When I lived in England, those who could afford to escape from government medicine by paying twice did so.  I addition to their high taxes, they bought a private insurance that I remember rejoiced in the name BUPA.  Things haven’t changed.  I don’t know why I’m on the mailing list, but I just got this announcement in today’s email:

NHS Waiting Lists Soar by 50% in the Last Year !!

Can you afford to be without Health Insurance ??

With the NHS waiting lists out of control, it’s no surprise millions of UK residents are protecting themselves with medical cover.

Premiums have dropped dramatically in recent years and are now at an all time low due to increased competition.

There are more providers and more plans available which has had an impact on price. Providers also offer more flexible underwriting terms which means helps people switch even if they have pre-existing conditions.

For many people, medical insurance may seem like a luxury that they just cannot afford to have. The reality is that medical insurance is a necessity that they cannot afford to live without.

Whether you have still not yet taken out Medical Cover, or wish to review an old one – let us do the hard work for you and compare the leading providers for you.

If you don’t have Health Insurance Click here

If you are about to renew Click here

We’re actually all familiar with this situation. Everyone pays for public schools. Thanks to unions, though, even the best public schools indoctrinate as much as they teach. The worst public schools are dangerous slums where children learn basic survival skills. Parents who want out, in addition to paying high taxes, also end up paying tuition for private schools. Poor parents, of course, are trapped, and beg for vouchers, which their elite Democrat masters deny them. (And yet they still vote Democrat. Go figure.)

Socialized anything is low-quality, crowded anything. Only the rich, who can afford to double pay, escape.

Because our government isn’t yet doing enough, or costing enough, or interfering sufficiently in our lives, three researchers at the University of California San Francisco now recommend that the government should regulate sugar, just as it does alcohol and tobacco:

A new commentary published online in the Feb. 1 issue of Nature says sugar is just as “toxic” for people as the other two, so the government should step in to curb its consumption.

The United Nations announced in September that chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes contribute to 35 million deaths worldwide each year, according to the commentary. The U.N. pegged tobacco, alcohol, and diet as big risk factors that contributed to this death rate.

Two of those are regulated by governments, “leaving one of the primary culprits behind this worldwide health crisis unchecked,” the authors, Robert H. Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt and Claire D. Brindis, argued.

I’m struggling here to say something snarky and clever, but I just can’t.  You see, I have this sneaking suspicion that, if Obama gets another four years in the White House, we’ll see a Department of Sugar Regulation, complete with punitive taxes on its purchase, minimum age requirements, rationing to ensure that people don’t eat too much and, quite possibly, rules requiring that sugar and sugar products be kept in special locked areas in stores in order to prevent theft and underage use.

Incidentally, does it strike you as coincidental that this study got published two weeks before Valentine’s Day?  Yeah, I don’t think it’s a coincidence either.  Considering that Communist and Muslim cultures consider Valentine’s Day evil both because of its Christian origin and because of the fact that it triggers an orgy of spending (how capitalist!), it is “holiday non grata” in those totalitarian societies.  It seems as if the food police want to see the same thing happen here.

I am envisioning some sort of bumper sticker, though.  You know, something along the lines of “Protect Valentine’s Day.  Vote Republican in 2012.”

Alec Baldwin has undergone an amazing transformation in the last few months.  This is Baldwin at peak pudgy:

And this is Alec Baldwin today:

What’s even more impressive than this transformation is Baldwin’s claim that he dropped all the weight in four months, primarily by leaving sugar out of his diet:

Baldwin, who’s dating yoga instructor Hilaria Thomas, tells “Access Hollywood,” “I gave up sugar. I lost 30 pounds in four months. It’s amazing.

“(I do) Pilates, spin, not as much yoga as I’d like. When we’re shooting (‘30 Rock’) it’s tough… When we’re shooting and I can’t work out, I just have to eat less. So, I’m very conscious of that. But sugar was the real killer for me – that was the problem.”

In one of those frequent coincidences I so often see in the internet world, within minutes after reading about Baldwin’s weight loss, I returned to an email thread in a conservative group to which I belong.  The thread had made a fascinating journey, traveling from poor grammar (specifically, the loss of the declaratory in favor of the interrogative), to the feminization of speech, and then to chemicals in food that may affect boys’ hormonal development.  The last email in the thread, the one that arrived immediately after I read about Alec’s “I gave up sugar” statement, was about the dangers of sugar generally and, more specifically, high fructose corn syrup.  The author of the email made his argument against sugar compelling by including pictures that precisely echo Baldwin’s photos:  he went from middle-aged plump to trim and muscular, not through surgery and time travel, but through sugar control and exercise.

My friend linked to Peter Attia’s War on Insulin site, and said that it changed his world.  I have to admit to being intrigued.  Last year, I gave up flour (which transforms into sugar in the body) and felt better, although I lost at most three pounds.  By the end of the year, though, I’d slipped back into my old ways.  The War on Insulin approach, however, is better rounded than just giving up foods, and that may be what I need.  It’s not even so much about the weight gain, although I’d be happy to drop the last baby fat (13 years after the baby was born).  It’s also about feeling better.  I feel draggy, and draggy people don’t get black belts.

Aside from finding the whole thing very intriguing, I thought it was incredibly funny that, in a country that is currently experiencing a very deep, rancorous political divide, one that splits it pretty much straight down the middle numerically, two people from opposite ends of the spectrum (my conservative friend and the liberal Alec Baldwin) can find common ground in the world of low-glycemic diets.

Back in the 40s or 50s, Esquire Magazine, when it was still a magazine for gentleman, published some quite funny, if very risque cartoons.*  One of them showed a gorgeous, voluptuous, obviously purely decorative woman talking on the phone in her apartment.  Behind her is a kitchen piled to the ceiling with dirty dishes.  It is quite obvious that she is on the phone with her milquetoast husband:  “All is forgiven, Dear.  Come home.  I miss you terribly.”

That cartoon, which I haven’t thought about in decades, popped fully formed into my head when I read that the Obama Administration is doing what it can to hasten a Supreme Court hearing about ObamaCare.  Alana Goodman posits that this rush has a purpose:  “Maybe they reasoned that Obama would have more time to recover from a SCOTUS decision the June before his election, rather than risking a potential September or October surprise?”

Goodman shares the same assumption I do, which is that the currently constituted Supreme Court will reverse ObamaCare, probably in its entirety.  If that happens in June, Obama has the perfect campaign strategy:  We tried, our first effort was flawed, we now have a clean slate, so let us try again.  You know we’ll get it right the second time.  And all I can think about is that old Esquire cartoon.

________________________________

*I hasten to add here that I was not around when Esquire first published these cartoon.  My Dad loved books that gathered together magazine cartoons, and one of the gems he found at Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul’s was a collection of Esquire cartoons.  I also inherited from him a lovely book that put together the best cartoons from the old British magazine, Punch.

What do you all think of the Gardasil leviathan attached to Perry? Bachmann went off the deep end when she said that the vaccination causes mental retardation, but I know there are plenty of conservatives (Michelle Malkin is a good example) who think that Perry’s attempted Gardasil legislation makes him unfit for office.   Much as I respect Michelle, I have to disagree on this one.

Government has for decades mandated vaccinations as part of its public health responsibilities. Parents have always been allowed to opt out, but the default setting is to require vaccinations to stop the spread of transmissible diseases. I think even libertarians would concede that a core government function is to stop disease transmission, something that is entirely different from forcing people to buy health insurance and otherwise engage in “life maintenance” to save money.

People are also upset with Perry because they believe he was encouraging premarital sex. I think that’s wrong too. The vaccination confers a lifetime protection, but it seems to work only if you give it to young girls. There’s a small window of time within which to buff up that immune system. Despite the age at which girls receive the vaccination, it doesn’t exist simply to protect them during their teen years.  In other words, it’s not a premarital, teen sex aid.  Instead, it’s about any sex — martial, post-martial, extramarital, you name it. I bet a lot of famous 19th century women who got marital syphilis (e.g., Jenny Churchill and Isak Dinesen) would have loved to have had a syphilis vaccination when they were 12 or 13.

What’s your opinion on this one?  Do you think Perry’s Gardasil initiative (a) fell outside the traditional government public health role of disease prevention and/or (b) tacitly encourages girls to engage in premarital sex?

I continue to root for the candidate who can beat Obama, and who has a generally conservative, small government world view.  While I want someone with Churchill or Reagan’s charm, rhetorical chops, and moral courage, and, of course, Keanu Reeves‘ looks (always a good thing in a president), that candidate does not exist, at least not going into the 2012 election.  I refuse to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Of course, living in California, it’s not as if I have a choice.  By the time the primaries come here, it’s already decided.  Actually that’s a good thing this year, since the Dems managed to get the voters to agree to destroy the California primary process, with a new law that makes it impossible for people to choose the member of their own party whom they’d most like to see run for president — but that’s another story altogether.

In Marin, a surprisingly large number of kids do not get vaccinated.  This is because a lot of the yuppies here have hippie inclinations.  They want everything natural.  They spend a fortune on organic foods, think raw is always good, and consider vaccinations to be an unnatural and therefore dangerous activity.  “Natural” is their God.  They are unresponsive to gentle sarcasm (“You know, arsenic is a naturally occurring substance.”).  I get that.  Not everyone is subtle.

The problem is that these same parents are also unresponsive to facts.  Point out to them that unpasteurized milk carries heinous bacteria of that type that once contributed to the pre-Pasteur 50% child mortality rate and they’ll earnestly explain that they get milk from “clean” cows.  That’s an interesting notion.  I’ve visited an organic dairy with those “clean” cows.  The cows’ udders trail in the muck beneath their feet, muck composed in equal parts of urine, feces, bugs and generic dirt.  The automatic milking machines aren’t always so friendly to the cows teats, which means that the milking process can be a mildly bloody experience.  When I visited the farm, the fact that the farm workers cursorily wipe the cows udders with a disinfectant before milking them didn’t really allay my concerns about bacteria.  Pasteurizing, however, does set those fears to rest.

The same “if I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist” mentality governs when it comes to vaccinating children.  The current generation of parents has never seen a polio epidemic.  They’ve never gotten reports that their school mates died, or seen them months later, dragging around in braces — or worse, visited them once they were confined in a giant iron lung for life.  These parents have never seen a child struggle to breath through diphtheria, or held that same child in their arms moments after it died.  And of course, they’ve never watched a child fade away slowly from the heart damage inflicted by scarlet or rheumatic fever.

I haven’t experienced these pre-vaccination tragedies either.  But unlike these Marin parents, I have a vast repository of historic knowledge ferreted away in my brain.  I know the statistics.  I’ve read the letters parents wrote in the wake of their children’s death.  Since I’m an older mom, and the child of older parents, my folks grew up in a mostly pre-vaccination era (worsened, in my dad’s case, by extreme poverty).  My mother almost died from diphtheria and my dad from scarlet fever.  I knew men rendered sterile by mumps and people who limped through life, permanently damaged by polio.

Yes, vaccinations have risks.  If your child is the one in ten thousand, or even one in one hundred thousand, who has a seriously bad response to a vaccination, resulting in death or permanent disability, that risk, in retrospect, was too high.  But for the the 9,999 kids or the 99,999 kids who responded just fine to the vaccination — well, you’ve saved them from death or permanent disability, and at much higher rates.  Polio, for example, was a terrible early- to mid-20th century scourge for both adults and children:

Spinal polio is rarely fatal.[33] Without respiratory support, consequences of poliomyelitis with respiratory involvement include suffocation or pneumonia from aspiration of secretions.[56] Overall, 5–10% of patients with paralytic polio die due to the paralysis of muscles used for breathing. The mortality rate varies by age: 2–5% of children and up to 15–30% of adults die.[4] Bulbar polio often causes death if respiratory support is not provided;[39] with support, its mortality rate ranges from 25 to 75%, depending on the age of the patient.[4][60] When positive pressure ventilators are available, the mortality can be reduced to 15%.[61]

In the Third World, the unvaccinated world, kids with  measles or diphtheria or polio die in horrible numbers.

And yet . . . .

Affluent Americans, blind to the world around them, still resist vaccinations.  So on a regular basis, scientific organizations, clinging to their threads of respectability (I think science squandered a lot of its reputation on global warming scares), issue reminders that vaccinations aren’t really so bad.  The latest comes from the National Academy of Sciences, which again reminds us that, in a risk benefit analysis, the risks of vaccinations are much, much lower than the benefit they confer.  In other words, stop worrying about polar bears, melting ice caps and rising seas.  Just vaccinate your children.

Interesting item from the New York Times today about a “mischaracterization” (what we knucklewalkers call a “lie”) Obama made during the 2008 campaign. The lede:

“The White House on Wednesday declined to challenge an account in a new book that suggests that President Obama in his campaign to overhaul American health care, mischaracterized a central anecdote about his mother’s deathbed dispute with her insurance company.”

The Obama “narrative” is slowly unraveling. Even the true believers are getting sick of the guy. So expect more sniping at the edges as the whore media wait to see if Obama is losing his momentum. If so, they will throw him under the bus as fast as they can to make room for somebody else.

Speaking of—and I know this is a long shot—let’s say the Democrats do decide to toss Obama overboard. Who’s waiting in the wings? Could Hillary take advantage of the resentment among all the Demo women who saw how disgracefully the media and Obama treated her? Is there a Demo dark horse who’s been making waves off camera who could make a plausible case for being both the not-Obama and the not-GOP candidate? A superb tightrope walker?

How would the not-Obama position him/herself to get Demos and independents to the polls in large enough numbers to win the 2012 election? In a way we’re looking to design a successful campiagn from our opponents’ point of view.

Paul Ryan seems adamant about not running, but boy! do I like him.  This video perfectly exemplifies his highly intelligent policies and his extremely pleasant persona:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I like to consider myself a true and patriotic American, but I have a confession to make:  I hate baseball.  Yes, I know it’s the quintessential American sport, right up there in Americana with Mom and apple pie.  But I still hate it.  I find it boring and surprisingly non-athletic.  It’s such a static game.  The guys run bases periodically, but mostly they just stand around.  Oh, and they hit balls.  And of course, they spit.

I’ll concede that the ball hitting part is a real skill.  With a surprisingly small stick, baseball players manage to whack away with great precision at a small, incredibly fast moving ball.  That’s impressive . . . but still boring.  Kind of like darts, which is fun to play (especially if you’re a little beer lubricated, but really not that exciting to watch).

Here’s something I learned from Barry Bonds, though:  the bigger your muscles, the harder you can hit that little ball, and the further and faster that ball then travels.  That fast and far travel means either that (a) the ball goes right out of the park or (b) nobody can catch it within the park.

Bonds’ problem when he began his baseball career was that he wasn’t born with those muscles.  He had to create them artificially.  Enter steroids.  With steroids on his side, and a strong natural and honed talent for hitting balls with frequency and precision, Bonds became a bulging behemoth who could effortlessly hit balls further and faster than anyone else.

Forget about all the icky little side effects that come with steroids, such as shrunken testicles, damaged joints, pustule covered skin, and surging anger, not to mention the whole law-breaking thing.  Bonds was hitting the big time, becoming a baseball hero and one of the most famous men in the world.

When the Bonds story first broke, I asked myself one question:  Why shouldn’t players in a commercial enterprise be allowed to do anything they want to become the best?  After all, the downsides of steroids are centered on the individual himself.  The individual is the one who makes the Faustian bargain:  In exchange for destroying his health, he has a brief moment as a superb baseball player.  Isn’t that a private bargain, that isn’t anyone else’s business?

In fact, though, it is also other people’s business, since it affects the other baseball players.  Those players who take steroids distort the market.  The up and coming player no longer needs to have only innate talent and an enormous work ethic.  Instead, to compete in this distorted market, he too needs to be willing to destroy himself.

One could argue that the market place will adjust:  ultimately, America would end up with two leagues, one filled with weird, steroid bulging, slow-moving hard hitters, and one filled with “all natural” players, lithe and quick.  Those who wish to poison themselves can, those who don’t want to won’t.

The specter of grotesqueries, however, not to mention the fear of legions of young men hitting the steroids to going into the steroid league (and that’s just what we need — teenagers on steroids), meant that we, as a society, decided that we didn’t want to go down that road.  Instead, the Major League Baseball machine, law enforcement, and public opinion all agitated against the distortion of the current baseball market that Bonds and his ilk represented.

Right now, I imagine many of you saying, “Fine, you’ve insulted baseball left, right and center.  You also maundered on about steroids and the free market.  But what does this have to do with health care?”  My answer:  “This whole baseball riff is a perfect illustration of the problem with government interference in the health care market.”

In the context of health care, government money is the functional equivalent of steroids.  The huge, bumbling, slow moving, inefficient, corruption-prone government behemoth places huge chunks of money into the market and, just as Barry Bonds’ distorted normal baseball, so too does Medicare (and Medicaid and ObamaCare) distort the normal market.  I’ll let the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation explain:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think the video is remarkably clear but, if it’s not, just think of the way in which Barry Bonds, by tossing steroids into the baseball mix, perverted and potentially destroyed baseball.  The same holds true for a system that has clunky government rules, combined with third party money that diminishes anyone’s interest in honesty and efficiency.

The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land, available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon, Smashwords or through your iBook app.

My mother is very old.  This means that she no longer actively contributes to society.  Her working and child-rearing days are over.  She lives off of her diminishing savings, a small pension and her social security checks.  In a utilitarian world, she has no value.  Because — thankfully — we haven’t yet reached that moral abyss, in our world, she has a high value:  my sister and I love her, and her friends like and respect her.

I mention this because I spent this morning in the hospital with my mother.  She has a recurring heart problem that can be fixed by cardioversion (i.e., electric shocks).

From the moment her heart went flippy-wacky this morning, she received the following treatment:  a phone call with her cardiologist; a visit from the onsite doctor at her retirement home; double doses of heart medicine; an ambulance trip to the emergency room; an hour stay in the ER, complete with IVs and blood tests from two different nurses; an ER bedside visit from her cardiologist; a trip up to the cardioversion room, which involved the nurse and an orderly to move the gurney; an hour-long prep, involving forms to fill out, expensiive monitors, all sorts of special sticky things that were put on her back and chest as part of the procedure; an anesthesiologist; the procedure itself by the cardiologist; and then a follow-up EKG to get a good sense of her sinus rhythm.

I don’t know how much this morning’s care will cost (especially since it will be billed straight through to Medicare and her insurance), but I can guarantee you it will cost a lot of money.  Someone has to pay for the drugs, the ambulance, the ER bed, the lab tests, the cardioversion equipment, the EKG machine, and the eight people who took care of her (two EMTs, two nurses, a tech, and three doctors).

My mom’s stay raised two questions vexing to the statist:  First, do people in their high 80s deserve this kind of high level treatment?  In hardcore Soviet countries, the answer was always no, but it was never so crudely stated.  The fact was that everyone got equally lousy, minimalist care, but the elderly, by being sicker and more fragile, died more quickly.

European socialist countries also answer that question with a “no.”  They’re also not crude in stating it as a standard treatment principle.  It’s just that, if you read the British papers, you’ll discover that elderly people are ignored in hospitals, and that treatments that disproportionately benefit the elderly are phased out as too costly relative to their benefit.

(Apropos the manifestly abysmal care in socialist countries, we’ve all been told repeatedly that the care there is better than American health care.  To understand the vast fraud perpetrated on those trying to figure out whether socialized or free market medicine is better, you must read this Commentary Magazine article.  It’s behind a pay wall, so you either have to pay for the article itself or subscribe to Commentary Magazine.  I recommend the latter.  For a relatively low price, you get what must surely be the best magazine around.)

Second, how do you deal with the fact that modern medicine is so labor and equipment intensive?  Two hundred years ago, my mom would have been bled.  That would have been the end of the treatment and probably the end of my mom, too.  It would also have been very, very cheap.  Even fifty years ago, a practitioner’s options were limited to a few pills, some surgeries, and palliative care.

Today, the options seem endless — and they’re very costly.  The only way to bring down the cost is to refuse treatment, which can be done either through price controls, which make treatment prohibitively expensive for the provider, or through rationing, which makes the absence of treatment potentially deadly for patients.

Oh, wait, I forgot.  There is one more way to bring costs down:  the free market.  Competition is a beautiful thing.  As always, let me mention here the flash drives that used to sell for hundreds of dollars, and are now given away for free, like pens.  But for the socialists caught in their dilemma, the free market is the one route they refuse to consider.