Behind the Times

The Obama administration, headed up by a liberal dogma that has been trying to create it’s socialist utopia since Woodrow Wilson is not going to give up it’s sole dream of controlling everyone and everything ‘for their own good’ and “fairness”.

But it is curious that the Europeans who already went down this road in large part are starting to go back in our former direction.

It’s kind of like driving towards a massive accident and seeing people coming back from it bloodied and hurt, but you decide it can’t happen to me so you keep going anyhow.

That’s National Health Care now nearly 5 months after it was crammed down the throats of the American public in the single most partisan vote in memory.

Damn The Torpedoes! Full Steam ahead!

LONDON — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.

Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.

Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.

The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished. (London Times)

So like the G20 Summit where “austerity” was the watchword by the Europeans and Obama stood there stamping his foot demanding people spend even more.

Not only are the Democrats and their dream out of date they are out of step even with the people they still want to dance with.

They wanted to be them.

Now it’s too late.

But that won’t stop them, of course.

Zealots who have been waiting 80 years+ for this will not be so easily deterred.

But the effects of this are beginning.

MANDEVILLE, La.—Mark Baumann, a 44-year-old uninsured diabetic, sees in the Obama administration’s health-care law a future with stable coverage to pay for his insulin shots and blood tests.

That’s likely to come indirectly at the expense of his mother’s generous health-care plan.

Humana Inc., Mary Baumann’s insurer, intends to pare her “Medicare Advantage” plan to make up for the smaller government payments it will soon receive as a result of the new law, leaving her with higher costs or fewer services. On the table are beefed-up co-payments and premiums, as well as the loss of perks such as her free membership at a health club.

Most Americans know the overhaul is designed to cover the uninsured, a decades-long goal of Democrats. But it also represents a change in how the government spreads its social safety net underneath Americans. Already, it’s creating tensions that are a harbinger of debates to come.

Since the creation of Social Security and Medicare, younger workers have funded programs for the elderly. It’s a compact in which workers paid for retirees with the understanding that they’d be looked after by the generation behind them.

The health overhaul diverges by tapping a program for the elderly to help provide insurance to 32 million Americans of younger generations. Nearly half the funding for the law is supposed to come from paying lower fees to hospitals, insurers and other health-care providers that participate in Medicare, the federal insurance program for Americans age 65 and older, as well as younger disabled people.

The 44 million Americans on Medicare won’t see changes to their guaranteed benefits under the law. But of those, 11.3 million on Medicare Advantage plans, a public-private hybrid of the type used by Ms. Baumann, who is 79, are likely to begin seeing extra benefits go away as soon as next year. Medicare Advantage cuts are slated to pay for 15% of the health-care law’s tab.

The trims mark the leading edge of a spending shift that could broaden as lawmakers grapple with a deficit expected to hit $1.47 trillion this year. Left unchanged, Medicare and Social Security will consume half of all federal spending by 2035, up from about one third today, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

And remember, by recess appointment an NHS-loving administrator is the head of Medicare.

And if, as predicted by many, including me, that private health insurance is driven completely to extinction then you’ll have health cost also in that GDP soup and with already half the people in this country not paying any taxes it does very bleak.

But at least it’s “fair”. 🙂

And, of course, the solution that will be published after the election by Obama’s “deficit commission” is a forgone conclusion, The VAT TAX and other taxes.

Then came Financial “reform” where one of the biggest cause of the problem, just like in Health Care (Trial Lawyers anyone?), were ignored because of partisan politics — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And then with the massive tax increases, even on the poor, slated for Jan 1,2011 you have the perfect storm.

But the Democrats will not change course. You know that. I know now that. They know that.

Damn the Torpedoes! Full Steam ahead!

They don’t care how many European train wrecks occur.

It’s their time and they will do it anyhow!

For “fairness” and “equality” and “social justice”! 🙂

Meanwhile, the rationing the Democrats say will not happen here are happening in their beloved NHS, acocrding to the  liberal Sun Telegraph newspaper:

Some of the most common operations — including hip replacements and cataract surgery — will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected.

Patients’ groups have described the measures as “astonishingly brutal”.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:

* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.

* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.

* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.

* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.

* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.

* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.

* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.

And now back to US…

“We badly need to, over time and very gradually, reallocate resources from the elderly to younger families and their children,” said Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.

“I’m sure that some of those additional benefits have been nice,” Nancy-Ann DeParle, who runs the White House’s Office of Health Reform, says of Medicare Advantage plans. “But I think what we have to look at here is what’s fair and what’s important for the strength of the Medicare program long term.”

Sun Telegraph: The Government has promised to protect the overall budget of the NHS, which will continue to receive above-inflation increases, but said the service must make “efficiency savings” of up to £20 billion by 2014, which would be diverted back to the front line.

Brother from another socialist mother? 🙂

Dr Peter Carter, the head of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was “incredibly worried” about the disclosures.

Dr Carter said: “Andrew Lansley keeps saying that the Government will protect the front line from cuts – but the reality appears to be quite the opposite. We are seeing trusts making job cuts even when they have already admitted to being short staffed.

Trust boards are the ones who make the health care calls now.

Much like the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology  that was in the Stimulus Bill.

And we won’t even go over the Food Police again this time.

Sun Telegraph: On Thursday, the board of Sutton and Merton primary care trust (PCT) in London agreed more than £50 million of savings in two years. The plan included more than £400,000 to be saved by “reducing length of stay” in hospital for the terminally ill.

As well as sending more patients home to die, the paper said the savings would be made by admitting fewer terminally ill cancer patients to hospital because they were struggling to cope with symptoms such as pain. Instead, more patients would be given advice on “self management” of their condition.

Bill Gillespie, the trust’s chief executive, said patients would stay at home, or be discharged from hospital only if that was their choice, and would be given support in their homes.

The president told the {New York Times in 2008}magazine that the chronically ill and elderly represent 80 percent of American healthcare costs, and said, “(T)here is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.”

“And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance,” he added.

That “independent group” turns out to be the government, now run by him. Funny how that worked out. 🙂

But the president questioned whether his now-deceased grandmother should have received her hip replacement while suffering a terminal illness.

Recounting the dilemma, Obama said, “(T)he question was, does she get hip replacement surgery even though she was fragile enough that they weren’t sure how long she would last (or) whether she could get through the surgery.”

“I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time,” Obama said.

This was not the first time the president had used his grandmother to illustrate his point on health care. In an April 2008 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Obama suggested much of the cost of health care in America comes from the elderly and those with chronic illness.

“That’s where you get into some very difficult moral issues,” Obama said – specifically considering whether “in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.”

This was BEFORE he became president mind you. But the Journo-List inspired Media was not going to let you dwell on it.

2009 Newsweek article on the “The Five biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate”:

What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the current system, by both Medicare and private insurance. No plan covers everything, but coverage decisions “are now made in opaque ways by insurance companies,” says Dr. Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

Donald Berwick? Where have I heard that name recently.

Oh yeah, he’s the guy who was appointed by Obama as Head of Medicare and Medicaid without Senate approval by a recess appointment and he’s an admitted lover of the NHS.

Gee, that couldn’t be a coincidence now could it? 🙂

The {Health Care} law will spend $938 billion over a decade, mostly to expand coverage to lower-income Americans. To finance that, there will be $455 billion coming from cuts in government payments to health-care providers that serve patients on Medicare and two other federal programs. The hardest hit—to the tune of $136 billion—will be private insurance companies that run Medicare Advantage plans.

The payment cuts to Medicare Advantage begin in 2012.

“With the president being younger, my biggest concern is that we don’t mean anything,” said Sandy Reed, a 61-year-old who has a Medicare Advantage plan because she qualifies as disabled. “We’re disposable.”

‘Death Panels’ indeed…

And it has come out on the Daily Caller in their further investigation of the Journo-List scandal that the Mainstream media were in full bore mode of destruction when Gov. Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate.

All that savagery was plotted out.

So what you do when your opponent speaks the truth to power, destroy her.

So that’s why the ‘death panels’ comment was so widely and uniformly from left mocked, dismissed and discredited.

To this very day she is the most hated woman in America by the Left.

Most of the rest will be funded by new levies, including taxes on health-care companies, a higher Medicare payroll tax for wealthy Americans and a tax on high-value insurance plans. Critics of the law say its total cost is likely higher than advertised.

But it’s not like the Democrats actually care.

Their one and only shot at injecting their socialist cancer, that they’ve been waiting since their grandparents time in many cases, is all that matters.

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

But at least it’s “fair”. 🙂

You’re Just Ignornant

Again I was going to say how much fun it is to see Obama and his teleprompter took nearly 4 months to decide to do both a surge strategy and an exit strategy (were coming to get you, but we’re leaving before my re-election campaign) and manage to look weak being decisively indecisive.

But then I saw this from the The Guardian newspaper in England, On Climate Gate:

Liberals, faced with having their faith challenged resort to even more childish insults.

For one thing, as well as the proper scepticism of the inquisitive mind, which all scientists face, they must tackle the talk-show brand of bastardised scepticism that is borne  of wilful ignorance.

Sound familiar?

You’re a “moron” for questioning us, the Liberal elite intelligentsia.

Health Care, Illegal Immigration, Global Warming, Cap & Trade, anyone?

The Guardian continues: Blinded or at least baffled by science, the uninitiated majority imagine it as the sort of impersonal process a robot might carry out. Days before the Copenhagen climate conference – where scientific reasoning will make strenuous demands on everyday life – we have all been reminded that the frontiers of technical knowledge are not in fact advanced by automatons, but by fallible human beings.

When we get caught we’re fallible and you should forgive us our sins, then lets us do whatever the hell we want because we’re right. 🙂

Orwell would be proud of the doublethink.

But calling protesters of the Health Care Reform collosus “morons”, “idiots”,”dupes”, “racists”, “sexists”,”insurance company hacks” anyone?

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “Journalist” on his own blog- “Granted, the way that opposition has been ginned up by outside forces does discount these outbursts some.”

A Liberal Blogger: Given the math deficiency of the American public, it is difficult to imagine how Democrats will be able to prove to the public with numbers, that health care costs will not rise with their reform.

Well, considering that Liberal control Education, and have for at least 30 years, then the “math deficiency” is their fault too. 🙂

Salaon. com editorial pick: A “Journalist” from St, Louis after a Town hall in August.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

And the editorial agreed: They’ve become political terrorists. Yeah, pretty much.

So I guess I can add that to my list of list insults.

Then the editorial continues: “Terrorists, like it or not, are people who believe they are doing the right thing and feel passionately about their cause. They also feel that anything they do is justified because they have Absolute Right on their side.”

Sounds like the Liberals I know and have seen on display in the News, on the radio, and the internet.

But Liberals generally can’t even utter the word “terrorist”, it’s a “man-caused disaster” after all. 🙂

The point is, Liberal can’t argue or take criticism without resorting to condescending and insulting personal attacks and childish behavior.

But yet, they are “the consensus”. The “perceived wisdom”. The “majority opinion”.

They are better than you.

God help mankind if that were true!

Guardian: But like politicians before them, climate scientists are learning the hard way that sticking to the rules is not enough – they must also to be seen to be sticking to them.

So are they Scientists or Politicians?

You can’t be both.

They don’t mix.

Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.

Politics is the cynical application of power and manipulation of truth to fit ones agenda.

They don’t mix.

The fact that liberals think they do, is the death knell of science, just like journalism died under the weight of liberalism.

Climate projections are surrounded by margins of error, a vulnerability when humans are poor at grappling with risk and prone to letting self-interest cloud their thinking.

They were talking about you and me, but they  should have looked in the mirror. 🙂

Another rule of public life, however, is that the cover-up does more harm than the scandal. Any suggestion that scientists are being less than frank will shred their credibility. The leaked emails are thus profoundly inconvenient for all of us who are concerned to make the world wake up to an inconvenient truth.

So what is the media doing in large majority, covering it up. 🙂

And the truth is inconvenient.

So decry the cover-up, then cover it up.

Well, that sounds like a liberal. 🙂

Orwell: It is the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime and thought-criminals, using psychology and omnipresent surveillance from telescreens to find and eliminate members of society who were capable of the mere thought of challenging ruling authority.

🙂

Meanwhile, today’s Times – the paper which boasts it has more environmental correspondents than any other publication: gotta use them somehow, I suppose – prints a special, glossy, Copenhagen-themed supplement about global ecodoom. On the cover there’s a picture of a pretty clownfish nestling amid an anemone. The coverline shouts:

“Losing Nemo: Is it too late to save the ocean?”

Sen. Boxer, Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, says that the recently released e-mails should be treated as a crime. (eaminer.com)

“You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,'” she said during a committee meeting.

And her co-written bill is one of the Cap & Trade nightmares. So no conflict of interest there. 🙂

CBS: Markey, the head of a House global warming committee, said during a hearing that his Republican colleagues “sit over here using a couple of e-mails to (tell us) how to deal with a catastrophic threat to our planet.” And: “There is no alternative theory that the minority is proposing, other than that we know has been funded by the oil, by the coal industries that want to continue business as usual.”

Sound familiar?

Do you feel talked-down to yet?

Ed Miliband, British Secretary of State For Energy and Climate Change: “I think it’s a question of political will, of mobilising the public.”

And here I thought it was about science… 🙂

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy ( a “Czar”),He denied its significance, calling the embarrassing disclosures “not remotely sufficient to demonstrate a culture of corruption” and said “as to exactly what went on in the way of manipulation of data, that remains to be seen.” He objected to the idea of an independent probe — the CRU received U.S. government grants — on grounds that he’s not sure an “independent investigation by the Congress of the United States is a way to get at the truth.”

Isn’t that special. A liberal who doesn’t want to appoint a special prosecutor because it’s a liberal policy that is under the microscope.  Where is a Republican when you need one. 🙂

SYDNEY – Australia’s plans for an emissions trading system to combat global warming were scuttled Wednesday in Parliament, handing a defeat to a government that had hoped to set an example at international climate change talks next week.

Whoops. Someone needs more re-education. So let’s go back to London:

A London Times Supplement write posited why on earth it can be we’re so reluctant to stop taking flights, turn down our heating and generally try to make our lives more primitive and miserable. Her conclusion? Because of our sense of powerlessness. The threat of climate change is so great, apparently, that rather than deal it we retreat into denial mode.

“When we can’t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defence mechanisms,” explains Tom Crompton, “change strategist” for the World Wildlife Fund.

So your fear of the Global Warming hoax and it’s doomsaying, and it’s massive government controls and taxes and the fact that it’s all crap is just an irrational pathological fear.

You have a phobia.

And you really should get some treatment for it.

The Government is here to help you get better.

Maybe they can include that in the Health Care reform legislation.

Climatechangeaphobia, the irrational 🙂 fear that “consensus” science  and liberal politicians have gotten together to push a mutually beneficial hoax for their own benefit.

The network news broadcasts have ignored a growing scandal over evidence of a potential climate cover-up — and now they’ve even been scooped by the fake news at Comedy Central.

“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” produced its “reporting” on Climate-gate Tuesday night, when Stewart quipped, “Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!”

The Silence from the Ministry of Truth is both telling and deafening.

James Delingpole, columnist London Telegraph:

So here, very, very simply, is a quick idiot’s guide to why Climategate does matter.

1. A bunch of climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have been caught out cheating. They distorted evidence, hid or lost inconvenient raw data, manipulated the science towards a particular end, and set out to silence hard-working, decent, honest scientists who disagreed with them.

2. Those climate scientists aren’t just any old bunch of scientists. They work at the very heart of the IPCC process. They – and their friends: for this is a small and tight cabal, comprising around 43 scientists – are the ‘lead authors’ on the IPCC’s reports. They also supply the most important of the four data records used by the IPCC. They are the people telling our political leaders that the world is suffering from catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming – caused largely by the growth in CO2 emissions – and that urgent action needs to be taken to prevent it.

3. According to one estimate – by the International Energy Agency – the global cost of dealing with AGW will be $45 trillion (that’s 2/3 of the world’s current entire economic). This will mean our energy bills will rise by perhaps a factor of ten; that we will be subject to more and more pettifogging rules on what kind of lightbulbs we use and how we dispose of our trash – perhaps even how often we’re allowed to fly; it will mean governance by unelected “experts” and technocrats from the UN; it will cripple industry; it will mean higher taxes; it will take money from the middle classes in the Western world and hand them over in the form of “compensation” to kleptocrat dictators in the Third World; it will almost certainly send the global economy diving into a double dip depression. We are, in other words, about to be presented with the biggest bill in the history of mankind.

4. Given what we now know about the reliability of 2 and the basis of 1, are we really sure that with 3 we’re getting our money’s worth?

I say no it’s not worth it.

But then again I’m just an “ignnorant” “terrorist” with climatechangeaphobia. 🙂

I need to watch more MSNBC, I will feel better… 🙂