Competition Obama Style

The buzz word for the Obama health care plan seems to be competition. He used this word in his press conference this week in regards to reducing costs. As I understand it the competition between private and public health care providers will work to reduce costs and make health care insurance more affordable.

First of all when he uses the word competition in this way Adam Smith and Milton Freidman must be rolling over in their graves. Competition infers a battle of some sort. Sports teams and players compete. GM competes against Toyota and the other auto companies (at least they did until they became Obama Motors). Dell competes against the other computer manufacturers. The common thread is that none of these companies or teams gets to make the rules. They all follow the same rules whether they be an actual rule book as in sports or a set of laws set down by government in the arena of business.

Now the government decides they want to play. Already we have Congressmen and Senators calling up CEO's 'advising them' why the dealerships in their district should not be closed and maybe some other dealership may work out better in the long run (surprise surprise Barney Frank). So now the government wants to go up against the big insurance companies. Part of me says they all deserve each other. It sickens me to defend the principles of free markets with the likes of Medical Mutual, Anthem and the rest of them. They are however privately held firms and therefore cannot print money to attract customers. They cannot write laws to make their own stake more attractive. They cannot lead around a gaggle of sycophantic reporters around to make their pitch. These firms have to pay for advertising, they can't just call up ABC news and ask for an hour infomercial.

Calling this setup competition is vile. It shows how depraved the people are that misuse the language in this way are. Who do we have to blame for this mess? I have to put the blame on the Republican Congress who spent the eight years before 2006 spreading pork and selling influence which brought on the band of miscreants we have running things now.

Make no mistake about this. If this health care scheme passes health care will be entirely in the public domain in short order. This is entirely the plan, of Obama and Polosi and Reid. As government gets deeper into health they will lower the price of their plan. This does not reduce costs it only reduces price. Since the private firms will not be able to match this price they will lose subscribers until the costs will be divided up into a smaller and smaller pool of people. This will necessarily cause their prices to go up and up. They will eventually leave the health care market altogether and put their capitol into markets where they can compete. This will of course leave the health care market to the government and they can boast that they won it through 'fair competition'. It makes me sick!

The dirty little secret is that the government and especially President Obama have us convinced that if we don't pass his plan we are choosing to do nothing. There are other alternatives. Private sector changes will work. One way or another we need to take insurance out of the hands of employers. Please see the Heritage Foundation for ideas of private sector health care. We can increase actual competition by opening up health insurance to the entire nation not just within the state as it is now. Auto insurance competes nationwide. Why can't health care insurance? For auto insurance we pay for nearly everything with our cars and use insurance for the big costs such as accident, collision and theft. While we can't use the same model with a national market for insurance there can be differing levels of insurance. If you want just a catastrophic plan for a lower premium that will be available. If you need more things covered at a higher price that will be there too. You really should be able to set your price depending on what you want covered. More young people would carry insurance in that scenario. They are one of the largest groups of the uninsured now. They don't see it as worth their limited resources to pay for insurance that covers everything when they rarely use it. Let them cover only the big things. That can't happen when the employer is offering a one size fits all policy.

We cannot let this plan pass. We will delegate our liberty to the Democrats. With this group we will be a banana republic soon. We will soon see the disasters that Canada, Britain and the other socialized nations see now. Only narcissism makes this crowd think that what failed everywhere else will work here. Narcissism is the one thing that won't be in short supply when they take over.

Mr. President:Don't we deserve nuclear power as much as the Iranians?

Back on June 2 President Obama said that the Iranians desire for nuclear power was legitimate as long as they could prove their desire was peaceful. (See the Associated Press story here). Candidate Obama said he could be for nuclear power only when we could prove we could safely store the waste, and then on May 9 decided to end the funding for the Yucca Mountain storage facility.

The obvious questions exist here:

1. Why can Iran have nuclear power but we can't?
2. Why does Iran merely have to prove they are peaceful (which I'm not sure what that means anyway) and we have to prove we can safely store it (again how do we define that?)
3. If our priority is for clean green fuels why can't we use the most successful world wide clean green fuel?
4. If cheesy 1970's movies can set national policy (The China Syndrome), I vote that we pass a resolution that President Obama apply for a name change to President Le Petomane (if you are keeping score that is my second Blazing Saddles reference this week but if the reference fits use it).
5. Does an emphasis on clean green fuels only apply to clean green fuels the President approves of? Part II: doesn't that make him the Emperor not the President?

Pointing out the obvious inconsistencies in the President's policies used to be something our main stream media did, but is left to bloggers now. Luckily there are some that people actually read.

Changing the World one Life at a time

The environmentalists have an expression, 'think globally act locally'. As it goes I actually don't disagree that much with that. I certainly don't agree with most of their prescriptions, but I think most conservatives and liberals alike want to improve the world we live in. This goes for the environment and the non tangible elements as well.

As I look around at our culture we have become accustomed to a certain amount of creature comforts. We expect to be able to go on vacation to the destination of our choice. We expect to be able to go out to eat if we want. We expect nine gazillion channels on our television for a reasonable price. When we see someone who doesn't have that we think we need something done to make sure that person can do that in short order.

Here is where the left and right move apart. We are so accustomed to these things that it has become unfashionable to ask how to get there. We don't always ask honest questions. Health care is the immediate subject facing us right now. We see millions of people who cannot afford health care insurance at prevailing prices. Now instead of talking about the millions of people that cannot afford health insurance how about one person. OK that is not representative enough, I understand that. Lets take twenty people. First do they all have the same problems? In truth they probably do not. Some may have had children and dropped out of school and not gained the skills necessary to compete in our economic system. Someone else may have developed a substance abuse problem and cannot hold a job. Still another has just lost a job and is going to get another as soon as the economy gets better. Another is young and just doesn't want to pay for insurance they feel they don't need today. Another may not have the problem of cost at al.. Maybe they just want to take the risk and have the means to do so.

You may be saying I have heard this all before. Here is the fresh look. Lets take person one. They poor unfortunate lady who had children in high school and the father abandoned her. After this happened she did her best but just never got around to finishing her high school degree or college. Now let's go back in time. If some person, a parent, a counselor, a pastor, a friend had given her the honest assessment of her future would she have chosen it? By honest assessment I mean when you have that child, and turn to the government, statistics show that you will never be able to go to college, you will never make substantially more than you will today, and you will have very little choice in the direction of your life. Of course these are statistics and they can be wrong in individual instances but for the majority of people these are the realities. If these facts had been given to her would she have chosen to have the baby and raise it or some other choice? One of the choices she could have taken is abortion which I would pray she would not choose. This too has consequences. Her entire life she would wonder what could have become of this never born child. She would have wondered what if she had chosen differently. This is a legal choice but not one without consequences just like all choices.

Let's now say she had been given this information and had chosen to give the baby up for adoption. She would have had her life inconvenienced for the time she was pregnant and would still have the future of wondering where the child is, what the child believes about its mother and all the similar questions. Once again consequences. Now let's go back even farther. Every parent tries to have the talk with their children about sex. Instead of just telling them that premarital sex is wrong and don't do it, what if they knew all they statistics we spoke of. What if they volunteered at a battered women's shelter for a time. What if she went to a homeless shelter and saw all of the lives that hadn't turned out the way the people planned. Would she have chosen a different life? Maybe or maybe not, but we don't know because we lump her in with all of the other people who are nothing but statistics that we use to make our political point.

How about the other people we looked at above. Is there a conversation we could have had for them as well to give them an honest assessment of their future? I think there might be. My children are nine and five years old. I plan to have these conversations. It will still be their choices but at least they will have the long term consequences laid out to them. Shouldn't we start treating the 'poor', the 'disadvantaged', the 'less fortunate' as individuals and not a group? I guess the question comes down to do we want to feel good about ourselves or actually make a difference? You can't make a difference for a group without making a difference for an individual. There will be things that happen that we cannot avoid, untimely deaths, killer tornadoes and Hurricanes. Wouldn't it be nice to reduce the avoidable personal tradgedies? We have always had cases of all these people I talked about, the degree of occurrance is the new phenomena. We may not be able to avoid all of them, but we can reduce them, one life at a time.

Give the President a "Hurrumph"

This is of course a reference to the movie Blazing Saddles. In one scene the Governor played by Mel Brooks is being ridiculous and the cabinet secretaries are sitting and saying "hurrumph hurrumph". At one point the Governor says "I didn't get a hurrunph from that guy" to which his assistent Headley Lamar says "Give the Governor a hurrumph". Then the Governor says to watch your _ss.

I quote one of the funniest movies in history because watching the early Obama administration reminds me very much of this scene. President Obama is constantly spitting out words of wisdom, which are by themselves all that is needed. No action or results are ever necessary. The main stream press then responds in kind by telling us how brilliant he is and how lucky we are that he decided to grace us with his wisdom.

He goes to Egypt and says many of the same things President Bush said for eight years and it is a magnificent new beginning. Let's not pay attention to the fact that the sticking point in the middle east is still that Israel will not make an agreement with the Palestinians or anyone else before they stop shooting rockets into their country. I don't think they can be blamed for that. The area of Gaza will never advance until Hamas decides to rule instead of conduct terror. Beautiful words or not these things are true. Iran and other terrorist entities will not stop their terror and support of terror until we surrender friendly words or not.

Today I hear he is vowing to step up speed on the stimulus package. The problem with that is that he chose to fund things that don't happen quickly. He chose building programs similarly to what Hoover and Roosevelt did. Unfortunately for President Obama the states have many more Bureaucrats that Hoover and Roosevelt had to deal with (not that their programs worked anyway). For him to say he is going to speed it up simply can't happen. My personal opinion is that he doesn't care that it can't happen. The fact that he says something tells the masses that he cares and that is enough for a Hurrumph.

More examples? President Obama talks constantly about health care reform. Rather than show how his program will control costs, the fact that he says they will control costs is enough. We know already how he will control costs, just like every other national plan controls costs, he will have rationing. It may not happen day one, but we will have rationing. It is not possible not to. When you give the users the illusion that the plan is free demand will go up dramatically. How will costs go down then? Note I didn't say price, I said costs. Costs can only go down if some process improvement occurs, either technology, or raw materials or labor costs. Since he is owned by labor I don't think labor costs are going down any time soon. If it is a process improvement it would be the first time in history that this came about from a government program. None of this matter though, since he is going to pass something that is all that is needed. Hurrumph!

Whose Ox is being Gored

Imagine this made up news story:

Representatives from the communications giant Salem Communications which is the broadcast home of such hosts as Mchael Medved, Dennis Prager, and Mike Gallegher today said they believe the Justice department should change its anti trust procedures so they could work with other companies to find solutions to their financial woes. Senator John McCain has an alternative idea where they could book losses against the previous five years when they were more profitable.

This is of course a made up story, but the outline was taken from an actual Reuters story dated June 3 about the big publishers of newspapers which are of course facing the threat of going under. I encourage people to read this story. The point I am making is that while this story is highlighting that the publishers don't want to be given an auto industry style bailout because it could hurt their perceived objectivity, but do want some help from the feds to help them survive. If the same point were made by another industry that has real or perceived ties to conservatives and the Republican Party it would by definition be reported as a case of special interests asking for special treatment.

This subject of the newspapers is real and in my humble estimation it is a question of arrogance. The biggies in this field believe that only they can do the job of journalism. Some newspapers have gone out of business and some more are on the brink. The market has shown that we don't need as many newspaper outlets as we have. As long as the firm going out is from a small town it is believed that it is OK to have the market rule. Let it happen to a large market and I might add a large blue state market and it is a matter of dire emergency that the nanny state must act on. Are we to assume that all journalism will stop if the New York Times goes out of business? How about the Washington Post? This is rediculous!

Did transit stop when the street car companies went out of business? Did telephone traffic stop when the telephone operators went by the wayside? The entire argument is laughable. Would we bend anit-trust legislation for an oil company? How about for a software company? I argue that this new bailout industry stems not from size but from who their friends are. I argue that if GM were largely a non-union company today they would still be in bankruptcy, but if no lenders were to be found, they would soon be liquidating.

I have written before about defining what special interests are and I will continue to write about it because it is a subject we must face honestly. To me a special interest is a industry or business that disagrees with the speaker or writer calling it a special interest. A healthy political environment cannot allow this spoils system to continue. This is an out growth of the group politics which was not invented by President Obama but played so skillfully buy President Obama.

As for the newspapers, let the market shake it out and let the chips fall where they may. If anti trust procedures are to be changed I say good. Anti trust has been a giant club to be employed any time the given Justice Department feels like using it. If procedures are to change however let it be for the public good and not because a liberal interest group came knocking with the threat of writing unflattering stories about the Attorney General.