Category Archives: morality

Four Pillars of a Health Care System?

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The Wall Street Journal posited this in a Wednesday op-ed.

1. Provide a path to catastrophic health insurance for all Americans.

The WSJ then supports this with old saws: being covered generally leads to better medical results, health insurance is good for the wallet, and so on.  Then they want a government solution—while they carefully avoid saying how they would pay for it:

The ObamaCare replacement should make it possible for all people to get health insurance that provides coverage for basic prevention, like vaccines, and expensive medical care that exceeds, perhaps, $5,000 for individuals.

Those Americans who don’t get health insurance through employers, or Medicare and Medicaid, should be eligible for a refundable tax credit….

They don’t even say why catastrophic health insurance should be particularly targeted by Government.  They ignore an actual market solution for this: free market competition, accompanied with lower tax rates (which leave more money in people’s pockets), and no annual or income caps or requirements for high deductible insurance plans (and no requirement for any insurance plan at all) on Health Savings Accounts.  Folks are fully capable of making their own decisions about the structure of their health insurance plans without the Know Betters of Government holding them by the hand.  And insurance companies, in a fully competitive environment, are fully capable of developing and delivering the products actual customers want without Government mandates.  If that includes catastrophic insurance plans, those will appear.

2. Accommodate people with pre-existing health conditions.

See above regarding free markets.  Of course such coverage would come at a higher cost than other sorts of health coverages; the risk being transferred to the insurer is higher.  But even this risk is not certain.  Folks who’ve had a heart attack (or more than one), for instance, have a preexisting condition (unless a single heart attack has occurred sufficiently far in the past that a medical doctor (the patient’s, not the insurer’s or a Government hireling) says it’s a one-off and not preexisting), but not everyone who’s had heart attacks will have their next one simultaneously.  Even a preexisting condition can be amortized across time given a free market that allows pooling of [those who’ve had heart attacks] so that premiums can be adjusted to match the actual payout requirements, the actual risk—just like “ordinary” insurance plans.

So as long as someone remains insured, he should be allowed to move from employer coverage to the individual market without facing exclusions or higher premiums based on his health status.

This conflates two separate questions.  The preexisting question is addressed just above.  The mobility of an insuree (or someone who’d like to buy a health insurance plan) is separate: and yes, in a free market environment, an insuree would be able to take the plan he’s purchased, whether originally obtained through his employer (unless it was the employer who actually did the purchase and the premium payments) or bought on the individual market, with him wherever he went or to whatever job he moved.  The latter case, too, would reduce or eliminate the need for the new employer to offer health insurance coverage through his benefits program.

3. Allow broad access to health-savings accounts.

There should be a one-time federal tax credit to encourage all Americans to open an HSA and begin using it to pay for routine medical bills. And HSAs combined with high-deductible insurance should be incorporated directly into the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Another Government solution—again carefully unpaid for—and it’s much too timid.  I addressed HSAs and their market availability above.

4. Deregulate the market for medical services.

This is the only move necessary.  It’s the move to enable the free market solution.

Full stop.

The Diversity Officer Doesn’t Understand

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Recall the Somali student at Ohio State University who attacked so many of his fellow students because he blamed the US for anti-Muslim fervor in Burma and who “wanted to kill a billion infidels.”

Stephanie Clemons Thompson, Ohio State University’s Assistant Director of Residence Life, put this up on Facebook, according to Debra Heine of PJMedia:diversityofficercompassionHeine has already addressed the pain of his fellow students whom he attacked and other of his fellow students, pain which Thompson has chosen to ignore.  I’ll just note that Thompson plainly does not understand family, community, association.

Artan removed himself—no one removed him—through his own criminal acts from his earlier status as a Buckeye, from his membership in the OSU family, from his membership in the community of the United States.  He created himself an outlaw.  Thompson should review her Locke, which she surely read in her own freshman General Studies coursework.

Oh, and Thompson appears to have taken down her Facebook post.  Apparently she doesn’t even have the courage of her own conviction.

Nonsense

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The Left never seems to run out of it.  This time their foolishness runs to their disapproval of the No Shave November campaign for calling attention to male health questions ranging from prostate cancer to men’s suicide rates.  They object because…well, just because.

Next they’ll be claiming that focusing on men’s health is heteronormative male chauvinism and exclusionary.

Oh, wait—they already are.  Seb Starcevic, of the Sydney Daily Telegraph:

It’s disappointing that what could’ve served as a much-needed dialogue about the many ways in which men, trans men included, can express their masculinity without resorting to chauvinist caricatures is in danger of devolving into at best a pissing contest between bros about who can grow the most facial hair to prove their manliness and at worst an implicit endorsement of 1950s-style gender norms, complete with transphobia.

And Jacob Brogan and Christina Cauterucci in Slate:

Above all else, Movember [No Shave November—yeah, I know] irritates me because it’s not so much about cancer awareness as it is about masculinity awareness. It starts from the assumption that men are somehow uniquely imperiled—threatened by all these horrible diseases….

Of course, there’s nothing at all unique about prostate cancer—women, too, are starting to be victimized by an epidemic of it….

Nah.  Charity, support for less fortunate, cannot be done in any way but that in which these Precious Ones personally approve.

All they’re capable of thinking about is themselves.

I Disagree, Mildly

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…with Walter Russell Mead, who wrote of Fidel Castro’s death in American Interest.

In some ways, Fidel has to be accounted a success.  …  He wanted to assert Cuban independence of the United States; Cuba not only sided with the USSR in the Cold War, but it intervened against US interests in wars in Angola, Ethiopia and the Middle East.

That’s not independence, though.  Castro tied Cuba irrevocably to the US by basing his actions on their relation to the US’ activities, as those examples illustrate.  Indeed, by being a “symbol of resistance to US power and to capitalist order,” he cemented Cuba’s dependency: he did not create Cuba as a symbol of anything related to Cuban independent behavior—a Cuban model of socialism, for instance, or a Cuban font of socialist revolution support, as Che Guevara made himself (not his own movement) into.

On the contrary, Castro demonstrated his long-term failure, as Mead showed in the rest of his article.  Castro’s only success was in his ability to impose and then maintain his rank and rancorous dictatorship for as long as he did.  And even in this he had American aid at critical moments, from Jack Kennedy’s waffling over invading Cuba during a nascent Castro…administration…to Barack Obama’s open support for the Castro regime in the latter stages of both administrations.

Racism and Sexism in a Teachers Union

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San Francisco’s public schools have been offered a classroom lesson plan that calls President-elect Donald Trump a racist, sexist man who became president “by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base.”

The union that represents city teachers posted the plan on its website and distributed it via an email newsletter to its more than 6,000 members. The school district has more than 57,000 students.

This is what the United Educators of San Francisco has done.

Union President Lita Blanc said that even House Speaker Paul Ryan had called Trump’s campaign racist and sexist.

This is plainly false and another carefully manufactured union slur.  Ryan did indeed denounce certain of Trump’s remarks as racist and sexist.  But Ryan denounced those remarks; he did not denounce the entire campaign.  Blanc knows this.

It’s not just racism and sexism, it’s hypocritical racism and sexism to manufacture charges of racism and sexism out of the æther, and it’s especially so when the manufacturers do so knowing full well there is no racism or sexism present.