In any competition, there's nothing worse than having your own allies make unforced errors (or "own goals", in soccer-speak). So, President Obama's faction must be getting pretty frustrated with some recent New York Times articles.
Today, readers learned how ineffective Medicare is at covering patients needing kidney dialysis or transplant (over which it has exercised a monopoly since 1972.) Medicare stops paying for drugs that prevent the body's immune system from rejecting the transplant after three years. The article suggests that employer-based group-health insurance pays for the drug as long as the patient needs them. Unfortunately, for very sick patients who can't hold down a job, loss of employment results in an automatic sentence to Medicare's limited benefits. Read more
Here are some highlights from the new Washington Post/ABC News poll released today. This poll is generally among the most liberal-leaning, and yet there would still be plenty to be concerned about if one were a swing-state Democratic senator flirting with voting for Obamacare.
According to the poll, not only do more people disapprove, rather than approve, of the way President Obama is handling health care and the federal deficit, but more than 40 percent strongly disapprove of his performance on these issues (41 and 43 percent, respectively, compared to only 28 and 19 percent who strongly approve). Read more
California has already received more than $5 billion in federal education bailout funds, compliments of the American taxpayer. Another $2 billion is on its way this fall. Last month during a visit to San Francisco, Education Secretary Arne Duncan asked whether California was going to lead the way or retreat in K-12 education reform. Duncan was referring to the $4.35 billion in "Race to the Top" state incentive funding for groundbreaking reforms, including data collection about teacher performance and preparation. Read more
Monday's Fox News Pundit Pit asked three child prodigies, "Should the U.S. expand the school year since other places around the globe go a lot longer?" Jonathan Krohn, who's 14, says there's no guarantee that "if you lengthen the school day everything is going to change, and we are going to perform better." Go to the head of the class, Jonathan Read more
Today's news of the overreaching federal state brings reports of antitrust action by the US Department of Justice against Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan. The purported violation? As Michigan's largest health plan, BCBS was able to persuade hospitals not to charge lower fees to any other carrier. According to the story, other health plans paid hospitals 25 percent more than BCBS. Read more
Full disclosure (in the spirit of James C. Capretta): I don't do consulting work for private health insurers, and I doubt they'd have me. I share Benjamin Zycher's frustration with the various corporate interests, including AHIP (the health-insurers' trade association), which have managed to get the enemy (government) "exactly where they want us," with their eager appeasement of the ruling faction. Read more
As 60 Minutes reported last week, Medicare fraud is rampant and has now replaced the cocaine (ahem) business as the major criminal activity in South Florida. Both 60 Minutes and the Washington Postreport that Medicare fraud now costs American taxpayers roughly $60 billion a year. That may sound like a lot of money, but surely it pales next to the extraordinary profits of private insurance companies, right? Read more
Just weeks ago, Stanford University released the most comprehensive review to date of California’s public education system, written at the bi-partisan request of legislative majority leadership, Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, and the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence. Think critics have the decency to let the ink dry before stonewalling reform recommendations? Think again.
During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope was often mentioned. A year after his election to the presidency, Obama continues to push on his number-one domestic-policy issue — affordable, accessible, high-quality health care for all Americans. Under his vision of achieving universal coverage while reducing health-care costs, he touts a plan that he says would cost about $900 billion over 10 years and be deficit-neutral. His goal — a bill on his desk by the end of this year. Read more
While senators' families undertake their Christmas preparations without them, Sen. Harry Reid and President Obama continue to celebrate this festive season by pushing the Senate to give the American people the "gift" of Obamacare for Christmas. Fruitcakes and lumps of coal have never sounded so good. Read more
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC is bizarre at best: whatever one's views of their work and their cause, it is difficult in the extreme to make the case that they have somehow advanced peace per se. (Much more appropriate would have been the underrecognized John Garang.) This isn't the first time the Nobel committee has gone off the rails, of course -- remember the endorsement of anticapitalist greenie Wangari Muta Maathai? -- but it does lend credence to the idea that the award is now merely a tactical expression of political sympathies, rather than a meaningful honor for men of peace. Read more
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