I see where community organizers are fanning out into the inner cities, setting up offices and combing social networking sites like Facebook to enroll children in SCHIP and adults in MEDICAID before these citizens turn into federal criminals in 2014 for lack of health insurance.  Of course, doctors can’t afford to serve MEDICAID and SCHIP patients because reimbursement rates are low and claim denials are high, but the important thing is to keep those community organizers employed between election cycles.  One wonders just who are these people who can afford the time and means to engage in social networking while also meeting the means test for MEDICAID and SCHIP eligibility.

Lots of grab-shot images to upload when time permits.  Shanghai environs have changed drastically in two years.  Factories of every sort of fabrication, assembly and manufacture of every item imaginable saturate the land.  We’re either getting used to the frenetic manner of Chinese driving, or perhaps Chinese drivers are settling down a bit.  Still lots of horns, lights, random intersection crossings, near head-on collisions between cycles and cars and various other flirtations with disaster, but the overriding traffic law here seems to be, “No harm, no foul.”  The second law of the Chinese model traffic code would go something like, “Flashing lights and honking horns are simply data and do not carry an emotional message, regardless of how insistently they are employed.”  Twitter and Facebook appear to be blocked at this location in Shanghai though I think they were available in Shenzhen and certainly were in Hong Kong.  Google US is available though the news (CNN) said that Google will pull out of China next month.  I think that refers to the Chinese language Google.cn which I’ve read that the Chinese don’t use much anyway.  I hope English speakers can still access US Google though if US Google is no longer maintained for Chinese references, it would seem to become less relevant over time for English speakers over here.  Conclusion: Mandarin lessons are in order.  Headed to Xiamen this afternoon for a day/night then on to Kuala Lumpur.  Not much time this trip to smell the roses though we’re accomplishing the mission and everyone’s healthy.

Noted item from today’s Shanghai Daily, pg. A9:

“The health care reform program would affect nearly every American and remake one-sixth of the US economy.  For the first time, Americans would have health insurance.”

That sort of misinformation is just not helpful.

The day began today in China (for us) with……Fox News! and the O’Reilly Factor–which works well as a morning talk show!

Fox News.  Communist China.  Go figure.  Maybe it has something to do with Obama and Napolitano both on Fox today?  Nice to see the left venturing outside their comfort zones on CNN and MSNBC.

(Update: Over in Shenzhen this afternoon–crossing the border from Hong Kong to China, we said goodbye to Fox News.  13 years into the 100 year merger of Hong Kong and China, looks like China proper will have to wait a little longer for Fox News.)

We read some illuminating articles in the China Daily (state) newspaper in transit.  In a story about closing down ubiquitous unlicensed health clinics in China, the China Daily noted, “More than half of the rural population of China does not have adequate medical insurance.”  The rural population is around 800 million.  And migrant workers are not reimbursed for health care because people only get insurance reimbursement for fees incurred in the region they are from, not fees incurred in the region where they live and work.  So, the government is trying to shut down market health care alternatives while also using health insurance as a tool to control migration.

On the next page of the 3/16/10 China Daily (page 9), an editorial says, “In the United States, the epitome of Western culture, it is difficult for a person without health insurance or enough money to get medical treatment.  Visitors to the US, especially from poorer countries may be refused access to healthcare.”  Well, this is simply misinformation.  EMTALA guarantees health care to the point of stabilization to anyone who walks into a hospital emergency room.  Moreover, it’s an unfunded mandate. Hospitals don’t get reimbursed for care provided under EMTALA.

It would be more productive for China to focus on health care provision for its uninsured and insured people than to obfuscate their own problems with straw man allegations about the U.S. system, which, though imperfect, is pretty good.

“The 1941 pension reform also introduced mandatory health insurance, the lack of which had been considered a “persistent societal shortcoming, threatening the welfare of pensioners.” Monthly contributions were set at one reichsmark with exemptions for widows and orphans.  Previously, retirees had had to apply for state relief assistance or take out private insurance, which few of them did.  The new regulations took effect in August and November of 1941.”

“Significantly, the will to achieve social reform was strongest among those leaders within the Nazi Party who were also the most actively involved in pushing forward the agenda of ethnic genocide.”

Gotz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State, Holt Paperbacks, 2008. p. 56.

As the Senate considers socialized medicine for the U.S. today, consider what the concentration of government funding for socialized medicine throughout Europe has done for the business of health care.  See Medica 2009 in Dusseldorf.  It’s simply enormous.  Floor space for the 4-day event costs around $20,000 for a 10′ x 10′ square.  That’s $2M for a 100′ x 100′ space.  The opulence is palpable.  Massive displays of every medical device, machine, and product stretch for acres and acres in multiple linked buildings.  Thousands of beautiful women and sharp dressed men represent their products with panache, elan and requisite sex appeal.  The Medica show began around the same time governments began pouring public money into health care in the 60’s and 70’s.  If you want more of something, subsidize it, and the evidence seems beyond doubt that public health care dollars have had this effect.  It is puzzling, however, that the business of health care seems to be doing so well while the actual provision of health care seems to be in a state of crisis and in need of further socialization, more subsidy, and more government control.  Is there really a disconnect here?  Or is the argument for socializing health care in America a myth propagated by a leftist congress intent on perpetrating an extreme device to transfer more wealth and power to government forces?  If the U.S. House and Senate get their way, we’ll definitely get more health care business.  Ironically, we’ll also get health care rationing, scarcity of providers, and enormously increased taxes.  Imagine how our economies would look without governments confiscating enormous wealth and directing it into favored industries, and instead, people directed the spending of their own wealth toward goods and services they actually wanted?  Would we buy these fantastically expensive trade shows?  I seriously doubt it.    

The “public option” is about power.  Faceless, anonymous, unassailable, bureaucratic, federal, impersonal, arbitrary, and punitive power.

A “public option” for health insurance would promote competition, proponents claim.

On what planet?  If that were true on planet Earth there would be a thriving market of low-cost health insurance alternatives to compete with Medicare for senior citizens.  There would be a thriving market of low-cost health insurance alternatives to compete with Medicaid and SChip.  All of these “public options” have destroyed competition, not fostered it.

Democrats aren’t stupid and they can understand these facts as well as anyone, which leaves only one conclusion: the “public option” is neither about health care nor competition.  It’s about power, control, and growing government.

9/3/09 at Elbert County Public Health building.  About 150 in attendance.

Overview of HB 3200

“Public Option” example in Colorado 

The Overlooked Existing Safety Net 

Things That Can Be Done 

“Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist.  The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself.  Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise. . . . .[T]he larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for moral choice; it does not depend on the goodwill or the genuine decency of people.”  Shelby Steele, White Guilt, 2006.

The moral authority that comes from an absence of moral choice is actually no moral authority.  This is a prescription for endless manipulation–by both blacks and whites–which Steele documents at length.  He also wrote, (more…)

Greg Scandlen of the Heartland Institute………….

This study tries to balance the hysteria about cost-shifting from the uninsured to people with private coverage with an analysis of how much cost-shifting is the result of underpayment by Medicare and Medicaid.

The answer, it turns out, is that underpayment by those two public programs dwarfs any problems created by the uninsured. (more…)

Health-Status Insurance
How Markets Can Provide Health Security
by John H. Cochrane

Read it and weep.

Porkulus Rex

Surreal Spending
The House is poised to take a final vote on the compromise $800-billion spending bill on, appropriately, Friday the 13th, with the Senate likely to follow soon after.

In my 36 years in Washington, I have never seen such a surreal environment, with hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed taxpayer money being spent without committee hearings or even meaningful public debate over the thousands of new and expanded programs the bill funds. (more…)