Thursday Wrap-Up

President Obama's desperate pitch for validation- I mean- to save his audacious health-care plan is filled with gilded promises and has staved off (for now) a sudden defeat.

From his speech:

"Instead of honest debate, we have seen scare tactics ... And out of this
blizzard of charges and counter-charges, confusion has reigned."

Indeed. Has Mr. Obama examined how socialised medicine works, including all its short-comings? He has no further to look than Canada where one could wait weeks to months for a knee replacement or MRI. The government can also cap the number of medical personnel entering the workforce and the salary of a general practitioner.

Further:

But he said "the time for bickering" over details of the legislation is past
and insisted the consequences of defeat - measured in lives lost, bankrupted
families and cost to the U.S. Treasury - are too high for him to accept.

It is the details that confuse or anger the opponents of his plan. For example, Mr. Obama promised that illegal immigrants would not be covered under this plan. Unless something suddenly drastic occurred, that is not what the plan states:

CRS Report for Congress - Aug. 25, 2009- Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress-
"H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens participating in the Exchange - whether the noncitizens are legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently." (emphasis mine)

A detail that cannot be bickered over are the numbers of uninsured. Byron York of the Washington Examiner pointed out the fluid numbers of people who are not or cannot be insured (that itself is an important distinction):

Remember all those statements from Democrats, including Barack Obama
himself, that 47 million Americans are without health insurance? That's no
longer the operative number. "There are now more than thirty million American
citizens who cannot get coverage," the president said in tonight's speech.... So
why did Obama make the change? The first possibility is the difference between
people who "don't have any health insurance" and people who "cannot get
coverage." Millions of Americans who can afford health insurance choose not to
have it, many of them because they are young, healthy and unlikely to need it.
The second difference in Obama's phrasing is between "people without health
insurance," in his old phrasing, and "American citizens" without coverage, as he
said in last night's speech.

I think what needs to be scrutinised is Obama's intention. There is no doubt that insurance reform is needed in the US. If Obama is as "centrist" as he claimed, then he would have gathered various experts and held a round-table discussion in order to explore efficient and fair possibilities for reform. That is not what he did. He tried to adopt the "universal health-care" approach which would have proven unwieldy, expensive and ultimately discriminatory to patients who would have their health-care rationed by bureaucrats.

Sidebar: the preceding statement is made deliberately and from someone who lives with socialised medicine. Imagine being told you have to wait for treatment for a brain tumor, or having a cancer exam botched. Now imagine there is no one to appeal to.

Emerging from self-imposed exile is former Alaska governor Sarah Palin whose "death panels" remark caused quite a stir. Despite unproven claims of intellectual dwarfism, Mrs. Palin's opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal makes a fair bit of sense for a skeptic:

Writing in the New York Times last month, President Barack Obama asked
that Americans "talk with one another, and not over one another" as our
health-care debate moves forward.

I couldn't agree more. Let's engage the other side's arguments, and
let's allow Americans to decide for themselves whether the Democrats'
health-care proposals should become governing law.

Some 45 years ago Ronald Reagan said that "no one in this country
should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds." Each of us knows that
we have an obligation to care for the old, the young and the sick. We stand
strongest when we stand with the weakest among us.
We also know that our current health-care system too often burdens individuals and businesses—particularly small businesses—with crippling expenses. And we know that allowing government health-care spending to continue at current rates will only add to our ever-expanding deficit.

How can we ensure that those who need medical care receive it while
also reducing health-care costs? The answers offered by Democrats in Washington all rest on one principle: that increased government involvement can solve the
problem. I fundamentally disagree.

Mrs. Palin outlines the deficits of the current system and the merits of free choice in the first five paragraphs of her opinion piece. How has she erred here? She is right to point out that there are deficiencies in the system. She is also correct in pointing out how taking on the vast responsibility of health-care could fail not only the government but the very people the system is meant to care for. She calls for reform- a patient-oriented reform- not government interference. Sounds sensible to me.

When Jon Voight points out "Hanoi" Jane Fonda's baffling yet not-too-unexpected hypocrisy regarding Israel, it's like a breath of fresh air. If there could be demerit points for every time a Hollywood buffoon said or did something stupid, I would feel hope for the universe.

Now, for your daily shock. Watch as ACORN (Obama's ACORN) not bats an eyelid when an undercover pimp and prostitute ask how they can illegally smuggle children across the border. Sick just doesn't encompass the lot.