a coincidence though.

Meanwhile, I can't wait to hear the story of how Tom Ridge courageously stood up to Bush Administration attempts to use Terrorism warnings to help him win the 2004 election by not saying anything at all and keeping the story to himself so that he could finally tell it when it could prove most profitable to him... the day he releases a book.

What a courageous man... what a brilliant man of integrity...

What a douche.

The good news is that, as a human, Tom Ridge is so brain-numbingly dull, that even hardcore 9/11 Truther Libs won't be able to bring themselves to actually read this paperweight.

Your government is lying to you...

No this is not another "curse that Obama and his lousy healthcare plan" post... though I could certainly throw one of those together in about four-and-a-half seconds if asked to do so.

No this is a story about something that happened to me last Saturday... it's a story of a casual lie told by a local government that I think has huge implications in a world where our current government seems intent on controlling more and more aspects of our daily lives. It was a relatively small thing to be sure, but as they say, the devil is in the details, and once you tell the first little lie, it almost always gets easier to tell the next bigger one. Especially if you have a government title and access to tax dollars to back you up.

I've been living in Los Angeles for 16 years, having come (as many of us do) from some other part of the country. As a result, I tend to get a lot of visitors who come to see L.A. for the first time. In all those years I have perfected a four hour driving tour of all the major sites in L.A. It's a pretty great tour, if I do say so myself.

So last Saturday, I had some folks in from a southern state, which shall remain nameless, and we were headed up to the Hollywood Sign, which is the third stop on my tour.

There's really only one way to get up there... you take a little turn off a main road and wind your way up through a pretty ritzy neighborhood called Beachwood Canyon. So on this day as I made my turn onto the steep road that makes its way up to the sign, I noticed that someone had installed a road sign at the turn that read "no access to Hollywood sign."

Now I'm here to tell you, that sign is 100% pure weapons-grade horseshit. Not only is there access to the sign from that road... it's the ONLY access road that takes you up to the sign.

Here's what I think happened. Some rich asshole, or collection of rich assholes got together and decided, you know what, we don't like it when people drive up our pretty little private street on their way to the Hollywood sign. Let's go to our city councilman with a petition, and possibly some thinly veiled threats of lawyers in Armani suits and ask them to install a sign that tells people a blatant lie... that they can't get to the Hollywood sign by using this street.

And just as it is with all the lies that are being told about how great Obamacare will be, it doesn't really matter that we're sort of breaking a cardinal rule... that government should always try to be as truthful as possible to the people it serves... because a larger good is being served by the lie.

And the infuriating thing is some dickweed government bureaucrat actually acquiesced to this nonsense. In order to get these squeaky wheels (aka rich assholes) out of his or her office, they agreed to put up a flagrantly false official city street sign on a public road.

Think about the implications of that for a moment. Because some jerkweed doesn't like tourists driving down "his" road, a sign meant to provide drivers with up-to-date information about road conditions and other important information, but which in this case features 100% false information, was placed on a city street.

I cannot tell you how pissed off this made me. I mean for one thing, it's just flat-out dangerous. Forget for a minute that if there's ever a serious emergency and people are looking for specific ways to drive here or there to get to safety, in this case they are receiving inccorect information from at least one official city sign... think about the slippery slope implications for a minute.

At least one bureaucrat has decided to move his own moral compass to "it's OK to put up a sign that is a lie in order to protect the peacefulness of a rich douchebag's quiet little street." But now that the compass has been moved, who is to say it can't be moved again? What else might this bureacrat, or one of his coworkers upon hearing about this, be willing to do if only the right (read: rich or influential) people "ask" him or her to do it.

Maybe I'm the only sane person left in this godforsaken city, but I think the implications are absolutely terrifying.

Holy crap!!!!

"According to last month's IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year."

The return of Viet Nam... in the face of a Health Care debate

There were a lot of Apocryphal moments in the saga that was the American intervention in Viet Nam.

Most people remember only a few... Walter Cronkite's declaration of stalemate in the wake of the Tet Offensive perhaps. Or maybe it's the photograph of a young girl naked and burned from head-to-toe running from an American napalm attack.

One of my personal favorites has always been the twisted logic on evidence in the famous quote given to AP reporter Peter Arnett by an Air Force Colonel who said that in order to save a village it became necessary to destroy it.

That one quote and its bizarre snake-eating-its-own-tail internal logic came to symoblize the futility of the entire effort.

And I feel like we've had a similar moment here in the debate over Obamacare. No one has yet said it in quite this way, but it seems to me that Obama is saying to us...

"In order to increase the number of choices available to you, we have to decrease the number of choices available to you"

Much as the Colonels' comment on the destruction of a village helped end our war in Viet Nam... this unspoken truth about Obamacare ought to end our self-destructive pursuit of a Government run Health Care System once and for all, as well.