Category: Health Care

The Nadir of Hackery

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Fail, failure, failing — anyone who has paid attention to the ObamaCare rollout knows that it has more that justified the criticism of its opponents. The president’s signature legislation is a policy disaster for the nation and a political liability for Democrats. Any attempt to ignore that objective truth is simply dishonest. And speaking of “simply dishonest,” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

For years, Obamacare supporters weathered at best tepid support for the President’s reform in the expectation that once people experienced the actual law, rather than the right-wing fever dream, opinions would change. Then they were hit with the wholly unexpected surprise of a botched website roll out that set the whole public opinion war back on its heels and then a wave of cancellations that were reported in a misleading way (and only affected a tiny portion of the population) but nevertheless further soured public opinion.
But for all that, here’s why I think the generally cataclysmic press is overblown and why the law will be a success. . . .

He goes on from there, but you get the general idea — Josh Marshall begins his argument with the conclusion and then, ignoring all contradictory evidence, scrounges up whatever excuses and rationalizations can be made to serve his conclusion. Whatever else he may be, Josh Marshall is a partisan Democrat, and his is a partisan argument. Anyone who doubts him is pre-emptively accused of buying into “misleading” reporting and “the right-wing fever dream.”

Josh Marshall is as objective about ObamaCare as a Baptist evangelist is objective about Jesus. Yet in this tent revival, Josh Marshall preaches only to the faithful, and offers this as his altar call:

We didn’t pass Health Care Reform for it to reap electoral gains for Democrats (though I think it still will) or to have it be popular, per se (though I suspect it will be). The aim was to get people covered, make the health care provision system more efficient and reduce the scale of human suffering, especially the spectrum of suffering tied to your wealth and your luck.
By that standard, I think it will be a success and I think there will be no going back. And that’s the only standard that matters.

If you don’t accept the eternal salvation of ObamaCare, Preacher Josh is saying, it’s because you don’t want to “reduce the scale of human suffering.” You are morally inferior, a sinner.

What was that he said about a “fever dream”?

 

‘Forget About Repealing #ObamaCare. Repeal Obama’

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by Smitty

Emphasis original:

Below is a note from Bill to C. Steven Tucker. Bill is the man stricken with cancer who Tucker helped out after seeing Bill on Megyn Kelly’s show talk about how ACA mandates caused him to lose his coverage in the middle of cancer treatments.

“Steve, the company decided to keep me active. Since it is a chronic illness. Until this illness kills me. Battle #1 is won. Now the hard part. You literally saved me. Thank you so much.”
Those are the greatest words I have ever heard in my 20 year career as a licensed health insurance broker. I couldn’t be a happier man today! – C. Steven Tucker

That’s the good news. Now the bad-

Bill is now being audited by the IRS.

And now for the 2nd punch line-

C. Steven is being audited back to 2003.

THAT’S what happens when you do the right thing, and in the process embarrass that bastard in the white house.

Forget about repealing Obamacare. Repeal Obama.

My concern is that repealing Obama isn’t enough, either. #OccupyResoluteDesk has taken every wrong thing about our lest century of Progressive collapse and turned it up to 11. This IRS thuggery is precisely the sort of heavy-handedness this country was founded to preclude, not enable.

As Politico was noting the other day, “Tea party unscathed in early GOP civil war“. I hope that proves true. The GOP needs to reclaim Congress in 11 months, but with the understanding that the last century is indeed over. It’s time for reform. Time for an honest appraisal of just how jacked up this experiment in self-government has become, and how many dozen bureaucracies need to go under the bus to restore it.

Ideas like the Fenwick-Sugden Plan–let’s give it a catchier name, say, Single Patient–need to be fleshed out an implemented.

The IRS as we know it needs to go, and take the DOE, EPA, and large swaths of the DOJ with it.

If we don’t do this in 2014, folks, it’s not unlikely that we can kiss our country goodbye.

Via BigFurHat at iOwnTheWorld

The Fenwick-Sugden Healthcare Plan

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by Smitty

Whittle describes it with his usual polished delivery:
The full transcript of Bill’s video is here. A taste:

The Fenwick-Sugden plan is very simple, really, and it has one goal: keep the money in the hands of the patients, because if it’s your money, you’re going to care whether that aspirin tablet you get billed for is going to come in at two cents or twenty dollars per pill.

Rather than paying a traditional insurance company, your employer would put that same amount of money into an Insured Contingency Escrow, or ICE account, with your name on it. It is nothing more or less than a personal savings account, held in escrow by a Savings & Loan. It can only be used for clearly defined contingencies, such as healthcare, disability and retirement. You would pay into the account too, as you do today for private insurance.

Individuals would then be able to chose and join a “chapter:” a collection of other people pooling their money so that they collectively get the best rates on procedures and bulk discounts. Included in these chapters are “co-pilots”: professionals who know the ropes, do the negotiating and help you make your own decisions about what to do with your own money. These people don’t work for the hospitals; they don’t work for the insurance companies; and they don’t work for the government – they work for you.

Any small items: a sprained wrist, sore throat, etc, would be paid for, in cash and at cash rates, from that individual ICE account. And any money you don’t use at the end of the year gets rolled over into the next.

Interestingly, the only other link to this Fenwick-Sugden plan is at Idaho Reporter, presumably because that’s where Fenwick lives.

The outline given smacks of so much common sense that it’s clear that the intrenched interests will fight it every step of the way. As with all other needed reform, it will only come at the tip of the public boot against an official backside.

Do Democrats Think They Can Spin Their Way Out of the ObamaCare Catastrophe?

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One of the things you may have noticed in the past couple of weeks is that some liberal pundits are claiming that ObamaCare is essentially a public relations problem: The program is just wonderful, but there have been some P.R. problems with the rollout.

Democrats need to learn that denial is not the name of a river in Egypt:

Democratic leaders claim the bungled launch of Obamacare is just the latest news sensation — a media-stirred tempest that looks in the heat of the moment like it could upend the midterm election, but ends up fizzling well before voters head to the polls.
Some party strategists say they’re in denial.
And that perceived gap between party spin and facts on the ground is fueling worries that the White House and Democratic higher-ups aren’t taking the possible electoral blowback seriously enough or doing enough to shield their candidates. Democratic contenders in the toughest races are distinctly less convinced that Obamacare will fade as an election-year issue — and they can’t afford to just cross their fingers that things get ironed out or that Republicans revert to political hara-kiri.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a forum hosted by BuzzFeed recently that the rollout won’t “hurt us in 2014,” adding that “we’re proud” of the law. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in a recent appearance on CNN, went so far as to assert that Obamacare would be “an advantage” for Democratic candidates next year.
“Democrats will run on the Affordable Care Act and win,” she has also told reporters.
The White House, meanwhile, has come across as equally dismissive of Obamacare’s consequences for 2014.

Anyone who doubts the devastating impact of ObamaCare’s failure need look no further than NY-23 where Democrat Martha Robertson is trying to run away from her previous support of the policy. This is a “purple” district that, on paper, should be competitive for Democrats, but Robertson’s campaign is in complete meltdown mode. And speaking of complete meltdown . . .

We are starting to see a broad polling trend for Barack Obama, and it should have the White House worried — but maybe Obama’s fellow Democrats in Congress even more.  The latest CNN poll confirms what the Washington Post/ABC poll first noticed, and what the CBS poll corroborated — Obama’s approval decline involves more than just his performance.  The Americans public is souring on Obama as a person and as a brand, and that spells real trouble for his agenda . . . .

There are limits to what media spin can accomplish, and trying to tell people who lost their insurance that this is good news, that the president had a good reason to lie to them — that won’t sell.

 


Weird NY Times Column: Not Supporting ObamaCare Is Slavery or Something

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This is just downright bizarre:

[T]he South is once again committed to taking a backward path. By refusing to expand health care for the working poor through Medicaid, which is paid for by the federal government under Obamacare, most of the old Confederacy is committed to keeping millions of its own fellow citizens in poverty and poor health. They are dooming themselves, further, as the Left-Behind States.

What? Let’s read that again:

“Medicaid . . . is paid for by the federal government under Obamacare.”

What does this mean?

Elsewhere, the expansion of Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, has been one of the few success stories of Obamacare. . . .
In Kentucky, which has bravely tried to buck the retrograde tide, Medicaid expansion is projected to create 17,000 jobs. In Washington, the state predicts 10,000 new jobs and savings of $300 million in the first 18 months of expansion.

Do you believe this? “Free” money from the federal government? Medicaid as a job-creation dynamo? While I have not bothered to dig down on the data here, the basic economics of it is like saying that if you take $5 out of your pants pocket and put it in your coat pocket, you will then have $10. Government has no money of its own to spend. Every cent expended by government must come either from tax revenue or from borrowing, and borrowing — i.e., deficit spending — is ultimately a drag on economic growth, because capital invested in government bonds (which is how deficit spending is financed) is capital not invested in private-sector businesses.

The liberal belief in “free government money” is like one of those quasi-religious magical thinking exercises that Ace discusses here.

To cite X-number of people signing up for “expanded Medicaid” as “success” is simply to say that if you’re giving away the taxpayers’ money, moochers will gladly take their share of the loot.

Is the South doomed to be the “Left-Behind States”? Next time you hear of someone moving from Texas to Detroit, let me know.

 

Confirmed: Crazy People Are Dangerous

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He was once described as “happy-go-lucky,” but then his father lost an election and his parents divorced and Gus Deeds went nuts:

“Eventually it got to the point where everyone… you couldn’t ignore it. It was obvious he was going through a difficult time,” Tony Walters, who has been friends with Gus since they were children in Bath County, Va., told ABC News on Wednesday. “I don’t know where they ended up taking him but he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and did get treatment for a while and I know he was on medication. . . .
“He seemed very sort of scattered, very different. He had strange paranoias,” Walters said. “And he was imagining different schemes against him; suspicions of people around him…it really seemed like he was going through a very difficult time.”
At one point, Gus said that God told him to drive to the Pacific and he did.
“He would say it was a spiritual thing that he felt a calling that just needed to go and drive west, see the ocean and when he came back that’s when he really, he was a different Gus than he was,” said Adam Michaels, a friend who worked at Nature Camp with Gus for several summers. “His personality had changed a lot, he was pretty manic for a while.”

Was this really bipolar disorder? The symptoms actually sound more like schizophrenia, but ultimately the bottom line is the same: Gus Deeds was crazy, and crazy people are dangerous. See my Wednesday column, “Madness Takes Its Toll.” And speaking of crazy . . .

The problem is really spiritual and moral. Unable to cope with failure, the damaged personality seeks to externalize responsibility by fixing blame on demonized scapegoats. This is how disappointments, which the healthy mind can cope with rationally, become psychic wounds that develop into paranoia: “RACISTS! EVERYWHERE!”

Some people unfortunately resort to violence and self-destruction. Charles Johnson committed reputational suicide.

 

Sarcasm Therapy: A Hope for Cure?

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It’s astounding.
Time is fleeting.
Madness takes its toll . . .
— “The Time Warp,” The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Mental illness is a serious problem, but taking your problems too seriously? That will drive you nuts — says the guy who’s being sued for $1 million by a convicted bomber.

Amid the swirling madness of life in the Obama Age, having a sense of humor is the only hope for maintaining sanity. The ability to laugh at your problems is an indication that you have sufficient emotional distance to see how objectively absurd your situation is.

The ghastly seriousness of what happened Tuesday in Virginia cannot be overemphasized. The New York Times reports:

On Monday, state mental health officials unsuccessfully sought to find a bed in a hospital psychiatric ward for Gus Deeds, who had undergone an evaluation, according to Mary Ann Bergeron, the executive director of the Virginia Association of Community Services Boards.
None could be found and he returned home, even though a magistrate had issued an order of involuntary commitment. “In that particular rural area of the state, it is not unusual to have contacted anywhere from seven to 15 hospitals” looking for an available bed, Ms. Bergeron said.
Dennis A. Cropper, executive director of Rockbridge Area Community Services, said Gus Deeds was evaluated at Bath Community Hospital, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch. Mr. Cropper issued a statement late Tuesday declining to elaborate, citing the family’s wish for privacy.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 by a mentally ill gunman, the state made it easier to get involuntary commitment orders.

It is important to note that we do not yet know what kind of problem led to this involuntary commitment order. A lot of commenters were speculating last night that Gus Deeds was suffering from schizophrenia, but I felt obliged to caution against such speculation.

Historian and blogger Clayton Cramer is the author of My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill. Cramer advocates “assisted outpatient treatment, a step in between doing nothing at all, and involuntary commitment . . . an effective strategy that reduces self-harm and harm to others.” One of the problems is that too many “experts” don’t have the kind of personal experience with insanity necessary to understand it.

Look, I joke about this, but there is nothing remotely funny about that kind of total freak-out, when you’re the one freaking out. It was a serious psychiatric situation at the time, and thank God I made it through. The point is, when I joke about kooks and lunatics, I’m speaking with the authority of direct personal experience. And if my sarcasm seems somewhat insensitive to the plight of the demented, it’s because I know that the pitiful hand-wringing pose of sensitivity isn’t really helpful to nutjobs and schizos. Unfortunately, other people don’t see it that way:

Since the 1970s, a general policy of deinstitutionalization has meant that most people suffering from mental illness are treated on an out-patient basis, with strict legal limits on involuntary commitment, which is only for those who can be proven a danger to themselves or others. Deinstitutionalization has been facilitated by improvements in psychiatric medication, especially the development of advanced anti-depressants like Prozac and Paxil, known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Such drugs have side-effects, however, and outpatient treatment means that there is no supervision of whether the medications are being taken as prescribed, so that there is always the problem of people who are, in the colloquial phrase, “off their meds.”
Colloquial phrases for mental illness are frowned upon in an age where sympathy for the deranged is supposed to override our concern for public safety. To call them nuts, lunatics, or wackos might hurt their feelings or perpetuate a social stigma. People who pride themselves on being well-meaning, enlightened, and sophisticated — “the anointed,” as Thomas Sowell called them — regard the mentally ill as victims of society. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator. And next time I tell you somebody’s crazy, trust me: I’m an expert in crazy.

 

 


Gus Deeds: What Went Wrong?

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Following up on today’s tragedy in Virginia — state Sen. Creigh Deeds was severely stabbed by his 24-year-old son, who evidently shot himself to death — I’m trying to find what led to the fatal conflict.

The good news, insofar as anything in this kind of situation can be “good news,” is that Sen. Deeds’ medical condition has been upgraded from “critical” to “fair,” meaning that he is likely to recover.

The Washington Post already has online a detailed and lengthy article:

The younger Deeds, who had withdrawn last month as a student at the College of William and Mary, underwent a mental health evaluation on Monday at a local hospital performed under an emergency custody order, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. But the son was released from Bath County Community Hospital because no psychiatric beds were available across a wide area of western Virginia, the paper reported.
“This was preventable,” said Sen. Richard Saslaw (D-Fairfax), adding that a “breakdown in the mental health system” led to a lack of beds and prevented medical authorities from holding the younger Deeds. . . .
Dennis Cropper, the executive Director of the Rockbridge County Community Services Board, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that Gus Deeds on Monday had undergone a mental health evaluation performed under an emergency custody order. Cropper told the paper that the younger Deeds was released from Bath County Community Hospital because no psychiatric beds were available across a wide area of western Virginia.
In a statement, the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg said Gus Deeds had been enrolled as a student there since 2007 and withdrew last month. Geller said it was not immediately clear whether Gus Deeds lived at his father’s home. . . .
Sarah E. King, 27, of Bodega Bay, Calif., has known the Deeds family all of her life. She grew up about 15 minutes from their home and attended William and Mary with Gus Deeds. She is good friends with Rebecca Deeds.
“I can’t even really process it. It’s really ground-shaking, not only for all the Deeds, but the entire community,” King said. “Everyone is just devastated.”
Heather Hannah, who attended elementary and high school with Gus Deeds, saw him two weeks ago at a nearby Pizza Hut. She said the younger Deeds seemed like he was in good spirits.
“I asked him if he was doing all right and he said he was good,” Hannah said.
Hannah described Gus Deeds as intelligent and happy-go-lucky. She said he played in the marching and concert bands at Bath County High School. He played the trombone and harmonica. Hannah remembers Gus Deeds as a talented musician. For talent shows, he performed bluegrass numbers with a group of other students.
It was not immediately clear what prompted the effort to seek the emergency mental health evaluation for Gus Deeds.

Read the whole thing. These are the questions: Why had Gus Deeds dropped out of college? Why would this “happy-go-luck” musician spiral off into viral madness with such apparent suddenness? What led to the “emergency evaluation” for Gus Deeds?

The obvious hunch in this kind of situation is that the kid was on drugs, but nobody is actually saying that yet. At this point, most of the attention is on the shortage of psychiatric beds that led to Gus Deeds being turned loose Monday. But why was this kid in need of psychiatric treatment? No answers for that yet. If you see anything, please link it in the comments or send it to me on Twitter.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer notes research showing “that 20% of the state to state variation in murder rates could be explained by availability of psychiatric beds.” That’s very interesting as a matter of public policy, of course. Right now, however, I’m just trying to get the facts behind this particular crime.