Here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal this morning about the rationing commission.

Like most of Europe, the various health bills stipulate that Congress will arbitrarily decide how much to spend on health care for seniors every year—and then invest an unelected board with extraordinary powers to dictate what is covered and how it will be paid for. White House budget director Peter Orszag calls this Medicare commission “critical to our fiscal future” and “one of the most potent reforms.”

On that last score, he’s right. Prominent health economist Alain Enthoven has likened a global budget to “bombing from 35,000 feet, where you don’t see the faces of the people you kill.”

As envisioned by the Senate Finance Committee, the commission—all 15 members appointed by the President—would have to meet certain budget targets each year. Starting in 2015, Medicare could not grow more rapidly on a per capita basis than by a measure of inflation. After 2019, it could only grow at the same rate as GDP, plus one percentage point.

……

Worse, it makes little room for medical innovations. The commission is mandated to go after “sources of excess cost growth,” meaning treatments that are too expensive or whose coverage will boost spending. If researchers find a pricey treatment for Alzheimer’s in 2020, that might be banned because it would add new costs and bust the global budget. Or it might decide that “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller,” as President Obama put it in June.

In other words, the Medicare commission would come to function much like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which rations care in England. Or a similar Washington state board created in 2003 to control costs. Its handiwork isn’t pretty.

The Washington commission, called the Health Technology Assessment, is manned by 11 bureaucrats, including a chiropractor and a “naturopath” who focuses on alternative, er, remedies like herbs and massage therapy. They consider the clinical effectiveness but above all the cost of medical procedures and technologies. If they decide something isn’t worth the money, then Olympia won’t cover it for some 750,000 Medicaid patients, public employees and prisoners.

So far, the commission has banned knee arthroscopy for osteoarthritis, discography for chronic back pain, and implantable infusion pumps for pain not related to cancer. This year, it is targeting such frivolous luxuries as knee replacements, spinal cord stimulation, a specialized autism therapy and MRIs of the abdomen, pelvis or breasts for cancer. It will also rule on routine ultrasounds for pregnancy, which have a “high” efficacy but also a “high” cost.

Currently, the commission is pushing through the most restrictive payment policy in the nation for drug-eluting cardiac stents—simply because bare metal stents are cheaper, even as they result in worse outcomes. If a patient is wheeled into the operating room with chest pains in an emergency, doctors will first have to determine if he’s covered by a state plan, then the diameter of his blood vessels and his diabetic condition to decide on the appropriate stent. If they don’t, Washington will not reimburse them for “inappropriate care.”

via The Health Care Rationing Commission – WSJ.com.

Here is more of the government deciding that if not everyone can have the expensive medical procedures, then no one will.  If this is the way you encourage growth and innovation, I must have missed it in my Econ 101 class. I said this in a previous blog, and I’ll say it again. Jealousy of the rich, who have more health care options, does not help the middle class or the poor. It’s the rich who pay for the innovations at first, and once companies begin recouping their R&D cost and run out of rich people (there aren’t that many of them), then prices begin to decline bringing the new technology to the masses.

While the government would argue that these limits are only on government plans, we all know that eventually we are going to fall under a national health care plan with government health care for all. Government never stops once a program is implemented. It only gets bigger. Government programs have to grow and get more people dependent on them. They are similar in this respect to private companies, except private companies have to grow by you voluntarily deciding to use them. Government just changes it’s rules and forces you to abide by them.

There is something seriously wrong when a communist government is lecturing us on our monetary policy, and they are right. Then again, it seems the communist government of China understand capitalism and it’s benefits more than our President.

BEIJING — China’s top banking regulator issued a sharp critique of U.S. financial management only hours before President Barack Obama commenced his first visit to the Asian giant, highlighting economic and trade tensions that threaten to overshadow the trip.

Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said that a weak U.S. dollar and low U.S. interest rates had led to “massive speculation” that was inflating asset bubbles around the world. It has created “unavoidable risks for the recovery of the global economy, especially emerging economies,”

via China’s Blunt Talk for Obama – WSJ.com.

Appparently, GE doesn’t believe in growing business by supplying goods and services that the consumer wants. Instead it believes in coersively taking money from the consumer via governments to grow their business. I guess it doesn’t hurt to have helped elect the President with your TV networks. It also doesn’t hurt to fake concern for the favorite causes of the left with “Green weeks” and “Service weeks”. I’m pretty sure on the road to fascism, this is a rest stop.

General Electric Pursues Pot of Government Stimulus Gold

BY ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON AND PAUL GLADER

The financial crisis hasn’t been kind to General Electric Co. Its stock has lost almost half its value, the government has stepped in to prop up its enormous financial arm, and sales have slumped in core industrial businesses.

But Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt now has his eye on a huge new pool of potential revenue: Uncle Sam’s stimulus dollars. Mr. Immelt, a registered Republican, quips about the shift in thinking in the nation’s corner offices: “We’re all Democrats now.”

GE has high hopes for the strategy. It says that over the next three years or so it could bring in …

via General Electric Pursues Pot of Government Stimulus Gold – WSJ.com.

Popular Science just released it’s Best Of What’s New 2009 list with 100 innovations. With a small glimse of the the winners, you will see the ingenuity of the human mind. There is no crisis (ie Health Care) that cannot be solved by unleashing human innovation, which is best driven by the self interested entreprenuer. While innovation is possible with government intervention, the innovation is in spite of the intervention not the result of it. If government encouraged innovation, the Soviet Union would have been the most innovative nation on earth.

Take some time to look at some of the innovations, and then tell me the unleashed innovation of the free human mind can’t solve the government created health care “crisis”.

The standards by which we judge the year’s greatest innovations are simple. The objects don’t necessarily need to be beautiful (although some, like the all-glass TKTS building in Times Square, certainly are). They don’t have to be eco-friendly (although the packaging made of biodegradable fungus certainly is). They don’t even have to be difficult to build (with all due respect to the telescope designed to find Earth-like planets).

They just have to push past what we thought was possible just twelve months ago. And the following 100 innovations have all blown us away, beginning with the headliner, our product of the year: something so simple yet so smart, with the ability to improve countless lives.

via Best Of What’s New 2009 | Popular Science.

Here’s a great post with examples of how the free market is already solving health care issues. Now if we can just get the government out of health care completely, we’d be set.

So while Congress now debates how to control rising healthcare costs and expand access to medical care through government intervention and a public option, the private marketplace has already started many healthcare reforms on its own—providing affordable access at more than 1,000 retail clinics in pharmacies, truck stops, and workplaces around the country; lowering drug costs with prescriptions for $4 or less anywhere in the country; introducing innovative prepaid medical and concierge plans that restore the direct patient-doctor relationship; and covering eight million employees with HSAs.

When it comes to lowering costs and improving quality and service, government enterprises have a miserable track record, and competitive markets have a proven, excellent record. If we want to make healthcare affordable and accessible, we should encourage greater competition and more market-based solutions like the examples above; and less government intervention, not more. Unfortunately, the politicians in Washington have it backwards.

Check ou the full article at Congress to Healthcare Market: Drop Dead — The American, A Magazine of Ideas.

Bob Murphy had a great post on his blog, FreeAdvice, about how the Right-Wingers (I’ve always considered myself a right-winger) are always blasting the government for it inefficient and disasterous social programs, but yet we act like things are different when it comes to the military, war, and safety. Here’s a snippet of his post.

Army Wasn’t Told of Hasan’s Emails

A person familiar with the matter said a Pentagon worker on a terrorism task force overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation was told about the intercepted emails several months ago. But members of terror task forces aren’t allowed to share such information with their agencies, unless they get permission from the FBI, which leads the task forces.

In this case, the Pentagon worker, an employee from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, helped make the assessment that Maj. Hasan wasn’t a threat, and the FBI’s “procedures for sharing the information were never used,” said the person familiar with the matter.

So the above suggests to me that even if we gave up enough civil liberties to transform the entire country into one big military barracks, we still couldn’t trust the government to protect us from obvious terrorist threats.

Since that’s the case, I vote that we don’t give up our civil liberties and test the theory.

Of course, what will happen is that they will “streamline agency cooperation” and implement other reforms, so that the above doesn’t happen again. Just like Fannie and Freddie and General Motors will keep revising their procedures every time they lose another few billion dollars.

“Just give us some more money and liberty, we’ll get it right eventually. We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

via Free Advice: Right-Wingers: “Gov’t Can’t Run the DMV or Health Care, But It Will Keep Us Safe From Terrorists”.

Bob is completely right. Right-wingers (me) have a contradiction in their ideas of government. We know the government is horrible at basically everything it does, and the free market is much better at handling the allocation of resources and meeting needs, but we still think it is better equiped to protect us and to wage war. Why would that be? Protection and war are basically just services. Think about it on a local level. Police don’t actually protect you. At best, the thought of police deter some from committing crimes against you, but for those who disregard the threat of police force, you are unprotected. Police can only come after the crime has been committed.

In this case, the military couldn’t even protect it’s soldiers against an obvious threat. So, how did the government actually function in it’s role as protector? It had the exact opposite effect, as government always does. Instead, it disarmed soldiers with idiotic gun control, so that the soldiers had no defense against this mad man. This is the same thing you have in most shootings. The government forces citizens to disarm, and the citizen is left unprotected against those who would do them harm.

The only way to prevent episodes like this or to at least minimize their damage is to rid ourselves of these ridiculous gun laws. “Whoa, whoa, whoa there militia boy. You can’t just have people running around with guns everywhere. It’s too dangerous.” Why is it too dangerous? Study after study have shown that crime is lowered as gun rights are increased and vice versa. If everyone carried guns or at least everyone could be packing, do you think it would not make those who want to do harm hesitate before they do it? Are we to believe that Hasan would have had the stupidity to start his rampage if he knew the other soldiers were armed? Are we to believe that he was not emboldened by the knowledge that the soldiers were unarmed?

Let’s walk through a small scenario. Say there is a guy who wants to kill another guy. He isn’t suicidal, and he doesn’t want to die. He knows where the guy is. Now, let’s say the victim carries a gun. Do you think the killer is going to plan his attack based on where the victim goes? Let’s say the victim works at a school, about the most unprotected place on the planet. Where do you think the killer is going to attack? He’s going to attack the guy when he’s working, because the guy remains unprotected, and no one around the guy will be able to help him either. Everyone is unprotected. Now, if you have unregulated gun ownership as the constitution allows, the killer doesn’t know who has a gun. The killer, not wanting to die himself, will hesitate because the victim could have a gun as well, or anyone around him could have a gun. The more people in society that have guns the more of a deterance to those like our killer here.

“Well, yeah, but what if he doesn’t care if he dies like this Hasan?” Well, if that’s the case, you will not prevent the attack no matter what, but you will end the attack quickly with less lives lost. In the case of Ft. Hood, if the soldiers were allowed to carry, someone would have taken Hasan out after his first kill. It’s horrible to have even one death, but it’s much better than a massacre.

To take it to the next step, would we even have had Hasan if we didn’t have 9/11. Without 9/11, we wouldn’t be fighting two wars against muslims. Because the government prevents anyone from carrying arms onto a plane, you had unprotected passangers unable to do anything to prevent the terrorist attacks. Do you think the terrorists would have hijacked the planes if they knew there were people on the plane with guns and they didn’t know who was armed? So in order to prevent hijackings by armed criminals, we get the exact opposite result of what we wanted.

This is a tough subject, but one that must be thought through rationally. We can’t just wish the world to be the way we want it to be, and then try to regulate it to conform to our ideals. As I’ve said, you end up with the exact opposite of what you wanted. Below is a video from Freedomain Radio. It’s a bit long, but he has a great way of explaining how going against our intution is a much better solution. He even takes it as far as leading to world peace. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but he makes a great case.

In my home town, they have been talking about a Maglev train for years now. Here is an example of government waste at it’s finest.

It’s argued that a multibillion-dollar, taxpayer-fleecing Pittsburgh maglev line would make the region the epicenter for this technology across the country. Except the country needs maglev as much as it needs more debt.

In remarks last week to state lawmakers, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute explained why expensive high-speed magnetic-levitation trains are beyond the realm of reasonable implementation.

Just ask China.

The 19-mile maglev line from Pudong Airport to downtown Shanghai rarely sees more than one out of four seats filled, says Mr. O’Toole, an expert in transportation issues. Which explains why China opted for less costly conventional high-speed trains between Shanghai and Beijing.

A $5 billion-plus proposed line between Pittsburgh International Airport and Greensburg wouldn’t fare better.

Even an optimistic projection of 28,000 round-trip passengers daily is a fraction of Pittsburgh travelers, O’Toole said. Moreover, research shows rail service to U.S. airports typically carries only 2 percent to 15 percent of air travelers, he said.

And because maglev uses vastly more energy than conventional high-speed trains, it produces that much more pollution, according to the Center for Clean Air Policy.

Economically and environmentally, Pennsylvania can’t afford to be taken for maglev’s ride.

via Maglev’s myth – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

$5 billion for an train from Greensburg to the Airport? This will do absolutely nothing to boost the economy. The $5 billion would have to be taken from the pockets of productive citizens to fund a useless train. Those people who have been robbed would have used $5 billion for purposes that would result in economic value and job creation. Instead, slime ball politicians believe their pet projects are more important.

If the Maglev was such an economic boon, the private sector would be producing it already. Instead the free market and entreprenuers would use that money for other more profitable ventures. Those ventures would create more wealth and more jobs. Central planning resulted in disaster for Soviet economies, but yet here we are, the supposed capitalist country doing the exact same thing.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a front page article about those with arrest records are finding it increasingly difficult to find a job in the current economy.  It reminded me of a tweet I put out last week, that government’s role in society is to create criminals our of ordinary people.

Aren’t we supposed to be the most compassionate country on earth? How about a little forgive and forget for our fellow man? Let’s start with Wally Camis Jr.

One petitioner is Wally Camis Jr., who wanted to clear the air about the time he threatened two men with a hairbrush.

Mr. Camis was hungry for work amid a divorce last fall. The 41-year-old Air Force veteran, who had worked as a security guard and owned a restaurant, filled out an application for temporary employment in Eugene, Ore., checking a box saying he had never been arrested.

When he followed up a week later, the temp agency told him no thanks — they’d turned up a 1986 conviction. Stunned, Mr. Camis recalled the night the two men threatened him and he pulled a silver brush from his back pocket, saying it was a knife. He called the police, he says, and later pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a misdemeanor. The judge entered a “no judgment” finding and ordered Mr. Camis to pay a $60 fine.

“I thought that was the end of it,” he says.

Instead, 22 years later, Mr. Camis found himself fighting to erase traces of the arrest, joining the growing ranks of Americans who hope that clearing their records of minor crimes will boost their odds in a tough job market. To help, entrepreneurs have set up record-clearing services and local governments have passed laws to speed the expungement process.

So, here is a veteran who served his country being punished because he threatened someone with a hair brush? Are you kidding me? This goes beyond ridiculous, and no one should have to go out of their way to expunge a dumbass ruling in the first place. Oh, how about this next mad man. Surely, he deserves what he has coming.

One Chicago 53-year-old, who has worked for an overnight delivery service and as a bricklayer, is nervous that his record’s sole smudge may come back to haunt him.

In 1974, he says, he was walking down a street near his Chicago home rolling a marijuana cigarette. He was arrested by an undercover police officer and convicted of possession. “That was back in the days when I had hair, and I just said, ‘Forget about it.’ I was like 17 or 18 years old — what did I care?”

His employers never learned of the conviction, he says, nor have his own children. But, hoping to coach high-school basketball when he retires in a few years, he’s working with a Chicago attorney to clear his record. “Nowadays they look for anything so I figured I better take care of this,” he says.

Wow, this guy smoked marijuana when he was 17 or 18. Who knows what he’s liable to do next. I know he’s 53 now, but you never know when those evil ways will return. How about these statistics.

These convictions are increasingly coming to employers’ attention. Background checks have become more commonplace in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and cheaper. More than 80% of companies performed such checks in 2006, compared with fewer than 50% in 1998, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, an association of HR professionals.

Millions of Americans are in a similar position. In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Holy sh!t. 60% of American men have been arrested, and then they have to worry about the arrest, which I’m guessing a large chunk are frivolous, coming back and preventing them from being productive and contributive members of society. What in the world are our politicians doing? Maybe we need to change our criminal laws to something similar to the points system used for automobiles. If you commit a “crime” (and crime is debatable in some of these instances), you get points. After a certain period of time, those points are erased off your record. Now, I’m not saying all criminals. There are crimes that we can all agree should not be removed. Most of those would be violent crimes, and I don’t mean threatening someone with a hair brush.

I have an even better idea. If you want to really get this worked out, how about anyone who has been arrested cannot serve in the government anywhere. With 60% of men having an arrest record, I’m guessing many of those are politicians, bureacrats, judgets, police, etc. Maybe seeing the stupidity of criminalizing our society, they will be a little more reasonable when branding someone for life as a criminal.

The house version of the healh care reform bill has fines and jail time for those who refuse to buy health care and pay the new fine. Wonder what that 60% of men will go up to?

As part of the health care reform bill, house Democrats put a new surtax into the bill of 5.4%. This is going to increase the effective capital gains rate by 69%. Capital gains is the tax term used by our government to explain investment income. For example, if you buy a stock at $5 and sell it at $10, you have a capital gain of $5. Now, capital gains also counts real estate investments, and Democrats were talking about repealing the owner occuppied housing exeption in the last election. So potentially, this could effect every American if Democrats get their way in the long run. As we know, anytime government wants more money they just seek out profitable sectors of our economy and decide to tax it. If most American’s have their saving sitting in their houses, surely you will see government eventually targeting that for more revenue.

That surtax takes effect on January 1, 2011, or the day the Bush tax rates of 2001 and 2003 expire. Today’s capital gains tax rate of 15% would bounce back to 20% because of the Bush repeal and then to 25.4% with the surtax. That’s a 69% increase, overnight. The last time investors were hit with anything comparable was 1986, when the capital gains rate jumped to 28% from 20%, a 40% increase, as part of the Reagan tax reform that lowered income tax rates.

The 1986 experience was not a happy one. Tax revenues from capital gains surged before the increase took effect in 1987, as investors moved to cash in at the lower rate. Revenues then plummeted. Total realized capital gains didn’t again reach their 1985 level of $172 billion until 1996. By 1992, the federal government was barely getting more in revenue ($29 billion) at the 28% rate than it did in 1985 ($26.5 billion) at the 20% rate.

Rate reductions, as in 2003 when Republicans cut the rate to 15% from 20%, have typically had the opposite effect. Treasury receipts from capital gains climbed to an estimated $117.8 billion in 2006 from $49 billion in 2002.

via Health-Care Surtax Applies to Capital Gains – WSJ.com.

Ok, so how is this going to effect the stock market? It will definitely hinder the stock market growth. If you are buying and selling stocks, your return will be decreased, which means you are less likely to take the risk. If less people are willing to take the risk, there will be less capital to fund businesses. On top of that, businesses, especially small businessses, have capital gains as well. If their capital gains is taxed more, they are less likely to invest in expanding their business because the investments now become more risky. Businesses look at after tax profits. As the article says, capital gains revenue to the government actually went down after increases in the rate. That means there was less investing and less turner of investment. Capital was held up in the system instead of flowing through the system.

Government is  the land of idiocy. They think we live in a static world where they can say, hey look at all that money. Let’s take some, and for some reason people are going to just say “Oh ok George, here you go.” Reality is much different. People’s behavior changes, and the government does harm to all of us. This increase will hinder our economy, and worst yet, it will destroy more jobs.

In the Wall Street Journal, an op-ed takes Gore to task on his need to continue to see only one side of the global warming debate because he has so much invested in the one side, and all his rewards can only come from one side.

Mr. Gore is quite right that his arguments should be judged on their merits, not on his investments. He’s wrong to think his investments are irrelevant, and, even more, that sincerity is dispositive of anything. Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.

Here are a couple questions: When so much of his position and prestige are invested in a predicted climate crisis, is Mr. Gore likely to be open to contrary evidence? Is he likely to be particularly fastidious about whether proposed steps will actually have an effect on global warming if they also happen to benefit his investments?

Ms. Blackburn’s challenge was in a sense late. Mr. Gore long ago jumped over to the side where salesmanship, by whatever means, was the trumping priority. As far back as 1989, he insisted there was “no dispute worthy of recognition” about the danger of manmade climate change. By now, he titularly heads a vast establishment with a stake in one side of the argument.

Notice, for instance, after a decade in which the earth appears to have stopped warming and even cooled, that global warming advocates have rushed to embrace a computer simulation that predicts this cooling (in retrospect, of course) and allows for indefinite future cooling, even while assuring that the world is destined to face disastrous warming anyway. Isn’t this what forecasters of doom have done since time immemorial when their deadlines for doom haven’t been met?

Mr. Gore’s own predictions of a climate catastrophe have not lessened, but every time he opens his mouth, the costs of meeting the emergency become easier and easier to swallow. They aren’t even costs anymore; as he says in his new book, they are “profits.”

All policy salesmanship naturally defaults toward the proposition of huge benefits and negligible costs (i.e., free lunchism). Isn’t that where Al Gore is today?

Mr. Gore notes that he has poured his own money into two climate action nonprofits, but, whatever his self-felt motives, aren’t these nonprofits functionally propaganda arms (i.e., advertising) that benefit his for-profit investments?

via Holman Jenkins: The Economic Uses of Al Gore – WSJ.com.

Like all used car salesmen, Al Gore has a lot full of junk that needs sold. He’s got all his investments wrapped up in the clunkers. If he can’t sell them, he’s rewards will vanish. So what do all used car salesmen do? They smooth talk you and feed you a line of BS to get you to buy their junky cars. Used car salesmen have to convince every person to buy a car though. Unfortunately for us, Al Gore only needs to convince the morons in Washington. Then they force us to buy.