Britain’s National Health Service Creaking

Running Out of Other People’s Money

NHS may be forced to abandon free healthcare for all, says Britain’s top doctor as he warns service need

Tania Steere

The Daily Mail

20 January, 2015

The NHS is ‘not fit for the future’ and unless it undergoes radical change it may be forced to abandon free healthcare for all, in the future, the service’s top doctor has warned. Medical director of NHS England Professor Sir Bruce Keogh said the NHS must become far less reliant on hospitals and needed a ‘complete transformation’ of the way it operates. Sir Bruce told the Guardian: ‘If the NHS continues to function as it does now, it’s going to really struggle to cope because the model of delivery and service that we have at the moment is not fit for the future.’ GP surgeries need to be given more resources to cope with the pressures of demand and tight budgets, he added.

In order for the NHS to keep itself sustainable, he said more services need to happen under the same roof – for example diagnostics tests and an expanded range of treatments at their GP surgery. Sir Bruce added: ‘If not, we will get to a place where the NHS becomes unaffordable and we will have to make some very difficult decisions which will get to the very heart of the principle of the NHS and its values.

This will open up a whole series of discussions about whether the NHS is fit for purpose, whether it’s affordable, and whether the compact with the citizen of free healthcare for all is sustainable in the longer term.’ He added: ‘Too many patients find the NHS fragmented (and) confusing. They find that they get pushed from pillar to post; they feel like a ball in a pinball machine at times.’ He denied claims that ambulance services, A&E and GP surgeries are struggling to cope and are in crisis – despite waiting times at A&E being at their worst levels in a decade.

Letter From America (About Nimbyism)

That’s Not What We Meant, At All

The whole animation of Obamacare is that the wealthy end up paying more so as to subsidise the health care of those less wealthy than they.  The mechanism to achieve this would be the the socialisation of health insurance premiums.  The wealthy’s premiums are rising in order to subsidise the premiums of those who are not so wealthy.   Obama and the Democrats “got away” with it by swearing black and blue that this was not so.  In other words, the lie was deliberately forged and propagated by cunning elites.  The rest of the Democrats remained ignorant and just parroted the official “talking points”.  Silly “useful idiots”–they trusted their leaders.  How quaint.  

Now Harvard academics are “finding out what’s in the Bill”–and they are mad–despite being strongly supportive of Obamacare, and, despite some of their colleagues having been donkey-deep in its design. “Not In My Back Yard” rules amongst the Harvard elites.

Harvard Ideas on Health Care Hit Home, Hard

By ROBERT PEAR 

JAN. 5, 2015

New York Times

WASHINGTON — For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.  Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.

The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?

“Harvard is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at the university who was an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But only up to a point: Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees. That makes the outrage among the faculty remarkable, Mr. Cutler said, because “Harvard was and remains a very generous employer.”

In Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform,” in the form of the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.

Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard professor of classics and one of the world’s leading authorities on Virgil, called the changes “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”  Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led opposition to the benefit changes, said they were tantamount to a pay cut. “Moreover,” she said, “this pay cut will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new parent.” . . .

In addition, some ideas that looked good to academia in theory are now causing consternation. In 2009, while Congress was considering the health care legislation, Dr. Alan M. Garber — then a Stanford professor and now the provost of Harvard — led a group of economists who sent an open letter to Mr. Obama endorsing cost-control features of the bill. They praised the Cadillac tax as a way to rein in health costs and premiums.

Dr. Garber, a physician and health economist, has been at the center of the current Harvard debate. He approved the changes in benefits, which were recommended by a committee that included university administrators and experts on health policy.  In an interview, Dr. Garber acknowledged that Harvard employees would face greater cost-sharing [i.e. wealthier people paying for the healthcare of the less wealthy, aka socialised health care. Ed], but he defended the changes. “Cost-sharing, if done appropriately, can slow the growth of health spending,” he said. “We need to be prepared for the very real possibility that health expenditure growth will take off again.”

But Jerry R. Green, a professor of economics and a former provost who has been on the Harvard faculty for more than four decades, said the new out-of-pocket costs could lead people to defer medical care or diagnostic tests, causing more serious illnesses and costly complications in the future.  “It’s equivalent to taxing the sick,” Professor Green said. “I don’t think there’s any government in the world that would tax the sick.” . . . .

Except that Professor Green is just ignorant.  Every socialist health system in the world taxes the sick at all times for their health as well as the health of others.  That’s just just how socialist systems work–everywhere.

 

Deadly Official Dietary Advice, Part I

The Ministry of Food Propaganda

Almost everything the “authorities” have told you about bad food over the past forty years is wrong.  The assertion was made in The Guardian by  Joanna Blythman. There are at least two aspects to this story, equally important.  The first is to expose the errors, fallacies, and chicaneries for what they are.  The second is to expose the research methodologies, posing as scientific, for the sugar puffs they often are.

First, the exposure of the errors.

Could eating too much margarine be bad for your critical faculties? The “experts” who so confidently advised us to replace saturated fats, such as butter, with polyunsaturated spreads, people who presumably practise what they preach, have suddenly come over all uncertain and seem to be struggling through a mental fog to reformulate their script.

Last week it fell to a floundering professor, Jeremy Pearson, from the British Heart Foundation to explain why it still adheres to the nutrition establishment’s anti-saturated fat doctrine when evidence is stacking up to refute it. After examining 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, the study, funded by the foundation, found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk. This assessment echoed a review in 2010 that concluded “there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease”.

No convincing evidence.  None.  Nada.
  What about all the headlines of this study or that study “proving” the very same–for example, that saturated fats, like butter, were very, very bad and must be banned?  It seems that it was all based on the fallacy of repetition: say something often enough and eventually everyone will come to believe it.  The fallacy of repetition is also known as propaganda.

Now Blythman is calling for a new script.  The choice of the word “script” is a hoot because it implies a work of fiction, of the theatre, or the playhouse–as, no doubt, deliberately intended by the author.

Neither could the foundation’s research team find any evidence for the familiar assertion that trips off the tongue of margarine manufacturers and apostles of government health advice, that eating polyunsaturated fat offers heart protection. In fact, lead researcher Dr Rajiv Chowdhury spoke of the need for an urgent health check on the standard healthy eating script. “These are interesting results that potentially stimulate new lines of scientific inquiry and encourage careful reappraisal of our current nutritional guidelines,” he said.

We have to eat something.  When saturated fats went out the window of “expert” approbation, something had to replace it to stop the growling hunger pangs.  Starchy foods have been the dietetic replacement darling of the day.  Ooops. 

Chowdhury went on to warn that replacing saturated fats with excess carbohydrates – such as white bread, white rice and potatoes – or with refined sugar and salts in processed foods, should be discouraged. Current healthy eating advice is to “base your meals on starchy foods”, so if you have been diligently following that dietetic gospel, then the professor’s advice is troubling.

There have been other reversals and recantations.  It has almost got to the stage of the truth being the exact opposite of what is being avowed by government run and funded science.  If the government orthodoxy, voiced by publicly funded health and diet experts, is to not eat “X” because its bad for you, then more should be consumed with gusto.  You will be better off.  No wonder Reagan once quipped that the utterance, “We are from the government and we are here to help you,” is one of the most terrifying sentences one could ever hear in a lifetime.

Of course, we have already had a bitter taste of how hopelessly misleading nutritional orthodoxy can be. It wasn’t so long ago that we were spoon-fed the unimpeachable “fact” that we should eat no more than two eggs a week because they contained heart-stopping cholesterol, but that gem of nutritional wisdom had to be quietly erased from history when research showing that cholesterol in eggs had almost no effect on blood cholesterol became too glaringly obvious to ignore.

The consequences of this egg restriction nostrum were wholly negative: egg producers went out of business and the population missed out on an affordable, natural, nutrient-packed food as it mounded up its breakfast bowl with industrially processed cereals sold in cardboard boxes. But this damage was certainly less grave than that caused by the guidance to abandon saturated fats such as butter, dripping and lard, and choose instead spreads and highly refined liquid oils.

Despite repeated challenges from health advocacy groups, it wasn’t until 2010, when US dietary guidelines were amended, that public health advisers on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledged that the chemical process for hardening polyunsaturated oils in margarines and spreads created artery-clogging trans-fats.  Manufacturers have now reformulated their spreads, hardening them by chemical methods which they assure us are more benign. But throughout the 20th century, as we were breezily encouraged to embrace supposedly heart-healthy spreads, the prescription was killing us. Those who dutifully swallowed the bitter pill, reluctantly replacing delicious butter with dreary marge, have yet to hear the nutrition establishment recanting. Government evangelists of duff diet advice aren’t keen on eating humble pie.

“Government evangelists of duff diet advice” indeed.  But it gets worse.  Sit up straight and pay attention now.  It turns out that what everyone needs more of is, wait for it, protein and fat.

But what lesson can we draw from the cautionary tales of eggs and trans fats? We would surely be slow learners if we didn’t approach other well-established, oft-repeated, endlessly recycled nuggets of nutritional correctness with a rather jaundiced eye. Let’s start with calories. After all, we’ve been told that counting them is the foundation for dietetic rectitude, but it’s beginning to look like a monumental waste of time. Slowly but surely, nutrition researchers are shifting their focus to the concept of “satiety”, that is, how well certain foods satisfy our appetites. In this regard, protein and fat are emerging as the two most useful macronutrients. The penny has dropped that starving yourself on a calorie-restricted diet of crackers and crudités isn’t any answer to the obesity epidemic.

Blythman goes on to speak about the “distended belly of government eating advice”–we are sure the pun is very much intended.   Traditional foods which have sustained generations have been portrayed as “natural born killers”, but have been replaced by the truly deadly.

As protein and fat bask in the glow of their recovering nutritional reputation, carbohydrates – the soft, distended belly of government eating advice – are looking decidedly peaky. Carbs are the largest bulk ingredient featured on the NHS’s visual depiction of its recommended diet, the Eat Well Plate. Zoë Harcombe, an independent nutrition expert, has pithily renamed it the Eat Badly Plate – and you can see why. After all, we feed starchy crops to animals to fatten them, so why won’t they have the same effect on us? This less favourable perception of carbohydrates is being fed by trials which show that low carb diets are more effective than low fat and low protein diets in maintaining a healthy body weight.

When fat was the nutrition establishment’s Wicker Man, the health-wrecking effects of sugar on the nation’s health sneaked in under the radar. Stick “low fat” on the label and you can sell people any old rubbish. Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed. The anti-saturated fat dogma gave manufacturers the perfect excuse to wean us off real foods that had sustained us for centuries, now portrayed as natural born killers, on to more lucrative, nutrient-light processed products, stiff with additives and cheap fillers.

But, we move on.  It is not just fat and protein which are “back on the menu, boys”.  It’s red meat!  Gimli would be pleased. 

In line with the contention that foods containing animal fats are harmful, we have also been instructed to restrict our intake of red meat. But crucial facts have been lost in this simplistic red-hazed debate. The weak epidemiological evidence that appears to implicate red meat does not separate well-reared, unprocessed meat from the factory farmed, heavily processed equivalent that contains a cocktail of chemical additives, preservatives and so on. Meanwhile, no government authority has bothered to tell us that lamb, beef and game from free-range, grass-fed animals is a top source of conjugated linoleic acid, the micronutrient that reduces our risk of cancer, obesity and diabetes.

The good, old fashioned advice of a balanced diet, with proteins, fats, and lots of fresh veggies is about all we need to know.  But that would do all sorts of bad to an entire industry dedicated to Victorian wowsering.  Worse, this industry is locked into government propaganda and the medical bureaucracy, which needs a crisis in order to justify its procession of bloated salaried “experts” hectoring, lecturing, puffing and pontificating. 

The crucial phrase “avoid processed food” appears nowhere in government nutritional guidelines, yet this is the most concise way to sum up in practical terms what is wholesome and healthy to eat. Until this awareness shapes dietetic advice, all government dietary guidance should come with a tobacco-style caution: Following this advice could seriously damage your health.

Joanna Blythman is the author of Bad Food Britain and What to Eat

It’s science, Jim but not as we know it. 

Letter From Australia (About the United States)

World-class Fakery on Show

TIM BLAIR
The Daily Telegraph
December 16, 2013 12:00AM

 A RIDICULOUS and under-qualified faker took to the stage last week during Nelson Mandela’s memorial service. And next to Barack Obama was some guy who hasn’t quite mastered sign language. 
 
Thamsanqa Jantjie’s erratic performance has drawn international ridicule, but all he really did was turn the failed president’s words into a disappointing jumble of incomprehensible nonsense. As is now apparent, Obama is quite capable of achieving this by himself.

Many Australians were puzzled by American resistance to Obama’s universal healthcare plan, back when it was first proposed in 2008. They couldn’t understand why the US would not embrace an Australian-style system of health coverage.  One reason is that the system in the US was proposed by Obama and his hopeless administration. If you thought Labor’s attempts in Australia to install home insulation and run grocery price websites were lame, they have nothing on Obama’s bid to reshape the massive US health sector.

Just as Labor did in Australia, Obama initially enjoyed near-universal media support. The allegedly impartial fact-checking site PolitiFact backed Obama five years ago for this claim: “No.1, let me just repeat, if you’ve got a healthcare plan that you like you can keep it. All I’m going to do is help you lower the premiums on it. You’ll still have choice of doctor.”  According to PolitiFact: “His description of his plan is accurate, and we rate his statement True.”

Leave aside the puzzling move of judging a political promise in the absence of any action, and move ahead to this year. Millions of Americans have lost their existing health coverage. Millions find themselves waiting for months to see doctors they don’t know. PolitiFact now reports:
“As cancellation letters were going out to about four million Americans, the public realised Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong … for all of these reasons, PolitiFact named ‘If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it,’ the Lie of the Year for 2013.”

I’m not sure how to indicate “lie” in sign language, but one way might be to simply point at Barack Obama’s mouth. A pro tip there for Mr Jantjie, the next time he’s called up for top-level hand-waving duty.

Former Obama fans, who credited their hero with almost mystical powers when first elected, now realise the man’s limitations. As Jantjie is to communicating with the deaf, Obama is to the US presidency. Even Obama’s core constituency of wealthy New York luvvies is cutting him loose. Last week the New York Times, the most Obama-enthralled of all US publications, ran the most hilarious news item of the year, beginning with a paragraph for the ages:

“Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s healthcare plan. But now, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning their health insurance plans are being cancelled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.” Thousands of opera singers! As the internet’s Dave Burge responded: “One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh one’s ass off.” Except, of course, for the dire chances of successful ass replacement surgery under Obamacare.

The Times continued: “It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people – liberal, concerned with social justice – who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better healthcare for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.”

Americans voted for hope and change. They got hopeless change. In any language, that message comes through loud and clear.

The Annals of Soft-Despotism

It’s Unique, So It’s Gotta Be Good

A government which sets forth to care for everybody becomes an inevitable soft-despotic monster.  But the monster is incompetent, bumbling, and stupid.  Irremediably so.  The only solution the monster can proffer to overcome its bumbling failures is to throw millions more of “good money” after bad.  It’s only solution is to double down on folly. 

Now this is not to say that private (non-state) enterprise is always efficient.  Far from it.  But private enterprise has an enforcer, a ruthless, take-no-prisoners punisher of business incompetence and failures.  Mr Competition is relentless in punishing and driving the bumbling incompetent out of business.  But the soft-despot has no competitors.  It is a despot after all, protected by law. 

We offer yet another illustration of the follies and self-destructive pathogens of a bumbling  soft-despotic government: the Obamacare website.

Obamacare: 500M Lines of Code, $500M, 60% Complete, No Surprise

by John J. Xenakis  

30 Nov 2013, 9:59 PM

Breitbart

The historic IT disaster known as the Obamacare web site has been of intense interest to me, since I’ve been a Senior Software Engineer for decades, and I have personally participated in, witnessed, and reported on (as a technology reporter) a number of IT disasters. But even so, the size of the Obamacare web site catastrophe on October 1 still takes my breath away.

When I first heard, shortly after October 1, that there was 500 million lines of code in Healthcare.gov, I quickly rejected that figure, because it’s impossible.

Going back to the development of IBM’s System/360 operation system, as described in Fred Brooks’ classic book, The Mythical Man-Month, the average programmer on the project wrote six lines of code per day. Of course, every programmer writes a lot more than that on SOME days, but on other days he writes zero lines of code, since he’s doing testing or debugging or rewriting or documenting. So for System/360, it all averaged out to six lines per day per programmer.

So let’s say that the Obamacare programmers were much better than that, and wrote 100 lines of code per day average. Let’s say that there were 1000 programmers. And let’s say that, over the three year period, there were about 660 business days. Then, with those generous assumptions, you get 100*1000*660 = 66,000,000 lines of code. It’s simply impossible to reach 500,000,000.

And yet, the 500 million figure is apparently true. I’ve heard it dozens of times in the last month, and no one is denying it. Healthcare.gov apparently really does have 500 million lines of code. How is that possible?

I get a picture in my mind of 1,000 people sitting a computers typing code, without worrying about whether or not it works. Given the size of the catastrophe, some variation of that must have happened.

More important than that, a code base that size is unsupportable. Health services is a rapidly changing field, and every time there’s some kind of process or rule change, it will take an army of programmers to make all the necessary changes in the code base. And that assumes that all the bugs have been fixed, which is far from true. Healthcare.gov will not be fully functional at any time in the foreseeable future, if ever.

On October 1, Healthcare.gov had 500 million lines of code, and could handle a handful of simultaneous users. Facebook.com has 20 million lines of code, and handles millions of simultaneous users.

Then there’s the cost. Healthcare.gov should have cost $5-10 million to implement. Take into account government corruption and incompetence, it should have cost $10-25 million. Instead, it cost $300-600 million — let’s say $500 million. How do we get to that figure? Well, assume 1000 programmers are paid an average of $100 per hour ($200,000 per year) for 8 hours per day for 660 business days: $100*1000*8*660 = $528 million. So at least that figure makes sense — as long as you understand that the Obama administration poured half a billion dollars into the pockets of his cronies and supporters, and got exactly what he deserved with Healthcare.gov.

How could President Obama have been so wrong?

There have been numerous reports that the Obama administration had been informed many times, including by McKinsey & Co. in March, that Healthcare.gov was in serious trouble. And yet, just two weeks ago, on November 19, President Barack Obama said:

I was not informed directly that the Web site would not be working the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know — I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the Web site opens if I thought that it wasn’t going to work. So, clearly, we and I did not have enough awareness about the problems in the Web site.

And so, since he posed the question of how he couldn’t have been that stupid, let’s try to find an answer.

Once again, I have a number of personal experiences that relate to this, and the main one I’d like to relate is the most bizarre day of my professional life.

In 1985, I was doing contract programming for Northrop Corp., developing embedded software for munitions guidance systems. The project manager had to be reassigned, and I became acting manager. After being in this position for 2-3 weeks, it was clear to me that the whole project was in trouble, would slip at least three months. I told this to the program manager, and he nearly freaked out.

I was then pulled into one meeting after another, and met high-level managers that I never knew existed. Their conclusion apparently was that I was full of crap, and they decided to fire me, but they weren’t sure, so they decided to let me stay on until the release date, and then they would fire me.

About a week before the release date, there was a meeting in the lab, where the lead programmer was to demonstrate the embedded system to the Corporate VP. I attended this demo, but I was ordered just to stand there and keep my mouth shut. So I stood back, leaned against the wall, and just watched the proceedings.

The lead programmer gave his demo, and the VP ooohed and ahhhhed. He then asked, “And this will be ready for release next Monday?” The lead programmer said, “Yes, it will be ready on Monday.” The other managers in the room also said, “Monday.”

I was holding my breath through all this. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Either I was crazy or all of them were crazy. That’s why I call this the most bizarre day of my life.

Well anyway, to make a long story short, the project was not ready for release the following Monday. It slipped six months. I wasn’t fired because one Silent generation manager went around and told everyone that “Xenakis was right, so he shouldn’t be fired.” So I wasn’t fired.

I’ve had several other experiences like that, except that usually I was fired, even though I was always right. In 1992, I was working as a contract programmer for Fidelity. I did a little unit testing, and wrote a memo to my manager, listing numerous problems why the project was in trouble, saying that it would slip at least six months. The manager was so furious that he had smoke coming out of his ears. He fired me. The project crashed completely a couple of months later. I was right, and he was wrong, though I paid the price.

In a previous article ( “14-Oct-13 World View — HealthCare.gov IT systems a continuing disaster”) I related a 2005 experience where I was fired for telling my management that the $10 million project currently under development would slip 6-12 months. I was fired and out of a salary, while the dozens of incompetent engineers kept collecting salaries for over another year, at which time the disastrous project was canceled completely.

So there’s really nothing about the Healthcare.gov disaster that’s a surprise to me (except the 500 million lines of code). I’ve been a Senior Software Engineer for a long time, and I’ve worked on over 100 projects, so I’ve seen disasters. The only thing that’s different about Healthcare.gov is the breathtaking size of criminality of the Obama administration in wasting so much money on cronies and corruption, and the breathtaking size of the resulting well-deserved disaster.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Obamamandias

Posted on Sunday, November 17, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

With apologies to P.B. Shelley . . .

I met a traveler from bankrupt land
Who said: ‘One vast and hapless head of stone
Lies in the desert. Near it, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered website lies, still down.
That haughty look, and sneer of cold command,
And photo-op poses, a myriad!
Still cannot get it, overwhelmed by “things”
Like “If you like it, you can keep it. Period.”
And on the teleprompt these words appear—
“My name is Obamamandias, king of kings:
Look on my work, ye uninsured, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
A once great health care system stretches far away.’

Letter From America (About the US Monarch)

Thus Spake Obama

The incompetence of our neo-monarchy

By Mark Steyn

National Review Online

November 15, 2013 3:30 PM 

 

 It is a condition of my admission to this great land that I am not allowed to foment the overthrow of the United States government. Oh, I signed it airily enough, but you’d be surprised, as the years go by, how often the urge to foment starts to rise in one’s gullet. Fortunately, at least as far as constitutional government goes, the president of the United States is doing a grand job of overthrowing it all by himself.

On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.

“I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this,” mused former Vermont governor Howard Dean. But he’s obviously some kind of right-wing wacko.
Later that day, anxious to help him out, Congress offered to “pass” a “law” allowing people to keep their health plans. The same president who had unilaterally commanded that people be allowed to keep their health plans indignantly threatened to veto any such law to that effect: It only counts if he does it — geddit? As his court eunuchs at the Associated Press obligingly put it: “Obama Will Allow Old Plans.” It’s Barry’s world; we just live in it.

The reason for the benign Sovereign’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative is that millions of his subjects — or “folks,” as he prefers to call us, no fewer than 27 times during his press conference — have had their lives upended by Obamacare. Your traditional hard-core statist, surveying the mountain of human wreckage he has wrought, usually says, “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But Obama is the first to order that his omelet be unscrambled and the eggs put back in their original shells. Is this even doable? No. That’s the point. When it doesn’t work, he’ll be able to give another press conference blaming the insurance companies, or the state commissioners, or George W. Bush . . .

The most telling line, the one that encapsulates the gulf between the boundless fantasies of the faculty-lounge utopian and the messiness of reality, was this: “What we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” Gee, thanks for sharing, genius. Maybe you should have thought of that before you governmentalized one-sixth of the economy.

By “we,” the president means “I.” Out here in the ruder provinces of his decrepit realm, we “folks” are well aware of how complicated insurance is. What isn’t complicated in the Sultanate of Sclerosis? But, as with so many other things, Obama always gives the vague impression that routine features of humdrum human existence are entirely alien to him. Marie Antoinette, informed that the peasantry could no longer afford bread, is alleged to have responded, “Let them eat cake.” There is no evidence these words ever passed her lips, but certainly no one ever accused her of saying, “If you like your cake, you can keep your cake,” and then having to walk it back with “What we’re also discovering is that cake is complicated to buy.” That contribution to the annals of monarchical unworldliness had to await the reign of Queen Barry Antoinette, whose powdered wig seems to have slipped over his eyes.

Still, as historian Michael Beschloss pronounced the day after his election, he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” Naturally, Obama shares this assessment. As he assured us five years ago, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Well, apart from his signature health-care policy. That’s a mystery to him. “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working,” he told us. The buck stops with something called “the executive branch,” which is apparently nothing to do with him. As evidence that he was entirely out of the loop, he offered this:

Had I been I informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, “This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,” a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.

Ooooo-kay. So, if I follow correctly, the smartest president ever is not smart enough to ensure that his website works; he’s not smart enough to inquire of others as to whether his website works; he’s not smart enough to check that his website works before he goes out and tells people what a great website experience they’re in for. But he is smart enough to know that he’s not stupid enough to go around bragging about how well it works if he’d already been informed that it doesn’t work. So he’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing. The country’s in the very best of hands.

Michael Beschloss is right: This is what it means to be smart in a neo-monarchical America. Obama spake, and it shall be so. And, if it turns out not to be so, why pick on him? He talks a good Royal Proclamation; why get hung up on details?

Until October 1, Obama had never done anything — not run a gas station, or a doughnut stand — other than let himself be wafted onward and upward to the next do-nothing gig. Even in his first term, he didn’t really do: Starting with the 2009 trillion-dollar stimulus, he ran a money-no-object government that was all money and no objects; he spent and spent, and left no trace. Some things he massively expanded (food stamps, Social Security disability) and other things he massively diminished (effective foreign policy), but all were, so to speak, preexisting conditions. Obamacare is the first thing Obama has actually done, and, if you’re the person it’s being done to, it’s not pretty.

The president promised to “fundamentally transform” America. Certainly, other men have succeeded in transforming settled, free societies: Pierre Trudeau did in Canada four decades ago, and so, in post-war Britain, did the less charismatic Clement Attlee. And, if you subscribe to their particular philosophy, their transformations were effected very efficiently. But Obama is an incompetent, so “fundamentally transformed” is a euphemism for “wrecked beyond repair.” As a socialist, he makes a good socialite.

But on he staggers, with a wave of his scepter, delaying this, staying that, exempting the other, according to his regal whim and internal polling. The omniscient beneficent Sovereign will now graciously “allow” us “folks” to keep all those junk plans from bad-apple insurers. Yet even the wisest King cannot reign forever, and what will happen decades down the road were someone less benign — perhaps even (shudder) a Republican — to ascend the throne and wield these mighty powers?

Hey, relax: If you like your constitution, you can keep your constitution. Period. And your existing amendments. Well, most of them — except for the junk ones . . .

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Letter From Australia (About Pain in the US)

No Cure as Obamacare Gets Worse 

James Morrow
The Daily Telegraph
November 15, 2013 12:00AM

IN politics, leaders live and die by their promises. Julia Gillard effectively wrote her government into the history books when she went back on her assurance that “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”. 

In the US, President Barack Obama is in similar strife over an oft-repeated promise that under his plan to overhaul health care – the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare for short – Americans who liked their GPs and their health care plans would be able to keep seeing their GPs and using those same plans.  Or as he put it in various forms to the American public more than two dozen times: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

The only thing is, it turned out not to be true.
Experts and skeptics warned that trying to bend the US healthcare sector – which were it a stand-alone economy would be as big as France, only with more bureaucracy and worse customer service – to the will of Washington bureaucrats would be a disaster. The predictions are now coming to pass.

Under Obamacare, costs are going up for millions of Americans and the website designed to navigate individuals through the insurance “exchanges” has driven users away by the million on ­account of its poor design, buggy nature, and lack of security. . . .

How poorly has the system performed?  By one estimate in the  first month of the program just 50,000 Americans had successfully  signed  up under the new ­program.  To put those numbers in perspective, that’s about the same number of followers as The Daily Telegraph‘s Joe Hildebrand has on Twitter. Though in Joe’s favour, the federal government is not compelling anyone to follow his feed.

Yet. . . .

While government experts raised red flags about the site as early as March, by all accounts the White House did not realise there were problems until after it launched a few weeks ago, when they read about it in the papers.  This passive “who knew?” attitude was expressed by Obama himself during a recent interview on American TV when he blithely stated, “If we had to do it all over again … there would have been a whole lot more questions that were asked.”

No wonder Americans are angry and that the American president is now languishing in the polls and is sitting on disapproval numbers as ignominious as those of George W. Bush in his second term.  And in contrast to Bush, Obama has not started any unpopular major wars (the Nobel Peace Prize winner is more of a drone strike man), nor with some exceptions does he face an overwhelmingly hostile media.

Democrats in the US legislature, facing elections in just under a year and the danger of being associated with the president’s broken promise, are increasingly skittish and warning of a “crisis of confidence” in the president.  When Republicans faced mid-term elections at the same stage of George W. Bush’s presidency, Democrats swept the House and gained a commanding majority. Today, the polls are the same but the parties are reversed. . . .

Because the US Constitution does not provide for Westminster-style circuit breakers like spills or no-confidence motions, Obama does not face an existential threat to his presidency, only his legacy. Whether this is enough for him to change course again remains to be seen.

Letter From America (About Presidential Prevarications)

A Phalanx of Lies

Remember that health insurance you could keep?

By Mark Steyn

November 1,  2013 8:30 PM

National Review Online

 

CNN has been pondering what they call “a particularly tough few days at the White House.” “Four out of five Americans have little or no trust in their government to do anything right,” says chief political analyst Gloria Borger. “And now Obama probably feels the same way.” Our hearts go out to him, poor wee disillusioned thing.

We are assured by the headline writers that the president was “unaware” of Obamacare’s website defects, and the NSA spying, and the IRS targeting of his political enemies, and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press, and pretty much anything else you ask him about. But, as he put it, “nobody’s madder than me” at this shadowy rogue entity called the “Government of the United States” that’s running around pulling all this stuff. And, once he finds out who’s running this Government of the United States rogue entity, he’s gonna come down as hard on him as he did on that videomaker in California; he’s gonna send round the National Park Service SWAT team to teach that punk a lesson he won’t forget.

Gloria Borger and CNN seem inclined to swallow the line that the president of the United States is not aware that he is president of the United States.
For the media, just a spoonful of bovine manure makes the Obamacare medicine go down. It remains to be seen whether the American citizenry will be so genially indulgent. Hitherto, most of what the president claims to be unaware of, they are genuinely unaware of: Few people have plans to vacation in Benghazi, or shoot the breeze with Angela Merkel on her cell phone. But Obamacare is different: Whether or not the president is unaware of it, the more than 2 million Americans (at the time of writing) kicked off their current health-care plans are most certainly aware of it.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been opposed to government health care because, as I’ve said in at least two books, it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to that of junkie and pusher. But that’s a philosophical position. Others prefer constitutional arguments: the federal government does not have the authority to do what it’s doing. Dear old John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, twisted himself into a pretzel to argue that, in fact, the government does.

But he might as well have saved himself the trouble and just used Nancy Pelosi’s line: asked by a journalist where in the Constitution it granted the feds the power to do this, she gave him the full Leslie Nielsen and said, “You’re not serious?” She has the measure of her people. Most Americans couldn’t care less about philosophical arguments or constitutional fine print: For them, all Obamacare has to do is work. That is why the last month has been so damaging to Big Government’s brand.  In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust.

The Canadian and British health systems get by on the principle that, as bad as they are, for enough people they’re good enough, and you don’t have to think about it. Obamacare doesn’t even meet that modest standard, and it’s not clear it ever will. You have to think about it constantly, alert to every potentially catastrophic regulatory tweak that might scuttle your next prescription refill.

On Day One, the junkies were eager for their fix: As the administration crowed, the site received 4.7 million unique visits. By the following morning, the HHS “war room” was informed that “six enrollments have occurred so far.” That’s six as in half a dozen, as in fewer people than in just one vehicle of Obama’s 40-car motorcade. Kathleen Sebelius had successfully enrolled one American for every assistant secretary of health and human services. Oh, no, wait: She has seven assistant secretaries, so there was one free, waiting for that seventh enrollee. One in every 783,333 visitors managed to close the deal: Dr. Obama could make house calls to every one and still have time for a round of golf.

In order to meet its target of 7 million enrollees by March 1, Obamacare needs to enroll approximately 46,358 Americans per day. So on its opening day it fell 46,352 short. Were it to maintain that enrollment rate, Obamacare would reach its target of 7 million enrollees in the year 5209. That’s longer than waiting for a hip replacement on the Scottish NHS.

At the same time as dozens of Obamacare enrolees were being signed up, millions of other Americans were having their health insurance cancelled — including so many pundits of left (Kirsten Powers), right (Michelle Malkin), and center (David Frum) that the Pulitzers should introduce a prize for Best Suddenly Uninsured Writing. Among their number was Matthew Fleischer, who wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

Most young, middle-class Americans I know are happy that millions of previously uninsured people will receive free or heavily subsidized insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
We just didn’t realize that, unless we had health insurance at work, we’d be the ones paying for it.

The reason he didn’t realize it is because the president lied to him, not just once in a casual aside, but on dozens of occasions, and very bluntly: “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan. Period.” But the entire premise of Obamacare was that, in order to cover (some of) the uninsured and (in many cases) uninsurable, other Americans were going to have to pay significantly more.

Obamacare was always intended to be the Great Disruptor: Avik Roy reports that, by 2010, administration officials knew that 93 million Americans would lose their current plans under Obamacare. Small businesses are cutting back on full-time workers; medium businesses are dumping employees’ spouses and children from their plans; and the largest businesses are eating nine-figure bottom-line increases. Delta Airlines claims that it will spend an extra $100 million on health-care expenses next year.  Even with cutbacks on complimentary mini-pretzels, a tenth of a billion is a big sum to recover.   Meanwhile, the Obamacare plans won’t recognize your preferred doctor, and major hospitals won’t recognize the Obamacare plans.

My old comrade David Frum was somewhat insouciant about the extra $2,400 a year he’ll have to find for his new Obama-approved health arrangements. These days, comparatively few Americans are that liquid, and for most an extra $200 a month will have to be clawed away from real things of value. “Not only will I pay more,” grumbled Mr. Frum, “but I have had to divert many otherwise useful hours to futzing around with websites and paperwork.”

But that’s life in the Republic of Paperwork, isn’t it? The remorseless diversion of time and energy to “futzing around.” That’s why so much of American life seems to be seizing up, why so many routine features of human existence require time-consuming bureaucracy-heavy painstaking navigation (to borrow a term from Obamacare’s “customer-service representatives”). America would benefit from an opposition party that offered a serious de-futzing of the nation: a platform on the scale of Mrs. Thatcher’s privatization program in 1979 or Sir Roger Douglas’s in New Zealand in the Eighties that offered to make ordinary life comprehensible to non-wonks once more.

Instead, the Obama crowd have bet that, after the usual whining, you’ll settle down and get used to it: higher co-pays, higher premiums, higher deductibles, higher mountain of paperwork, higher futzing. But the fact remains that nowhere in the Western world has the governmentalization of health care been so incompetently introduced and required protection by such a phalanx of lies. Obamacare is not a left–right issue; it’s a fraud issue.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn
 

 

 

Annals of Soft Depostism

Worthy Mockery

In the Annals of Soft-Despotism we lampoon the pathetic works of the all-nannying-state.  This, we remind our readers, is the dominant idolatry of the post-Christian West.  Whereas once men looked to God and His providence to sustain their lives and provide for them, sophisticated moderns now look to the State, as their vaunted secular deity.  The Living God is so passe, so medieval, so primitive.  We are all moderns now and we worship a new shiny god–one we have made ourselves, in our own image.

God, however, sits in the heavens and mocks the rebellious kings of the earth.  This includes Western secular governments, due to their vain attempts to shake of the bonds and cords of God, their Creator.

He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath
and terrify them in his fury. (Psalm 2: 4,5)

Behold the wonders of the vast realms of the secularists and their idol.  John Stewart, himself a public acolyte of secularism and statism,  leads us in a hymn of adoration–in this case, to the demi-god Obama and the idolatrous realm of the Federal Government.  The problem: the god is trying to provide health care.  Will the wonders never cease?  Stewart and his followers are miffed because their god has disappointed them, failed them. 

Let the derisive lampooning proceed:

Death Panels, Anyone?

Dehumanising and Unjust

When Sarah Palin came out criticising President Obama’s socialising of the health system in the United States, saying the system would set up “death panels” of bureaucrats deciding who lived and who died she was dumped on from a great height. 

She was right, prophetically so.  But this gift did not require a special prophetic gift–only some clear thinking on her part.  Health care resources and services, like everything else in this life, are not infinite.  They are limited.  Therefore, rationing of some sort is inevitable.  In a socialised heath care system the government does the rationing.  It is the government which will ultimately decide–bureaucratically–who gets treatment and who does not.  Put bluntly that makes the government a convener of death panels–and that is the fundamental objection, not to rationing per se which in one form or another is inevitable and necessary.   

Fast forward just  a few short months.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius has become a one man death panel.  This from Politico.

Kathleen Sebelius at center of storm over child’s lung transplant

The plight of a dying 10-year-old girl in urgent need of a lung transplant has been taken up by some GOP lawmakers, and it’s shining a light on what critics say is a questionable policy that puts children further down the waiting list.

The family of the Pennsylvania girl, Sarah Murnaghan, has garnered the media spotlight, on cable news and in other outlets. And some GOP congressmen have joined the fray, quite literally “begging” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to intervene and save the girl’s life. Both Pennsylvania senators — a Democrat and a Republican — have also written on the child’s behalf. “I’m begging you,” Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) told Sebelius at a House hearing Tuesday morning, asking her to suspend the transplant rules until they can be revisited. “Sarah has three to five weeks to live. Time is running out.” The child has cystic fibrosis.

At the hearing, Sebelius called the situation “agonizing” and said she had talked to the girl’s mother. She has ordered a review of the policy, which she acknowledged would take too long to have any impact on this girl’s situation, but said it wasn’t her place to pick and choose transplant recipients.  “I can’t imagine anything worse than one individual getting to pick who lives and who dies,” she said. Sebelius said putting Sarah next in line would disadvantage other young people who have also been waiting for transplants — including three in the same area. Helping one child could possibly hurt another.

Sounds like a death panel to me.  But, when the death panel consists of just one it becomes personal and agonising.  We feel your pain, Kathleen.  That’s why socialised medicine always opts for impersonal rules, regulations, panels–meeting in back rooms and making up endless impersonal rules and regulations to ration the supply of government funded healthcare.  Somehow that removes personal responsibility.  Except that it does not.  For when the government takes responsibility for rationing health care, the government and its functionaries are responsible for life and death.  The impersonality of it does not obviate the personal moral guilt and accountability Sibelius is now confronting.

One of the inevitable evils of government rationing of health care is that government decisions will, in the end, become politicised and ideological–as in, “you can get government funded health care if you give up protesting outside Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics”.  Sound far fetched?  Actually, not lately, it doesn’t.

Sarah Palin was bang on.  She was right.  She is now being demonstrably proven right.  We wish it were not so, but right back then, we knew any such a wish would prove forlorn.  In a finite world, rationing is inevitable.  Government rationing of health will always be dehumanising and unjust, the favouring of the few over the many. 

Stakes in the Heart

Limitations of Public Health Exposed

A debate is taking place in the UK about public health.  The cold hard reality is that the UK government has run out of money and its debt levels are worrying.  It has consequently put the squeeze on the public health system.  It now has a duty to raise more money by providing health services to the more wealthy, to those who can pay for medical services and procedures. 

This from The Guardian:

Hospitals are seeking a radical increase in revenue from the treatment of private patients as their budgets come under pressure from the needs of an ageing population, according to new figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.  Great Ormond Street children’s hospital has budgeted for an extra £11m from treating private patients in the financial year ending in 2013 compared with 2010 – a 34% increase. The Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is also expecting to boost revenues by £9m over the same period – a 42% rise. The Royal Marsden is expecting an extra 28% increase on 2010 revenues, equating to about £12.7m. Across all trusts an 8% increase in revenues from private patients is expected to be posted for 2012-13 compared with 2010-11.

Previously, successive governments have decried and rejected the idea that state funded health services should generate any money from the more wealthy.  It was a rationing system that was a bridge too far for socialists.
  Now the government has no choice.  Socialism, as the Thatcherite adage has it, eventually runs out of other people’s money.

The increase in revenues (from private patients) follows the government’s controversial decision to allow foundation trusts to earn 49% of their income from treating private patients. They were previously capped at earning about 2% from private sources. 

The Achilles heel of all public health systems is that, as one NZ Treasury official put it, they are a fiscal black hole.  You can never have enough of other people’s money to satisfy the its demands.  Aging demographics and shrinking population bases are one thing.  But equally relentless is the wonderful expansion of health care itself.  As medical science and technology advances the number of cures and medical procedures rises exponentially.  All these new, wonderful procedures and treatments cost money to provide.

Critics of the new policy warn that a two-tier system will develop in the public health system.

Ministers, who want trusts to act more like businesses, will celebrate the latest figures. However, critics fear that NHS resources are being disproportionately directed at patients with money and that a two-tier system is emerging. Gareth Thomas MP, who obtained the figures, said: “The huge expected rise in income from private patients is a further sign of an underfunded NHS. These figures confirm that the NHS under David Cameron is increasingly offering a two-tier service: pay privately and you’ll be seen quickly; don’t pay privately and join an increasingly long waiting list.”

The retort is that all the private patient income is directed back into the public health system.  But the cavil over a preferential priority for paying patients remains.  The critics will be proven right.

To our mind the only fundamental solution is one which is even more of an anathema to socialist ideology: the encouragement of charity.  Socialists hate charity with a passion.  Welfare is a right, a demand right in socialist dogma.  Charity is an anathema because it drives a stake into the ideological status of public health demand rights.  That aside, it remains the only viable solution to the withering of public health under fiscal constraints.

Charities raise a great deal of money for the needy and the indigent.  They would raise a great deal more if the government were more up front and honest about the inadequacy of its socialist welfare services.  It’s long past due for the state to acknowledge its severe limitations and to welcome participation from charities.  We have one qualification: what the UK, nor NZ needs, is more charities which are really a front for government funded welfare.  Many charities have turned to government funding to support their operations.  Governments have agreed: the fee for service model in delivering welfare can work well up to a point.  But it does not plug the gap in public funding.  It merely shift services from one provider to another, both alike publicly funded.  The crisis we are talking of is a fiscal crisis due to socialist money running out.  That is the fundamental issue.

We expect that this UK initiative will continue to be opposed by socialist ideologues.  The introduction of charitable funds into the public system will be even more resisted. It represents a strike at the very heart of socialist dogma.  But it remains the only viable way forward.

Ben Carson for President!

Two Big Un-PC Ideas

Further to our recent post on Dr Ben Carson speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, a columnist in the Wall Street Journal is calling out a new slogan: “Ben Carson for President”.

The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon has two big ideas for America.

The Wall Street Journal 
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
February 8, 2013, 6:03 p.m. ET

Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until “Downton Abbey,” make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week.

Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn’t look happy. You know something’s coming when Dr. Carson says, “It’s not my intention to offend anyone. But it’s hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere.”

Dr. Carson tossed over the PC police years ago.
Raised by a single mother in inner-city Detroit, he was as he tells it “a horrible student with a horrible temper.” Today he’s director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and probably the most renowned specialist in his field.

Late in his talk he dropped two very un-PC ideas. The first is an unusual case for a flat tax: “What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe.

“We don’t necessarily have to do 10% but it’s the principle. He didn’t say if your crops fail, don’t give me any tithe or if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithe. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you’ve got to get rid of the loopholes. Some people say, ‘Well that’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made 10.’ Where does it say you’ve got to hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot. We don’t need to hurt him. It’s that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here building our infrastructure and creating jobs.”

Not surprisingly, a practicing physician has un-PC thoughts on health care:

“Here’s my solution: When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account to which money can be contributed—pretax—from the time you’re born ’til the time you die. If you die, you can pass it on to your family members, and there’s nobody talking about death panels. We can make contributions for people who are indigent. Instead of sending all this money to some bureaucracy, let’s put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care. And very quickly they’re gong to learn how to be responsible.”

The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon may not be politically correct, but he’s closer to correct than we’ve heard in years.

Clash of Light Sabres

Ancient Battle Rejoined

In the Star Wars movies epic fight scenes were conducted with light sabres.  Everyone remembers the clash of the sabres and the sound of electric current arcing through the atmosphere.  In the great contest between Christ and the Devil, between Belief and Unbelief there emerge points of conflict which are so representative of the respective world-views that the clash is like two light sabres meeting in deadly battle. 

The issue of abortion is one such clash of the light sabres.  When Obamacare was legislated in the United States it contained a provision that forced businesses to provide health insurance coverage for their employees.  Wrapped up in that little package was the implicit requirement that employers provide coverage that would fund abortifacient drugs for their employees.  Now the implicit has become explicit.  Businesses that refuse will effectively be driven out of business. 

Hobby Lobby is a US retail business selling supplies for home hobbies.  Its owners are Christians.  They have declared that they cannot comply with the government’s strictures.  Ken Klukowski, writing in Breitbart News, describes that is going down.
 

“We must obey God rather than men!”—Acts 5:29.

Now that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has denied Hobby Lobby’s application for an emergency injunction protecting them from Obamacare’s HHS Mandate on abortion and birth control, Hobby Lobby has decided to defy the federal government to remain true to their religious beliefs, at enormous risk and financial cost.

Hobby Lobby is wholly owned and controlled by the Green family, who are evangelical Christians. The Greens are committed to running their business in accordance with their Christian faith, believing that God wants them to conduct their professional business in accordance with the family’s understanding of the Bible. Hobby Lobby’s mission statement includes, “Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company … consistent with Biblical principles.” 

The HHS Mandate goes into effect for Hobby Lobby on Jan. 1, 2013. The Greens correctly understand that some of the drugs the HHS Mandate requires them to cover at no cost in their healthcare plans cause abortions.

Today Hobby Lobby announced that they will not comply with this mandate to become complicit in abortion, which the Greens believe ends an innocent human life. Given Hobby Lobby’s size (it has 572 stores employing more than 13,000 people), by violating the HHS Mandate, it will be subject to over $1.3 million in fines per day. That means over $40 million in fines in January alone. If their case takes another ten months to get before the Supreme Court—which would be the earliest it could get there under the normal order of business—the company would incur almost a half-billion dollars in fines. And then of course the Supreme Court would have to write an opinion in what would likely be a split decision with dissenters, which could easily take four or six months and include hundreds of millions of dollars in additional penalties.

This is civil disobedience, consistent with America’s highest traditions when moral issues are at stake. The Greens are a law-abiding family. They have no desire to defy their own government. But as the Founders launched the American Revolution because they believed the British government was violating their rights, the Greens believe that President Barack Obama and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are commanding the Greens to sin against God, and that no government has the lawful authority to do so.

The Christian tradition of defying government commands to do something wrong goes back to the very birth of Christianity. When the apostles were ordered not to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with anyone, the Book of Acts records: “Peter and the other apostles replied: ‘We must obey God rather than men! The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.’”

Eleven of the twelve apostles—including Peter—would lose their lives for the sake of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ; only the apostle John died of old age. They were determined to obey God’s will at all costs.
This issue of civil disobedience is never to be undertaken lightly. The Bible teaches Christians to submit to all legitimate governmental authority (e.g., Romans 13:1), and so a person can only disobey the government when there is no other way to obey God.

But here in America, the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, and in its First Amendment it protects against a government establishment of an official religion and separately protects the free exercise of religion. On top of that, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) to specifically add an additional layer of protection against government actions that violate a person’s religious beliefs.

The HHS Mandate is a gross violation of the religious beliefs of the Green family. The issue before the courts here is whether the Greens religious-liberty rights include running their secular, for-profit business consistent with their religious beliefs. In other words, is religious liberty just what you do in church on a Sunday morning, or does it include what you do during the week at your job?

The Greens are now putting their fortunes on the line to do what they believe is right. The courts should side with them, affirming a broad scope of religious liberty under the Constitution and RFRA. And the Supreme Court should resolve this matter with dispatch in their favor.

Millions of Christians across the country feel exactly the same way as the Greens. The Obama administration has issued a statist command that is a declaration of war on people of faith who object to abortion, and civil disobedience could break out all over the country unless the courts set this matter right—and quickly.

Breitbart News legal columnist Ken Klukowski is on faculty at Liberty University School of Law.

The light sabres are engaged.  The ancient Beast has emerged once again.  Battle is joined.

Death Panels

Bureaucrats With the Power of Life and Death

Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal, analyzes the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).   He discusses the strange phenomenon of the UK public believing that the NHS delivers high quality health care, despite a steadily growing number of horror stories about its practice.  It’s almost as if the public is in denial, not daring to face the truth lest their god appear before them naked and puny.

But eventually truth will out.  Dalrymple describes how the devastating effects of nationalised health in the beginning are often subtle and not obvious.  By the time the cracks start to show up the first response of governments is to throw more money at it, thereby contributing to the general fiscal debt crisis.

The end game of socialised medicine is bureaucratic rationing of healthcare–which is to say the government and its functionaries decide who will live and who will die.  Not a pleasant thought.  But if you believe the government is a demi-god it’s an inevitable outcome.  Soft despotism in the end is just as crushing and destructive as hard despotism.

Dalrymple summarises the inequities and the iniquities of the system:

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Make the Rubble Bounce

Culture and Politics – Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 14 February 2012

In his essay on membership in The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis says this: “in the first place, when the modern world says to us aloud, ‘You may be religious when you are alone,’ it adds under it’s breath, ‘and I will see to it that you are never alone.'” I thought of this when I was pondering the outrageous behavior of the Obama administration, continuing down to the present, with regard to Catholic institutions having to make the payments for contraception. “You may have religious freedom in every area where the federal government does not have jurisdiction, and by the way, the federal government has jurisdiction everywhere and in everything.”

Before getting to a brief analysis, let me make just a few focused observations on the behavior of these bureaucratic miscreants, trying to avoid, as I proceed, a descent to personalities.
This decision in the first place, the doubling down afterwards, and the risible compromise suggested last Friday, were among the scaliest moves of an administration that has already shown itself adept at this kind of thing. This turpitudinous bit of business is clearly the work of pop-eyed and secularist bleaters, who have the Constituion up on derricks and pulleys, and are swinging it around like they knew how to keep from wrecking it, which they don’t. They are frankly trying me a little high these days, this group of serious thinkers are.

These apostles of Uplift know that you can’t fight sacraments without a sacrament, and so they are offering the nation their sacrament, which is free birth control. And “offering” states it too mildly — they are insisting on their parody of free grace.

I am a broad-minded man, and so I don’t mind be governed by dumb people. But what strains me to the breaking point is being governed by dumb people who believe they have contrived to keep that datum invisible.

Bureaucrats come in two categories. The first is lazy and intelligent. These are the guys who have been asleep at their desks so long that one side of their heads is flat. The other is the busy-pants variety, and these guys are not so intelligent. And the less intelligent they are, the more insistent they are that we all partake of their version of the one true faith, which, since they are modernists, comes in the form of a pill and which guarantees fruitlessness.

If we have any patriots left in the country, the election next November will need to be the kind that will, to use Churchill’s phrase, will make the rubble bounce, than which thought few are pleasanter. The electorate needs to go up in a sheet of flame and ask questions about what happened later. This officious hoodoo, this diktat that has all the constitutionality of a mass of inert porridge, needs to be told . . . words fail me.

So then, having cleared the air, let us conclude with a bit more dispassionate analysis. This decision embodies everything that was wrong with Obamacare, and it shows that Obamacare’s fiercest critics were perhaps too mild. An over-reaching and tyrannical health care package was jammed through Congress, but even in their over-reach there were things they left out of the bill. After we read it in order to find out what is in it, and we discovered there were tyrannies left unstated, no matter.

A cabinet officer can just announce that this gap is now filled, and the sacrament of fruitlessness is now available to everyone, whether Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. Then, when there is an outcry because freedom is not yet dead, the president comes out with a royal decree that will solve everything. He says that institutions that have objections of conscience to this tawdry stuff need not worry — he has issued a royal decree, the kind the Sun King used to do, that will require insurance companies to provide this sacramental service free of charge.

They don’t have a conscience, but they do have money, and so he fixes the problem that way. It turns out that hope n’ change is tyranny n’ theft.

>Evolution, Science, and Urban Legends

>Superstitions of the Age

The current age thinks itself the best and the brightest. This is an effect, in part, of the reigning paradigm of the current scientific community: evolutionism. This scientific meta-theory propounds that things develop by natural order and law: that is, they evolve to higher and higher planes of existence, from the simple to the more complex and advanced.  

Under the influence of evolutionism, each generation tends to consider itself superior and more advanced than those that have gone before. One upshot is the denigration of history to irrelevance. Why study primitives–except to set a backdrop for our comparatively advanced and sophisticated state?

One manifestation of this self-claimed superiority is medical science. Pop-medicine regales us with accounts of how superstitious and primitive the medical knowledge and treatments of former generations was. Implication: we are so much better and smarter now. One example of a medical procedure once widely practised in the West is bleeding. There are many others.  “How stupid and ignorant those doctors and medical scientists were,” is the overriding discourse.

Conveniently, we overlook the embarrassing implication that generations to come will look back at us and likewise chortle with amusement at the ignorance and stupidity of the medical profession at the “turn of the century”. This is not to deny that knowledge via the hard sciences does increase and grow. There is a very important sense in which we now know far more than the “bleeders”. The Christian attributes this to the coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth, as man fulfils the commands of subduing the earth and making it bring forth and bud, on the one hand, and makes disciples of Christ of every nation, on the other. This is gradual, developmental process is the fruit of God’s unfolding human history for His glory and the blessing of His people. It is not the result of the “law” of randomness, as the evolutionist propounds.

The Christian also knows through rigorous historical research that cultures and ages do not necessarily retain the knowledge they acquire. Things known now can be lost to future generations, through wars, famines, plagues, earthquakes and other calamities. It can also result from civilisations crumbling from with–partially at times as a result of scientific and technological error. The Roman’s proclivity to use lead pipes almost certainly contributed to the decline of that civilisation.

This raises the possibility that current prevailing medical consensuses may turn out to be profoundly ignorant and damaging to society. Take for example diet. We are threatened, we are told, by a plague of obesity. A new term has entered the lexicon: morbidly obese. Nutritionists, funded by the state, lecture us on what we should eat, and not eat–to escape the scourge. But obesity is just the latest food-related plague. Prior to that it was heart disease.

But what if the dietary preventatives for heart disease (high carb, low-fat diets) actually helped produce an epidemic of obesity? One gets an inkling that future generations will look back at us and conclude that we really were an ignorant lot.

One risk we are very clear about: when science gets married to government campaigns or programmes, the first thing to fly out the window is scientific rigour. The thing is that rigorous scientific research, particularly when dealing with human beings, is inevitably tenuous. It has to end up talking about probabilities and possibilities. Moreover, much current research is statistically based, trying to establish correlations and, from there, causality. For instance: 62% of people with bigger than average eye teeth contract gangrene in rest homes. Ergo, eye teeth size is a likely causal factor for gangrene.

Such research methodology, unless rigorously constrained, is readily subject to fallacious reasoning. But governments require certainty for public health programmes. “Large eye teeth are a danger: get your dentist to reduce their size.”  Actually, this rapidly translates into state funding of eye-teeth reduction procedures.  This food is “bad”; that food is “good”. Don’t do this; do that. When government, who pay, require emphatic certainty, scientists readily comply. But rigour and integrity have long since flown out the window. The upshot: urban myths substitute for effective cures.

When all this takes place within the prevailing discourse of evolutionism, flattering the age with the idea that we are the best and the brightest thus far, superstition and easy credulity can rapidly become the order of the day.

>An American’s Take on Britain’s Malaise

>The British Try to Climb Out of the Ditch
The U.S. would be wise not to follow Britain’s example.
October 8, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Mona Charen
Reprinted from National Review Online

Three and a half weeks from now, Americans will decide whether to pull the emergency brake on a train that is headed to bankruptcy. Across the pond in Great Britain, which got aboard that train following World War II, the sparks are flying as the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government attempts a very tardy — and accordingly, much more painful — reversal.

The nation that built the most far-flung empire in the history of the world — not primarily through conquest, but through trade and colonization — is now convulsed by protests as the coalition government imposes austerity. “Tory scum!” shouted protesters outside the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham last week. Half a dozen nearly naked, portly, middle-aged pensioners unfurled a banner (held strategically at waist level) proclaiming “Stripped of Our Pensions.” They were part of a massive rally (7,000 strong) of teachers, health-care workers, and other public-sector employees who swore to “fight back” against the cuts proposed by the Cameron/Clegg government. Even the queen has been told to accept reductions to her generous yearly stipend — though her response has thus far been more temperate

When a society has become as socialized as Great Britain, it becomes difficult to say where the public sector leaves off and the private sector begins. Take the arts. We squabble about public funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And certainly there is a good libertarian case to be made that these are not the proper province of government at all, and certainly not of the federal government. But in any case, government subventions amount to only about 10 percent of total arts funding in the U.S.

In the U.K., on the other hand, government contributes 50 percent. So when the Cameron/Clegg government announced that it may cut subsidies to the arts by as much as 25 percent, the howls were piercing. Alistair Spalding, artistic director of the Sadler’s Wells dance theater in London, sorrowfully complained to the Washington Post that if forced to seek private donations, he might not be able to stage such groundbreaking work as last year’s interpretative dance “in which the pope sexually abuses an altar boy.”

Socialists dislike programs for the poor. They prefer that everyone receive welfare because they calculate, so far correctly, that it’s much harder for governments to cut subsidies to everyone than to the poor. That’s why, in the U.S., liberals go rigid at the idea of cutting Social Security benefits to the affluent. In Britain, Labour is incensed at the proposal by the coalition government to reduce the annual child subsidy that all Britons, regardless of income, receive. “No more open-ended chequebook,” Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne explained. “No family should get more from living on benefits than the average family gets from going out to work.” These are the “same old Tories,” a Labour leader complained, “hitting hardest at those who can least afford it.”

What? The government is proposing to cut benefits principally for the better-off. Cuts to programs for the poor will be slight.

The British government, deeply in debt, is scrambling to avoid the fate of Greece, whose unsustainable obligations brought it to the brink of default until it was rescued by the European Union. Though full details of the budget will not be published until October 20, leaks in the British press have suggested that the VAT will increase from 17.5 to 20 percent; that banks will be assessed added taxes; and that military spending will be reduced by 10 to 20 percent. While Prime Minister David Cameron sought to quiet fears that drastic cuts in the military budget would compromise Britain’s commitment to Afghanistan, he was less than convincing.

Though the coalition government has shied from suggesting cuts to the Great White Elephant, the National Health Service, it has proposed to restructure the program. Britain spends more on the NHS than on any other line item — more than on pensions, social security, education, defense, transport, public safety, or interest on the debt. Under the previous Labour government, spending on the NHS tripled in just twelve years. It’s the great black hole in the center of Britain’s debt vortex. And yet the quality of care and efficiency of delivery are dismal compared with other European countries — and far inferior to the United States.

Or at least to the pre-Obamacare United States. The pain Britain is enduring should be instructive. They are trying to climb out of a ditch. If we grab that emergency brake now, we may avoid falling in.

– Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.

>Death and Dying

>The Importance of Hospice-Type Care

There is an important article about to be published in The New Yorker on how modern technological medicine has often made the last months and days of life so much harder and more difficult. The advanced technological procedures have also made it much, much more expensive. The article is entitled Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? and is by Atul Gawande, a surgeon.

The following excerpts give the general themes.

This is the moment in Sara’s story that poses a fundamental question for everyone living in the era of modern medicine: What do we want Sara and her doctors to do now? Or, to put it another way, if you were the one who had metastatic cancer—or, for that matter, a similarly advanced case of emphysema or congestive heart failure—what would you want your doctors to do?

The issue has become pressing, in recent years, for reasons of expense. The soaring cost of health care is the greatest threat to the country’s long-term solvency, and the terminally ill account for a lot of it. Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit.

Spending on a disease like cancer tends to follow a particular pattern. There are high initial costs as the cancer is treated, and then, if all goes well, these costs taper off. Medical spending for a breast-cancer survivor, for instance, averaged an estimated fifty-four thousand dollars in 2003, the vast majority of it for the initial diagnostic testing, surgery, and, where necessary, radiation and chemotherapy. For a patient with a fatal version of the disease, though, the cost curve is U-shaped, rising again toward the end—to an average of sixty-three thousand dollars during the last six months of life with an incurable breast cancer. Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop.

In the first Christendom, dying was a much more natural part of life, with a prescribed set of procedures.

Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe. Reaffirming one’s faith, repenting one’s sins, and letting go of one’s worldly possessions and desires were crucial, and the guides provided families with prayers and questions for the dying in order to put them in the right frame of mind during their final hours. Last words came to hold a particular place of reverence.

Contrast the modern approach, where death occurs within an Unbelieving secular humanist context:

These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition—advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence. Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are? Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly?

Gawande offers the following contrast between palliative or hospice care and remedial care:

“That’s not the goal,” Creed said. The difference between standard medical care and hospice is not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in your priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now. That means focussing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter.

Moreover, sometimes palliative care can prolong life, along with less pain and suffering.

Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. When Cox was transferred to hospice care, her doctors thought that she wouldn’t live much longer than a few weeks. With the supportive hospice therapy she received, she had already lived for a year.

Here is the concluding summary:

The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.

More often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.” All-out treatment, we tell the terminally ill, is a train you can get off at any time—just say when. But for most patients and their families this is asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. But our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and to escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

>Public Health Despotism

>The Idols are Broke in the Temple of Baal

It is discouraging, but true. It is also to be expected. Unbelieving New Zealand is a nation populated by sheep, and we are not talking about the four legged woolly creatures. The significant majority of New Zealand citizens applaud and approve of the bribery their government lavishes upon them: money for jam such as Working for Families, interest free student loans, the Domestic Purposes Benefit, the Sickness Benefit, and the government run and controlled health system–to name but a few.

Christians literally bow their knees to the Living God, thankfully acknowledging Him as their providential provider. Unbelievers inwardly and metaphorically bow their knees to the all-provident state and worship their idol in the privacy of their own hearts and homes. Sadly, they become more like sheep every day: with mincing steps they draw near to the slaughter-house. Their god will not let them down–surely.

But their idol is an empty vanity. It must borrow $240 million dollars every week to keep the larceny in place and the good times rolling. “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” is the anthem of our Epicurean culture. And die they will. And probably sooner than they think, and in more pain.

When taking care of our own health is handed over to the all-providing state, two things happen. First, we have ceded up our liberty. The government now has the authority to direct what will happen to our bodies. He who controls our bodies controls virtually everything. But, worse, when that control is willingly ceded in the first place, the state controls hearts, souls, and minds as well. Secondly, as the state begins to crack under the ungodly weight of its pretensions, it finds that it runs out of other people’s money, and it can no longer succeed as the Providential Provider for the people. It simply just cannot find enough money to pay for all that care of all the bodies of its subjects. There is a limit to larceny. Unbelief willingly enslaves itself to an idol which in the final analysis fails–abjectly.

The Public Health system inevitably has to engage in rationing. It becomes a ministry of death, not life. Consider this chilling account from MacDoctor:

The Dom Post today talks about the blocks that Pharmac places on people acquiring newer medications. This is but one example of how state medicine removes choice and reduces access. Reduced access to medical services is an inevitable consequence of socialised medicine, because there is an inescapable resistance to increased taxation. This resistance is far less noticeable in a private health care system, simply because that same money is then spent directly on oneself and one’s family. Access is therefore only dependent on ability to pay rather than dictated by the state machine in the name of equality (a word which usually turns out to mean equally miserable or equally badly served).

As a GP who refers both to private physicians and to the public health system, I can tell you the difference is extreme. Recently, I referred two people with identical problems, one to a private surgeon and one to the local hospital. The first has seen the surgeon, had several tests, including an MRI, and is now recovering from his surgery. The other is still waiting for her first surgical appointment and does not even have a firm date for this. This is not an unusual story. Many referrals to the hospital system simply get referred back to the GP as not having enough “points” even to “go on the list”. These are all people who genuinely need medical attention. People with hernia and haemorrhoids, suspicious lumps that need removing. People who need investigations that they can’t afford and now cannot access. People in need of joint replacements but who are not yet completely crippled. Eventually, your patient brings you a sickness benefit form and the New Zealand disease burden spills out of health expenditure into welfare. Price shifting with a vengeance.

The public health system morphs into the long-lingering-years-of-pain system: in secret, the mandarins attending the idol wish people would just die off. Once they loved to bribe them for their votes and devotion; now the plebs have grown querulous annoying and tiresome. The mandarins mutter about “hard choices”; they stretch out their hands to an ungrateful people, pleading that they have no choice in the matter and that there is simply not enough money to go around.

When the public-health fiasco was being debated in the United States, Sarah Palin presciently warned of the inevitable emergence of “death panels”, where state bureaucrats would ration care, deciding who would get treated, and what conditions and diseases would be ignored. She understated the reality, however. Prior to death, in many cases, are the long lingering years of perpetual pain and suffering. This is what public health systems end up producing. It is the most vicious and degrading unintended consequence of all.

Many of the lingering sufferers are not without blame, of course. They played the game. They allowed themselves to be bribed. They voted for the larceny. They raised their children to trust, idolize, and worship the state. “You don’t need to worry about me, sonny. The gummint will take care of me as I get old. Put out your hand, like me, and claim your entitlements.” Now, in their older years, it’s too late. Their idol is broke–both figuratively and fiscally. Their cupboards are bare. There is no way out, no way back.

Idols are always vicious, destructive, and ultimately deadly. Moloch was one of the most evil and degraded conceptions in the age of old-covenant Israel. Moloch “required” that devotees sacrifice their own children in the fire. And they did, in special ovens outside the city walls. The modern idol of choice is the despotic adminsitrative state that organizes and provides for all of life. Except, it fails to deliver–inevitably–and so consumes its older, most vulnerable citizens in the burning fires of constant pain. Truly a god to be worshipped and venerated.

The gracious call of God is more urgent and needs be heard than ever:

“Say to them, ‘As I live!’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live Turn back, turn back from your evil ways! Why then will you die, O house of Israel?’ Ezekiel 33: 11