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Eric Hanneken's Library tagged socialism   View Popular

17 Dec 09

Penny Wong jeered, Hugo Chavez cheered

The climate change debate is conventionally portrayed as between disinterested scientists and thoughtful laymen on one side; and ideologues, selfish consumers, and greedy businessmen on the other side. Actually, both sides contain people with agendas, as this article shows.

www.theaustralian.com.au/...story-e6frgczf-1225811179614 - Preview

climate change global warming Copenhagen Hugo Chavez capitalism socialism politics

  • When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

    But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.”  He won a standing ovation.
16 Dec 09

Bland CBO Memo, or Smoking Gun?

  • Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding.  But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation.  It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.


    If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail.

10 Dec 09

Progressives vs. Democracy: The health care debate reveals a nasty tendency within liberal politics

  • Their increasingly shrill reaction to the debate has revealed a
    disturbing strain of American political thought that cannot
    comprehend how anyone could disagree with a big-government
    solution to health care without being evil, stupid, insane, or
    all three.
  • “I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old
    tactics to keep things exactly the way they are,” the president
    said in a September speech to Congress. “If you misrepresent
    what’s in the plan, we will call you out.” Call you out, yes, but
    not by name— an understandable strategy, considering that all the
    major corporate interests within the health care industry have
    been busy negotiating with (and lending support to) the White
    House and Congress.
  • 4 more annotations...

Why I Prefer French Health Care

Matt Welch compares his health care experiences in France and in the United States.

reason.com/...why-prefer-french-health-care - Preview

France United States health care socialism politics Matt Welch

  • In the U.S. you
    have to fight to get on the appointment schedule of a doctor
    within your health insurance network (I’ll conservatively put the
    average wait time at five days), then have him or her scrawl
    something unintelligible on a slip of paper, which you take to a
    drugstore to exchange for your medicine. You might pay the doc
    $40, but then his office sends you a separate bill for the visit,
    and for an examination, and those bills also go to your insurance
    company, which sends you an adjustment sheet weeks after the
    doctor’s office has sent its third payment notice. By the time
    it’s all sorted out, you’ve probably paid a few hundred dollars
    to three different entities, without having a clue about how or
    why any of the prices were set.




    In France, by contrast, you walk to the corner pharmacist, get
    either a prescription or over-the-counter medication right away,
    shell out a dozen or so euros, and you’re done. If you need a
    doctor, it’s not hard to get an appointment within a day or
    three, you make payments for everything (including X-rays) on the
    spot, and the amounts are routinely less than the co-payments for
    U.S. doctor visits.

  • But as long as
    the U.S. remains this ungainly public-private hybrid, with
    ever-tighter mandates producing ever-fewer consumer choices, the
    average consumer’s health care experience will probably be more
    pleasing in France.
  • 1 more annotations...
25 Nov 09

Health Care Reform in Massachusetts: Still a Bad Idea

  • Health care reform advocates
    have taken, in recent weeks, to noting that insurance premiums on
    the individual market in Massachusetts—the state where a variant
    on proposed national reforms is already in place—have fallen in
    recent years.
  • In 1996,
    Massachusetts passed an earlier set of reforms—community rating
    and guaranteed issue
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How Much Does A Decade of Health Care Reform Cost? It Depends on What You Mean By "First Decade."

  • In other words, according to data provided by the CBO, starting
    up the entire reform apparatus is going to cost more like $1.8
    trillion over its first real decade of operation.
24 Nov 09

Would ObamaCare Kill Medical Innovation?

  • Many regard the profit motive as cruel, but might it actually produce compassionate results? After all, America has generated vastly more medical innovations than other nations.
  • If America follows the lead of the rest of the world and clamps down on profits in health care, who will make tomorrow's wonder drugs?
18 Nov 09

Health 'Reform' Gets a Failing Grade

  • Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.
  • whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system.
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16 Nov 09

Obamacare: Buy now, pay later

  • Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. As we recover slowly from a devastating recession, it's widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending and curb massive future deficits.
  • So what do they do? Just the opposite. Their far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system -- which Congress is halfway toward enacting -- would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he's doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.
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05 Nov 09

Florida’s Public Option

  • Florida has had a public option for years, not for health insurance but for property insurance.
  • As the largest private insurer pulls out over a three-year period (that period negotiated with the state), Citizens will get an even larger share of Florida’s property insurance.


    Everybody in Florida knows Citizens is a fiscal time bomb.  Already, every Florida insurance policy (on homes, boats, cars, etc.) pays a surcharge that goes to Citizens, but Citizens still doesn’t have sufficient reserves to weather a major hurricane.  When one comes, Florida taxpayers will be on the hook for the bill.

  • 1 more annotations...
12 Oct 09

Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve

  • Fenton’s daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother
    before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex,
    on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her
    mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.
  • Ball, 42, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be
    left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for
    legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”
07 Oct 09

The Lesson of State Health-Care Reforms

  • Like participants in a national science fair, state governments have tested variants on most of the major components of the health-care reform plans currently being considered in Congress. The results have been dramatically increased premiums in the individual market, spiraling public health-care costs, and reduced access to care. In other words: The reforms have failed.
24 Sep 09

Taking Over Everything

  • This president and his Ivy League advisers believe that they know how an economy should develop better than hundreds of millions of market participants spending their own money every day. That is what F. A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit,” the idea that smart people can design a real economy on the basis of their abstract ideas.

Coverage Story: Does the cost of uncompensated care justify forcing people to buy health insurance?

  • the true annual cost per family is more like $200, with uncompensated care accounting for "less than one percent of private health insurance costs."
  • What about the young and healthy (or middle-aged and wealthy) person who decides insurance is not worth his money but pays all his medical expenses out of his own pocket? His choice does not impose costs on anyone, but under Obama's plan he would still be punished for it.
  • 1 more annotations...
14 Sep 09

Obama's Health Care Plan: Put Up And Shut Up

  • If there was anything bipartisan about the speech it was that he embraced every bad big-government idea from both sides. If he prevails, the American public won't get "choice and competition" as he proclaimed, but a one-size-fits-all government-prescribed health care plan that it dare not refuse and dare not challenge.
  • Obama would encourage unlimited health care consumption by patients while eliminating the last vestige of price consciousness. But the reason America is facing unsustainable health care cost increases is precisely because its third-party system of insurance doesn't encourage prudent consumption by patients.
  • 3 more annotations...
08 Sep 09

From 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four

Sheldon Richman replies to George Orwell's review of Friedrich Hayek's <em>The Road to Serfdom</em>.

fee.org/...1944-nineteen-eighty-four - Preview

George Orwell F. A. Hayek socialism politics Sheldon Richman

  • “[A] return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State.” It’s hard to believe that someone so familiar with Stalinism could have written that. Even without knowing much economics, could he really have thought that what goes on in market-oriented societies, even during depressions, could be worse than the famine Stalin inflicted on the Ukrainians, the show trials and executions, or the labor camps in Siberia?
  • I think that part of the problem for Orwell is that a truly free market is not among the possible options. For him and many others, the choice is between a system run for employers and one run for workers. (The preferable alternative is not obvious.) In this view, the former is capitalism, sometimes dressed up as “the free market,” and the latter is socialism.
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