Tag Archives: morality

Obamacare and Choice

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There are 3,142 counties and equivalents (Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs, three States each have an independent city, Virginia has 38 of them, and State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations does things entirely differently) in the US.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expects that 40 of those counties will have no health care coverage plan providers at all in 2018, and 1,332 of those counties—over 40% of them—will have only one such provider.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but this is not choice.  This also drives home the lie of “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor; if you like your insurance plan, you can keep your insurance plan.”

Obamacare’s implosion is in full swing, it’s happening rapidly, and Republicans are fiddling.  They can bleat that it’s all Progressive-Democrats’ fault, that the Progressive-Democratic Party owns Obamacare to their heart’s content.  It’s irrelevant.  The Republican Party has been running on repeal and replace for the last four election cycles, and they now have majorities in both houses of Congress, and they have the White House.  The Republicans own repeal and replace—and they own the failure to make even the first syllable of progress toward that worthy end.

Timid Republicans need to find their courage and get on with the business.  Along these lines, others who demand that it all be done at once—both right damn now and in a single bill—need to recall the lessons of Obamacare as a single, all-at-once, almost right damn now bill, and they need to keep in mind political realities: Republicans in the Senate don’t have the filibuster-proof majority the Progressive-Democrats had for most of the time they were putting together their bill.

Repeal and replace can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t happen in a single bill.  It’ll need to occur as a series of bills, although those bills need to be passed in quick succession as politics go: over the course of a couple of Congressional sessions, or at most over two Congresses.

Senators Susan Collins (R, ME) and John McCain (R, AZ) are desperate to return to “regular order,” to negotiate with Progressive-Democrats and to hold hearings.  Fine.  Do that.  Those hearings need not take longer than a couple of weeks—especially if the Senate (read: Republicans) get rid of the ridiculous 2-hour per day limit on hearings—and the negotiations can be done similarly quickly, particularly since the Progressive-Democrats have shown they won’t seriously negotiate.

But get after it.  Republicans need to stop dithering, stop playing with their…fiddles…and get on with the business.  They have their own choice to make regarding their place in Government and in the nation.

YGTBSM

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Yet again.  This one is from Watts Up With That.

A bloke bought a sheep property of half a million acres in western Queensland for $2.0 million. Instead of running sheep on it, he now gets $350,000 per annum under the federal government’s Direct Action scheme for not using the grass on his property. The idea being that the grass locks up carbon and reduces Australia’s carbon emissions. A neighbouring property gets $600,000 per annum.

I have no idea what the second guy paid for his property, but the first guy will have recouped his investment in three years of doing nothing.  I’m torn between the waste of taxpayer money and wishing I could beat feet to Australia so I could get in on this kind of deal.

What Do Teachers Unions and the NAACP Have Against Poor Children?

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Richard Whitmire, a contributor to The 74, offered some information that might bear on the question in his piece in The Wall Street Journal.  The National Education Association and the NAACP both oppose charter schools, the one because they don’t use union teachers and the other because they attract poor kids to charters and away from inner city public schools in which the NAACP is so politically invested.  In other words, because as Whitmire put it, charters upset the comfortable status quo of these adults.

Now some hard data via Whitmire’s piece; these are in addition to the rising test scores that charter school students are achieving (especially compared to comparable schools—which is to say public schools in poor districts).

Graduates from the top charter networks—those with enough high school alumni to measure college success accurately—earn four-year degrees at rates that range up to five times as high as their counterparts in traditional public schools.

Those traditional counterparts are low-income, minority students in public school systems in cities like Eric Garcetti’s United Teachers Los Angeles-run LA and Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Teachers Union-run city, cities where the NAACP also is highly influential.

There’s this datum, too:

Roughly half the graduates of Uncommon, YES Prep and the KIPP New York schools…earn bachelor’s degrees within six years. About a quarter of the graduates of the lower-performing charter networks earn degrees within six years.

This compares with 9% of “graduates” of low-income public schools.

One more: charters help their graduates succeed in college with active advice on course to take, how to manage the credit amounts within and across semesters, even such things as how to perform while being the only minority student, or one of a very few, in what used to be an all-white class.  Those public schools just shove their students out onto the street.

Actually, the teachers unions and the NAACP don’t have anything in particular against these charter children of low-income families.  The kids are just tools to be used for the benefit of union leadership and NAACP virtue signaling.

The Betrayal of Lisa Murkowski

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Lisa Murkowki is a Republican Senator from Alaska who voted against even opening debate on repeal and replace of Obamacare.

Murkowski has betrayed her constituents.  She betrayed them this week by trying to block debate on repeal and replace.  Or, she betrayed her constituents when she lied to them in 2015 with her vote in favor of repeal in the full knowledge that her vote didn’t matter because then-President Barack Obama (D) would veto the matter.

It’s Murder

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That’s what one of the signs held by a protestor says in the lead image of the Wall Street Journal piece on the soon-to-be-fatal plight of baby Charlie Gard.  The baby suffers from a rare mitochondrial disorder that usually is fatal.  The baby’s doctors insisted this case can only be fatal, and a British court (and a European Union court!  Is there any stronger argument for the Brits taking themselves out of the EU?)—because in Great Britain Government gets the final word on babies, not parents—agreed and agreed with the doctors’ further demand that baby Charlie be taken off life support to die.

But.

An American doctor has treated babies with this mitochondrial disease, and he has had some success with his treatment.  He indicated he had a 10% chance of helping Charlie.

However.

Charlie Gard’s parents’ legal fight to keep him on a ventilator and take him abroad for experimental therapy, against the opinion of his doctors, ended Monday when they dropped the case, saying his muscular damage was worse than feared and the treatment wouldn’t help.

Charlie’s parents struggled for months (months!) to get their baby out of gaol so they could take him somewhere to get treatment, however long-shot.  Now the doctors claiming to treat him and the court that said “No further effort to treat is allowed” must explain the impact those months of interference and delay had on baby Charlie’s chances.

This is what Brits can look forward to, now that their government and its death panels have asserted their absolute control over the fate of British children.  The sign isn’t far wrong.