HealthCare -- What is quality?

It should be amazing that the following is not discussed more often. It is a meaningful, and perhaps the most meaningful measure of "quality of healthcare." Too often "life span" is a measure, but convenience has to be more relevant measure.

In addition I often hear "16% of GDP is too much to spend on healthcare!" Too much for whom? By what measure? What is the appropriate amount? Is 16% too much of a spend for flat screen TVs or electronics? What about transportation? Education? -- Blank out. No Answer, just ignore the obvious question. No questions from our journalistic 'watchdog' media.

A recent "Investor's Business Daily" article provided very interesting statistics from a survey by the United Nations International Health Organization.

Percentage of men and women who survived a cancer five years after diagnosis:

U.S. 65%
England 46%
Canada 42%

Percentage of patients diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment within six months:

U.S. 93%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Percentage of seniors needing hip replacement who received it within six months:

U.S. 90%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Percentage referred to a medical specialist who see one within one month:

U.S. 77%
England 40%
Canada 43%

Number of MRI scanners (a prime diagnostic tool) per million people:

U.S. 71%
England 14%
Canada 18%

Percentage of seniors (65+), with low income, who say they are in "excellent health":

U.S. 12%
England 2%
Canada 6%

Republican Budget Items

I think this list needs some more detail to be considered legitimate, but I assume it is close. (i.e. what it needs is to clarify how much savings over what time frame, which is offered for some items but not for all).

These are all the programs that the new Republican House has proposed cutting. Read to the end.
· Corporation for Public Broadcasting Subsidy. $445 million annual savings.
· Save America 's Treasures Program. $25 million annual savings.
· International Fund for Ireland . $17 million annual savings.
· Legal Services Corporation. $420 million annual savings.
· National Endowment for the Arts. $167.5 million annual savings.
· National Endowment for the Humanities. $167.5 million annual savings.
· Hope VI Program.. $250 million annual savings.
· Amtrak Subsidies. $1.565 billion annual savings.
· Eliminate duplicative education programs. H.R. 2274 (in last Congress), authored by Rep. McKeon, eliminates 68 at a savings of $1.3 billion annually.
· U.S. Trade Development Agency. $55 million annual savings.
· Woodrow Wilson Center Subsidy. $20 million annual savings.
· Cut in half funding for congressional printing and binding. $47 million annual savings.
· John C. Stennis Center Subsidy. $430,000 annual savings.
· Community Development Fund. $4.5 billion annual savings.
· Heritage Area Grants and Statutory Aid. $24 million annual savings.
· Cut Federal Travel Budget in Half. $7.5 billion annual savings
· Trim Federal Vehicle Budget by 20%. $600 million annual savings.
· Essential Air Service. $150 million annual savings.
· Technology Innovation Program. $70 million annual savings.
· Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Program. $125 million annual savings.
· Department of Energy Grants to States for Weatherization. $530 million annual savings.
· Beach Replenishment. $95 million annual savings.
· New Starts Transit. $2 billion annual savings.
· Exchange Programs for Alaska , Natives Native Hawaiians, and Their Historical Trading Partners in Massachusetts. $9 million annual savings
· Intercity and High Speed Rail Grants. $2.5 billion annual savings.
· Title X Family Planning. $318 million annual savings.
· Appalachian Regional Commission. $76 million annual savings.
· Economic Development Administration. $293 million annual savings.
· Programs under the National and Community Services Act. $1.15 billion annual savings.
· Applied Research at Department of Energy. $1.27 billion annual savings.
· FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership. $200 million annual savings.
· Energy Star Program. $52 million annual savings.
· Economic Assistance to Egypt . $250 million annually.
· U.S. Agency for International Development. $1.39 billion annual savings.
· General Assistance to District of Columbia . $210 million annual savings.
· Subsidy for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. $150 million annual savings.
· Presidential Campaign Fund. $775 million savings over ten years.
· No funding for federal office space acquisition. $864 million annual savings.
· End prohibitions on competitive sourcing of government services.
· Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. More than $1 billion annually.
· IRS Direct Deposit: Require the IRS to deposit fees for some services it offers (such as processing payment plans for taxpayers) to the Treasury, instead of allowing it to remain as part of its budget. $1.8 billion savings over ten years.
· Require collection of unpaid taxes by federal employees. $1 billion total savings.
· Prohibit taxpayer funded union activities by federal employees. $1.2 billion savings over ten years.
· Sell excess federal properties the government does not make use of. $15 billion total savings.
· Eliminate death gratuity for Members of Congress.
· Eliminate Mohair Subsidies. $1 million annual savings.
· Eliminate taxpayer subsidies to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. $12.5 million annual savings
· Eliminate Market Access Program. $200 million annual savings.
· USDA Sugar Program. $14 million annual savings.
· Subsidy to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). $93 million annual savings.
· Eliminate the National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program. $56.2 million annual savings.
· Eliminate fund for Obamacare administrative costs. $900 million savings.
· Ready to Learn TV Program. $27 million savings..
· HUD Ph.D. Program.
· Deficit Reduction Check-Off Act.

· TOTAL SAVINGS: $2.5 Trillion over Ten Years

I think this shows how things get into the budget. Something as small as $10MM dollars is not taken seriously. That, in addition to the process in Washington, means this is how our rulers play the game. They play power politics with our money. Think about the taxes you paid last year -- would you be pleased to know that your entire tax bill went to pay for a subsidy to Ireland?

Mark Steyn on Demographics and Decline

This post from Mark Steyn caught my eye. Enjoy.

Steyn on Culture
TUESDAY, 24 MAY 2011
Mitch Daniels has wrapped up his "To be or not to be" routine, and, according to Paul Rahe, left the GOP looking like a hamlet without a prince. Paul is upset. I'm less so. As I said on the radio some months back, one should never underestimate the Republican Party's ability to screw up its presidential nomination. The GOP had a grand night last November only because the entire party establishment was more or less absent from the 2010 election dynamic. It would be unreasonable to expect that luck to hold, and a presidential year requires a single frontman for the party that makes election season less friendly to decentralized insurgency Tea Party-style.

And in any case doesn't last November seem an awful long time ago? A transformative Tuesday night, followed by an entirely untransformed Wednesday morning after. There is the Paul Ryan plan, but last year's hero Scott Brown has come out against it. And he won't be the last if NY-26 goes south. And the Ryan plan itself is, in the grand scheme of the looming abyss, extremely minimal and cautious.

Governor Daniels' long tease over the Presidential race will be remembered mainly for one thing - the "truce" he called for over so-called "social issues". This was depressing on two fronts: First because Republicans spend too much time pre-emptively conceding and agreeing to play on the left's turf - and, if ever there were an electoral cycle when that should be unnecessary, it's this one. And secondly because the social issues are not separate from the debt crisis. The collapse of the American family is a fiscal issue: Unwed women are one of the most reliable voting groups for big government.

Steven Hayward suggests Daniels proposed the wrong truce, and that the one implicit in the Ryan plan is closer to what's needed: Both Republicans and Democrats accept the current obligations of the welfare state, and figure out a way to make them work. I'm inclined to agree with Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute - that the GOP would get suckered:

T]here is no evidence that if conservatives agree not to try to roll back the welfare state, liberals will agree to restrain its growth. More likely, conservatives will simply become involved in a bidding war, in which they will inevitably look like the less caring party.

You don't need to hypothesize about that. In essence, it's the "truce" accepted by so-called "right-of-center" parties (Jacques Chirac) in post-war Europe. And all it means is that the troika of permanent bureaucracy, government unions, and a vast dependency class gets to carry on bankrupting the nation even under nominally "conservative" government.

Out there in Insolvistan life goes on. Detroit, a city that has the functioning literacy rate of a West African basket case, has just renovated its library with designer chairs from Allermuir costing $1,000 apiece. Any books to go with the chairs? Who cares? "How about the young mother with several children that looks forward to a weekly trek through the snow/sleet to improve their reading skills and are hopeful that a spot near the fireplaces will be open, because the warmth provided is greater than what they experience at home?" argues Allermuir sales rep Paul Gingell in a Dickensian vignette that warms the heart of my bottom almost as much as his chairs do. God forbid any Detroiter should be required to "improve their reading skills" without a thousand-dollar seat to sink their illiterate posteriors into. What matters is to keep spending at all costs. Three chairs for Detroit!

Who will pay for Detroit, and California, New York and the rest? New Hampshire? Wyoming? Mitch Daniels can demand a "truce" from conservatives on social issues, and Democrats can demand a truce from Republicans on the welfare state, but the real fault-lines on which this nation will fracture are not half so clubbable. How many citizens of the remaining relatively solvent states are prepared to pick up the tab for Detroit's Allermuir chairs for the privilege of keeping 50 stars in the flag? The spendaholics are setting up conditions for serious secession movements.

What of those states that feel at home in a spendaholic America? Mainly as a result of government policy, the south-west has undergone one of the fastest and most dramatic demographic transformations ever seen in a settled, self-governing nation. As a consequence, there is a widening divergence between young and old in states such as California: The old are very white (with some black), and the young are very Hispanic (with some Asian). The principal beneficiaries of the mid-20th century entitlement programs are honky geezers. The fellows expected to fund them are increasingly Latino. That doesn't sound a recipe for social tranquility. The welfare state developed in small ethnically homogeneous northern European nations with a strong sense of intergenerational solidarity. That model applies less and less on an Islamizing Continent, and it makes just as little sense for southern California. When the Democrats' dependency culture collides with their immigration policies, it isn't going to be pretty. Eighty-three per cent of Medicare recipients are white; 70 per cent of births in Dallas' biggest hospital are Hispanic. The speed of transformation represented by those numbers would be difficult to manage at the best of times. In the brokest nation in history, the chances of pulling it off smoothly are zero.

Daniels' "truce" is irrelevant measured against the likelihood of any truce between solvent and insolvent states, young and old, private sector and government retiree. We're approaching the point of no return. If you scuttle the Ryan plan, the next one will be far more convulsive. Assuming there is a "plan" at all, rather than simply societal disintegration. From Scott Brown to Mitch Daniels, from the post-November business-as-usual to a potential Democrat upset in NY-26, it's starting to look as if the political institutions of the republic are impervious to course correction. I always cite the Milton Friedman argument: What matters is not electing the right people (Scott Brown was "the right people" just a year ago), but creating conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing - ie, whatever squishes and opportunists emerge as the Scott Browns of November 2012, we've moved the meter sufficiently in the broader public discourse. Otherwise, the president who takes office in January 2013 will be presiding over the early stages not of American decline but of collapse.

Brilliant Post on Brown

This post from Krauthammer is worth re-reading (thanks to the "Sting of the Lash" blog for alerting me). In particular I am really suprised by the over-reaching of the left since 2008. Many said that the left had become a platform of "anti-bush" only. Many said they would over-reach fast and furious. I thought such views were wrong, but they were correct. Read on.....

What Scott Brown's win means for the Democrats

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 22, 2010; A21

On Jan. 14, five days before the Massachusetts special election, President Obama was in full bring-it-on mode as he rallied House Democrats behind his health-care reform. "If Republicans want to campaign against what we've done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over American families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have."

The bravado lasted three days. When Obama campaigned in Boston on Jan. 17 for Obamacare supporter Martha Coakley, not once did he mention the health-care bill. When your candidate is sinking, you don't throw her a millstone.

After Coakley's defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration "not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years."

Let's get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that . . . it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.

And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama, not Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.

Bull's-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to a Rasmussen poll, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.

Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don't Mirandize terrorists. Don't raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests.

These deals -- the Louisiana purchase, the Cornhusker kickback -- had engendered a national disgust with the corruption and arrogance of one-party rule. The final straw was the union payoff -- in which labor bosses smugly walked out of the White House with a five-year exemption from a ("Cadillac") health insurance tax Democrats were imposing on the 92 percent of private-sector workers who are not unionized.

The reason both wings of American liberalism -- congressional and mainstream media -- were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they'd spent Obama's first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer. With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.

You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.

The evidence was unmistakable. Independents, who in 2008 had elected Obama, swung massively against the Democrats: dropping 16 points in Virginia, 21 in New Jersey. On Tuesday, it was even worse: Independents, who had gone 2-to-1 Republican in Virginia and New Jersey, now went 3-to-1 Republican in hyper-blue Massachusetts. Nor was this an expression of the more agitated elements who vote in obscure low-turnout elections. The turnout on Tuesday was the highest for any nonpresidential Massachusetts election in 20 years.

Democratic cocooners will tell themselves that Coakley was a terrible candidate who even managed to diss Curt Schilling. True, Brown had Schilling. But Coakley had Obama. When the bloody sock beats the presidential seal -- of a man who had them swooning only a year ago -- something is going on beyond personality.

That something is substance -- political ideas and legislative agendas. Democrats, if they wish, can write off their Massachusetts humiliation to high unemployment, to Coakley or, the current favorite among sophisticates, to generalized anger. That implies an inchoate, unthinking lashing-out at whoever happens to be in power -- even at your liberal betters who are forcing on you an agenda that you can't even see is in your own interest.

Democrats must so rationalize, otherwise they must take democracy seriously, and ask themselves: If the people really don't want it, could they possibly have a point?

"If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call," said moderate -- and sentient -- Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, "there's no hope of waking up."

I say: Let them sleep.

New Media

If you have not yet checked out PajamasTV please go to PJTV.com and take a look. In particular, Bill Whittle is a real gem, and here is a link to his recent video post if you have 10 min. this is becoming my main source of "video" news.....

Storm

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=video&video-id=2907

Steyn Online

This guy is too quick and too funny not to be repeated.  Reposted with the (implicit) permission of Mark Steyn....

The Joke¹s on Us


WE ARE THE LAUGHING STOCK OF THE WORLD







January 02, 2010, 7:00 a.m.

The Joke’s on Us
The Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. We are.

By Mark Steyn


On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh?

But the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you. At Heathrow last week, they were permitting only one item of carry-on on U.S. flights. In Toronto, no large purses.

Um, the Pantybomber didn’t have a purse. He brought the bomb on board under his private parts, and his private parts weren’t part of his carry-on (although, if reports of injuries sustained in his failed mission are correct, they may well have been part of his carry-off). But no matter. If in doubt, blame the victim. The TSA announced that for the last hour of the flight no passenger can use the toilets or have anything on his lap — not a laptop, not a blanket, not a stewardess, not even a paperback book. I can’t wait for the first lawsuit after an infidel flight attendant confiscates a litigious imam’s Koran as they’re coming into LAX.

You’re still free to read a paperback if you’re flying from Paris to Sydney, or Stockholm to Beijing, or Kuala Lumpur to Heathrow. But not to LAX or JFK. The TSA were responding as bonehead bureaucracies do: Don’t just stand there, do something. And every time the TSA does something, you’ll have to stand there, longer and longer, suffering ever more pointless indignities. Last week, guest-hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show, I took a call from a lady who said that, if it helps keep her safe, she’s happy to get to the airport “four, five, whatever hours” before the flight. Try to put a figure on “whatever” and you’ll get a sense of where America’s transportation system is headed. Ten years ago, you got to the airport 45 minutes, an hour before the flight. Now, thanks to the ever more demanding choreographers of the homeland-security kabuki, it’s two, three, four, whatever. Look at O’Hare and imagine the size of airport we’ll need. And by then the Pantybomber won’t even need to get on the plane; he can kill more people blowing up the check-in line.

And remember, this was a bombing mission that “failed.” With failures like this, who needs victories?

Joke, joke, joke. The only good news was that the derision was so universal that the TSA promptly reined in some of their wackier impositions a couple of days later. But by then Janet Incompetano, the homeland-security secretary, had gone on TV and declared to the world that there was nothing to worry about: “The system worked.”

Indeed, it worked “smoothly.” The al-Qaeda trainee on a terrorist watch list, a man banned from the United Kingdom and reported to the CIA by his own father, got on board the plane, assembled the bomb, and attempted to detonate it. But don’t worry ’bout a thing; the system worked.

Twenty-four hours later, Secretary Incompetano was back on TV to protest that her words had been taken “out of context.” No doubt, the al-Qaeda-trained CIA-reported cash-paying crotch-stuffed watch-list member’s smooth progress through check-in was also taken “out of context.”


But by then the president of the United States had also taken to the airwaves. For three days, he had remained silent — which I believe is a world record for the 44th president. Since Jan. 20, 2009, it’s been difficult to switch on the TV and not find him yakking — accepting an award in Oslo for not being George W. Bush, doing Special Olympics gags with Jay Leno, apologizing for America to some dictator or other . . . But across the electric wires an eerie still had descended. And when the president finally spoke, even making allowances for his usual detached cool, he sounded less like a commander-in-chief addressing the nation after an attempted attack than an assistant DA at a Cook County press conference announcing a drug bust: “Here’s what we know so far. . . . As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device. . . . The suspect was immediately subdued. . . . The suspect is now in custody and has been charged.” Etc, etc, piling up one desiccated legalism on another: “Allegedly . . . ” “suspect . . . ” “charged . . . ” The president can’t tell an allegedly alleged suspect (which is what he is in Obama fantasy-land) from an enemy combatant (which is what he is in cold hard reality). But worse than the complacent cop-show jargonizing was a phrase it’s hard to read as anything other than a deliberate attempt to mislead the public: The president referred to the Knickerbomber as an “isolated extremist.” By this time, it was already clear that young Umar had been radicalized by jihadist networks in London and fast-tracked to training in Yemen by terror operatives who understood the potentially high value of a Westernized Muslim with excellent English from a respectable family. Yet President Obama tried to pass him off as some sort of lone misfit who wakes up one morning and goes bananas. Could happen to anyone.

But, if it takes the White House three days to react to an attack on the United States, their rapid-response unit can fire back in nothing flat when Dick Cheney speaks. “It is telling,” huffed the president’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, “that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the administration than condemning the attackers.”

“Condemning the attackers”? What happened to all the allegedly alleged stuff? Shouldn’t that be “condemning the alleged isolated attacker”? The communications director seems to be wandering a bit off-message here, whatever the message is: The system worked, so we’re inconveniencing you even more. The system failed, but the alleged suspect is an isolated extremist, so why won’t that cowardly squish Cheney have the guts to condemn the attacker and his vast network of associates?

The real message was conveyed by Fouad Ajami, discussing the new administration’s foreign policy in the Wall Street Journal: “No despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue.” True. Another Iranian deadline passed on New Year’s Eve, but the United States will set a new one for Groundhog Day or whenever.

And, just as the thug states understand they now have the run of the planet, so do the terror cells. A thwarted terror attack at Christmas is bad enough. Spending the following week making yourself a global joke is worse. Every A-list despot and dimestore jihadist got that message loud and clear — and so did American allies already feeling semi-abandoned by this most parochial of presidents. Expect a bumpy twelve months ahead. Happy New Year.

Uhhh Ohhhh......

Help…….Poll numbers sinking………fast……..am losing control of media………….getting bad advice from people who surround me………….they are on to me………..must get a legislative win on the board……….Help…..Dirty politics not working as planned……..Harry Dean is against me……..Help…………..


Credit below to Jeff Schreiber....


TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2009

A New Low

White House threatens Nebraska senator with closure of a crucial Air Force base in an attempt to obtain his critical vote on health care reform



First, they gave Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu $300 million in exchange for her vote in favor of Harry Reid's health care reform bill. That was bad enough. Now, the White House is playing games with our national security and using 10,000 military families as political pawns in an attempt to garner the vote of Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, who has had very public misgivings about voting for the legislation because it holds provisions which would allocate federal funds to fund abortions.



According to the Weekly Standard, the White House is threatening to place Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base, home to U.S. Strategic Command and 10,000 military families, on the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission List. From Michael Goldfarb's piece:

Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a "naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson's vote." They are "threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?" asked the Senate staffer.



Indeed, Offutt is the headquarters for US Strategic Command, the successor to Strategic Air Command, and not by accident. STRATCOM was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.



This isn't the same as playing to the economic dire straits in Landrieu's Louisiana. This has gone from bribery to blackmail. It is outright dangerous, and downright treasonous. Already today, the White House provided aid and comfort to our enemies by revealing the plan to close the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and house nearly 100 foreign terrorists in northwestern Illinois for the sake of political expediency, now they're playing games with American national security for the sake of forcing the passage of health care reform.



What gets lost in all of the left-right shuffle and the ongoing debate on the cable news networks is that the Democrats have the seats to pass anything they want. That they have not, that they have to resort to bribery and blackmail and--in the case of Sen. Joe Lieberman and his wife--the politics of personal destruction shows that this legislation is poisonous. And, as the pressure mounts, we're seeing that this administration is all too happy to administer the dose.