http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/02/AR2010040204207.html

Mr. Stuever is correct in the assertion that this is not news, but he misses the point that much of what is paraded in front of us is not news. Bald children claiming to need S-CHiP expansion to get treatment is news(?) but the revelation that the family could afford health insurance but campaigned for federal aid expansion so they would not have to, is not (?), ad. nauseam on both sides.

But, there is one point of merit, veiled as he points out, that we are told daily that we cannot do inspiring things like help one another. We are told that Massachusetts cannot provide health coverage for all, only the federal government can do that. We are told that Virginia cannot regulate drilling off her shores, only the federal government can do that. We are told that the state of Utah cannot manage her lands, only the federal government can do that. We are told, although subtly, that people cannot do inspiring things, until they go to Washington.

So, he is correct that this is not news to most of us. But, that this particular show got any comment at all, indicates that the author knows that someone was trying to say something, (political perhaps, it is Palin after all?) but the fact that the author lumps it in with all the sunshine being blown at us indicates that the thinly veiled point was lost on him. Or, perhaps not, perhaps he would like to think it will be lost on his readers if he simply wills it.

“There are 100 senators here and I don’t know that there’s a senator that doesn’t have something in this bill that isn’t important to them,” Reid said. “If they don’t have something in it important to them then it doesn’t speak well of them. That’s what legislation’s all about,” Reid said of the compromises. “It’s the art of compromise.” – Harry Reid.

His excuse, like I often get from my 7 year old, is a permutation of the he-started-it defense. It is similar to my 7 year old defending making a mess by pointing out that my 5 year old made one the day before. Reid would have us swallow that grabbing tax dollars for votes is OK because they are all doing it, if not, . . . well . . . sucks to be them, that is their loss. He says health legislation is about the payments we taxpayers will have to pay to hire Senators to vote to end debate, not about representing Americans by voting like they would vote for themselves. Ben Nelson, the Senator from Nebraska successfully arranged to exempt his state from the Medicare expansions . . . forever. If it is such a good idea, why would Nebraska want to be exempt? If this is such a good bill, why do we need to bribe Senators to vote for it?

Do not try to convince me that paying a state an estimated $100 million in concessions before their Congressman will vote for something is anything other than a bribe. Shame on Nebraska, and I hope that the Governor sticks to his principles and agrees to drop this provision.

They passed cloture on debate of the health care amendments some 36 hours after it was shown to the Senate. They voted to stop debate on a healthcare scheme that does not apply to them, will not start helping anyone until 2014 even though the massive taxes start immediately, and contains numerous payoffs for those who represent us. They voted to stop debating a bill hardly any have seen, because they were paid to do so, without having to live with it themselves, hours after it became public, in the middle of the night.

We could afford to buy insurance for everyone who is uninsured ten times over and still have some left over to subsidize the trial lawyers with the $1.2 Trillion this health care would cost. My question is this, if the price of a vote is $100 million or so, and we have 100 Senators, can we simply pay them the $10 billion to vote to go home?

How many bosses can say that sending their employees home, with pay, can save the bosses a thousand times the employee’s salary?

When it was common for a doctor to visit the sick’s home and order, “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning,” aspirin was the state of the medical art. How ridiculous would it seem if the people of that age complained that access to aspirin was a basic human right, to be provided by the government at taxpayer expense? How ludicrous would it have seemed if someone would have suggested that we all pay taxes to hire people to buy the aspirin from Bayer and then deliver it to us for “free”? That generation would have wrinkled their noses at such a suggestion and said, “No thank you, I can buy my own aspirin.”

The only difference is that Bayer, and others in the industry, took the profits and invested them in the future. Little did they realize that once they expanded our medical knowledge, their efforts would be demonized and labeled evil.

Think what might have happened if the “progressives” could go back and “fix the oversight” or our founders and included life, health care, and the pursuit of happiness in the original inalienable rights. We would still be having 15 kids a generation, several of which would die before they were old enough to have kids of their own. We would still be amputating limbs as a method of fighting infection. There would be no cat scans, dialysis, open heart surgery, Botox, or Lasik eye surgery.

OK, so maybe there would have been the last two. Interestingly enough, Botox and Lasik have gotten cheaper and better, more people are getting them with fewer side effects, all without government mandate. They are generally not covered by insurance and people generally pay for them out of their own pocket. They are now more available and the prices are going down as competition for patients increases. Procedures covered by Medicare, on the other hand, are more expensive and fewer Doctors are providing them to Medicare patients who are also increasing in number.

In order to limit expenses all known socialized medical systems in the world ration treatment and drugs. President Obama suggests that we can save $500 Billion in Medicare by simply refusing to pay doctors once the lower amount is reached, in other words by rationing procedures once we have spent $500B less than before. If we only buy a few of something, we can limit what we spend on that something. This has an additional affect on the research industry which further limits costs: There will be no new drugs or treatments. Sure, there will be the occasional discovery by a housewife who mistakenly mixes the last few drops of her old brand of fabric softener with a healthy dose of her latest choice and discovers that her skin cleared up after exposure to the green cloud coming from the washing machine. Give me enough orangutans with typewriters and enough time and one of them will accidentally type out the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Some of you don’t know what typewriters were. They were like laptops running Microsoft Word with the printer built in, only noisier and less likely to spontaneously produce the Declaration of Independence or auto-morphed emoticons.

The problem with rationing access and stifling development of new technology is that these are exactly the problems we are told such efforts will solve. We complain that not everyone has access to treatment, then calmly discuss rationing. Then we complain that new drugs cost too much while ignoring what it would cost to research new ones in government run labs staffed with government employees overseen by Congress.

If we could go back, would we freeze health care at a level available 40 years ago? There was no arthroscopic surgery, no cat scans, and no contact lenses. We would not have witnessed the last fatal case of Smallpox. No? How about only 30 then? We still loose MRI’s, implanted cardioverter defibrillators, and laser eye surgery. There would be no Hepatitis B vaccine. No, want to keep those? At 20 years we loose several cancer treatments and a vaccine for Lyme disease and in the last ten we loose more cancer treatments and the advances in stem cell research. These are only a small example of the progress, (not the stuff of the progressive movement but the other direction) made in medicine over this time period. Just think what we will know tomorrow.

My question, then, is why now? Why is this the right time to stop advancing medicine? Why is now the time to limit access to future levels of quality health care by future generations so that we can claim to offer universal access to most everyone now? How ridiculous and ludicrous will we seem in 40 years when they look back and ask what were we thinking when we tried to eliminate the system that, although it does not offer all levels of treatments to everyone, it constantly adds to the list of treatments that are available to everyone. No one goes without aspirin or an X-ray for that matter because they cannot pay. One day, no one will pay for stem cell therapy. Only after the rich buy it first, and then those with “Cadillac Insurance Plans”, and then common off-the-shelf plans, and then uninsured people who pay cash. Just like aspirin and X-rays.

We were promised that Social Security taxes were the property of the person paying them, that they would be available with interest once one retired, and that they could be passed on to one’s heirs should one die before drawing the funds out. How does that resemble what we actually have?

We were promised that if we only gave people who needed it a Welfare hand up, we could assist most in moving back into the working main stream. Now, more people are on Welfare as a percentage of population, the programs were extended to less and less willing to accept a hand up over a hand out, and who find a gap between what the government will pay them to stay home and what working people are paid (after the taxes are paid).

We were promised that the 4 cent per gallon gas tax would only be used to fund highway construction and maintenance. It did just that, until Congress voted to use the funds to support public transportation like Amtrak, city busses, subways, etc. Now, transportation funds are scarce, Amtrak looses $39 per passenger (despite promises that it would be returned to the private sector, at a profit for taxpayers, once it is profitable), and gas taxes are many times the 4 cents per gallon that originally worked.

In Virginia, we were promised that if we allowed a state lottery, the money would be used for public education. Although the amount spent on education does come from the left over lottery money, the left over money equaled the previous budget. The original money was used for other desires. Now, the Virginia lottery participates in the Mega Millions ring that includes several states, the payouts have risen in dollar amounts, the chances of a Virginian winning have gone down, and the school systems are still peddling cans of Virginia Diner peanuts to help supply classrooms.

In June, a District of Columbia Metro crash killed 9 people. Accidents happen, and the causes must be identified and corrected, regardless of who is in charge. In an unrelated line of thinking, the NTSB and others exclaim this as an example of the need for more federal oversight of locally operated systems. They say that there needs to be more uniform rules among States and within localities. Why is this related to the “Trust me, I’m with the government” charade of the previous examples?

The District of Columbia is the exclusive purview of Congress. The DC Metro is completely within federal control. How can the NTSB then claim that the accident indicates the need for more federal oversight? They do so same way that they say that the deficit in highway spending is the result of anything other than Congressional raiding of the funds for other desires. They do so in when talking about the deficit in funds for Social Security after allowing people to get benefits without being citizens, much less contributors to the system. They talk about amendments to the current health care “bills” to forbid the use of Medicare money for other programs, even though the “trust fund” has long been dissolved and the money spent for other desires and Medicare funds do not cover Medicare expenses now, much less other desires.

In the words of Ronald Reagan, “Government is not the solution, Government is the problem.”

Are we more interested in doing the most good with the available resources? Or are we more interested in having equal good for all, even if it is, on average less good?

The “poor” are now a powerful electorate demographic, our children are less educated despite the spending, Amtrak is still bankrupt, people are still “denied” health care, and the list goes on. And the statist wrings his hands and points to these facts as proof that the original takeovers of these things didn’t go far enough.

I ask a simple question: Is there any cause for which our public servants solved the problem in their charge, where the program and its offices were then closed, and where the taxes collected for that purpose stopped?