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Thad McCotter: The problem with a government takeover of health care is not the GOP

"Will the Republicans Post their Health Plan … And When?" is memeorandum's top story, linking to a who-me? suggestion on the part of the White House that the GOP has published no plan for Thursday's "bipartisan" meeting on the subject. We guess the President's people aren't following our favorite Congressman, Thaddeus McCotter (R, MI) on Twitter. Just a couple of hours ago "Young Thad" twittered this link to the House GOP Health Care Reform Bill via his own FaceBook page. The tweet:

The problem with a government takeover of health care is not the GOP. It is the American people do not want it. http://fb.me/KuebKP29D.

First a couple of paragraphs from the White House complaint, and then a few excerpts from the GOP.gov plan:

The President believes strongly that Thursday’s bipartisan meeting on health insurance reform will be most productive if both sides come to the table with a unified plan to start discussion – and if the public has the opportunity to inspect those proposals up close before the meeting happens.

That’s why yesterday [Monday, February 22, giving us 2-3 days to read and digest -ed] the White House posted online the President’s proposal for bridging the differences between the Senate- and House-passed health insurance reform bills.

What you can’t do just yet is read about the Republicans’ consensus plan – because so far they haven’t announced what proposal they’ll be bringing to the table … As we said today, we’ll be happy to post the Republican plan on our website once they indicate to us which one we should post.

Well, we don't know what they mean by "which one we should post," but the House GOP HC plan twittered by Congressman MCotter, "Common-Sense health care reforms our nation can afford," sounds pretty good to us. [Update: Not to mention that it's been online since November!] It includes a summary, full text, "Ten Reasons to Support" and a side-by-side policy comparison with the Pelosi bill. From the intro:

Americans want a step-by-step, common-sense approach to health care reform, not Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s costly, 1,990-page government takeover of our nation’s health care system. Republicans’ alternative solution focuses on lowering health care premiums for families and small businesses, increasing access to affordable, high-quality care, and promoting healthier lifestyles – without adding to the crushing debt Washington has placed on our children and grandchildren.

Key elements include lowering premiums, ending junk lawsuits, encouraging innovative state programs and allowing Americans to buy insurance across state lines. Click here to read the whole thing.

Update: New post by Congressman McCotter just posted at Red State: "The Crisis of Consent: Republicans Must NOT Abet Obama's ShamWoW! Summit."

"It compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies"

Sunrise at Camelot-by-the-Sea from Goomp's terrace this morning.

L'heure bleu. Tuesday morning after Labor Day meant the first day of school for us children of the Fifties, a day of trepidation for ourselves, a smartie pants with social-skill issues. We were great at reading, writing and 'rithmetic but borderline pathologically shy. 'Wonder how we'd have taken a presidential "live cable-cast speech on values and education" piped into the classroom back then? We were still wet behind the ears when our radar screen began to pick up blips of the insidious Big Lie behind the Gramscian march through the institutions. As we blogged back on Flag Day of 2005: 

We remember the first inklings of the emasculating Marx-lite mindset beginning to infiltrate our elementary and high school classrooms in the fifties and sixties, when reflexively p.c. teachers -- before anyone really knew what p.c. was -- told us there was no such thing as human nature and keened that we shouldn't have a battle hymn for a national anthem.  We should change it to "America the Beautiful," they told us. While we love the poetry and religious fervor of "Oh, beautiful for spacious skies," with its unspoken recognition of what used to be called "Manifest Destiny," as a national anthem it falls short, missing the point that came crashing into our consciousness on that awful 9/11: Freedom isn't free.

Last gasps of summer. Tiny attends Ellen's plate for a Sunday bookend to our season-opening lobster bake with all the fixin's last May.

The light fantastic caught in the folds of a little linen shirt hung out to dry.

L'heure bleu, last gasps, hung out to dry. And now Tiny, above, sucking out the juices of a lobster carapace. The psychological landscape closes in. Intimations of creeping statism. We jumped into the Medicare maelstrom last week as our 65th approaches, waiting an hour (but we brought Jonah's Liberal Fascism, so no time wasted) to register at the local Social Security office, only to find they had us listed by our maiden name. That meant going back home to fetch the marriage license and then back for more waiting. Their error but our time. Unnerving inklings of things to come with the President's and Congress's medical-insurance meddling? In related frustrations, Goomp had asked us to help him switch from pro-Obamacare AARP to Humana for his Medicare supplemental. We duly researched, called and made an appointment for today, turned our schedule upside down to accommodate, but the rep never showed. Arggghhhhh! Public insurance, private insurance. Where's the competition to keep 'em honest? Rudy Giuliani had the libertarian's answer to an attempted Tom Brokaw gotcha the other day:

BROKAW: "What's been interesting to me is that the Republicans have raised the public option as some kind of Orwellian monster. Half the health care in America is already delivered by the government ... Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, Federal Employees insurance ..."

GIULIANI: "That's part of the problem. Part of the problem is that half of it is already in the hands of one massive monopoly. You make that monopoly greater and you destroy private insurance."

The rest of the problem with the dark cloud of "universal coverage" looming on the horizon is Tocqueville's "network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd":

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Baa!

Update: "The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subued to man, its presence refreshes him," wrote Thoreau. Head on over to Modulator's Friday Ark #260 and be refreshed.

Update II: The News Junkie at Maggie's links.

Milton Friedman: Socialized Medicine for Dummies

Milton Friedman's prescient "The Economics of Medical Care" — AKA "Socialized Medicine for Dummies" — delivered to a Mayo Clinic audience in 1978, is going viral on YouTube and Twitter. A few excerpts below, and then listen to the whole thing for yourself. Beyond the wisdom and common sense of his words, his soothingly straightforward, low-key performance is a refreshing antidote to the ubiquitous POTUSs much-ballyhooed "soaring rhetoric" and frenetic use of pumping and pointing hand gestures. Obama's teleprompter was unavailable for comment.

"I believe that this trend [towards increasing government involvement in medical care], including many of the steps that have already been taken, is very much against the interests of patients, of physicians and of other health care personnel," Milton Friedman warned a Mayo Clinic audience thirty years ago. We know in our gut that socialized medicine won't work in our interests because the incentives are perversely turned upside down when government, not the patient, is client. Friedman explains:

This trend is part of a general trend in our society toward replacing voluntary, free market arrangements by government control and regulation.

In industry after industry, producers who protest strongly their belief in free markets have fostered and helped produce government takeover, government regulation, government control … Businessmen, leaders in various areas who are very foresighted when it comes to … the concerns within their own enterprises are very shortsighted when it comes to the area of public policy and allow themselves to be led by small advantages to foster and favor policies which ultimately redound very much to their disadvantage.In the medical case, the initial inducement is that here is a new source of money, and presumably this is why organized medicine has been schizophrenic about the trend toward government involvement …When the government is taking over any activity, there IS more money available, but what typically happens once the government has taken it over, the situation changes. There are no more votes to be gotten by taking it over some more …

In addition to the fact that the ultimate result of a government takeover is less resources, you invariably get lower quality and a lower quantity of medical care.

Unnerved by polls suggesting most Americans are happy with their medical coverage and disapprove his handling of the issue — not to mention a CBO report that his budget is on an unsustainable path — President Obama turned up the volume in promoting Obamacare, misdirecting careless listeners with his ominous assertion that "the need for reform is urgent, and it is irrefutable." Urgency and irrefutability all depend upon what you mean by "reform." The urgency is in his mind, where time is of the essence if he is to ram through misrepresented policies before his approval ratings go further south when the citizenry wakes up to their implications. As for irrefutablity, former Economic Policy Advisor to President GW Bush Keith Hennessey — who has a must-read market-based plan of his own, complete with do's and don'ts — bursts that balloon:

It is unfair to characterize those who oppose the current legislation as opposing all health care reform, or as defenders of the status quo.

Echoing Friedman's early-warning speech, the Mayo Clinic itself "calls health plan bad medicine," the Washington Times reported yesterday:

Minnesota's not-for-profit Mayo Clinic, which Mr. Obama has repeatedly hailed as offering top quality care at affordable costs, blasted the House Democrats' version of the health care plan as lawmakers continue to grapple with several bills from each chamber and multiple committees.

The Mayo Clinic said there are some positive elements of the bill, but overall "the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher quality, more affordable health care for patients."

"In fact, it will do the opposite," clinic officials said, because the proposals aren't patient-focused or results-oriented. "The real losers will be the citizens of the United States."

That's the problem with good intentions based upon a refusal to take human nature and the processes common to all economic systems — competition, cooperation, adaptation and feedback — into account: "It will do the opposite."

Update: "Still relevant," says Bird Dog with a link.