Bioethics professor argues for rationing and discrimination in healthcare

Professor Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University has an article in the New York Times that lays out his case in favor of government rationed health care.  His arguments are based on that rationing is going to happen, one way or the other.

For example he cites Sutent a drug used in Kidney Cancer patients that costs $54,000 and only extends a person’s life by 6 months.  He argues that while a man who could afford that would probably pay that amount to extend his life; a man would be upset to know that his insurance paid for that treatment for another person and therefore made his premiums go up as well. And while this may be true, he fails to explain WHY the insurance company would even consider paying for this treatment.  In fact, the reason why is the same reason health insurance in the U.S. is so expensive.

Professor Singer fails to comprehend, or intentionally omits the fact that government (either Federal or State) has implemented mandates to the health insurance industry.  Some of those mandates include the coverage of highly expensive, low result treatments like the Sutent drug.  These mandates number around 2000 these days.  With these 2000 mandates, the insurance industry has been forced to offer coverage that it would normally not cover due to high expense and low result.  Because of these higher expenses (mandated by the federal and state governments) insurance companies are not able to offer lower-coverage products that healthier and less wealthy people would be willing to purchase.  Instead, those people are left WITHOUT health insurance because they are not willing or able to pay.  He calls this rationing by price, but in reality the government has made it too expensive for people to purchase the insurance that they want or need.

Professor Singer also writes in favor of rationing by discrimination.  He assigns different value to life based on a person’s age, disability, and the cost of care.  He says that a teenager is more valuable than an 85 year old.  Or that public health insurance should only pay a certain amount to extend life one year. He claims that this happens already in an unseen fashion within the private sector.  But what Singer proposes is that a government body will do the rationing in place of the private sector.  This is evil.  When governments assign differing values to human life based on a set of criteria that the person cannot change (like age, disability, or cost of care), and then uses that criteria to assign the benefits of life saving care we no longer have a free society.  We would have an oppressive, discriminatory society; an evil society.  We would also lose the title of health care, we would have DEATH CARE.  Government would then determine who lives and who dies based on these criteria.   But this would not apply to the super rich, or the political elite.  They would of course, have a different set of rules.

Governments cannot be trusted to properly ration health care to the masses.  They will be influenced by special interest and their political ambitions.  It is their political ambitions that they feed now by proposing this health care public option.  Their actions over the many years have made health insurance so expensive that 45 million people cannot afford it.  When things are rationed in the free market it is done through efficiency which in the end brings costs DOWN.  In the long run the private health care system would make things more affordable if left alone.  The government mandates on health insurance are what brought the costs to skyrocket. 

So you see, the government has made health insurance more expensive by mandating coverage of certain items.  Then it demonizes the insurance industry for not covering the 45 million people that had to go without coverage while failing to mention that it was their own mandates that lead to them not being able to afford insurance in the first place.  Then they will offer a public plan that is supposed to bring the cost of coverage down while in reality it will undercut the private sector and drive costs up to the point where everyone will opt for the public plan.  Then they will begin rationing health care based on discriminatory criteria. And voila! We have an oppressive totalitarian regime, regulating every aspect of our life under the guise of “bringing down health care costs.”

So it is not the unseen rationing that we oppose, it is the government imposed rationing.  Government rationing of healthcare is cruel and inhumane and we cannot allow this to happen.

If this is what you get from a professor of bioethics at Princeton, I’d have to say… SAVE YOUR MONEY AND TAKE ONLINE CLASSES!!!!

How is the stimulus working for America?

This video does a good job at summing up how well Obama’s stimulus package is working for America so far…

Who we be confirming?

Democrats continue to attack John Roberts 4 years after his confirmation to the Supreme Court.  This is of course during the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor.  I guess that the Dems think that their girl is on the fast track to being confirmed and rightly so.  They have now reverted to attacking John Roberts more than they are confirming Sotomayor.  Of Course, Sotomayor is their partisan hack so they won’t bother attacking their own.

 It’s just so sad that we have come to this.  We the People, don’t even get the courtesy of feigned impartiality!  They can’t even PRETEND to be objective or civil.  Why the hell do we keep electing these people?

 Look America, the tyranny is coming.  We are about to confirm a judge that cannot see through her own racist view of the world.  She ruled against people who were denied promotion based on race alone and she thinks that her racist views won’t affect her judgments.  The hypocrisy is amazing!  She even says that she’s racist repeatedly by claiming that she is a wise Latina and can make better judgments than an old white guy.  But that didn’t stop her from denying White Firefighters their day in court when they sued New Haven for racial discrimination. 

 In case you don’t know… the firefighters took a test to qualify for promotions.  All the top applicants were white and Hispanic.  The black applicants also passed the test but none were eligible for immediate promotion.  The city then threw out the test on the basis that no blacks were eligible for immediate promotion.  So the whites and Hispanics sued, saying that it wasn’t right to deny them their results based on someone else failing.  The city of New Haven could not prove the test was inherently racist but Judge Sotomayor ruled in favor of the city anyway without even so much as reading all the details of the case.  She essentially ruled in favor of racial discrimination.

 But all the Democrats can talk about is John Roberts!  That’s great.  We are really getting our money’s worth when it comes to the Congress. 

 Let’s do ourselves a favor AND THROW THEM ALL OUT!!!!  All of them.  Even the Republicans and elect new representatives that will have that sour taste in their mouth.  If you don’t work for us we’ll throw your ass out on the street.

Obama has rewritten the Cold War

Liz Cheney has a WSJ article slamming Obama for his recount of the Cold War.

‘Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: “The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.”‘

Mr. Obama apparently has either no idea of what was going on during the Cold War – probably because of all the drugs he was using or selling – or, he is intentionally sucking up the the Russian regime.  Either way, it’s sick.

Mr Obama’s version is not even close to the truth.  We were not fighting over astrophysics and athletics.  Nor were we really fighting about ideology.  We were at odds because one regime was a brutal totalitarian regime filled with secret police, KGB killings, imprisonment of political enemies and dissidents and the denial of basic human and civil rights.  The Soviet Union then tried to export this type of terrorist government to other nations as a means of controlling them.  The ultimate goal of the USSR was to dominate the world and create a de facto World Empire. 

Mr. Obama seems to leave out these facts when he was speaking to these young Russian graduates.  In fact he does them and us all a disservice by telling it any other way.  The Soviet Union was evil – as all totalitarian regimes are.  It collapsed because the West was too much for them, economically, socially, and militarily.  The nation that took the lead in defeating the Soviet Union was none other than the United States. 

I suppose this drivel that Obama speaks is whats showing up in history books and that our children will no doubt be droning this in the near future.  But it is a bold faced lie to say that the Soviet Union or the Cold War ended peacefully.  Nothing about the experience of the citizens of the Soviet Union was peaceful I would imagine.  The Cold War was more about their struggle within the Soviet Union than ours outside of it.  The USSR was a reminder about just how far tyranny can take you, but it also shows that it can only take you so far.  The will to live free always prevails. Even if it takes 80 years or so.

So I would appreciate it if Mr. Obama would tell the truth about the Cold War.  Unless he is trying to model OUR nation after the Soviet Union.  Then I wouldn’t expect him to tell the truth about anything.

In this economy, patience is no virtue

The AP reports that president Obama is asking us for patience and to give enough time for the economic stimulus to work.  The economy is still in the midst of a deep recession but the President is just asking for time, and patience.

That advice will fall on the deaf ears of those who have lost their jobs or who are struggling  to make ends meet in this recession.  The advice will also be unheeded as more and more companies are laying workers off or going out of business.  Patience is not a virtue for those people.  Expedience is.

It’s funny, how patience and sound judgment were not required when the bill was passed in the first place.  No, it was shoved down our throats and crammed up our asses at such a speed that has not been seen since the days of yore when FDR was passing plan after plan after plan.  Patience was not required when we were examining the bill and finding that it was not an economic stimulus bill at all, but a special interest stimulus bill.  We were told that everything was going to come to a halt if this did not pass.  We were also told that we were going to see some results within six months.

Photo ops with the Vice President aren’t going to cut it either.  Neither will the administration’s reports of it created (or saved) 150,000 jobs.  150k jobs is nothing compared to the 6.9 million jobs that have been lost.  So far the hundreds of billions of dollars spent has only saved (or created) 150,000 jobs.  At this pace Obama will be in his 8th year touting how he created (or saved) 1.2 million jobs.  But in the meantime we will have lost 15-20 million jobs.  But really we should be ashamed of ourselves.  He said results, not meaningful results.

Besides they “misread” the economy remember?  Maybe that was because Mr. Obama was too busy placing lobbyists in his administration after he said he wouldn’t.  Maybe it was because he was too busy going on talk shows and campaigning for president after he already was inaugurated.  Maybe it was because this economic stimulus was really not a recovery and reinvestment act, it was the Recovery (of tyranny) and Reinvestment (of Special Interest and of course the buying of votes) Act.  Maybe they misread the economy because they don’t know the FIRST thing about economics and how the private sector works.  Or maybe they do and this is just a power grab.

But now we are told to wait.  We are told to wait and have patience when it was this congress and president that did not exude those virtues when it suited them.  We are told to give it time when this government told us we had no time left and the sky was falling.  We were told this was financial Armageddon!  So the bill passed and it has had little to no impact on anything. You see?  The virtue of patience is to fall on us, not them.  The burden of this recession will fall on us as well. They will consolidate their power and we will lose ours.  We are to serve them.  They are to rule over us.  They hold the power and we are holding the check… again!  Shame on us again.  We believed politicians. 

The truth of the matter is, that with any semi-free market, the economy will recover.  In some way it will get back on its feet again because that’s the way it is, we’re Americans.  We will find a way to make this work.  But the dirty secret is that this economy would have recovered without this stimulus bill anyway.  That’s why we’re being told to wait.  We will be told to have patience and to wait until the ecnomy naturally recovers from the recession.  That means that companies will become more efficient and find ways to make money on their own.  When that happens our government will hold up the stimulus package as a great success.  And we will be shamed again because we will believe it.

America as we think it exists no longer exists.  We are too dependent on the government and too stupid to realize it.  We will believe this government when they tell us they did something good when in fact they probably did nothing but consolidate their own power by duping the masses.

Bush’s spy program still hanging around

Despite what many on the Democrat side will tell you, Bush was not the incarnate of evil.  He had many faults and many unwise policies and possibly some down right illegal ones.  Hell even Obama can tell you that.  He never came out and said it , but all of his cronies did.  They accused Bush of being a tyrant and a usurper of rights.

But that won’t stop president Obama from keeping the warrantless wiretapping programs of Bush. 

The Miami Herald reports that the program was bigger than what was originally thought and tells stories of the Bush administration’s fight to keep it secret.  Then in 2005 they had to fight to keep it at all as the New York Times exposed the program.  In 2007 the Bush Administration stopped using warrantless wiretaps and started using warrants from a special national security court.

The controversy is still present.  Does the U.S. have the right to potentially spy on its own citizens in the name of national security?  Probably.  But the down side is way worse than the up side.  So the program should go. 

Let’s face it.  The potential to use this system as a form of “big brother” is too much.  Did Bush do it?  I don’t know but let’s not risk it anymore.  The fact that Obama wants to keep it is pretty frightening as well.  It should be to you too.  We don’t need anymore J. Edgar Hoovers. 

But this is the hypocrisy that I see in Washington.  One party decries the violation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but as soon as THEIR side gets into power they want to use all the handy dandy spy programs to spy on the “enemy.”

Remember what the enemy is right?  According the the DHS memo that I read, it could include, veterans, gun owners, the religious parts of our nation, and conservatives who think the government is too big.  That’s odd.  I thought we called those people patriots.

 Just remember that when this new administration holds that kind of power in their hands they will be looking at anything they think is a threat to their power.  I have no doubts that this kind of power will corrupt our government even further.  Remember, J. Edgar Hoover opened people’s mail and spied on them in order to “find communists and soviet spies.”  But in the end he was using this power to dig up dirt on any personal and political enemies of his and eliminate or silence them.

It’s time to end warrantless wiretapping.  Just remember the next person may be you.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/1136796.html

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/obama-sides-wit/

Are you scared? I sure am!

I just read a news story about the kidnapping, torture, and ultimate beheading of a Statue of Liberty replica. Apparently the experts believe that the video is the work of terrorists trying to spread fear. Seriously…They are making this out to be some devious work by terrorists that is supposed to scare American’s by showing us that the jihad is alive and well.

I think this video actually shows us two different things… 1. It shows us that the jihad movement is alive and extremely stupid. 2. It shows us that the news media and certain members of the NYPD are complete idiots for making this out to be some huge terrorist event and thinking that American’s are going to get scared from it. This is just another case of the news media taking something stupid and making it even more stupid.

But let me talk about the video itself for a second… the words “we don’t want your freedom” and “Death to America” were included in the video. Again, the jihad movement is alive and stupid. If you don’t want our freedom, go away! It’s not that hard to figure out. The funny thing, assuming that this was in fact the work of terrorists, is that the people behind this are in America and using the freedoms we provide to say they don’t want our freedoms.

So lets recap what we learned from all of this…

News Media… MORONS!

Terrorists… MORONS!

Obama’s numbers continue to fall

According to Rasmussen Reports President Obama’s poll numbers are in continual decline.  The poll says that 30% of the nation strongly approve of the president while 38% strongly disapprove.

39% approve of his handling of the economy while 43% disapprove.

Curiously, 51% still give the president good or excellent ratings while 48% disapprove in general.

Good for Massachusetts!

The State of Massachusetts is suing the Federal Government over the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996.  Good.

For too long the Federal Government has been stepping all over the states.  Our politicians have been using the Constitution like toilet paper.  They have overstepped so many boundaries and this is just one more.  They are damn right that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional.  What? Are you surprised that I would defend gay marriage?  Don’t be. 

Look, marriage has long been defined by the states.  In 1996 the Republican Congress thought that passing the Defense of Marriage act would help bolster support for Bob Dole.  But Clinton signed the bill into law in a brilliant political maneuver that helped him win over some conservative Democrats.  But all this hoopla doesn’t detract that the law violates the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution.  And it may very well violate the 1st Amendment.

States have long recognized religious ceremonies as a proper and viable means of marriage.  Without discrimination, if someone has a religious ceremony performed the states count that as legal as long as the marriage certificate is legal too.  The 1st Amendment states that the Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof…  Gay marriages are performed by a host of mainstream religious denominations including the Episcopal Church (which is not some fringe wacko church people).  If the Federal government denies the recognition of that marriage, especially when it is recognized by the state, is it not prohibiting the free exercise of that religion?  I’m just sayin’..

And if the federal government denies the recognition of marriage based on the same-sex argument then it violates it’s own Constitution whereas the 9th and 10th Amendments delegate all powers not enumerated within the Constitution nor prohibited by the States shall be left to the states or the people. 

For example, California’s banning of gay marriage is totally legit because the people voted on it.  And it lost.  Fine.  There are many other states that allow for gay marriage.  Why?  because it works for them.  That’s the beauty of the Constitution: what may be good for one state may not be cool for another.  I don’t expect Mississippi to be approving gay marriage any time soon, I doubt that would work for the state of Mississippi.  But you see my point.

But WAIT!

CAN the states ban gay marriage at all?  Or would that violate the rights of gay people to practice their religion?  Touche!  Ah such a question indeed!

The short answer is that yes they will be allowed to for some time.  Because that’s how our system works.  Remember slavery was once a “states rights” issue as well but it ended up being a human rights issue.  In this Blogger’s opinion, gay marriage will come down to the 1st, 9th, and 10th amendments but ultimately to the first amendment and the Supreme Court will probably rule that all states must allow for gay marriage. 

Then we will start all over again when Congress passes the law that marriage can only be between two human beings and that it cannot contain more than two people in a marriage nor can it contain anything other than humans.  This will be passed in order to prevent people from marrying 12 women or their goat, but when the aliens land on our planet it will set off a whole new firestorm of lawsuits. Ah, the great American Saga…

Unemployment and Propaganda

With Unemployment sure to hit 10% this year, I would like to remind everybody that the 10% figure is actually a depressed figure.  The real unemployment as reported by the government is around 16.5%.  This number is not reported because many have become so lost that they have given up on trying to find employment. 

With that in mind, I find it laughable that when 6.9 million people have lost their jobs, our government is trying to sell us the stimulus by saying it saved 150,000 jobs.  It’s all propaganda.

The great depression started off with 17% unemployment and rose to nearly 24%.  We’re almost at those numbers now.  The only problem is that we have been printing money and inflating the dollar.  It will soon be too much for us.  If we continue down this path we will see unemployment rise as lenders tighten their belts even more.

Wiemar Germany is the next step after that… and does anyone know what happened to Germany after the Wiemar Republic went bust?

They elected a little man called Adolf Hitler.

Please for the love of God!  We need to put a stop to this madness.  Our elected officials are blatantly ignoring us!  They either have no clue as to what they are doing OR they know exactly what they are doing.  I don’t know which is scarier!

Either they are driving us headlong into oppression by mistake or by design.  I chose that latter because I don’t think that they’re really that stupid.

Our officials have to know that their stimulus did not work and was never going to work, but they just didn’t care!  They wanted the vote-buying bill to pass to solidify their re-election campaigns.  They wanted to pay off their special interests because it got them campaign donations.  They also realized that the Stimulus would afford more control to the government which gave them more power.

I wonder if they’ll even have to run for re-election in 2010 or will they find a way around that?