|
HEALTHPLANUSA.NET |
QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER |
|
Community
For Affordable Health Care |
Vol IX, No 3, Oct, 2010 |
Utilizing the $2 Trillion Information
Technology Industry
To Transform the $3 Trillion HealthCare
Industry into Affordable HealthCare
Through Innovation by moving from a Vertical to a Horizontal Industry
Thus
eliminating $1 Trillion wasted
Insuring
every American without spending the Extra $1Trillion Projected
To
purchase a copy of the business plan, go to the bookstore at www.healthplanusa.net/index.asp.
In This Issue:
1. Featured Article: The
Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine
2. In the News: Discontinuing
Failed Drug Research is Expensive
3. International Healthcare:
The
Stockholm Network
4. Government Healthcare: A
Growth Agenda for the New Congress
5. Lean HealthCare: Healthcare is going ‘lean'
6. Misdirection in Healthcare:
What Motivated ObamaCare?
7. Overheard on Capital Hill: Benign
Dictatorship and the Progressive Mind.
8. Innovations in Healthcare: Health Plan from the National Center for Policy Analysis
9. The Health Plan for the USA: How
technology reduces health care costs
10. Restoring Accountability in Medical Practice by
Moving from a Vertical to a Horizontal Industry:
The Annual World Health Care Congress, a market of ideas co-sponsored by The
Wall Street Journal, is the most prestigious meeting of chief and senior
executives from all sectors of health care. Renowned authorities and
practitioners assemble to present recent results and to develop innovative
strategies that foster the creation of a cost-effective and accountable U.S.
health care system. The extraordinary conference agenda includes compelling
keynote panel discussions, authoritative industry speakers, international best
practices, and recently released case-study data. The
8th Annual World Health Care Congress will be held April 4-6, 2011
at the Gaylord Convention Center, Washington DC. For more
information, visit www.worldcongress.com. The future is
occurring NOW.
* * * * *
1. Feature
Article: The
Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine
"The
Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine"–and us. by Debi Ghate, ARC, July 20, 2009
During a meeting today, my colleagues and I were
discussing the frightening prospect that socialized
medicine is right around the corner. Obama-care is not being opposed on any
principled grounds – the only real dispute appears to be over the details, such
as its projected cost. So if you are counting on somebody, like the
Republicans, stepping in to rescue us from this impending disaster, think
again.
I emigrated from Canada some time ago and at that
point, one of the significant differences between the two countries was their
respective approaches to health care. A relatively free market in health
insurance and health care rather than a monolithic government-managed system?
Terrific! You mean I'm not stuck on a long waiting list in order to see
whichever doctors the government allows people in my geographic area to
see? Wonderful!
Should President Obama succeed in implementing "health
care reforms," those last remaining advantages of the American health care
system will disappear. That would be disastrous for all of us, but it would be
especially devastating for the medical profession.
In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, there's a minor
character, a brain surgeon named Dr. Hendricks, who refused to practice under a
socialized medicine. This excerpt (reprinted in "For
the New Intellectual") explains why Dr. Hendricks decided to
shrug:
"I quit when medicine was placed under State
control some years ago," said Dr. Hendricks. "Do you know what it
takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands,
and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to
acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of
men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the
fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing
their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose
for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my
choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the
discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed
everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare'
of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a
doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as
irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.' That a
man's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with
a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick
by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the
smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work,
to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it
they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?
Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the
virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them
discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them
discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to
place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if
he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who
doesn't."
Instead of bickering about the price tag of
Obama-care, it's time to fight
the battle against socialized medicine on moral grounds. It's time for
doctors to defend their moral right to practice medicine free from government
interference. And it's time for their patients to defend their
moral right to purchase health-care on a free market.
http://blog.aynrandcenter.org/the-forgotten-man-of-socialized-medicine-and-us/
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA . . .
* * * * *
2. In the News: Discontinuing
Failed Drug Research is Expensive
Novartis AG said Thursday it will halt
studies on an experimental lung-cancer drug in favor of developing other cancer
treatments, as the Swiss drug maker revamp its portfolio after stopping
development of two other candidate medicines earlier this year.
The Basel-based company
said it will take a charge of $120
million against fourth-quarter earnings to halt ASA404, after study results
indicated the drug had little or no prospect of improving survival rates of
patients with non-small cell lung cancer.
They also
said the decision to remove the drug from Novartis's pipeline underlines the
company's intent to finely manage its research portfolio, which still contains
many promising late-stage drugs.
"It's
always a tough decision to decide on how to proceed with an experimental
drug," said David Kaegi, pharmaceuticals analyst at Bank Sarasin.
"But since ASA404 already had weak trial results earlier, the market
disappointment is limited. Also, Novartis still has a very strong
pipeline."
The decision
comes after Novartis said in October it will stop the development of chronic
hepatitis C compound albinterferon alfa-2b and also end research of Mycograb,
an antifungal agent.
The
discontinuation charges of around $590
million for these two compounds were booked in the third quarter.
Like many
large drug makers, Novartis faces the pending patent expiration for key drugs.
. .
A loss of
patent often means that annual sales can drop by more than 30% as cheaper
copycat versions of the drug are administered to patients. . .
For this
reason, the pharmaceutical industry is expected to keep a tight grip on costs
and also continue to consolidate as large pharma firms are expected to look for
takeovers to boost their pipelines and seek partnership and licensing deals
with smaller biotech companies. . .
Novartis has
spent some $7.5 billion in R&D in 2009 and is expected to keep up this
elevated spending level—among the highest in the industry—rather than seek
bigger acquisitions, analysts say. . .
Read the entire report in the WSJ, Subscription is required. . .
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA . . .
How can drug companies keep bringing us new drugs for
a $ Billion if they lost nearly three-fourths of a billion dollars on these
three drugs which never made it to market?
* * * * *
3. International
Healthcare: The
Stockholm Network
The Stockholm Network is the leading pan-European
think tank and market oriented network.
It is a one-stop shop for organisations seeking to
work with Europe's brightest policymakers and thinkers. Today, the Stockholm
Network brings together more than 120 market-oriented think tanks from across
Europe, giving us the capacity to deliver local and locally-tailored global
messages across the EU and beyond.
Combined, think tanks in our network publish thousands of op-eds in the high
quality European press, produce many hundreds of publications, and hold a wide
range of conferences, seminars and meetings. As such, the Stockholm Network and
its members influence many millions of Europeans every year.
Weathering
the Storm: Central and Eastern European Healthcare in Financial Crisis by
Stockholm Network (published 2010)
This CEE Ahead publication assesses the future for
Central and Eastern European (CEE) healthcare reform in light of a financial
crisis that has exposed the fragility of public budgets. The financial crisis
is raining down on the public purses of CEE countries and governments are
struggling to provide adequate protection for their citizens. The paper argues
that if CEE countries are to weather this storm, there is now a need to
consider new ways of providing healthcare:
- By encouraging open
competition in healthcare;
- By allowing greater
use of public-private partnerships; and
- By fostering more
varied sources of healthcare funding;
Ultimately, the paper argues that the CEE region now
has an opportunity for healthcare reforms to develop and the financial crisis,
however unwelcome, provides an incentive to begin. Whilst the problem will
undoubtedly be finding the political will, it should not be overlooked that
reform presents the best chance for establishing health systems that are fit to
help and cure citizens in the difficult years to come.
Download the executive summary
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA . . .
The above three tracks for health care reforms are
also relevant to the United States.
* * * * *
4. Government Healthcare: A
Growth Agenda for the New Congress
By ARTHUR LAFFER
For now: Extend
the Bush tax cuts, repeal ObamaCare, support free trade. After 2012: Enact a
flat tax, stabilize prices, balance the budget, give politicians incentive pay.
Since its
cyclical zenith in December 2007, U.S. economic production has been on its
worst trajectory since the Great Depression. Massive stimulus spending and
unprecedented monetary easing haven't helped, and yet the Obama administration
and the Federal Reserve still cling to the book of Keynes. It's an approach
ill-suited to solving the growth problem that the United States has today.
The solution
can be found in the price theory section of any economics textbook. It's basic
supply and demand. Employment is low because the incentives for workers to work
are too small, and the incentives not to work too high. Workers' net wages are
down, so the supply of labor is limited. Meanwhile, demand for labor is also
down since employers consider the costs of employing new workers—wages, health
care and more—to be greater today than the benefits.
Firms choose
whether to hire based on the total cost of employing workers, including all
federal, state and local income taxes; all payroll, sales and property taxes;
regulatory costs; record-keeping costs; the costs of maintaining health and
safety standards; and the costs of insurance for health care, class action
lawsuits, and workers compensation. In addition, gross wages are often inflated
by the power of unions and legislative restrictions such as "buy
American" provisions and the minimum wage. Gross wages also include all
future benefits to workers in the form of retirement plans.
For a worker
to be attractive, that worker must be productive enough to cover all those
costs plus leave room for some profit and the costs of running an enterprise.
Being in business isn't easy, and today not enough workers qualify to be hired.
But workers
don't focus on how much it costs a firm to employ them. Workers care about how
much they receive and can spend after taxes. For them, the question is how the
wages they'd receive for working compare to what they'd receive (from the
government) if they didn't work, plus the value of their leisure from not
working.
The problem
is that the government has driven a massive wedge between the wages paid by
firms and the wages received by workers. To make work and employment attractive
again, this government wedge has to shrink. This can happen over the next two
years, even with a Democratic majority in the Senate and President Obama in the
White House, through the following measures:
1) The full
extension of the Bush tax cuts. The Republican-controlled House of
Representatives can write legislation extending all the tax cuts in perpetuity.
Of particular importance for employment is keeping the highest personal income
tax rate at 35%, the capital gains tax rate at 15% and the dividend tax rate at
15%, while eliminating the estate tax permanently. If the Senate blocks this
legislation or Mr. Obama refuses to sign it, House Republicans should hold firm
and let voters decide in 2012. (My guess is that he'll sign it or have his veto
overridden.)
2) The full
repeal of ObamaCare, which allows individuals to pay only five cents for each
dollar of health care. Who do you think pays the other 95 cents? As former Sen.
Phil Gramm notes, if he had to pay only five cents for each dollar of groceries
he bought, he would eat really well—and so would his dog. No single bill is
more antithetical to growth than ObamaCare.
Repeal could
take the form of Michele Bachmann's Legislative Repeal Act, and if it is
blocked in the Senate or by a veto Republicans should continue bringing it up
every six months. Come 2012 the public will have a clear view of what
congressional candidates stand for. The end game for U.S. prosperity is the
election in 2012.
3) The
cancellation of all spending that punishes those who produce and rewards those
who don't. This is really the distinction between demand-side economics and
supply-side economics. Stimulus spending and quantitative easing don't make it
more rewarding to work an extra hour. If the government pays people not to work
and taxes people who do work, is it really so difficult to see why employment
is so low?
So the
government should sell its stakes in public companies acquired via TARP, sell
government-run enterprises that lose money (e.g., Amtrak and the Postal
Service), end farm subsidies that pay people not to farm, cancel the rest of
the stimulus and return all spending programs to their pre-stimulus levels.
Congress should also continually examine spending in Afghanistan and Iraq. And
it should return the duration of unemployment benefits to the standard 26
weeks, from the current 99 weeks. . .
These changes
would spur recovery, but they are just the start. Elected officials should
offer longer-term measures that voters can judge in 2012, when 33
senators—including 21 Democrats, two independents who caucus with the
Democrats, and 10 Republicans—as well as the entire House and President Obama
are up for re-election.
Beyond 2012,
the ideal growth agenda would include:
1) A true
flat tax, a la Jerry Brown's proposal in 1992. Congress should replace all
federal taxes (except sin taxes) with two flat-rate taxes, one on personal
income and one on net business sales. The personal income tax would be on all
forms of income: wage income, dividends, inheritance (as proposed by Democratic
Rep. Jared Polis), and all capital gains. This tax code would remove loopholes
and almost all deductions, and the static revenue rate would be around 11.5%.
2) Price
stability. . .
3) Passage of a balanced budget
amendment, without raising taxes. This would prevent government from being able
to balance its budget by unbalancing the budgets of its citizens. And it would
force politicians to make difficult decisions about what spending is
worthwhile, just like the rest of us.
4) Finally,
saving the best for last, the mother of all supply-side reforms is incentive
pay for politicians (which the comedian Jackie Mason called "putting the
politicians on commission"). Politicians must be held personally
responsible for their actions. In business, firms align the incentives of
decision makers with the incentives of shareholders to ensure that they take
the best course of action. Washington must begin doing the same by creating an
incentive structure that pays elected officials according to factors such as
stock market performance and economic growth.
Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer
Associates and co-author of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain
Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).
Read
the entire report at WSJ.com.
Subscription required . . .
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA . . .
Government is not the solution
to our problems, government is the problem.
- Ronald Reagan
* * * * *
5. Lean
HealthCare: Healthcare is going ‘lean'
Adopting Toyota process principles shows promise for
improving by
Wayne Nelson, 3/25/2009
St. Luke's in Duluth will spend about $1.5 million
later this year to modernize its cardiac catheter lab in a strategy to capture
larger market share.
Expensive new technology is an old story in the
healthcare industry, and widely viewed as a factor in the runaway costs that
are forcing many businesses to scale back or drop their group benefits for
employees.
But how St. Luke's has developed its project — and is
beginning to run its overall operation — represents one of the most promising mechanisms
for taming healthcare inflation.
St. Luke's, SMDC Health System and a handful of
smaller healthcare providers in Northeastern Minnesota all are adopting the "lean"
principles of process efficiency and quality assurance that Toyota developed
after World War II to become the world's leading auto maker.
St. Luke's two-bed cardiac catheter lab is plagued
with inefficiencies common to industrial and service business processes that
are designed around existing facilities rather than for efficient work flow.
When St. Luke's added the second bed in its lab, the storage area for cardiac
catheter supplies and equipment was relocated to an available room across a
hallway, outside the lab's sterile area.
As a result, the lab's nurses and technicians have to
keep seldom used sterile supplies on the mobile carts within the lab, making
the already cramped space there even less efficient, said registered nurse
Michelle Fleming, the hospital's patient care services director. When a
physician asks support staff for a special medical item, the physical
obstructions become barriers to traffic patterns, she said.
Fleming identified the bottleneck using "value-stream
mapping," a lean technique for measuring process efficiency. "There
are a number of times when a tech and nurse need to get equipment. We're making
way too many trips," she said.
So many, in fact, that St. Luke's believes it will be
able to handle current cardiac catheter patient volume with one fewer
technician in the new lab. "We're not going to lay off anyone,"
Fleming quickly added. "Our hope is that with the additional efficiency we'll
be able to do more procedures without adding any people."
The healthcare industry is just beginning to adopt
Toyota Production System waste reduction and process concepts to increase work
capacity, reduce cost, raise worker and patient satisfaction, standardize
results and to build a culture for continuous improvement.
While the design of the new cardiac catheter lab is
its most striking embrace of "lean," St. Luke's has been at it since
Fall 2007, said Jo Ann Hoag, vice president, chief nursing officer and the
initiative's self-described "administrative champion."
It began with a 2007 presentation by the customized
training team at Lake Superior College to Hoag and other senior St. Luke's
managers who embraced the concept and directed 64 executives into formal lean
training at the health system's expense.
Two of those executives, Education Director Linda
Basara and Michael Boeselager, materials management director, were named "Lean
Committee" co-chairs with a mandate to train and implement lean principles
that will change how all 2,200 employees at St. Luke's do their jobs by 2013.
To date, nine classes of 16 employees across departments have been trained as
trainers to spread the lean gospel system wide.
So far, the effort has reorganized the hospital's
laboratory and the storage areas that Boeselager manages. Jennifer LaMaurea,
the lab's blood bank manager, said lean process changes have helped shrink the
bank's inventory of red blood cells on hand by "30 units at $200 per unit.
Lean objectifies the process for implementing change," she said.
Boeselager said the initiative is producing a "brush
fire" of process improvements.
Hoag said the lean process is creating teams across
departments — laboratory, emergency room, nursing units and pharmacy to name a
few — to make care more patient-centered.
To measure whether the initiative is making a customer
service difference, St. Luke's has commissioned PRC Associates, the Omaha-based
healthcare research firm, to conduct satisfaction surveys with discharged
patients.
"Where we have taken this on, patients are happy
with it," Hoag said. "This is a learning process, we're on a journey."
. . .
Meanwhile, Gail Anderson, customized training
representative at Itasca Community College, is coordinating lean grant projects
. . .
"Each of these projects is customized to the
institution," she said. "Lean is very simplistic and easy to learn.
Once it becomes part of the (institutional) culture, it becomes sustainable. We
help develop the needs assessment and goals, and provide the curriculum to get
there."
Anderson is a certified reviewer for Montana-based
Lean Healthcare West, which developed the curriculum the Northeastern Minnesota
healthcare providers are using to become lean. Founder and President Cindy
Jimmerson, a former trauma system developer and emergency healthcare provider,
is a pioneer in applying Toyota Production System principles to the healthcare
industry. She won a 2001-04 National Science Foundation grant and developed
that curriculum for hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, community healthcare
programs and health insurance companies.
She said lean is the perfect anecdote for a healthcare
system that easily wastes two-thirds of the money it consumes.
"We're spending $3 trillion annually and wasting
$2 trillion, enough to insure everyone without spending an additional cent,"
she said.
"In the United States with all the available
technology, science and education, competent healthcare workers are only as
good as their ability to deliver.
"We're swimming in money in healthcare, but it's
not being used effectively because broken processes are getting in the way,"
she said.
Lean can fix those processes and gets at embedded
waste, she said. "If we want to be a Toyota, we need to do it differently."
To
read the entire article and peruse the Lean website, go to . . .
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA . . .
The Future of Health Care Has to Be
Lean, Efficient and Personal.
* * * * *
6. Misdirection in Healthcare: What Motivated ObamaCare?
To understand where ObamaCare will eventually lead us, we must understand what motivates this man. Dinesh D'Souze points out that Obama's father stated: "Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 per cent of income so long as the people get benefits commensurate with the income which is taxed."
Barack
Obama: the Last Anti-Colonialist
Barack Obama is perhaps the least known figure
ever to enter the White House. A set of very unusual circumstances, including
an economic nose-dive just a few weeks before the election, put him there. Only
now, almost two years into his presidency, Americans are starting to ask: who
is Barack Obama? This was the title of a recent column in the Washington
Post by Richard Cohen. The question was not about Obama's policies;
everyone knows about those. Rather, it was one of Obama's underlying ideology.
What motivates this man?
Europeans are routinely given a pre-packaged
portrait of Obama: he is an historic figure, the first African-American
president; he is the embodiment of multiracialism and multiculturalism; he is a
cosmopolitan, in refreshing contrast to his parochial predecessor; and he looks
and speaks the way that many in the world think an American president ought to
look and speak. Consequently, Obama's critics are often dismissed in Europe as
a bunch of right-wing fanatics, otherwise known as the Tea Party movement.
So goes the usual propaganda. It was pretty much
the same propaganda that helped Obama win. But now Americans have had the
opportunity to see what Obama is all about and most of them don't like it.
Obama's popularity has plummeted. Quite apart from the insatiable right-wing,
many moderates and independents who voted for Obama are now suffering buyer's
remorse.
Even some of Obama's supporters profess to being
mystified by what moves the man. Appearing on a TV show, Newsweek
editor Evan Thomas said he found himself curiously repelled by a president with
whose ideas he generally agreed. Thomas called Obama "slightly
creepy" and "deeply manipulative". He suggested that there was
something fake and unreal about Obama's public persona.
Theories about Obama abound. On the Left, he is
sometimes portrayed as a champion of the civil rights movement, a kind of
latter-day Martin Luther King. On the Right, Obama is often described as a
closet Muslim or more often as a kind of socialist. Neither of these quite
works. Obama has never sat at a segregated lunch counter. In a sense, he's not
even African-American. In the US, this means you are descended from slaves.
Obama's father was an educated immigrant from Kenya and his mother was a white
woman from Kansas. Obama's formative experience, in Hawaii, Indonesia and
Kenya, seems very remote from that of Martin Luther King.
There is no evidence that Obama is a Muslim. His
father Barack Obama Sr was raised as a Muslim, the consequence of his
grand-father Onyango Obama converting to Islam. His stepfather Lolo Soetoro was
also raised in the Islamic faith. But neither man practised Islam, and Obama
writes that his father treated Islam with the same contempt he reserved for African
witch doctors. Obama studied Islam in Indonesia, where he lived for four years,
but he also studied Catholicism and Buddhism and he seems to have emerged with
no firm religious convictions at all.
The charge of socialism is closer to the mark.
Obama as President has presided over the largest expansion of state power in
American history. To an unprecedented degree, he has extended the tentacles of
the federal government into banking, mortgage lending, finance, healthcare,
insurance, automobiles, and energy. In Britain and the rest of Europe, such
aggressive intervention is customary, but in America it is an anomaly. While
Europeans debate ways to trim the bloated welfare state, Obama continues to
make America's welfare state even more bloated. Consequently, America has
become the world's largest debtor, and Obama threatens to stick the bill to the
richest Americans, a group that he says is not paying its "fair
share". . .
A good way to understand the American president is
to ask a simple question: what is Obama's dream? Fortunately, we don't have to
speculate about this because Obama himself provides a vital clue. Obama's
autobiography is entitled Dreams from My Father. So there it is:
according to Obama, his dreams come from his father. It is not Dreams of My
Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams. He is writing about
the dreams he received from his father.
This isn't just a matter of a book title. Obama's
book is chock-full of admissions that Obama derived his aspirations, his
values, his very identity from Obama père. Although his father was
gone for most of his life, Obama writes that "even in his absence his
strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up
to, or to disappoint". Obama writes: "It was into my father's image,
the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in
myself." Others who know Obama confirm this account. Obama's grandmother
Sarah Obama told Newsweek: "I look at him and I see all the same
things. This son has taken everything from his father. The son is realising
everything the father wanted."
So who was Barack Obama Sr and what did he want?
As a man, the senior Obama was deeply strange. He was a polygamist who had four
wives and eight known children. He looked after none of them, and was accused
by one of his sons, Mark, of being a wife-beater and an abusive father. He was
also a chronic alcoholic who was known at Harvard as "Double Double"
because he liked to order a double Scotch and tell the waiter, as soon as it
arrived, "Another double." Since he regularly drove while
intoxicated, he was involved in multiple accidents. In one, he killed a man; in
another, he injured himself so badly that both his legs had to be amputated and
replaced by iron rods. Eventually, he became drunk in a bar in Nairobi and
drove into a tree, killing himself.
Not much of a role model for a son. But young
Obama didn't know about his father's misdoings, because a romantic image of his
father had been cultivated in his mind by his mother, Ann. She revered her
husband even though he abandoned her. When Obama complained about his absentee
father she chastised her son, informing him that Obama Sr was a great man, a
champion of African liberation.
Eventually, Obama discovered the truth about his
father from his half-sister Auma. Still, Obama didn't give up on his father. He
went to his grave and wept. He pressed his hand into the earth and tried to
commune with his father "through Africa's red soil". But Obama
couldn't get back his dead father, so instead he decided to take his dream. He
concluded that, although flawed as a man, the senior Obama had great ideals.
Obama would realise those ideals, and perhaps in this way he could complete the
family circle and be worthy of his father's love. Through a kind of sacramental
rite at the family tomb, the father's ideology became the son's birthright.
But what was Barack Obama Sr's ideology? First and
foremost, he was an anti-colonialist. He came of age in Kenya during that
country's struggle for independence from the British. The Obama family suffered
the scars of colonialism. In the 1950s, when the Prime Minister, Winston
Churchill, cracked down on the Mau Mau guerrillas in Kenya, Obama Sr was
arrested for his political activities, and Barack's grandfather Onyango Obama
was placed in a detention camp and allegedly tortured. Anti-colonialism arose
out of anger and humiliation, and in the case of Obama Sr those sentiments were
the product of direct experience. . .
It may seem incredible to suggest that the
anti-Western, anti-American ideology of Obama Sr that justifies massive state
appropriations of private wealth is the belief system of the American
president. But that is what I am saying. For instance, I believe that the
premises of Obama Sr's paper can help us understand what President Obama means
when he says the rich aren't paying their "fair share". The top 10
per cent of income earners in America pay around 70 per cent of the taxes. By
ordinary standards, it would seem that the affluent are more than paying their
share. However, if you assume that wealth is not earned through effort or
creativity but is rather the product of greed and theft, then there is no limit
to what percentage you can legitimately seize. Obama's rhetoric and actions
suggest that he feels morally justified in state confiscation of wealth to
whatever extent he can get away with it. . .
Many in Britain, I know, are deeply ambivalent
about Britain's colonial legacy. But colonialism is now dead and so is
anti-colonialism. No one today cares about it — except the man in the White
House. He is the last anti-colonial. Obama's problem isn't that he opposes
foreign subjugation. It is that he is trapped in his father's time machine. He
is trying to apply the ossified, antiquated solutions of a generation ago to
the very different problems of the world today. Obama's approach does poor
countries no favours, because his remedies would not help them rise out of
poverty. At the same time, Obama is trying to end America's leadership in the
world, bringing to an end centuries of Western dominance. If he succeeds, the
future for both America and Europe is likely to be less prosperous and less
secure. . .
Read the entire article at
StandPointMag.com . . .
Well-Meaning
Regulations Worsen Quality of Care.
* * * * *
7. Overheard on
Capital Hill: Our Freedom is at Stake
Benign
Dictatorship and the Progressive Mind
By Andrew Thomas, American Thinker, August 7, 2010
Recently,
I received a rare visit from my brother-in-law. He is a smart guy, having
graduated valedictorian of his high school class and currently running a
successful business. Unfortunately, his politics run 180 degrees counter to
mine, as he grew up in the socialist environment of his Swedish homeland.
As
we talked about the weather and other neutral subjects, he stared into my
library. Among my compilation of Holy Bibles and Vince Flynn novels, he noticed
my Glenn Beck book collection. "Do you believe in that stuff?" he
asked, giving me a repulsed look as though they espoused the philosophy of satanic
pedophilia. "I do," I replied resolutely, upon which he began a long
diatribe on his vehement hatred of George Bush and the fascist dictatorship he
created.
President
Obama, he declared, although he has his flaws, "means well." I won't
go into my rebuttal of that statement, but his final thought on the matter was:
"Of course, the perfect form of government is the benign
dictatorship."
I
have been thinking about that perception for a while now -- not because I
believe it's true, but because it may help explain the motivations of the
progressive leftists in this country. I am continually attempting to truly
understand the conceptual thinking of progressives, as it is so foreign to my
analytical personality. Like Star Trek's Mr. Spock, I am driven by
phenomenological facts and data. Progressives apparently can function with
neither.
Over
a year ago, I
wrote about my theory that liberals "crave a master" who will
instill stern discipline and mete out harsh punishments to a deserving
citizenry. This was based on my belief that progressives have a predilection
for "moral masochism." While I still maintain the validity of this
argument, I am beginning to understand that much of their apparently illogical
craving for domination is actually agenda-driven.
To
the committed progressive, the leftist priority agenda issues are so pure and
righteous that the frustration of not having them immediately implemented is
unbearable. For instance, "climate change" legislation is a
progressive, neo-religious, life-or-death cause for whose achievement many
would gladly give up all of their (and our) democratic freedoms and liberties.
The
U.S. Constitution is a preventer rather than an enabler of the progressive
agenda and therefore must be removed as an obstacle. Obama once called it a "charter of
negative liberties." And so the dream of a benevolent dictator who will
powerfully push aside all opposition and enact just and virtuous laws
throughout the land dwells in the psyche of the left. Human beings will always
succumb to the corrupt temptations of power, but that doesn't stop progressives
from trying. There is no doubt that Obama has successfully amassed power to
himself unlike any American president before him in just his first eighteen
months. To be fair, George Bush gave him a running start.
The
fact that our normal American safeguards have thus far failed to contain this
unprecedented expansion of executive power is itself deeply troubling. This
failure is due in part to the fact that the executive branch has followed a
determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information,
appearing to yield but then refusing to do so, and dissembling in order to
frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore a
healthy constitutional balance.
So
spoke Al Gore in a 2006
speech on the Bush administration's abuse of the Constitution. He railed on
about Bush's power grabs, including the use of warrantless wiretaps and
surveillance, efforts to control the internet, and imprisonment of citizens
suspected of terrorism without an arrest warrant or due process.
Following
in Bush's footsteps but with a longer gait, Obama has maintained and expanded
the wiretapping and surveillance of citizens' communications, recently
including warrantless
seizure of private e-mails. He has been granted the power to shut
down the internet at any time he deems necessary, and he is working
diligently to further control all communications through the FCC and his
Marxist communications diversity czar, Mark Lloyd.
Most
distressingly, Obama has reserved for himself the right to declare any U.S.
citizen a "terrorist" and target him for assassination
without a trial or due process. Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano has identified
veterans, states-rights advocates, people who oppose abortion or illegal
immigration, and members of right-wing groups as potential domestic terrorists.
To paraphrase Newsweek
magazine, "We are all terrorists now."
The
pieces of the "benign dictatorship" of Obama have been set into
place. The two primary components are the gargantuan monstrosities known as
ObamaCare and the Financial Reform Bill. They were intentionally designed to be
indecipherable. Read the statements of our most brilliant legislative minds in
Congress:
House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): "[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can
find out what is in it."
Rep.
John Conyers (D-MI): "What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand
pages?"
Christopher
Dodd (D-CT): "No one will know until this [financial reform bill] is
actually in place how it works."
An
August 5 Wall Street Journal editorial
on ObamaCare said this:
Earlier
this week, the Congressional Research Service reported that the new bureaucracy
the bill created is so complex and indiscriminate that its size is
"currently unknowable." Capitol Hill's independent policy arm added
that among "the dozens of new governmental organizations or advisory
bodies," it is "impossible to know how much influence they will
ultimately have."
The
bottom line is that it doesn't matter what is written in these convoluted
legislative nightmares. They are merely concepts to be molded and interpreted
in any way the administration desires. The people who will perform these
interpretations are the very scary regulatory czar Cass
Sunstein and history's largest assembled collection of '60s radicals
appointed as government bureaucrats. They, along with Obama, are now in
complete control of our lives.
Congressman
Pete Stark
(D-CA) may be an elitist and a fool, but I believe he was correct when he
recently said, "The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this
country." With a total disregard for the U.S. Constitution and no
discernible moral compass, Obama's Chicago-style administration looks like it
is heading toward dictatorship, though hardly benign, no matter what my
brother-in-law and others may believe about Obama's intentions.
Andrew Thomas blogs at darkangelpolitics.com.
Printed from: www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/benign_dictatorship_and_the_pr.html
What is Really Happening?
* * * * *
8. Innovations in
Healthcare: Health Plan from the National Center for Policy Analysis
To confront America's health care
crisis, we do not need more spending, more regulations or more bureaucracy. We
do need people, however, including every doctor and every patient. All 300
million Americans must be free to use their intelligence, their creativity and
their innovative ability to make the changes needed to create access to
low-cost, high-quality health care.
I. Free the
Doctor
Doctors today
are forced to practice medicine under an outmoded, wasteful payment system
designed for a different century. They should instead be given access to
payment systems available to other professionals.
Problem: Typically, doctors receive no financial
reward for talking to patients by telephone, communicating by e-mail, teaching
patients how to manage their own care or helping them be better consumers in
the market for drugs. In fact, doctors who help patients in these ways will end
up with less take-home pay. To make matters worse, as third-party payers
suppress reimbursement fees, doctors are increasingly unable to perform any
task that is not reimbursed.
Solution:
Let Doctors Be Doctors. In
Medicare and Medicaid, it should be as easy as possible for providers to get
paid in better ways. We should be willing to reward doctors who raise quality
and lower costs — including improving patient access to care, improving
communication and teaching patients how to be better managers of their own
care. What is needed is not pay-for-performance, but performance for pay — with
ideas and proposals coming from the supply side of the market (which is more
knowledgeable about potential improvements than the demand side).
Any doctor should be able to propose and
obtain a different reimbursement arrangement, provided that (1) the total cost
to government does not increase, (2) patient quality of care does not decrease
and (3) the doctor proposes a method of measuring and assuring that (1) and (2)
have been satisfied.
Problem: All
too often providers face perverse incentives. When they make changes that raise
quality and lower costs, their income goes down, not up!
Example: Geisinger
Health System in central Pennsylvania gives heart patients a "warranty"
on their surgeries. Patients who have to be readmitted because of complications
pay nothing for the second admission. Yet in providing higher quality and
lowering patient costs, Geisinger loses money. That's why other hospitals do
not follow its example.
Example: Studies
show that if every patient went to the Mayo Clinic for health care, we could
lower the national health care bill by one-fourth — and quality would improve.
If everyone went for care to the Intermountain Hospital System in Salt Lake
City, we could lower our health care costs by one-third — while improving
quality. Why don't other hospitals copy these exemplars of low-cost,
high-quality care? Because they would be severely penalized financially under
the current system.
Solution: Let Hospitals Be Hospitals. Facilities that figure out how to lower patient costs,
raise quality and offer warranties and other guaranties should be rewarded for
doing so — just as they would in any other market. Accordingly, the same three
reimbursement rules proposed for doctors above should also apply to hospitals.
Problem: Entrepreneurs are creating new products
to meet needs not being met by traditional health insurance. For example, people can pay with their own money for
telephone and e-mail consultations. They can purchase blood tests via the
Internet and get results in 24 hours. They can get low-cost care with very
little waiting at walk-in clinics in shopping malls. Yet all too often these
services are hampered by outmoded, unnecessary government regulations.
Amazingly, doctors are prohibited from owning and operating walk-in clinics
that refer patients to their regular practices!
Solution: Let Entrepreneurs Be Entrepreneurs. We should welcome and encourage new ways of meeting
patient needs, rather than stifle these efforts with unnecessary, outmoded laws
and regulations. As with providers and facilities, promising innovations should
be expedited and approved quickly. For example, walk-in clinics that charge
half as much and match the quality of traditional care, with electronic medical
records and electronic prescriptions to boot, should be approved outright. . .
II.
Free the Patient
Patients
also suffer when payments to doctors and hospitals are based on outmoded
formulas. Whereas suppliers compete to meet customer needs in almost every
other market, this happens all too rarely in health care.
Problem:
Many patients have difficulty seeing
primary care physicians. All too often they turn to hospital emergency rooms
where there may be long waits and where the cost of care is much higher. When
they do see doctors, all too often patients get inadequate information. The
problem is made worse by the inability to communicate by telephone or e-mail.
Solution: Patient Power. We need to explore new ways to empower patients —
especially the chronically ill, allowing them to manage more of their own care
and more of their own health care dollars. Also, patients should be able to
purchase services that are not paid for by traditional health insurance,
including telephone and e-mail consultations and patient education services. Example:
Studies show that diabetics, asthmatics and other chronic patients can
manage their own care as well as or better than conventional physician care and
at lower costs. Yet to do this patients need training, easier access to
information and the ability to purchase and use in-house monitors. . .
III. Free the Employees
Our health insurance system evolved at a time when
many workers expected to work for the same employer for their entire work
lives. Clearly, that assumption is no longer valid.
Problem: When
employees switch jobs, they are usually forced to switch insurance plans. This
often means a switch of doctors, which means no continuity of care. Also, their
new insurance may not have the same benefits as the original. To make matters
worse, many employees are trapped in jobs they cannot leave because they cannot
afford to lose their health insurance.
Solution: Personal and Portable Health Insurance. We should move to a system in which employees can take
their health insurance with them when they travel from job to job. Transition
to a new system may take many years. A good place to start is with baby boomers
who retire early. . .
IV.
Free the Employer
Employers
are also trapped in a system designed for a different age.
Problem:
In ways that are sometimes subtle and
sometimes not so subtle, too many employers are trying to avoid hiring
employees (and employee dependents) with high health care costs, much like a
game of musical chairs.
Problem: By
default, employers have been put in the position of having to manage their
employees' health care costs — an activity for which most have no experience or
expertise. While some large employers do an adequate job, small employers are
incapable of doing it well.
Solution: Personal and Portable Insurance. Portable insurance would be a boon to employers as
well as employees. Employers could make a defined contribution to each employee's
health insurance; yet the insurance would be owned by the employees and travel
with them on their journey through the labor market. In an ideal world,
employers should be able to hire employees based solely on their ability to
produce, irrespective of expected medical costs.
Example: The
United Mine Workers, NFL football players and many other workers have better
arrangements. Although employers pay all or most of the health insurance
premiums, the health plan is largely independent of any particular employer and
coverage is fully portable — traveling with employees whenever they switch jobs.
. .
V. Free the Nontraditional Workplace
Most of our labor law, tax law and employee benefits
law was enacted years ago and was based on the assumption that employees would
be full-time workers, typically with a homemaker telecommuting. Today, one-third
of the workforce consists of part-time workers and independent contractors.
Many are telecommuting from their own homes. These changes are partly the
result of the most important economic and sociological change of the past
half-century: the movement of women into the labor market.
Problem: Two-earner
couples are common in the labor market. They need employee benefits, including
health insurance, but they don't need duplicate benefits. An employee covered
by a spouse's health plan should be able to choose higher wages rather than an
unnecessary second health plan. Yet today employers cannot give her that
option.
Problem: Many
part-time employees face the opposite problem. They would willingly take less
pay if they could be enrolled in their employer's health plan. Yet employers
generally are not allowed to give employees this option either.
Solution: Flexible Employee Benefits. Public policy should be on the side of helping people
meet their needs rather than creating bureaucratic obstacles. Employers and
employees should be free to adjust their employee benefit policies to meet the
needs of a changing workplace.
VI.
Free the Insurer
Like
doctors, patients, employees and employers, insurance companies are also
trapped in a dysfunctional system.
Problem: All
too often insurers operate under regulations that encourage them to avoid the
sick and attract the healthy. Even worse, they may face incentives to
underprovide care to the sick and overprovide to the healthy. These perverse
incentives are as bad for the insurers as they are for the patients.
Solution: A Market for the Care of Sick People. We need to encourage insurance markets in which health
plans specialize in various conditions — especially chronic illness. Plans
should compete to see who can better solve the needs of the people with the
most severe health problems. . .
VII. Free the Uninsured
One reason why there are so many uninsured in America
is that we encourage people to be uninsured.
Problem: Most
uninsured people do not have the opportunity to obtain tax-subsidized
employer-provided health insurance. As a result, if they buy insurance on their
own they must do so with aftertax dollars. In this way, the tax law discourages
private insurance. . .
VIII.
Free the Kids
Many
in Congress want to push children into a State Children's Health Insurance Plan
(S-CHIP), paid for by taxpayers. Both the children and the taxpayers would be
better off if kids were enrolled in their parent's private health insurance
plans instead.
Problem:
Studies show that every time
government spends an extra $1 on S-CHIP, private insurance contracts by 60
cents. Either families drop their private insurance in order to take advantage
of free government-provided health insurance or employers drop coverage and pay
higher cash wages instead — knowing that free health insurance is an option for
their employees. Because of a very high crowd-out rate, S-CHIP expansion is
very costly to taxpayers and produces small social benefits. To make matters
worse, children are leaving private plans where they have access to a broad
array of doctors and facilities to enroll in public plans where their access is
often no better than the access of the uninsured or Medicaid enrollees.
IX. Free the Parents
Under the current system, a child could be enrolled in
S-CHIP, a mother could be enrolled in Medicaid and a father could be enrolled
in an employer's plan. Medical outcomes are likely to be better for all three
if they are in the same health plan.
Problem: As
in the case of S-CHIP, Medicaid has a very high crowd-out rate. Public dollars
substitute for private dollars. And access to care inevitably diminishes when
people make the transition. . .
X. Free the Grandparents
More than 40 years ago our country decided to
segregate seniors into a separate health insurance system called Medicare. In
the beginning Medicare copied the standard Blue Cross plan of the day. With the
passage of time, however, Medicare lagged behind the improvements in other
insurance products.
Problem: The
basic Medicare package (Parts A & B) is distinctly inferior to the kind of
insurance most other Americans have. (It is even inferior to coverage for poor
families under Medicaid.) For example, seniors are exposed to far more
out-of-pocket risk and they do not have coverage for preventive care.
Shockingly, the basic Medicare package will pay for the amputation of diabetic's
leg, but it will not pay for drugs that would have made the amputation
unnecessary.
Problem: To
fill the gaps in their basic coverage, most seniors obtain MediGap coverage —
which means that must pay two premiums to two plans. Even then, seniors usually
do not have the coverage for drugs that most nonseniors have. So they must pay
a third premium to a third plan (Medicare Part D) to get the same total
coverage other people obtain by paying a single premium to a single plan.
Paying three premiums to three plans is wasteful. Studies show that if the
first two premiums were paid to a single, comprehensive health plan, the third
premium seniors are paying would be unnecessary. . .
Read the entire NCPA
Health Plan Proposals. . .
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA . . .
* * * * *
9. The Health Plan for
the USA: How technology reduces
health care costs.
Technology reduces health care costs, but it is not
implemented by the health care establishment.
In section 5 above on Lean Health Care,
Wayne Nelsen cites references that we're spending $3 trillion on healthcare and
wasting $2 trillion which is enough to insure everyone without spending an
additional cent.
Unfortunately this does not resonate
with members of the US Congress, the White House, the AMA, the medical
profession, or the general public. This should not be surprising anymore that
these same organizations cannot conceive of any waste in any entitlement,
whether Social [In]Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or VA Healthcare. These same
people can only think of increases in costs and in benefits—a non-sustainable
approach.
This may be the same in many
organizations. This was brought home to me when I assumed the Medical
Directorship of the Respiratory Therapy Department and Pulmonary Function
Laboratory at the now defunct American River Hospital in 1970. We received
calls from these same departments at the other five hospitals in Sacramento
inquiring what our anticipated fee increases would be for Arterial Blood Gases,
Pulmonary Function Tests, and Respiratory Therapy Treatments. There was no
awareness of the principles of Lean Medicine with increased efficiencies, which
are currently being so well highlighted by the Lean Enterprise Institute. It
was always about increase charges so that we keep up with the market. It was
never about increased efficiencies to reduce costs and charges.
To illustrate, let's use the efficiency
in ABG analysis. The first equipment I ordered was a replacement for the
Radiometer Blood Gas apparatus. It not only took a competent Pulmonary Function
Technician to operate, it also took at least a half hour of his time. Including
the collection and cleanup time, a good PFT technologist could average one
analysis an hour or eight per day. The salary of a PFT technologist at that
time was $16 an hour or $16 per ABG of labor cost. The capital cost of the
equipment was less than $1 per test. Thus the real cost of an ABG was about
$17.
With the new automated Instrument
Laboratories (IL) analyzer, which cost $16,000, there was considerable savings
in labor costs since a technologist could now do eight tests per hour. At the
above salary costs, this would be $2 per test or $2 per ABG. The capital cost
of the equipment amortized over five years increased to $360 per month.
The number of requested ABG tests went
from four per month, or revenue of $100 a month with the old equipment, to four
per day, or revenue of $100 per day or $3,000 per month with the new equipment.
Even with the new capital cost of $360 a month, doing 120 ABGs a month
increased the capital cost to $3 per test. With the labor costs having dropped
to $2 per ABG, the total cost per ABG was about $5 per test. Thus the total
cost per ABG was considerably less at $5 than the previous $17. The $25 per
ABG, which previously covered the $17 cost ($16 labor plus $1 capital cost),
would now have to cover the approximately $5 cost per ABG ($2 labor plus $3
capital costs). We proposed that this increase in efficiency be reflected in an
initial reduction in ABG charge to patients from $25 to $20 per test, which
would still bring in additional revenue of $2400 per month (120 tests a month
with the new efficiency vs four tests a month with the labor-intensive
equipment). Thus the department's profits would increase to 75% from the
previous approximate 30% despite the reduction in charge per ABG.
The critical but misunderstood
difference was the total capital cost of the equipment or $16,000. The
administration always used this as an excuse to raise charges. The immediate
change was to increase the charges from $25 a test to $50 a test. Our
calculation on the cost of a standard five-year amortization, which was the
standard at that time, was about $360 a month. At 120 ABGs per month, the
capital cost per ABG increased from $1 to $3 per test. The administration
prevailed in doubling the charges from our proposal of reducing the charge to
the patient despite the more than doubling of profit.
Needless to say, the respiratory therapy
department remained one of the major hospital profit centers. When we continued
our efforts of reducing the charge, we found that administration had already
scheduled further increases. When asked why when our profits now exceeded 90%,
we were told: We have not yet found the maximum that Blue Cross, Blue Shield,
and Medicare will pay since they kept paying the billed charges.
This thinking in the hospitals, the
largest cost center of the health care industry, will seriously impact any
Medicare and Medicaid costs in the United States. This will ultimately restrict
any attempts at true health care reform.
Recent analysis and proposal in Canada
to change from a free Medicare system to a 25% co-payment indicated a savings
of as much as 50% of Canadian Medicare costs. They predicted the entire overlay
of bureaucracy to monitor utilization would disappear since patients would
monitor their own utilization with the 25% co-payment. However, a 25%
co-payment on hospital costs cannot be implemented because a 25% co-payment on
hospital bills would not receive any political or professional or patient
support.
We have been working in our research
group on a graduated system of age-coordinated deductibles and co-payments. We
have devised a HealthPlanUSA, which will be a serious reform of health care
costs in the United States. Although we have actuarial analysis that suggested
a 40% reduction in health care costs, it is now apparent that this was a
reasonable estimate. Others have now suggested (see section five above) that as
much as two-thirds of health care costs can be eliminated if unnecessary
expenses are eliminated. The graduated deductibles and co-payments will provide
better and more efficient utilization than the entire team of reviewers located
on every hospital floor and oversight of every private office could possibly
achieve. Since most reviewers are RNs, they can easily be re-incorporated into
patient care—the profession for which they were trained. This would also solve
our nursing shortage problems.
A copy of this plan can be purchased at www.HealthPlanUSA.net/bookstore.
We invite your review of this innovative Business Health Plan.
Feedback . . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA . . .
* * * * *
10. Restoring Accountability in Medical Practice by Non Participation in
Government Programs and Understanding the Devastating Force of Government
·
Medicine and Liberty - Network of Liberty Oriented Doctors, www.MedLib.ch/, Alphonse Crespo, MD, Executive
Director and Founder
Medicine & Liberty
(MedLib) is an independent physician network founded in 2007, dedicated to the
study and advocacy of liberty, ethics & market in medical services.
- We support professional autonomy for doctors and liberty of choice for
patients
- We uphold the Hippocratic covenant
that forbids action harmful to the patient
- We defend responsible medical
practice and access to therapeutic innovation free from
bureaucratic obstruction
- We work towards a deeper
understanding of the role and importance of liberty & market in
medical services
MedLib is part of a wide movement of ideas that
defends
- the self-ownership principle &
the property rights of individuals on the products of their
physical and intellectual work
- free markets, free enterprise and
strict limits to the role of the State
·
Entrepreneur Country. Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne
Capital, has launched Entrepreneur
Country. Read their manifesto for information: 3. The bigger the State
grows, the weaker the people become - big government creates dependency . .
. 5. No real, sustainable wealth
creation through entrepreneurship ever owed its success to government . .
. 11. The triple play of the internet,
entrepreneurship, and individual capitalism is an unstoppable force around the
world, and that Individual Capitalism is the force that will shape the 21st
Century . . . Read
the entire manifest . . .
·
Americans for Tax Reform, www.atr.org/, Grover Norquist,
President, keeps us apprised of the Cost of Government Day® Report and
the countdown to the biggest tax increase in history. Cost of Government
Day (COGD) is the date of the calendar year on which the average American
worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of spending
and regulatory burdens imposed by government on the federal, state and local
levels. Cost of Government Day for 2008 was July 16th, a four-day
increase above last year's revised date of July 10th. With July 16th
as the COGD, working people must toil on average 197 days out of the year just
to meet all the costs imposed by government. In other words, the cost of
government consumes 53.9 percent of national income. If we were to put health
care into the public trough, the additional 18 percent would allow the
government to control 70 percent or nearly three-fourths of our productivity
and destroy our health care in the process. We would have almost no
discretionary income.
·
National Taxpayer's Union, www.ntu.org/main/, Duane Parde,
President, keeps us apprised of all the taxation challenges our elected
officials are trying to foist on us throughout the United States. To find the
organization in your state that's trying to keep sanity in our taxation system,
click on your state at www.ntu.org/main/groups.php.
It takes nearly 8 months of hard work for every American to pay for the cost of
government. Read
more . . .
·
Evolving Excellence—Lean Enterprise Leadership. Kevin Meyer, CEO of Superfactory, has a newsletter which
impacts health care in many aspects. Join his evolving excellence blog . . . Excellence is every physician's middle name
and thus a natural affiliation for all of us.
This month read his The Customer
is the Boss at FAVI "I came in the day after I became CEO, and
gathered the people. I told them tomorrow when you come to work, you do not
work for me or for a boss. You work for your customer. I don't pay you. They
do. . . . You do what is needed for the customer." And with that single
stroke, he eliminated the central control: personnel, product development,
purchasing…all gone. Looks like
something we should import into our hospitals. I believe every RN, given the
opportunity, could manage her ward of patients or customers in similar lean and
efficient fashion.
·
FIRM: Freedom and
Individual Rights in Medicine, www.westandfirm.org, Lin Zinser, JD,
Founder, researches and studies the work of scholars and policy experts in the
areas of health care, law, philosophy, and economics to inform and to foster
public debate on the causes and potential solutions of rising costs of health
care and health insurance.
· Ayn Rand, a Philosophy for Living on Earth, www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer, is a veritable storehouse of common sense economics to help us live on earth. To review the current series of Op-Ed articles, some of which you and I may disagree on, go to www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_opeds.
* * * * *
Words
of Wisdom
FROM
NIGHTINGALE.COM
"Every day I get up and look through the Forbes
list of the richest people in America.
If I'm not there, I go to work."
— Robert Orben: Is a magician and comedy writer
"Nurture great thoughts, for you will never go
higher than your thoughts."
— Benjamin Disraeli: Was a British prime minister,
parliamentarian, and author
"By giving people the power to share, we're
making the world more transparent."
— Mark Zuckerberg: Entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook
Some
Recent Postings
Go to the recent
HPUSA newsletters found at www.healthplanusa.net/archives.asp.
Go to the recent
MedicalTuesday newsletters found at www.medicaltuesday.net/archives.asp.
This
Month in History - October
www.historyplace.com/specials/calendar/october.htm
Thank you for
joining the HealthPlanUSA network of 80,000 professionals that receive our
newsletter and visit our websites. To assure uninterrupted delivery, go to www.healthplanusa.net/newsletter.asp
and enter your email address. Stay tuned for the latest innovating thinking in
HealthCare and have your friends do the same.
Articles that appear in HPUSA may not
reflect the opinion of the editorial staff. Several sections are entirely
attributable quotes in the interest of the health care debate. We trust our
valuable and faithful readers understand the need to open the debate to
alternate points of view to give perspective to the freedom in healthcare issues.
We have requested permission and many of the sites have given us standing
permission to quote extensively from their sites and refer our readers back to
their site. Editorial comments are in brackets.
PLEASE NOTE: HealthPlanUSA receives no
government, foundation, or tax favored funds. The entire cost of the website
URLs, website posting, distribution, managing editor, email editor, and the
research and writing is solely paid for and donated by the Founding Editor (and
Friends of Freedom), while continuing his Pulmonary Practice, as a service to
his patients, his profession, and in the public interest for his country.
Contributions are welcomed but are not tax deductible since we ask for no
federal tax favors. Please see your tax advisers to see if contributions may be
a business deduction for you.
Spammator Note:
HealthPlanUSA uses many standard medical terms considered forbidden by many
spammators. We are not always able to avoid appropriate medical terminology in
the abbreviated edition sent by e-newsletter. (The Web Edition is always
complete.) As readers use new spammators with an increasing rejection rate, we
are not always able to navigate around these palace guards. If you miss some
editions of HealthPlanUSA, you may want to check your spammator settings and
make appropriate adjustments. To assure uninterrupted delivery, subscribe
directly from the website: www.HealthPlanUSA.net/newsletter.asp.
Del
Meyer
Del Meyer, MD, CEO & Founder
DelMeyer@HealthPlanUSA.net
Satyam A Patel, MBA, CFO, & Co-Founder
SatyamPatel@HealthPlanUSA.net
HealthPlanUSA,
LLC
www.HealthPlanUSA.net
6945 Fair Oaks Blvd, Ste A-2, Carmichael, CA 95608
Always remember that Chancellor
Otto von Bismarck, the father of socialized medicine in Germany, recognized
in 1861 that a government gained loyalty by making its citizens
dependent on the state by social insurance. Thus socialized medicine, or any
single payer initiative, was born for the benefit of the state and of a
contemptuous disregard for people's welfare.