Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
[Through Medicare and Medicaid the government now controls about 60% of our health care.]
UK: Patients Put in Hospital ‘Cupboards’ (mop closets) Due to NHS Budget Squeeze
by Pat_S on March 13, 2010 · 0 comments
A post by Pat
Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard,
To give the poor dog a bone:
When she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.
Poor doggie. If Mother Hubbard went to the cupboards of some hospitals in the U.K. today, she’d find plenty of bones though still in living bodies. We hope. The NHS is having some money problems. Oh, and by hospital “cupboards” they mean mop closets.
No, we sure wouldn’t want to maintain the status quo with our health care system in the U.S. Medicare and Medicaid are going to bankrupt us. Private insurers keep raising their premiums and denying coverage to people. The solution from Obama and the Democrats is government intervention to turn the screws on private insurers and “keep them honest”. Ultimately, a single payer system will solve everything. Just a matter of time.
You’d think we’re the only country experiencing a health care crisis since we’re the ones so backward about universal health care. Actually, most major economies are having a health care crisis right along with us.
It just goes to show that however perfectly a health system is designed, funded and organised, it is always going to have its problems. Right now, the health services of all advanced economies – good, bad, and ugly together – face a common challenge. The demographic time-bomb of baby-boomers about to hit the age of maximum health care cost has pretty much made all of them fiscally unsustainable. Either we are going to have to pay a whole lot more for our health care, or it will have to be rationed.
So how does a system that is already government run handle a health care crisis? The NHS instituted drastic cutbacks including reducing the number of hospital beds and curtailing medical procedures. Something will have to be done about the elderly too. A recommendation will be made to the NHS to provide “a minimum level of service” to the elderly.
Here are a few other things going on.
Patients treated in cupboards
More patients will be treated in hospital cupboards if further planned bed cuts are given the green light, a health pressure group warned on Tuesday.
Health Emergency chairman Geoff Martin made the comments following a Nursing Times survey that revealed over 60 per cent of nurses were aware of patients being routinely treated in mop cupboards, TV rooms and corridors.
The poll of more than 900 nurses showed almost 80 per cent believed this resulted in patient safety being put at risk and 29 per cent admitted it happened every day.
Nurses highlighted specific issues around safety with senior staff, including patients having no access to call bells or water, as well as a lack of emergency equipment and fire exits being blocked.
Hospitals being “full” and a fear that the government’s four-hour A&E target for patients to be seen will not be met, leading to unnecessary hospital admissions, were some of the reasons given for why non-clinical areas had to be used.
But Mr Martin warned of much worse to come if planned bed cuts, including over 30 per cent of the current capacity in London, were bulldozed through.
He said: “If NHS London get its way, a third of the current hospital beds in the capital will be ripped out of the system at a time when nurses are already making it clear that the crisis is so severe that patients are being treated in cupboards and that hospitals are dangerously short of capacity.” The Patients Association charity director Katherine Murphy said: “Not only is this potentially unsafe, but it is completely undignified.
If you need a tooth pulled or a hysterectomy, you probably won’t be put in the mop closet. You may not wind up in the dental chair or an operating room either.
Patients denied surgery because of black hole in health budgets
More than a third of Primary Care Trusts, which fund hospitals in England, are running deficits which have led to a cutbacks in operations and calls to close casualty departments, the report said. [...] Patients are already suffering from the deficit, the report said. GPs in one area have been told they must seek “approval” for a list of procedures including hysterectomies, removal of “skin lumps and bumps” and tooth extraction.
Bosses have advised that “it is usually better to wait to see if symptoms resolve themselves”, according to the report.
That sounds reasonable. Don’t be such a sissy running out for a tooth extraction or a hysterectomy before you know you really need it. Waiting for the pain to go away is much better than giving up premium cable to pay for higher health insurance premiums.
Being in a mop closet doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get any care.
Patients ‘routinely neglected’ at hospital of horrors
PATIENTS were “routinely neglected” at a hospital where managers became obsessed with cost-cutting and Government targets, an inquiry has damningly concluded.
Maybe they aren’t being neglected. Maybe everyone is waiting around to see if the problems go away, like when you’re dead.
NHS trust shamed for cost cutting
Stafford Hospital was ranked among the best in Britain – having been awarded a coveted foundation status in 2008. But on closer inspection things are not so rosy.
For the previous six years, it had had one of the highest mortality rates in the country. The Royal College of Nursing believes this could only happen because the criterion used to decide which hospitals are awarded foundation status does not focus closely enough on patient safety.
“It’s definitely more than a local problem, it comes from the government it really does. It comes from the targets they put in place,” [says a family member of a patient]. “The hospitals will do absolutely anything to meet the targets and even more to get foundation status.”
Anyone who looks to government to solve the problem of health care costs should remember Old Mother Hubbard.
She went to the baker’s
To buy him some bread;
When she came back
The dog was dead!
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, national healthcare, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
On Obamacare – just say no
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
WorldNetDaily.com
Posted: March 13, 2010
When Barack Obama was sworn in as president, he chose the Bible that Abraham Lincoln used on which to take the oath of office.
A little over a year later, as President Obama strong-arms House and Senate Democrats to pass a health-care bill that will nationalize 17 percent of our economic lives – a bill that Americans don’t want – we ought to recall Lincoln’s famous words at Gettysburg.
Dedicating the final resting place for those who fought there, Lincoln appealed that we not let up in the struggle for “government
of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Democrats may soon show, if we let them, that the American ideal of representative government – government of a nation, in Lincoln’s words, “conceived in Liberty” – is lost.
Bending rules into a procedural pretzel, Democrats will attempt to pass one of the largest government takeovers of private American lives in history without a single Republican vote and, against the will of the people. Obama will sign it into law.
Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen write in the Washington Post, “… a solid majority of Americans oppose the massive health-care reform plan.”
Pollster.com, which reports an average of all polls, shows that now for the first time disapproval for President Obama exceeds approval – 48.8 to 47.5 percent.
According to Gallup, just 21 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, down 10 points from spring of last year when the health-care reform push began.
And, per the latest from the Pew Research Center, only 13 percent of Americans view health care as “our most important problem.”
But this isn’t about logic. Mr. Obama and his colleagues on Capitol Hill perceive a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grasp the holy grail of the left and realize the dream of transforming America into a European-style welfare state. Democracy – what the American people actually want – is just not going to stand in the way.
It isn’t just about Republican opposition. Nancy Pelosi must persuade, bribe and threaten to get 216 House Democrats to support this despite having 253 sitting House Democrats.
Speaking the other day in Missouri, Obama mocked Republicans who want to stop this train and begin the process over.
But Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the nation’s wealthiest men – himself a Democrat – said the same thing in an interview on CNBC.
Buffett said we should “start over.” And he said, correctly, that the main health-care problem is runaway costs and that the bill the president is pushing “unfortunately … doesn’t attack the cost situation that much.”
Yet, in his remarks in Missouri, the president said, “Let me tell you, we’ve incorporated almost every serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain rising health-care costs. There’s not an idea out there that we have not worked on, that we have not included in this proposal.”
At the recent White House health-care summit, Rep. Paul Ryan challenged with clarity the massive accounting gimmicks and hallucinatory economic assumptions Democrats have used to present this massive budget-busting disaster of a bill as a prudent deficit-cutting measure.
Ryan, speaking for Republicans, showed that the 10-year costs are in reality $2.3 trillion, rather than under a trillion as claimed. It’s all been ignored.
In the one laboratory experiment we have – Massachusetts – which enacted a state plan similar to what Democrats want for the nation, premiums are now the highest in the nation, and per-capita health expenditures are 27 percent higher than the national average.
Every freedom-loving American patriot who cares about our future should be on the phone today to their senators and congressmen saying “stop.”
Star Parker is is an author and president of CURE, Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education. Her books include “White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialism, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Yellen is Spellin’ Future Inflation
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Townhall.com
The new Obama Fed is going to be very dovish when it comes to fighting future inflation and defending the value of the dollar.
The president has nominated Janet Yellen to be vice chair of the Federal Reserve. Ms. Yellen is a distinguished economist who unfortunately subscribes to the Phillips-curve model that trades off unemployment and inflation. In other words, rather than excess money creation as the cause of rising prices, she focuses on the unemployment rate, the volume of new jobs being created, and the growth of the overall economy. For Ms. Yellen, inflation is caused by too many people working and too much economic prosperity.
And since we have the opposite problem today — high unemployment and too few people working — she will be the last Fed governor to turn out the lights on the central bank’s zero interest rate.
There is no evidence in Ms. Yellen’s public opinions or speeches that she might use a market-price rule — targeting commodities, gold, bond rates, or the dollar — as a forward-looking inflation (or deflation) signal. So the absence of a commodity- or dollar-price rule will continue at the Fed. Ben Bernanke doesn’t use a market-price rule, and Obama’s additional Fed appointees — whoever they are — will undoubtedly come from the same Phillips-curve camp.
Supply-siders like myself who believe that only market prices can provide accurate signals of the supply and demand for money are going to be very disappointed. If the Fed supplies more cash than markets want, the inflation rate can go up whether unemployment is high or low. We learned this painfully in the 1970s, when high unemployment was accompanied by high inflation.
Even more troubling, fiscal policies coming out of Washington will reduce the investment demand for money. This is because tax rates on those individuals, families, and entrepreneurs who are most likely to save and invest are going up. Rather than extending the Bush marginal-tax-rate cuts on capital gains and other forms of investment, Washington will let that tax relief expire at the end of this year.
On top of this, Obamacare proposes to apply the 2.9 percent Medicare payroll tax on ordinary labor income to capital gains, dividends, interest, and profits from passive investments in partnerships and S-corporation small businesses.
Saving and investment are already double-taxed several times over. This includes the inheritance tax, which is slated to rise substantially next year. But taxing successful investors and earners is the exact wrong policy. Continued…
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Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, inflation, unemployment
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
How Real are the Defects in Toyota’s Cars?
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Megan McArdle – Megan McArdle is the business and economics editor for The Atlantic. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and the Economist.
Mar 12 2010, 2:56 PM ET
One of the great mysteries of the Toyota debacle is why Toyota ignored the complaints for so long. Or at least it’s a mystery to reporters on cable news, abetted by consumer advocates who were all too happy to imply that Toyota didn’t care how many people it killed as long as they made a profit.
The Los Angeles Times recently did a story detailing all of the NHTSA reports of Toyota “sudden acceleration” fatalities, and, though the Times did not mention it, the ages of the drivers involved were striking.
In the 24 cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89–and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger.
These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly, just as the sudden acceleration of Audis and GM autos did before them. (If computers are going to discriminate against anyone, they should be picking on the young, who are more likely to take up arms against the rise of the machines and future Terminators).
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Toyota
Posted in The U.S. Government | No Comments »
48 out of 50 States Have Lost Jobs Since Democrats’ Stimulus Passed
Friday, March 12th, 2010
Committee On Ways & Means Republicans Ranking Member, Dave Camp
Friday, March 12, 2010
While the White House claims their stimulus bill “has already created or saved up to 2 million jobs,” the table below compares the White House’s original projections of state-by-state job creation with the actual change in state payroll employment through January 2010, using the latest data from the U.S. Department of Labor. Only North Dakota, Alaska and the District of Columbia have seen net job creation since stimulus, and even those levels fall far short of what the White House forecast.
To see how the Democrats’ stimulus has failed your state, see the table below.
| State |
Administration Claims of Change in Jobs Through December 2010 |
Actual Change in Jobs Through January 2010 |
| Alabama | +52,000 | -67,800 |
| Alaska | +8,000 | +2,200 |
| Arizona | +70,000 | -104,600 |
| Arkansas | +31,000 | -22,300 |
| California | +396,000 | -558,800 |
| Colorado | +59,000 | -83,500 |
| Connecticut | +41,000 | -45,200 |
| Delaware | +11,000 | -12,500 |
| District of Columbia | +12,000 | +4,800 |
| Florida | +206,000 | -240,400 |
| Georgia | +106,000 | -131,000 |
| Hawaii | +15,000 | -15,500 |
| Idaho | +17,000 | -18,400 |
| Illinois | +148,000 | -188,600 |
| Indiana | +75,000 | -81,600 |
| Iowa | +37,000 | -36,000 |
| Kansas | +33,000 | -47,700 |
| Kentucky | +48,000 | -32,100 |
| Louisiana | +50,000 | -40,900 |
| Maine | +15,000 | -13,500 |
| Maryland | +66,000 | -53,200 |
| Massachusetts | +79,000 | -81,000 |
| Michigan | +109,000 | -96,200 |
| Minnesota | +66,000 | -60,500 |
| Mississippi | +30,000 | -28,400 |
| Missouri | +69,000 | -71,900 |
| Montana | +11,000 | -8,800 |
| Nebraska | +23,000 | -19,400 |
| Nevada | +34,000 | -66,700 |
| New Hampshire | +16,000 | -5,400 |
| New Jersey | +100,000 | -85,500 |
| New Mexico | +22,000 | -20,600 |
| New York | +215,000 | -160,900 |
| North Carolina | +105,000 | -89,300 |
| North Dakota | +8,000 | +800 |
| Ohio | +133,000 | -194,800 |
| Oklahoma | +40,000 | -50,000 |
| Oregon | +44,000 | -52,000 |
| Pennsylvania | +143,000 | -126,200 |
| Rhode Island | +12,000 | -13,900 |
| South Carolina | +50,000 | -28,500 |
| South Dakota | +10,000 | -7,100 |
| Tennessee | +70,000 | -85,200 |
| Texas | +269,000 | -221,600 |
| Utah | +32,000 | -24,400 |
| Vermont | +8,000 | -4,900 |
| Virginia | +93,000 | -65,200 |
| Washington | +75,000 | -83,900 |
| West Virginia | +20,000 | -22,200 |
| Wisconsin | +70,000 | -101,800 |
| Wyoming | +8,000 | -12,600 |
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, unemployment
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
The Democrats Won’t Talk About This Provision
Friday, March 12th, 2010
“You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future . … We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.” — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, March 9, 2010
Pity the Democrats. They just can’t get their message out. Not with a charismatic president (who has delivered 52 speeches on the subject), control of both houses of Congress, the gooey enthusiasm of 90 percent of the press, and more than a year of ceaseless agitation. Their efforts have been thwarted, so they imagine, by “misinformation,” “distortion” and the “special interests.” So influential are these dark forces that the leadership cannot shout over them. Speaker Pelosi must pass the grossly unpopular bill in order to get the peace and quiet she needs to explain its virtues.
In fact, on the most important variable about this legislation — cost — Americans see through the optimistic projections. Asked by Rasmussen whether the health care plan will cost more than currently estimated, 81 percent of voters said yes and 66 percent said it was “very likely” to exceed projections. Doubtless the Democrats can explain that Americans believe this only because they’ve been duped by lies and clever ad campaigns, not because 60 years of recent history demonstrate conclusively that government programs, particularly open-ended entitlements, nearly always exceed projected costs. In 1966, Medicare cost taxpayers $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that by 1990, we might be spending as much as $12 billion. The actual 1990 figure? $107 billion. In 1987, Congress estimated that the Medicaid DSH (disproportionate share hospital) costs would be less than $1 billion in 1992. The actual cost? $17 billion.
But since Pelosi is so eager for us to know the details, let’s indulge her. Among the specifications of the House bill that passed last November are several sections that mandate racial and ethnic quotas for medical schools and other federal contractors. As Allan Favish reported in The American Thinker, the bill specifies that the secretary of Health and Human Services, “In awarding grants or contracts under this section … shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of … training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”
This, along with other provisions, is broad enough to cover every medical, nursing, dental school and teaching hospital in the country and guarantees the institutionalization of racial, sex, and ethnic quotas in perpetuity (though the use of the word “underrepresented” before “minority” ensures that the quotas will not apply to Asians or Jews).
The rationale for quotas, insofar as there is one, is that African-Americans and Hispanics have, on average, poorer health than other groups. Liberals assume that these disparities are the result of discrimination or lack of access to health care rather than other factors like poverty, eating habits, heredity, and fitness. If medical and dental schools are required to admit more minority applicants, newly minted minority professionals will tend to those “underserved” populations.
Of course, medical and dental schools have been practicing affirmative action for decades, but they’ve had trouble recruiting large numbers of minorities. Part of the problem is that African-Americans do not tend to gravitate to math and science (the solution to which is to be found in families and schools). Still, for the past few decades, less-qualified minorities have been offered spots in medical schools, with the result that: 1) Those minority professionals who would have qualified without affirmative action bear a stigma, and 2) less-qualified minorities fail licensing exams at much higher rates than their classmates. Is it a service to the African-American or Hispanic communities to provide physicians and dentists who are less capable than others? Will it improve health outcomes to be treated by less-qualified professionals?
President Obama asked this week whether anyone could oppose “holding insurance companies accountable,” and “bringing down costs for everyone.” Funny, he doesn’t ask whether we object to this: a provision on “maintaining, collecting and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity,” in order to “facilitate and coordinate identification and monitoring … of health disparities to inform program and policy efforts to reduce such disparities.” That’s an engraved invitation to social engineering.
But then, even to mention it is probably contributing to the “fog of controversy.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, Houston Voters, national healthcare, Social Security
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Williams with Sowell – Government-Run Health Care
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
LibertyPen — November 01, 2009 — Economics professors Walter E Williams and Thomas Sowell discuss what citizens can expect from government-run health care. http://www.libertypen.com
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, national healthcare, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
