Once Again, Capitalism Saves the World

When Michael Moore wants to drop a few pounds he usually just pays someone to use Photoshop to stick his head on the body of a smaller fat guy.  Other than that he pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to the world’s most exclusive fat farm resorts.  However, if you’re a nurse in the socialist medical utopia of the UK, you just let the taxpayers pick up the bill.

Overweight nurses are to get personal trainers and high street vouchers to encourage them to lose weight.

More than 200 NHS staff are being equipped with pedometers and offered motivational fitness coaches to help them slim down.

They have been promised £20 of high street store vouchers if they manage to keep the weight off during the year-long pilot.

But here comes the best part.  Are you ready?  Make sure you’re sitting down, because this is awesome.

The £250,000 scheme at Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust is being run by American healthcare company Humana, which wants to roll the programme out across Britain.

That’s right, folks!  The compassionate, free governmental fantasyland of the UK is turning to an evil, greedy, for-profit, heartless capitalist American company to get their lard-ass nurses to drop weight. 

My God, it’s almost as if socialism doesn’t work, and the free market provides solutions that government either cannot or will not!  Who could have ever imagined such a thing?

Dead Baby Jokes

You know that wonderful medical utopia in the UK, where everyone gets all the super duper magical free healthcare they could ever need, and it’s paid for by fairies and unicorns?  Well, it’s killing babies.

A devastating report on the state of Britain’s maternity services has concluded that they put the lives of women and their babies at risk.

The first national inquiry into maternity care by the Healthcare Commission, the NHS watchdog, has revealed a critical shortage of midwives, obstetricians absent from wards, a lack of beds and poor continuity of care. These have contributed to high death rates in some units and threaten the long-term health of mothers and their babies in others.

The inquiry, which is the largest ever carried out, involved all 150 NHS maternity units in England. It was triggered by separate full-scale investigations conducted at three trusts where mothers and babies died, which revealed failings indicative of a national pattern.

The three trusts were Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, where 10 mothers died between 2002 and 2005, New Cross in Wolverhampton, where three babies died in two months in 2003, and Ashford & St Peters in Surrey, where there was a series of serious incidents in 2000 and 2001.

The Healthcare Commission said the root cause of poor performance was weak leadership by managers and medical staff. Many trusts were critically short of midwives, with numbers ranging from 40 per 1,000 births in the best-staffed trusts to 25 per 1,000 in the worst.

Only two-thirds of trusts had a consultant present on their wards for 40 hours a week – the basic safety standard laid down by the Royal College of Obstetricians. The study also revealed a five-fold variation in the number of consultants among trusts, from 3.3 to 0.6 per 1,000 births. In some trusts this meant consultants were present on the wards for just 10 hours a week.

More than £660m was paid out by NHS trusts in the three years to 2007 in negligence cases for obstetric claims – enough to hire 1,000 extra consultant obstetricians. Maternity services account for one in 10 requests to the Healthcare Commission to investigate particular trusts. Today’s report, which included surveys of 5,000 staff and 26,000 mothers, says nine out of 10 mothers rated their care as good. But it said there were “significant weaknesses”, with wide variations in standards between trusts. Many of the problems identified in earlier investigations were widespread, suggesting that NHS trusts are not giving maternity services priority. Sir Ian Kennedy, chairman of the commission, said: “I don’t ever again want to be reading another report into high death rates at a maternity unit.”

It’s worth noting that this report comes from The Independent, one of Britain’s leftie papers.  Ah, socialism.  Guaranteeing the same equal level of misery and shitty treatment for everyone.  (Except of course the rich, who can avoid the whole socialist disaster altogether by paying for private care themselves.)

Guess What?  Socialism Kills People

It’s often been our contention, as vehement critics of socialized medicine and its supporters like Moore, that all government healthcare provides is the same equally shitty service to everyone.  (Except, of course, the wealthy, who can pay for their own treatments.) As usual the Times of London lays it out.

The National Health Service is providing dying cancer patients with drugs that are five times less effective than those available privately and is refusing to treat them if they try to buy medicines themselves.

That’s right, folks.  If you decide to use your own money to pay for the life-saving drugs that your free healthcare system doesn’t provide, you’re shit out of luck on any future treatment.  Their policy is, “Use our substandard care or you’re on your own.” Ah, compassion.

One drug for kidney cancer, routinely available through public health systems in most European countries but not to British patients, can reduce the size of tumours in 31% of patients, compared with just 6% of those prescribed the standard NHS drug.

The growing row over “co-payments” has prompted the government to reconsider the ban. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, has promised a “fundamental rethink” of the policy.

Just not a fundamental rethink of the socialist disaster which created the problem in the first place.

A woman with bowel cancer is fighting for the right to pay for a drug that could extend her life long enough for her to spend Christmas with her grandchildren.

Sheila Norrington, 59, a former NHS medical secretary from Maidstone, Kent, has been told by doctors that if she buys the drug Erbitux, which the health service will not pay for, she will lose her state-funded cancer care. Erbitux is the only drug capable of treating her advanced bowel cancer.

Norrington’s husband, Goff, 61, a former sales manager, said: “We have been told that if we pay for it ourselves we will be thrown off the NHS completely and we will need to pay for everything privately. We are devastated. This is not going to cure my wife, but if it keeps her alive a little bit longer, then we would pay for it.”

The couple say that although they could pay for a few cycles of the drug, which costs about £3,000 a month, they could not pay for all Norrington’s care, including scans, blood tests and consultations.

Goff Norrington added: “We have two young granddaughters and this could make the difference between sitting round the table with them at Christmas or not. We think it is deplorable that patients can get this drug almost anywhere in Europe but we cannot get it in the UK.”

A spokesman for Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust said: “We are governed by Department of Health policy on this issue.”

And why shouldn’t they be?  The government is the one paying for it.  They aren’t concerned with individuals, they’re concerned with doling out their limited resources in the most compassionate and fair manner, which in this case is simply letting people die.

A poll for The Sunday Times shows strong support for allowing co-payment in the National Health Service, with 89% saying that people who buy additional cancer drugs should continue to get free NHS treatment.

Only 5% think allowing co-payment would create a two-tier NHS. Until now this has been the position taken by Alan Johnson, the health secretary.

Ministers had feared that allowing co-payment would upset less well-off patients, but the YouGov poll of nearly 1,800 people shows strong backing across the social spectrum and supporters of all three main parties.

This, of course, begs the question.  If compassionate free government healthcare can’t provide, y’know, actual healthcare to patients, and they are forced to paying massive amounts of money to buy their own treatments, maybe the solution to the problem is less free government healthcare and more private sector solutions.

Wow, paying for healthare.  What a concept!

Go Home and Die

Here’s some more of that wonderful socialist compassion that is supposed to infuse our cousins across the Atlantic, this proving their inherent moral superiority over us.

An HIV-positive Ugandan woman’s claim to stay in the UK has been rejected by the European Court of Human Rights.

Her lawyers argued that a lack of medical care in Uganda would lead to her early death, and this would amount to cruel and degrading treatment.

The government denies this, saying all NHS HIV drugs are available in Uganda.

The court agreed that if the unnamed woman were sent back to Uganda, there would be no violation of the bar on inhuman or degrading treatment.

When the woman entered the UK in March 1998 under an assumed name, she was seriously ill and was admitted to hospital.

Soon afterwards, solicitors lodged an asylum application on her behalf, claiming she had been raped by government soldiers in Uganda because of her association with the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group in the north of the country.

The lawyers argued that her life would be in danger if she were returned to Uganda.

By November 1998, she was diagnosed with two illnesses which are known to be indicators of having AIDS, and as being in an extremely advanced state of HIV infection.

Her asylum claim was rejected in March 2001, a decision she appealed against.

In rejecting her claim, the secretary of state found no evidence that Ugandan authorities were interested in her and that treatment of Aids in Uganda was comparable to any other African country.

The secretary of state also found that all the major anti-viral drugs were available in Uganda at highly subsidised prices.

In January the government sent a terminally ill Ghanaian woman who had been receiving treatment in the UK back to her country because her visa had expired.

Now, which do you think is more likely, that she was deported because of a expired viusa, or because and HIV diagnisis would reqire thirthy fo forty more years of retroviral and “drug cocktail” therapy to keep her alive, when we all know that NHS is failing miserably to provide even basic care to the citizenry.  So rather than deal with the expense of treating this woman they’re sending her back home, to her happy land full of sunshine and rainbows and rivers of chocolate, where the children dance and play with gumdrop smiles.

Full discosure:  The US has some pretty draconian laws regarding HIV people obtaining citizenship in this country.  I’m just as opposed to this as I am to what these European dickwads are doing? 

See?  That’s called “intellectual honesty.” You Moore fans should try it once in a while.

Getting Care to the Sick

Michael Moore has stated that evil capitalism is the cause of all America’s healthcare woes, and that only the loving, warm, benevolent arms of the nanny state can provide what we need.  (He has explicitly called for the abolition of private health insurance.) But it seems that (gasp!) maybe one solution to the problem is to get rid of the bloodsucking trial lawyers.

Tort reform, of course, resulting in substantially lower medical malpractice premiums and expenses, and an influx of 7000 doctors, including into many underserved regions. One indirect benefit: with less money spent on medical malpractice lawyers, self-insuring hospitals can spend more on doctors and on medical practice:

Take Christus Health, a nonprofit Catholic health system across the state. Thanks to tort reform, over the past four years Christus saved $100 million that it otherwise would have spent fending off bogus lawsuits or paying higher insurance premiums. Every dollar saved was reinvested in helping poor patients.

Also of relevance: the amusing results when Texas added evidentiary standards of medical harm to their asbestos and silicosis docket. Suddenly, over 99% of the cases went away because so few suing plaintiffs had a doctor willing to certify harm.

My God, what a concept!  It should be noted, gentle reader, that trial lawyers overwhelmingly donate to Democrats.  In return, the Democrats will inevitably put a stop to this terrible example of the deregulated free market actually, y’know, improving the lives of patients.  For liberals, especially those like Moore, the means are more important than the ends.  Moore doesn’t want to see more people get healthcare, he wants to prove that socialism is super peachy awesome, and he pimps out sick people to make that point.  Any solution which is not directly attributable to government intervention will not sit well with him, because it won’t support his overall thesis that eeeeeevil capitalism is to blame for everything.

Update Well well well.  It looks like the Democrats are dutifully bending over for their ambulance-chasing overlords with a nice $1.6 billion payoff which somehow managed to find its way into the Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008.

The language is from Sec. 311, Uniform Treatment of Attorney-Advanced Expenses and Court Costs in Contingency Fee Cases. The provisions allow trial attorneys to deduct advanced litigation fees regardless of whether their contingency fee was structured as a “net” or a “gross” fee arrangement. The law does not now allow lawyers to take a current tax deduction under a net fee arrangement.

Anything that makes it easier for bloodsucking mass tort lawyers to drive up the costs of healthcare (and everything else). 

A Film With Heart

You know how when you’re watching a movie, and there are three guys sitting around drinking beer, and all the beer bottles are positioned so you can clearly read the label?  That’s called product placement, which Wikipedia defines thus:

Product placement is a type of advertising, in which promotional advertisements placed by marketers using real commercial products and services in media, where the presence of a particular brand is the result of an economic exchange. When featuring a product is not part of an economic exchange, it is called a product plug. Product placement appears in plays, film, television series, music videos, video games and books. It became more common starting in the 1980s, but can be traced back to at least 1949. Product placement occurs with the inclusion of a brand’s logo in shot, or a favorable mention or appearance of a product in shot. This is done without disclosure, and under the premise that it is a natural part of the work. Most major movie releases today contain product placements.

This is one means by which movies get funded.  For example, in the last two or three James Bond movies starring Pierce Brosnan came out Bond was driving a BMW.  The producers signed a deal with BMW to provide the vehicle in exchange for monetary or other consideration.  When the last movie, Casino Royale, came out the producers signed a deal with Ford.  When Bond first goes to Bermuda he rents a small Ford which he drives to the hotel.  Once there he ends up winning the bad guy’s Aston Martin in a poker game.  Later on we see Bond driving his pimped-out Aston Martin, the one with the defibrillator in it.  At the time Ford owned Aston Martin, thus the majority of vehicles in the movie are by Ford.  (Apparently the new owners of Aston Martin have agreed to abide by the terms of the contract entered into by Ford, so Bond will be driving an Aston Martin for the next few films.)

The Only Chemist in the Village

It’s the latest socialized medicine success!

Tens of thousands of English patients could be registering with Welsh GPs and making day-trips to the country to obtain free prescriptions, it was claimed yesterday.

Statistics show that three million people are registered with Welsh GPs, about 100,000 more than the official population. Wales is the only part of Britain not to have prescription charges.

England has the highest at £7.10, followed by Northern Ireland at £6.85 and Scotland at £5.

The Conservative Party in Wales claimed that the figures pointed to patients from England travelling to Wales and called on the Welsh Assembly executive to stop “prescription tourism”.

The copay in Englad is roughly the same as the prescription copay that I have with my eeeeeevil kapitalist for-profit US health insurance.  The only difference is that I have access to a wider range of newer, higher-quality drugs than the English.  And I don’t have to travel to Wales to avoid paying for it.

Oh, lest anyone get the wrong idea, I live in Beijing.  I pay, every month, out of my own pocket, for US healthcare, so that I can get prescriptions which are not available here in China’s socialist paradise.  Funny how that works, isn’t it?  When I want something I (gasp!) pay for it.

Dr. Teeth

Remember folks, socialized medicine is a utopian paradise where everyone gets everything they need all the time.

Health service dentists have been forced to go on holiday or spend time on the golf course this month despite millions of patients being denied dental care.

Many have fulfilled their annual work quotas allotted by the National Health Service and have been turning patients away because they are not paid to do extra work. This is despite the fact that more than 7m people in Britain are unable to find an NHS dentist.

Patients have been told they must either pay privately or return in April when the new work year begins. People suffering from toothache have been advised to go to hospital.

This is vastly different from the US, where uninsured people are forced to either pay privately or go to an emergency room.

Scenes We’d Love To See

In this post below, Donna writes:

I just thought of something that really makes the idea of Moore bringing Castro to the Academy Awards this year even *more* repugnant, if that’s even possible.

As some of you will know, I published a long series of articles about the extraordinarily talented dissident Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. In the year 2000, director Julian Schnabel brought the story of Reinaldo Arenas to the silver screen with his film “Before Night Falls”, an adaptation of Arenas’ memoirs by the same name. In the movie Arenas was played so well by the talented Javier Bardem that he won an Oscar nomination for his performance.

How does this movie made nearly a decade ago connect to Moore’s desire to bring Castro to the Oscars this year? Simple, really. This year, Julian Schnabel is up for Best Director for his work in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, and of course Javier Bardem is the favorite to take home the Best Actor in a Supporting Role statue for his astounding performance in “No Country for Old Men”. So… Moore would like sit Castro just rows away from the man who brought Reinaldo Arenas’ story to the world and the man who immersed himself so deeply in the tortured soul of Reinaldo that he won an Oscar nomination for his work. Can you imagine the effect having Castro so close to them would have on both of these men, on what should be one of the happiest nights of their lives? How selfish and thoughtless could Moore possibly be?

We’ve all known for years that Michael Moore is a sociopath who cares about nobody but himself.  But if he does end up bringing El Presidente to the awards, this presents a golden opportunity. Assume that either Julian Schnabel or Javier Bardem win their respective awards.  They’ll be standing there, in front of the world, and can say anything they want.  Allow me to fantasize using Javier Bardem as an example.

“Wow, this is just incredible.  Thank you so much.  However, before I get stuck in with the thank you’s I’d like to say something.  A few years ago I played a Cuban Dissident named Reynaldo Arenas, a man tortured and humiliated by Castro’s Cuba, which was directed by another of tonight’s nominees, Julian Schnabel.  This man Castro, this monster, this piece of human filth, now sits among us as the guest of another nominee.  To Michael Moore, Castro’s most famous propagandist, I would like to say, shame on you.  Shame on you for sullying these awards with the presence of this vile, disgusting person.”

I think he’d get a standing ovation.  Of course Moore, Castro, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn will all remain seated.  Someone forward this to Javier Bardem’s publicist.

And the Walls Came Crumbling Down

As happens oh so often with Michael Moore’s bullshit, reality comes along and slaps him in the face with its dick.

Foreigners coming to Britain are to face a new “immigrant tax” under Government plans to try to make them help pay for the schools and hospitals they use, ministers are to announce.

They will have to pay a special levy on entering the country which will be used to provide extra funding for public services.

The announcement follows growing evidence that health, education and social services are coming under increasing strain from immigration, with councils complaining that they need hundreds of millions of pounds more every year to cope.

But… but… this is Britain.  They have glorious “free” healthcare for everyone!  It’s all free free free!!!  So how can it be that their healthcare system is swamped under the demand of immigrants?  Could it be that—gasp!—there is no such thing as “free” healthcare, and a single-payer system run by the government is a recipe for complete disaster?  (You know, exactly what we’ve been saying through the entire history of this blog.)

Sources indicate that the additional levy could be set at 10 per cent of the visa fee - an additional £20 for the usual £200 visa granted to those wishing to stay in Britain longer than six months.

Ministers hope to generate an extra £15 million a year, although council chiefs say they need £250 million more annually to avoid increased council tax.

Ah, I see.  So what’s going to happen is the immigrants are going to pay a little bit extra in taxes, and the rest of the bill is going to be footed by the general public through increased local taxes.  So much for “free” healthcare.

Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said the cost of the visas could put off key workers such as nurses coming from outside the EU.

What?  You mean there are negative consequences to big government socialist idiocy?  Who the hell could have seen THAT coming!

Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said recently: “It is fair that those who benefit most from using our immigration system should help fund it.

Come now, Liam.  Where’s your compassion?  What will Michael Moore make of this development?  Does anyone here think he has the balls or integrity to send out one of his super awesome messages?  Of course not, he’s a fucking coward.

Sorry, Tubby.  Go Home and Die.

Take note, Michael Moore, you fat bastard.

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

That’s right, tubby.  You’re a multi-millionaire, so you can afford to climb into your private jet and scoot off to the world’s most luxurious fat farms when you want to drop a couple of pounds.  But the average working class Joe, who eats the same food you do and puts on a few pounds, well, he doesn’t qualify for healthcare under your socialist medical care utopia.  But wait, it gets better.

Fertility treatment and “social” abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

That’s right, Mikey.  Not only is your socialist paradise going to stand by and allow fat fucks like you to drop dead of a heart attack, but they’re also going to prevent pregnant women from terminating their pregnancies, as well as only allowing the infertile rich to have children, since poor people won’t be able to afford to pay for the treatment themselves.

Oh yeah, that free healthcare is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?  Smokers, fatties, sluts, and the barren, all of them are completely fucked under your socialist healthcare fantasyland.

The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as “out rageous” and “disgraceful”.

About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.

Managers defend the policies because of the higher risk of complications on the operating table for unfit patients. But critics believe that patients are being denied care simply to save money.

Of course they’re being denied treatment because of money.  Money is a finite resource.  In economic terms it is “a scarce resource which has alternate uses.” And when the government provides all the fabulous free healthcare that people could ever hope for, they will quickly run out of money, because the public has no financial incentive NOT to go to the doctor.

But keep pushing for this evil scheme, you fat fuck.  Someone can always buy one of your books or DVDs instead of paying for their own medical care, while you hobnob with the rest of the unhealthy socialist millionaires at your $20,000 a day for-profit Swiss health chalet.

Update: Oh man, it just gets better and better.

School lunchboxes could soon be monitored by dinner ladies to ensure children are eating healthy meals, ministers said.

Under the Government’s obesity strategy, all schools will be expected to design a “healthy lunchbox policy” on what makes a nutritional packed lunch over the next year.

Some parents may even be asked to sign a form agreeing to ban unhealthy foods from their children’s lunches.

If a packed lunch is deemed to contain too much fat and sugar, parents could be sent warning letters or their children’s meals confiscated.

That’s right.  The food Nazis are now going to be keeping an Orwellian eye on what British children eat.  If they make food choices that Big Brother has determined are not in the public interest, then the Gestapo will ensure you comply.  Then, if the kid happens to choose to smoke or turns into a fat kid anyway, well, don’t come crying to the government for fabulous free healthcare.

Hey Michael Moore, we all know that you (or at least one of your low-paid, non-union flunkies) read this site.  Do you have the balls at all to comment on this?  You claim to oppose government and worship individual freedom, but the very policies you support are going to result in this type of surveillance-state over fucking food.  So rather than suck your own cock over your latest Oscar nomination, why don’t you show some integrity and actually send out one of your Mike’s Messages either supporting this type of police state activism or decrying it?

Naah, you’ll just keep sucking your own cock, won’t you?  Have fun at the fat farm, Tubby.

More Money for Schools!

When you hear Michael Moore or some other leftist issue their plaintive wails about how we need “more money for education,” despite the highest per-student spending in the world, think back to this story about the abandoned Detroit public school book depository.

Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the “ghetto palm” grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that’s left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. It is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear. In some breathtakingly-beautiful expression of hope, an anonymous graffiti artist has painted a phoenix-like book rising from the ashes of the third floor.

Click the link for pictures.  This is, yet again, why government is a failure at everything it does.

Dealing With the Facts

Let’s assume that there are still some readers out there who harbor the delusion that government-run healthcare is a good idea.  Could we even afford to pay for it?  The answer, of course, is no fucking way.

If you forgot to get a Christmas present for Charlie Rangel, don’t worry. The congressman picked one out for himself, and he’s sending you the bill: $2 million for a shiny new Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College.

The New York Democrat’s Monument to Me was one of about 9,000 earmarks in the omnibus spending bill Congress approved before going on vacation. Most represented a more subtle form of self-aggrandizement, aimed at maintaining power and prestige by currying favor with voters.

According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total cost of the 11,000 or so earmarks in the omnibus bill and an earlier defense bill is about $14 billion, which is not much in the context of a $2.8 trillion federal budget. But the same tendency that explains the persistence of earmarks—the habit of staying popular by pretending your constituents can get something for nothing—also explains the failure to address the federal government’s increasingly dire fiscal situation.

The root of that situation is not earmarks, which represent less than 1 percent of federal spending. Nor is it the war in Iraq, which at $100 billion or so a year accounts for less than 4 percent.

So-called entitlement programs are the reason “America faces escalating deficit levels and debt burdens that could swamp our ship of state,” as Comptroller General David Walker put it in a recent speech. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid account for 40 percent of federal spending and are expected to consume 51 percent in a decade.

Right now Social Security makes the federal fiscal picture look better than it really is, since the program generates a surplus that masks the true size of the deficit. In fiscal year 2007, for example, the official budget deficit was $163 billion; excluding the Social Security surplus, it was more than twice as high.

Since the government spends the surplus on other programs, the Social Security “trust fund” consists entirely of federal bonds, and those IOUs will come due soon. The oldest baby boomers become eligible for early retirement in 2008. They will start drawing Medicare benefits in three years.

The result, said Walker, will be a “tsunami of spending” that “will never recede.” Under current law the estimated gap between the benefits retirees have been promised and revenue to fund them is $53 trillion, of which $34 trillion is due to Medicare.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Medicare is America’s free government healthcare program for the poor.  So when Michael Moore tells you that there is no healthcare here for poor people, I’ve got $34,000,000,000,000 in IOUs that say otherwise.  Make sure you take note of the fact that the Iraq War costs less than 4% of federal spending.  This is one of the most common arguments we hear from Moore-ons who write us, that if it wasn’t for the evil Bush and his war for oil then we’d have all the money in the world for fabulous free government healthcare.

So, let’s hear some real-world solutions from the Michael Moore crowd.  Other than claiming that “free” government healthcare is more “compassionate,” make a practical argument about (a) how and (b) why the US government can provide fabulous free healthcare for everyone.

Two Emails

I just received two emails, one right after the other.  They are the polar opposites of each other.  One is from someone with a perfectly legitimate question, and in return she receives a perfectly legitimate answer.  The other is a typical Canadian Michael Moore-worshipping moron.  The first:

I have read your site for the last few hours. I admit, you do have some excellent view points, but between you three it seems to be a tug a war on one sidedness opinions. You guys express it through your site, and Moore expresses it through his films. Now about Moore generosity, well we all know that was more the sake of the movie, and to get attention to him and his ideas. But if you are here to argue his beliefs amd bash him to the ground, you need to consider what he has done for you besides his little donation, he not only allowed you to get more hits to your site, and allow people to see your view points but allowed people to make a “choice” by deciding what we want to believe in, stand for. He is allowing us to choose, to make a choice between the point of views. right or wrong? then again, is there a right or wrong between you three??? I beg to differ.

My response:

Vivian, thanks for a pretty reasonable question.

Let me put it like this.  Name ONE THING in Sicko which expressed, in any manner, that there is a downside to socialized medicine.  Name one.  You can’t, because there isn’t any.  This is why I say on the site that Moore has no interest whatsoever in actually seeing people get quality healthcare.  He wants to see people get healthcare *through socialism.* That’s his primary goal, to see his grand socialist plan implemented.  In order to do so he has to ignore all the negatives, and present socialized medicine as some kind of medical Disneyland, where people will come to your house and wipe your ass for you if you choose, and it’s all FREE FREE FREE!

Now, by way of comparison, Jim and I freely admit that the current US system sucks.  We also make the case that socialized medicine, far from being the utopian paradise portrayed by Moore, is just as bad, if not worse.  So the solution is not to abandon one shitty system (the US) for a system which is, at best, equally shitty (European and Canadian).

Moore’s trickery has made this appear like a two-sided coin:  one one side are the bloodthirsty evil capitalists and their for-profit healthcare system, and on the other are the kindly, benevolent government-run systems, which never deny anything to anyone.  The impression left in the viewers mind is “Wow, if I care about people then how can I support anything but socialized medicine?” Search our site, you’ll find countless horror stories about socialized medicine—people pulling their own teeth out with pliers because they couldn’t get in to see a dentist, nurses merely turning sheets over between patients to save on laundry costs, rationing schemes which send old people home to die because it would cost too much in limited resources, and so on.

Again, was ANY of this mentioned in Moore’s film?  No, of course not.  Because it was a two hour lie.

So, in this respect, does Moore actually give you a choice of what to believe in?  Or does he lie, distort, obfuscate, bullshit, and *trick* you into believing what he wants you to believe?  And if socialized medicine is so wonderful, why does he need to present such a distorted and inaccurate version of its reality? These are the real questions you should be asking yourself.

Take care.

And now, the clueless Canadian moore-on.

From:
Subj: Once again, the stupidity of United States is shinning through

Thank you MR. MOORE, you have again opened the eyes of many and shut the ones that are already blind. Blinded by stupidity. Michael Moore is one of the best things that is happening in the states.  Its pretty sad when people from the states have to sneak across the border, lie and say that they are Canadians just to get treatment they think they deserve.  Well if you are so deserving of this treatment, look to your own government for help.  You think that your land is the best, everything in the states are better than everyone else, WOW do you people need an awakening!  How much more stupid can you people get, you support a government that cares more about war then its own people.  They even treat the terrorist with better health care than they give their own people.  Hello?  should that not tell you something.  Its really a shame that you people can only see whats in front of you.  Take off the blinders, the rose colored glasses.  Hey, there is a world out there, other countries that do look after their own.  Theres alot about this SiCKO film that alot of you americans can learn alot from.  Take notes, that is if you can read or write!

First off, I would be willing to bet that I have lived in more countries than this dunce will ever visit in her entire life. Secondly, the Canadian inferiority complex is clearly evident here.  And third, the fact that there is an entire healthcare industry in Canada whose sole purpose is to find medical care in the United States for Canadians who are stuck for years on waiting lists shows that this woman clearly has absolutely no idea what she is talking about.  In other words, she’s a typical Moore fan.

Greedy, Heartless, For-Profit Government

Of the many points Michael Moore raises in Sicko, two stick with me.

1.  Insurance companies routinely deny service to patients as a matter of policy, and they do so out of a heartless sense of corporate greed.
2.  To solve this problem a government agency, with no heartless and greedy profit motive, is essential for equitable distribution of benefits.

Keep these two points in mind as you read this story.

Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision.

Two-thirds of those who appeal an initial rejection eventually win their cases.

But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.

The agency’s new plan to hire at least 150 new appeals judges to whittle down the backlog, which has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in 2000, will require $100 million more than the president requested this year and still more in the future. The plan has been delayed by the standoff between Congress and the White House over domestic appropriations.

There are 1,025 judges currently at work, and the wait for an appeals hearing averages more than 500 days, compared with 258 in 2000. Without new hirings, federal officials predict even longer waits and more of the personal tragedies that can result from years of painful uncertainty.

Backlogs?  Denials?  Years of uncertainty?  Where have we heard of all these things?  Oh yeah, I remember now:  Canada, the UK, Australia, and every other country with compassionate, “free” healthcare fun by the government.  But wait, it gets better.

Of the roughly 2.5 million disability applicants each year now, about two-thirds are turned down initially by state agencies, which make decisions with federal oversight based on paper records but no face-to-face interview. Most of those who are refused give up at that point or after a failed request for local reconsideration.

But of the more than 575,000 who go on to file appeals — putting them in the vast line for a hearing before a special federal judge — two-thirds eventually win a reversal.

Why, it’s almost like the government routinely denies claims.  You know, just like private insurance does.  But how can this be?  Government isn’t motivated by evil profit, is it?  They don’t operate with the brutal capitalist motivation, do they?  Government is the solution, isn’t it?  Government never fails us, does it?

The growing delays in the appeal process over the last decade resulted in part from litigation and financing shortages that prevented the hiring of new administrative law judges. In addition, the number of applications is rising as baby boomers reach their 50s and 60s.

Litigation?  The costs of litigation on rising insurance premiums are continually dismissed by compassionate Moore fans as nothing but capitalist propaganda.  But here it is, contributing to delays and waiting lists and misery in providing Social Security benefits.  But I’m sure that nothing similar will happen when government runs healthcare, will it Mikey?

And people wonder why we oppose government-run healthcare.  The government ponzi scheme is finally starting to fall apart, and the investors are finding out that they’ve being scammed.  What a complete fucking disaster.

But at least it’s a compassionate disaster.

GDP and Fingers

From Liz in Canada.

Mr K. and Mr. Lee,
I have been reading part of your site and, while on the whole I found it to be a little one sided, I found one opinion to be rather alarming.  The only mention I have found of this issue on your site is the following quote: “As the baby boomer generation ages, where are we going to get the money and resources to provide unlimited free healthcare?  Is it fair to saddle the current generation with a massive mountain of debt to do so?” While relatively harmless when only taken on its own, I wonder what the effect will be when others of my generation, the one who will have that massive debt, will respond to your quote.  The simple fact is that if not for our parents, who will require massive quantities of health care, we would not exist.  Was it fair to saddle them with the burden of raising us until, in some cases, the very late 20’s?  The current cost of raising a child is approximately 100 thousand dollars.  That does not even take into account the emotional responsibility as well as the difficulties involved in instilling a sense of responsibility and other , for lack of a better word, wantable attributes in another life.  After all this you actually raise the question is it fair to pay for their health care, to keep them comfortable, and to ensure that they feel as little pain as possible?  Perhaps you need to reevaluate your priorities ever so slightly.  By they way I am a canadian who has so far lived in ontario (universal health care) and alberta (more privatized) and I only have this to say: wait times may be high but there are less people missing fingers in ontario. I’ll gladly wait the extra time if it means getting the care i need.

Here’s my response.  My numbers might not be exactly right since I’m at work and wrote this from memory, but the overall theme is correct. Please, if you find more accurate numbers post them in the comments and I will correct what I wrote.

Elizabeth,

Thanks for a reasonably polite question.  Allow me to elaborate.  At the time Social Security was created there were more people paying into it than there were people taking out of it.  Thus there was enough money to finance the thing, plus a little bit left over. Piece of cake.

However, wherever there is a mountain of money laying around, and politicians eager to spend it to show that they’re “doing something,” there will be trouble.  So what the politicians have done is write themselves the world’s biggest IOU.  To put this in basic terms, imagine you had an empty jar on top of your fridge into which you put money for a rainy day.  Then, one day, you see a really cool stereo you want to buy. So you write yourself an IOU, take the money out, and spend it.

Then, when the rainy day comes, you have no money.  In this scenario, however, the only person who suffers is you.  What happened was the government opened the jar, wrote the IOU, then continued to write itself IOUs, to the point that there are currently something like $43,000,000,000 (that’s 43 trillion dollars) in unfunded benefits (i.e. IOUs) that the government has promised the baby boomer generation, who are now hitting retirement age.

Now, if you look at the boomer generation as a whole, they are the wealthiest single demographic in the entire United States.  The vast majority of them have no problem paying for their own medications.  They paid off their mortgages long ago, their children are grown and have college educations and families of their own, they’re doing just fine.  However, they’ve also been paying into the Social Security ponzi scheme their whole life and rightly want to get that money back.  Unfortunately, the government has already pissed it away.

So, how do we come up with $43,000,000,000?  There are one of two ways, we massively decrease benefits or massive increase taxes.  Since the boomer generation will be dead within the next two or three decades, and they are retired and thus not paying into the system any more (only withdrawing from it), they aren’t going to stand for any cuts in benefits.  So the only remaining option is to increase taxes to generate this $43,000,000,000.

To give you an idea of how much money this is, the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States is about $13,000,000,000 a year.  Again, to put this in basic terms, imagine you make $13,000 a year, and you have $43,000 in credit card debt.  How the hell are you going to pay it off?

So, as I initially wrote, is it fair to saddle the current generation, who have no stake yet in social security, with a $43,000,000,000 bill that they had no hand in creating?  If you made $13,000 a year, how would you feel being handed a $43,000 bill that you didn’t create?

So, don’t confuse what i wrote with “You’re a mean heartless poo-poo head because you don’t want to take care of old people.” The issue is a lot bigger and a lot more complex than that.  The problem is that you have fallen for Michael Moore’s schtick—“Anyone who disagrees with me wants to throw old people out into the snow.  Look, they don’t sew fingers back on in America!” This is, as we have demonstrated countless time on the site, complete bullshit.

Is our site one-sided?  Perhaps.  But if so, it is only to act as a counterweight to the one-sided stream of lies and propaganda that have you believing everything that comes out of Michael Moore’s mouth.

So, Elizabeth, you tell me.  Should a recent college graduate, starting his life, be instantly saddled with a tax burden of roughly $35,000 a year for his entire life just to pay for the healthcare of one of the wealthiest groups of people in the country?  You tell me, does that seem “fair” or “compassionate” to you?

It sure doesn’t to me.  Oh, and one final thought:  when your super wonderful awesome magical healthcare system, where everyone has sunshine and rainbows shooting out their assholes, fails to provide you the healthcare you need, you always have the option of crossing the border into the evil, heartless, for-profit United States, as millions of your countrymen do every year, fingers or no fingers.

Boobies for Capitalism

Remember, according to Michael Moore everyone in Canada gets all the super awesome healthcare they could ever possibly want or need.

Toronto is set to become a Canadian centre for breast reconstructive surgery thanks in part to a high-profile boost from politician and breast cancer survivor Belinda Stronach.

Stronach said today she has raised $1 million to establish an academic chair at the Toronto General and Western Hospital Foundation, to ensure that state-of-the-art techniques are available to Canadian women.

She also committed to raising an additional $1 million for the initiative with the hopes of making Toronto a world leader for breast reconstruction.

Stronach was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery in the U.S. earlier this year. [Emphasis added]

Fascinating, isn’t it, that Stronach would leave the healthcare utopia of Canada to seek care in the evil, greedy, heartless, for-profit United States? 

Health and Capitalism in Communist China

As many of you may know, I recently moved from California to Beijing, China.  Today I had my tour of two of Beijing’s western medical facilities.  The first was the United Family Hospital and Clinic.  Their website is here, so take a look through it and see for yourself.  I was met by the Marketing Operations Manager (note the word “market") who gave me a guided tour of the entire facility.  A few brief points:

• This hospital was as professional-looking as just about any US hospital I have ever been in.
• All the rooms are private.  They have regular rooms, which are nicer than most US hospital rooms, and they have VIP rooms, which were nicer than the hotel room I stayed in for the two weeks before I found my apartment.
• All the rooms had en suite bathrooms, and the couches all converted to beds in case family members wished to stay in the room with the patient.
• They are a full-service hospital.  They have a neonatal intensive care unit, MRI scanners, anything you could ever need. 
• They have a full pharmacy.  I had brought along the medications that I take to treat my OCD.  I spoke to their head pharmacist, who looked at the bottles and stated that they had every one of these drugs.  Some of the dosages the pills came in were different than the US, but getting the correct dosage wasn’t a problem, I’d just have to take two or four pills instead of one. 
• I saw one of their maternity rooms.  Everything, from labor through to the birth and follow-up care, is done in this room.  Right down the hall is a surgical room in case a c-section is necessary.

Capitalism is the Solution

The vast majority of the hate mail we receive from the Moore worshippers are people from Europe who have been fooled by their idol into believing that the only option to the current disastrous US healthcare system is the European socialist model.  This is, of course, completely untrue.  Everyone knows that the old system of employer-provided insurance, in place wince WWII, does not work in today’s world and needs to be ended.  The question is, do we replace it with the socialist model, which is clearly just as bad in many respects and vastly worse in others?  The following article from Reason explains how we can end the ridiculous system we have now without adopting the socialist welfare disaster of Europe and Canada.

Unfortunately, the CED proposals go quickly off the rails when the group recommends that every household receive a fixed-dollar credit sufficient to purchase an approved low-priced quality health plan. This health insurance credit would not be means tested and would be financed by some kind of broadly based tax—perhaps a payroll, value-added or environmental tax. Such taxes, like Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, are likely to be regressive, which means the poor will pay a larger percentage of their incomes than the rich. In fact, two-thirds of taxpayers paid more in social security and Medicare taxes than they did income taxes.

For example, today every wage-earning American pays a Medicare payr