Science, Technology & Health: July 2009 Archives
The fundamental deception underlying the President's health care reform pitch is that health care should be getting cheaper even as it continues to get better.
He never detailed his own plan or named a single victim of America’s broken system, and he spoke largely in the abstractions of blue pills, red pills and legislative processes. It’s not easy to turn delivery system reform into a rallying cry for change, but at times, it was as if Obama wasn’t even trying. ...He added in a puzzling abstraction about cost containment: “If there’s a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?” he asked.
Americans have grown used to products that get better and cheaper at the same time, largely because of the infusion of electronics and computers into many of the industries that touch our lives. However, labor-intensive products like automobiles and health care have gotten significantly better over the past decades without getting cheaper -- or even increasing in price. These industries have benefited from information technology, but because of their heavy dependency on labor they haven't gotten cheaper as they've gotten better.
If there were many inefficiencies to be wrung from the system, why wouldn't health insurance companies do it? The health insurance industry has a profit margin of around 3% which is about average for other industries as well. They aren't rolling in dough with no need to scrape up more. Profits are modest, and if they could be increased by simple gains of efficiency it would already be happening. There's no reason to think that the government will be able to find these mythical efficiency gains if the industry can't.
The fact is that the only way to reduce health care costs is to reduce health care quality. The idea that you can cover more people at the same level of quality for less money is absurd and betrays an ignorance of basic economics.
President Obama has delayed releasing budget and economic updates for more than a month in an effort to prevent the total evaporation of support for government takeover of the health care industry.
The White House is being forced to acknowledge the wide gap between its once-upbeat predictions about the economy and today's bleak landscape.The administration's annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack Obama's budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through Congress.
The release of the update - usually scheduled for mid-July - has been put off until the middle of next month, giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town on its August 7 summer recess.
The administration is pressing for votes before then on its $1 trillion health care initiative, which lawmakers are arguing over how to finance.
I'm sure independent voters will love this sleight-of-hand.
(HT: Gateway Pundit.)
This is too good to be true: zombie robots powered by dead bodies.
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.
That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.
Awesome. Let's give them weapons and an instinct for self-preservation.
(HT: RB.)
This is a few days old but it's still worth noting: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Democrat) admits that no one would vote for ObamaCare if they had to read the bill first.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
If a bill is too long and complex for our elected representatives to read and understand it, that's a good indication that the bill should not become a law. If the people creating the laws can't be bothered to read and comprehend them, how can the rest of us? It's their full-time job to do this Congress thing.
(HT: Hot Air.)
