Health care reform: as Maine goes…
…so goes the nation?
Maine and Massachusetts are two of the most liberal states in New England—indeed, in the case of Massachusetts, in the nation. I’ve written before about the difficulties Massachusetts has faced (and been unable to solve) in its efforts at health care reform, and Maine is another case in point.
Maine has been trying its hand at health care reform for quite some time, and so far its attempts have culminated largely in failure. That doesn’t stop both sides of the political spectrum from attempting to use Maine’s experience as an argument for the implementation of their own policies on the national level:
Maine’s history is a cautionary tale for national health reform. The state could never figure out how to slow the spiraling increase in medical costs, hobbling its efforts to offer more people insurance coverage. Many on Capitol Hill have criticized national reform legislation for similarly doing little to tame costs.
To [Senator Olympia] Snowe, Maine’s past shows that change, while needed, should be incremental because mistakes are common. This is among the reasons she opposes an immediate public insurance option. “I mentioned to the president that people can’t digest everything at once,” she said in an interview.
To conservatives, Maine proves that government efforts to strictly regulate the nation’s health insurance market are doomed. Many of the reform proposals circulating on Capitol Hill have already been tried in Maine.
“These reforms are very well-intentioned, but in reality they have yet to produce the promised results or even be financially sustainable,” said Tarren R. Bragdon, chief executive of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, a conservative research organization in Portland.
To others, Maine’s failures show why some reforms can be tackled only on a national level. Maine has the nation’s oldest population, its poor are among the sickest, and its median income ranks low.
Read the whole article to get the details. But the gist of it is that Maine lacks the money to accomplish its goals, and liberals are looking to shift the state’s problems to the federal level in hopes that they can be solved, despite the fact that nothing indicates that this is fiscally possible in our straitened times.
Mainers see their state as poor, and it is. But the article leaves out the main reason why the state is so poor and the population so old: high taxes that discourage industry and force young people to leave if they want to make a decent living. The Obama administration and the 2008 Congress seem determined to repeat the first problem on the national level, as well as adding a few more besides.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s some common sense from Senate Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Seems as though trouble might be brewing for Reid in the Senate.]
To Hell with the Constitution?
the federal government has no authority to operate a health care system. Indeed, the 9th and 10th Amendments forbid it
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
In The Wall Street Journal, Judge Andrew Napolitano writes that Congress has been getting around such constitutional bans by invoking its Commerce Clause, “the favorite hook on which Congress hangs its hat in order to justify the regulation of anything it wants to control.” Perhaps the most outrageous abuse of this tiny clause is the case of Wickard v. Filburn (1942), where the Supreme Court cited the Commerce Clause in denying a man the right to cultivate his own land for the purpose of feeding his family.
Judge Napolitano deems ObamaCare “unconstitutional at its core”.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/to_hell_with_the_constitution.html
Do note the general welfare clause has NOTHING to do with what they are now claiming it means… in fact the person who wrote it wrote that it didnt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (so anyone claiming this is showing their bonafides as either liars, revisionists, or just plain old ignorant).
of course this is what they are going to lead it to.
Soviets perfect ‘assembly line’ surgery
news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1356&dat=19900529&id=n8MTAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HwcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1050,2128793
he has built a 75 million a year business empire based on assembly line surgery.
fyodoroves 5000 employees treate about 250,000 patients a year… including 6000 foreigners.
his doctors and nurses are part owners, they are well paid by soviet standards and share teh clinics income receiving a bonus for each successful operation
a surgeons pay varies with ehe number of successful ioperations a year, but the average is 20,000 dollars.
take some time to read the article and THINK..
they claim 5000 employees, treate 250,000 a year.
that would be 50 a year for each of them.
the us would need over 6 million surgeons..
and it would put the bounty for each good surgery at about 400 us.
anyone who does a bit of calcluations and such with factual informatino will see that its abysmal.
well.. that was 1990… the ny slimes in 85 also ran the idea. (same doctor pushing it) that was about the time when obama and the other new leftists entered college..
MOSCOW EYE DOCTOR HAILS ASSEMBLY-LINE SURGERY AT CLINIC
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/02/science/moscow-eye-doctor-hails-assembly-line-surgery-at-clinic.html
[anyone care to notice how we are more like cattle than people?]
the doctor died… and goes by many first names.
and if you dont think that this is in their minds..
then read about him at NPR
Dr. Slava Fyodorov’s ‘Beautiful Eyes’
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6249164
and newsweek.. in 2006
http://www.newsweek.com/id/45115
Medical Meccas: Eye-Surgery Assembly Line
The Fyodorov clinics in Russia have maintained their world-class reputation for quality.
i would gather the same way that Cuba does.
here is popular mechanics 1989…
tinyurl.com/ygha8yv….
chealth.canoe.ca/channel_health_news_details.asp?news_id=19728&channel_id=8
so there ARE ideas of what will happen later.
they have been talking since the AMA was against them during FDR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
do a search on Shouldice hospital case study, and you will find that they have been discusing this stuff for decades (out of the ears of reasonable people, so that when this comes up, people like me who read them before, would seem like we are nutty as the reasonable havent paid attention for 30 years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
here is a power point… so you know that they are selling it!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ihome.cuhk.edu.hk/~b103313/dse%207100/shouldiceHospital.ppt#282,4,How Successful is Shouldice Hospital?
anyone want to dig more to find underneath the wall of shining papers by the left the other information?
my favorite is the figure of probability of recurrance!!! they say others have a 10% rate… and their rate is BELOW 1%…
anyone believe that?
ya got to love the page on what they offer their customers… hernia surgery (the shouldice method. ie assembly line). peace of mind, low risk, low recurrence, independence/dignity and control (how?), social experience/fraternity (use of code words come socialists… you’re not here for a hernia, your here ot make friends!), and i like this one for the left liberals.
excused absence from work without guilt, and A vocation… (really?)
even NEJM is on it…
wait… wait… there is TONS more… over 80 years of thousands writing essays, papers, swots, surveys, etc..
you all got used to the noise years ago and dont bother to remember or care…
the day you read the papers that explain why its good to lie, cheat and make change any way that will work, as there is no right and wrong… and the person writing it helped murder 60 million people by slow death of work… well you MIGHT be inclined to perk up your ears when our country is adopting all the same (equality) bad ideas of the totalitarian socialists…
but thats ok… i will be reasonable…
this history never happened…
these facts dont exist..
i never read them…
now i am just like the most reasonable here, and will make up some stuff so i can be equally a part of an empty conversation.
whew… that sure took a load off.
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
“… liberals are looking to shift the state’s problems to the federal level…”
Ho, hum, a bit more redunduncy here about the topic of stealing from Peter to pay Paul; indeed, “after a while you run out of other people’s money…”
“… liberals are looking to shift the state’s problems to the federal level in hopes that they can be solved…”
This is exactly the problem: liberals think that shifting a cost onto someone else is a solution. It’s the economic equivalent of proposing to use batteries as an energy source.
Part of the way out of this mess is to see health insurance as coverage for major illness or trauma. That is what people fear most. Automobile insurance does not cover oil changes, tires, wiper blades, or front end alignments. People are responsible to maintain their cars. They should also be responsible for basic health care like office visits and shots. Thus, if health insurance were for major problems with high deductibles, it would be affordable. That would be especially true with a national market and tort reform. Government requirements that insurance cover every possible problem make insurance to expensive for many.
More ho, hum…
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/11/dems-turned-away-11-votes-that-would-require-congress-to-enroll-in-pelosicare/
Go Ben Nelson!! What a guy.
“High taxes that discourage industry and force young people to leave” is the shoe that fits all urban economies run by the Left. “Young” as in young families. San Fran is an example: the wealthy, the professional beggars aka homeless, but a crashing birth rate, much of the economy dependent on tourism as a source of exogenous financing.
Tom: “San Fran is an example [of lousy urban economies run by the left]: the wealthy, the professional beggars aka homeless, but a crashing birth rate, much of the economy dependent on tourism as a source of exogenous financing.”
I totally agree. I live very close to “The City” (everbody kowtow to the great San Francisco) and I will never spend another dime in that filthy, overcrowded, claustrophobic, urine-soaked city/county.
What did it for me was the photograph taken after the 2004 election of a young San Franciscan (who obviously had voted for that blithering doofus Kerry–tell me again, who are the rubes?) holding up a sign that said “F— Middle America.”
When family or friends from back east come to visit, I make it clear to them that they will have to find some other stooge to take them around that horrible place. If it’s tourism that San Francisco is relying on, they might want to quit insulting half their potential customers. Of course, nobody else does, so why should they?
Hmmm. There’s more than one reason for SF’s crashing birth rate.
Anyone else get the feeling that the Dims have passed the point of giving a damn what the citizens think about anything? They figure if they can get a Marxist clown like Obama elected, they don’t have to give two hoots in hell what the patriots think about anything. At all. Ever.
And they show it by their astounding behavior. They really are counting on the big media to continue to be their propaganda machine to shut out all dissent and to create the storyline.
I like how the democrat in the article called the deaniacks a special interest group.
It’s been a big big problem for conservatives with how to label the left. The left controls the mass media and has pushed the meme that financial self interest (re: who benefits) is the only way to gauge ulterior motives… which conveniently doesn’t account for their ideologically motivated ulterior motives (why would they lie about wanting to nationalize healthcare, they just want a public option to lower prices… blaw blaw blaw.. [i]what do they get out of it???[/i])…
Anyway, just calling them another ‘special interest’ sorta works… and doesn’t fight upstream their own narrative (which is now well established in the general population)… it just dovetails with it…
Double whammy. The western border of Maine also relies on NH hospitals from Portsmouth to Berlin. As with all hospitals nationwide, some of this is care that has to be written off. So even with that extra advantage, Maine can’t afford it.
OB, that batteries image is indeed a good one. But with state economies, folks seem to be perennially convinced that there are lots of rich people “out there” who will pick up the tab if we go federal. Class warfare rhetoric persists because it perpetuates a myth necessary to garner Democratic votes. Some of the politicians even believe it, but that’s optional when it comes to campaigning.
Neo, Sorry off topic.
http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/2009/11/12/lionel-mcintyre-assaults-woman-english-language/
It stucky me about the active and passive voice also….
Thanks for another good post.
Let me extend your arguments just a bit.
Statewide Health Care reform has also been tried (TennCare) in a conservative southern state – Tennessee – which voted for McCain over Obama by 15% if I remember correctly.
It failed as well for most of the same reasons.