Bookworm Room

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 [...]

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People are rightly protesting on religious grounds the fact that Obama has mandated that health care plans must cover birth control and morning after pills: Most healthcare plans will be required to cover birth control without charging co-pays or deductibles starting Aug. 1, the Obama administration announced Friday. The final regulation retains the approach federal [...]

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In a market economy, the marketplace drives the availability of goods and services.  If there’s a big demand, the market will create a big supply; if the demand dries up, so does supply, as the market sends its resources elsewhere. Supply and demand, however, have no place in government controlled sectors of the economy.  Although [...]

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As the Soviet Union showed, by the time medicine is fully nationalized, careers in medicine have been reduced to the lowest status level, somewhere around street cleaning.  Learning medicine and practicing medicine (including nursing, pharmacy, technical jobs, etc.), is incredibly time-consuming and, in a society that still has the gloss of being capitalist, costly.  The [...]

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Readers of my blog know that one of my personal bête noires is liberal indoctrination in public schools.  I blog about it frequently.  My last outing on that subject was here, and I’ll get back to that in a little bit.  First, though, I’d like you to see how one public school teacher saw fit [...]

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Here’s what I see going on and, please, correct me if I’m wrong: Reconciliation is a red herring.  Right now, the House is being promised that, if it votes on the Senate bill, the Senate will fix differences between the two bills through reconciliation.  So everyone is focusing on whether the Senate will indeed have [...]

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Several years ago, when Bush Derangement Syndrome was at its peak, I tackled the “he’s got his finger on the button and he’s going to blow up the world” meme that anti-war activists were so shrilly screaming.  I pointed out that there was no evidence whatsoever to indicate that George Bush was an apocalyptic person.  [...]

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One of the bludgeons used to beat opponents of socialized medicine is the claim that everybody in Canada/England/Northern Europe/Etc., is soooo much happier with health care than we are.  A doctor friend of mine has been scouring the literature, and she’s discovered that this isn’t true.  Polls show that people in countries with socialized medicine [...]

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You can’t summarize the whole fiasco better than Mark Steyn did: We were told we had to do it because of the however many millions of uninsured, yet this bill will leave some 25 million Americans uninsured. On the other hand, millions of young fit healthy Americans in their first jobs who currently take the [...]

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It’s scary, but Mark Steyn is right: I’ve been saying for a year now, in NR and NRO, that the object for savvy Dems is to get this thing passed in whatever form because, once you do, there’s no going back. Kim Strassel in yesterday’s Journal gets it: So why the stubborn insistence on passing [...]

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There is something deeply, deeply wrong with the Obami and the Congressional Democrats.  Or maybe not.  Maybe they are just all too human and are living out that saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  In this case, the corruption isn’t necessarily monetary (although that’s there too).  Instead, it’s a rot of the [...]

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Britain’s NHS, which is government-run (i.e., Communist) medicine, has, unsurprisingly, Communist outcomes.  Lots of people die unnecessarily in England under the government’s beneficent care: British health care is little better than that of former Communist countries, which spend a fraction of the billions poured into the NHS. A survey published yesterday by the Organisation for [...]

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Liberals are very gung-ho for a health care bill that will see the government take over 1/6 of the American economy, that will dramatically raise taxes, that will (if all goes according to plan) destroy private sector insurance, that will force Americans to “buy” insurance or pay a penalty, that will force all Americans to [...]

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A message from William Kristol, one that I’ve already put into effect as to my own Senators (much good it will do, of course, as they’re Feinstein and Boxer): I gather Rasmussen will report today that its latest survey shows support for the Congressional health reform legislation falling to a new low — 38 percent [...]

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Just so you know, Britain, the ne plus ultra of single payer care, is having a little bit of death panel trouble: Liver cancer sufferers are being condemned to an early death by being denied a new drug on the Health Service, campaigners warn. They criticised draft guidance that will effectively ban the drug sorafenib [...]

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I don’t normally follow film critics to get my political information, so I missed what Roger Ebert wrote back in August to explain why Obama Care is a good thing.  Had I read it then, I would have learned that of course it’s socialized medicine — and that’s a good thing.  In a lengthy post [...]

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I just love Jennifer Rubin in the morning.  Let me just cherry-pick some paragraphs from her morning writing. On Obama’s governing style: James Capretta notices two developments in the health-care debate. First, the president is telling us to shut up again. (”President Obama said today that the debate on health care has gone on long [...]

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All of us have long known that poverty in America isn’t like poverty anywhere else in the world.  There really isn’t anything here comparable to the poverty in Haiti, or Calcutta, or large swathes of Africa.  Even poor people have televisions and phones.  And it’s apparent that a surprising number of people who are living [...]

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Is Obama telling a true story or not?  I don’t know and with Obama’s credibility gap, it’s impossible to tell.  It doesn’t matter, though.  What does matter is that, by relaying this anecdote, Obama is keeping alive the Obama/Hitler analogy: President Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner last night, discussing false claims made [...]

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Here’s a classic joke from the height of the Cold War: Man 1:  Come the revolution, we’ll all be driving Rolls Royces. Man 2:  But I don’t want to drive a Rolls Royce. Man 1:  Come the revolution, you’ll have to. And here’s the bottom line on ObamaCare, which Ed Morrissey neatly summarizes: Not only [...]

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The Wall Street Journal unsheathed its editorial knives in a slashing attack against the President’s health care speech.  Some examples, although I really recommend that you read the whole thing: The thing about the bully pulpit is that Presidents can make the most fantastic claims and it takes days to sort the reality from the [...]

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Lest anyone, including Maine’s Olympia Snowe, get too excited about the newly proposed trigger option in the health care proposals: President Obama has decided that another oration will rejuvenate his health-care agenda—despite having given 27 speeches entirely on health care, and another 92 in which it figured prominently. We’ll see how tomorrow night’s Congressional appeal [...]

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It was only last week that I wrote about the fact that the AARP’s weird support for Obama Care, a plan that is likely to ration care its members, might be connected to the fact that at least one branch of its management, the magazine editorship, is to the left of Left.  I think that [...]

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The debate on Obama Care has tended to focus on money and on vague accusations of probable racism.  Zane Pollard, an opthamologist, spells out precisely what that rationing will look like.  And no matter how the Dems dress it up, for the vast majority of Americans, it will look much worse than what they have [...]

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Karl Rove nicely articulates the bottom line facts driving Obama’s fear-mongering game to force through immediate and irrevocable changes to America’s health care system: Mr. Obama’s problem is that nine out of 10 Americans would likely get worse health care if ObamaCare goes through. Of those who do not have insurance—and who therefore might be [...]

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