Sensible suggestions on health care

… which is probably why they won’t be taken seriously in Washington

A must-read opinion piece by John Mackey, CEO and Founder of Whole Foods, about how badly government has already screwed up health care, just by regulating it.

Well, actually, he is suggesting new policies to fix our current problems, more than criticizing government. But reading between the lines, what this means is that government has already mucked up health care, just by regulating it. Never mind running it.

Of his eight solid, eminently reasonable suggestions, here are the first five:

• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness. Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.
• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.
• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.
• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

More choice for individuals, lower costs, less government control over our lives, better quality of care.

Hmmmm. Sounds pretty awesome to me.

Uh-oh … does that make me an angry mob?

Read the whole thing. Please.

Is this what the Founders had in mind? I have to doubt it.

I would love for somebody to read this and then explain to me how Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election still qualifies as a democratic election.

Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

I can’t stand Al Franken and find him boorish and generally a giant tool. BUT, if he had won the election fair and square, then he would project the moral authority that comes with a voter mandate.

He has none of that now, but will act as if he does. And that is why I can never take him seriously.

Hey, here’s an idea: let’s get the lawyers out of the election business. Concentrating that much power into the hands of a few people is always bad for everybody else. A-L-W-A-Y-S.

The perils of post-modern mumbo-jumbo writ large

It would be tough to top this ridonkulous pile of bullcrap from our newest Supreme Court nominee from Judge Sonia Sotomayor:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

So if Latina women are so wise, why would a Supreme Court nominee, blessed with these Latina woman super-powers, embarrass herself in public by saying something so provincial, divisive, and intolerant?

This statement sums up what is wrong with today’s Left most succintly. Note that she doesn’t just speculate that a minority woman—with the alleged “richness of her experiences”—would be wiser than a white male. She actively hopes for it.

In other words, this isn’t idle academic theorizing, based on sober and professional research. It is instead the fruition of decades of Post-Modern mumbo-jumbo about narratives being “truer” than the facts that inform them.

And a bigger pile of bullshit is harder to imagine.

Sure, lots of people walk around with these kind of thoughts in their heads. Only the dim bulbs among us say them out loud.

Yet today, it is considered “wisdom” when uttered by a Latina woman? Riiiiiggghht.

Gosh, thanks, but I’m trying to cut down on my racist platitudes!

It looks like we’ve already forgotten, after just 45 years, that Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement were all about ignoring skin color and racial identity, not elevating and exploiting it. I’d love to hear somebody tell me why was it was wrong for whites to say—and believe—similar things about blacks for centuries, but perfectly fine for Latinos or anybody non-white to say—and believe—similar things about whites today.

[... cue crickets in 3, 2, 1 ...]

And even in today’s supposedly “tolerant” world, white men constantly pay a price for making remarks even less inflammatory. We see it played out a few times a year, every year.

But a Latina woman? You go girl! Blast away!

I’m sorry, but I’ve had quite enough of this lunacy. There was a time and place when it would have been rightly dismissed by the culture at large. Today, though, we are too cowed by fear of being labeled “haters” to call out racist bullshit perpetrated by non-whites.

Well, racist bullshit cuts both ways, folks. And that’s exactly what this is: pure, 100%, unfiltered racist bullshit.

And from a Supreme Court nominee. My, my. How far we have fallen.

And she’s on record saying this numerous times. Obviously, Judge Sotomayor wants us to know that she has a race-infused worldview, about alleged street smarts and female empathy being superior to both analytical logical skill picking through Constitutional law, and clarity of thought to separate relevant facts from irrelevant facts.

That’s just silly. And it leads to bad decisions.

Presidents do only a few things that really impact our lives in any lasting, meaningful way. One of those, though, is nominating Supreme Court justices who then serve for life. Obviously, a very powerful tool in the President’s bag. And when he (or she) abuses that power—and the Constitution—by appointing nominees who share their misguided attitudes about the importance of judicial “empathy”, I have to call them on it.

So, here is the new reality: our intellectual standards have been lowered so much that even a Supreme Court nominee can say something stupid, that goes to the very question of their fitness for that appointment, with no national outrage.

Maybe too many of us have learned to accept racist demagoguery and pandering as essentially “normal”. Or maybe too many of us actually embrace such world views, unless and until they become embarrassing. Bad news, either way.

To me, this is a good example that illustrates how we’ve ended up in this intellectual wasteland because too many of us bought into politically-correct, post-modern silliness about class warfare outranking accomplishment, and narratives trumping facts.

And when cultures embrace such silliness, they end up nominating judges with clearly anti-Constitutional attitudes to the Supreme Court, where they decide Constitutional questions.

You don’t have to be conservative to see through this looniness. You just have to be awake.

Thank God we still have five sane people on the Supreme Court

The court actually ruled for common sense yesterday, not for “white firefighters” (that sounds much too reactionary).

On an almost daily basis, I struggle to understand what is happening to our country, when four Supreme Court Justices can fall in line with this kind of thinking:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing in dissent for the court’s four liberal members, said while she had sympathy for the white firefighters, the court’s decision ignored evidence that the city of New Haven’s promotion exam was flawed and that New Haven correctly responded to the biased results.

“Firefighting is a profession in which the legacy of racial discrimination casts an especially long shadow,” Justice Ginsburg wrote. “I would hold that New Haven had ample cause to believe its selection process was flawed and not justified by business necessity.”

Apparently, a United States Supreme Court Justice believes that:

• using a test to qualify candidates for promotion is “flawed”
• the sins of past white-on-black racial discrimination outweigh the benefits that accrue to everybody when firefighters are promoted based on merit

Hmmm. Well, by that logic, using a bar exam to qualify lawyers is flawed, too. Especially if it allows too many like her inside the gate.

Perhaps Justice Ginsburg would be less aggressive in promoting firefighters who didn’t pass the test, but are sufficiently dark of skin, if it was her sorry behind that needed saving?

Despite attempts to paint them as symbols in our desperate, obsessive need to continue beating ourselves up for past sins, firefighters are real people who fight real fires that kill and injure real people, including themselves, and destroy real property.

And any Supreme Court Justice who can’t put aside their ideological blinders long enough to comprehend that has no business deciding Supreme Court cases. It’s bad enough that this got all the way to the Supreme Court, meaning it had gone through years (since 2003) of arguments and lawyering:

The case dates back to 2003, when New Haven decided to fill 15 slots for lieutenants and captains in its fire department. The city contracted the test’s creation to a consultant company, who administered the test that fall. The exam consisted of a written, multiple-choice section, which counted for 60% of the total score and an oral assessment, weighted 40%.

Firefighters of all races had passed the test, but not proportionally. Of the 19 firefighters who qualified for a promotion, none were black, though two were Hispanic.

Troubled by the fact that the black firefighters had passed the test at roughly one-half the rate as the white firefighters, the city’s civil service board held five public hearings and ultimately deadlocked on whether to certify the test scores, which resulted in no promotions across the board.

A trial judge ruled in favor of the city and the 2nd Circuit affirmed the judgment in a one-paragraph summary order.

Ms. Sotomayor and two other 2nd Circuit judges said New Haven, in refusing to validate the exams, “was simply trying to fulfill its obligations” under federal civil rights laws after it was confronted with test results that had a disproportionate impact on minorities.

That’s an awful lot of layers of politically-motivated people on the public dime, right there.

By the way, one of the judges whose opinion was overturned by this decision: Sotomayor. Maybe some of her other decisions were good.

“Social justice” as a social movement could well be a fine thing. Though, honestly, I tend to doubt it, because of phrases like this used to describe it: “a world which affords individuals and groups fair treatment and an impartial share of the benefits of society”. Letting governments decide such questions is a recipe for disaster proven over and over again throughout history. Let’s not even go down that road.

But in a country founded on individual liberties and restraint on government, “social justice” as legal theory is simply hogwash.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

Congress and the White House are getting all up in AIG’s grill about a piddly $165M in bonuses. Yes, I said “piddly $165M”.

With the possible collapse of banks looming on the horizon — and a world awaiting some kind of plan to restore confidence in our economy and get credit flowing again, any kind of a plan will do, really, please Mr. President, the world is waiting, this is the job YOU wanted, remember? — who really cares about $165M?

It’s chump change.

Obama and his band of clueless dipsticks in his Cabinet and Congress just rushed through $800B of pork, and are on a mission to permanently enslave all of us to the government, via “free” health care and other lies, and we’re supposed to get all excited about 165 million bucks?

Surely you jest.

A little math:
$800B: $800,000,000,000
$165M:     $165,000,000

Here’s the deal: Obama wants us to get angry at Wall St. to escape his already sizable list of failures and fading poll numbers.

This AIG thing is simply a diversionary tactic that should be ignored.

How dumb do you think I am?  Wait, don’t answer that.

Stewart and Cramer

So Jon Stewart gets angry when Jim Cramer turns serious financial advice into theatre for TV ratings and ad revenue.

Yeah, it’s kinda like when Jon Stewart reduces serious political questions to idiotic jokes on The Daily Show. For, you know, TV ratings and ad revenue.

That makes me really angry! So I don’t watch.

Touché, Jon. You lying douche.

Or are you that clueless that you can’t see the irony of your outrage?

Why I’m Here

The purpose of this blog is to point out b.s. where I find it. That’s pretty much it.

I expect to be pretty busy.