15 Stats That Destroy Liberal Narratives - John Hawkins - Page full

15 Stats That Destroy Liberal Narratives - John Hawkins - Page full

1) “Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the U.S. population but account for about half of terrorist attacks since 9/11. That means Muslims in the United States are about 5,000 percent more likely to commit terrorist attacks than non-Muslims.” -- Mark Krikorian

2) “Consider, for example, that in 1958 a mere 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. By 2013, that number had grown to 87 percent. In 2012 these once-taboo unions hit an all-time high.
Ku Klux Klan membership has shrunk drastically from millions a century ago to fewer than 5,000 today. The Black Panthers are essentially extinct. While plenty of other hate groups have attempted to fill the void, they have always operated on the margins of society. Black politicians are now common—President Obama’s percentage of the white vote was almost perfectly in line with that received by other recent Democrats, all of whom were white.
Granted, these statistics offer but a snapshot of American society, but the more one looks, the more a trend emerges. America is a lot of things; racist isn’t one of them.”  -- Greg Jones

3) “The harsh reality awaiting these low-income Americans is undeniable: according to 2013 data from a 2014 Merritt Hawkins study, 55% of doctors already refuse new Medicaid patients. According to the HSC Health Tracking Physician Survey, 2008, the percentage of doctors that refuse new Medicaid patients dwarf by about 8 to 10 times the percentage that refuses new private insurance patients.
Such ‘insurance’ from Obamacare not only fails to provide access to doctors, but research in the top medical journals such as Cancer, American Journal of Cardiology, Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation and Annals of Surgery, show that Medicaid beneficiaries suffer worse outcomes than similar patients with private insurance ... all at an added cost of another $800 billion by CBO estimates to taxpayers after the decade.
It is not hyperbole to call Medicaid a disgrace at its annual cost of about $450 billion, and expanding it rather than helping poor people buy private insurance is simply inexplicable.” -- Scott Atlas

4 ) “In other words, all of the disruption, spending, taxation, and premium hikes in Obamacare has only reduced the percentage of U.S. residents without health insurance by 2.7 percentage points, from 13.9% to 11.1%: a remarkably small reduction, and far lower than what the law was supposed to achieve.” -- Avik Roy

5) “Bernie Sanders thinks you can pay for an 18 trillion dollar expansion of the welfare state — to make it align with a Denmark that doesn’t actually exist — simply by taxing ‘the billionaire class.’ There are 536 billionaires in America. Even if you confiscated everything they had — which, by the way, would surely destroy the American economy by triggering the greatest round of capital flight in human history and amount to government seizure of countless businesses — it wouldn’t come close to covering the tab of Sanders’s proposals.” -- Jonah Goldberg

6) “In 2010, 38,329 people died from drug overdoses, twice the number a decade earlier. More people died of drug overdoses than from automobile accidents (30,196), murders (13,000) or gun accidents (700).” -- Ann Coulter

7) “Between 1979 and 2010, for instance, the average after-tax income for the poorest quintile of American households rose from $14,800 to $19,200; for the second-poorest quintile, it rose from $29,900 to $39,100. Meanwhile, per-person antipoverty spending at the state and federal level increased sixfold between 1968 and 2008 — and that’s excluding Medicare, unemployment benefits and Social Security.” -- Ross Douthat

8) “Just last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee received a report that in just four years, 121 illegal aliens who had been released by ICE went on to murder Americans.” -- Mark Krikorian

9) “Officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the food-stamp program has become the country’s fastest-growing means-tested social-welfare program. Only Medicaid is more expensive. Between 2000 and 2013, SNAP caseloads grew to 47.6 million from 17.2 million, and spending grew to $80 billion from $20.6 billion, according to the Agriculture Department. SNAP participation fell slightly last year, to 46.5 million individuals, as the economy improved, but that still leaves a population the size of Spain’s living in the U.S. on food stamps.” -- Jason Riley

10) “Pace Mr. Obama, the state-prison population (which accounts for 87% of the nation’s prisoners) is dominated by violent criminals and serial thieves. In 2013 drug offenders made up less than 16% of the state-prison population; violent felons were 54% and property offenders 19%. Reducing drug-related admissions to 15 large state penitentiaries by half would lower those states’ prison count by only 7%, according to the Urban Institute.

In federal prisons—which hold only 13% of the nation’s prisoners—drug offenders make up half of the inmate population. But these offenders aren’t casual drug users; overwhelmingly, they are serious traffickers. Fewer than 1% of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2014 were convicted of simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most of those possession convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges.” -- Heather Mac Donald

11) “The conservative Heritage Foundation estimated unlawful immigrant households paid $39.2 billion in 2010, but received $93.7 billion in government services.” -- Oliver Darcy

12) “On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that ‘The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.’ Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015. At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four ‘mass shootings’ this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.” -- Mark Follman

13) “As Pew Research cheerfully reports, previous immigrants were ‘almost entirely’ European. But since Kennedy's immigration act, a majority of immigrants have been from Latin America. One-quarter are from Asia. Only 12 percent of post-1965-act immigrants have been from Europe -- and they're probably Muslims.
Apparently, the ‘American experiment’ is actually some kind of sociological trial in which we see if people who have no history of Western government can run a constitutional republic.
As of 1970, there were only 9 million Hispanics in the entire country, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, there are well more than 60 million.” -- Ann Coulter 

14) “No fewer than eight major studies from around the world have found homosexuality is not a genetic condition.
Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council says that these numerous, rigorous studies of identical twins have now made it impossible to argue that there is a ‘gay gene.’ If homosexuality were inborn and predetermined, then when one identical twin is homosexual, the other should be, as well.
Yet one study from Yale and Columbia Universities found homosexuality common to only 6.7 percent of male identical twins and 5.3 percent of female identical twins.
The low rate of common homosexuality in identical twins – around six percent – is easily explained by nurture, not nature.
Researchers Peter Bearman and Hannah Brueckner concluded that environment was the determining factor. They rejected outright that ‘genetic influence independent of social context’ as the reason for homosexuality. ‘(O)ur results support the hypothesis that less gendered socialization in early childhood and preadolescence shapes subsequent same-sex romantic preferences.’
‘Less gendered socialization’ means, a boy was without a positive father figure, or a girl was without a positive mother figure.
In light of the evidence, Sprigg said simply, ‘No one is born gay.’” -- Mark Hodges

15) “Over the last year, only 1.3 million Americans of working age have entered the workforce, even as the population of this same demographic increased by more than 2.8 million. Just over 1 million members of this group found jobs. That's right -- of the new additions to the working age population, less than four in 10 found jobs.
The newspapers touted the reduction in the unemployment rate to 5.3 percent as a cause for celebration. Yet for every three Americans added to the working age population (16 and older), only around one new job (1.07) has been created under Obama. At this pace, America will soon officially have a zero unemployment rate. But that will only be because no one will be looking for work.” -- Stephen Moore

Sorry Leftist Americans, Your Swedish Utopia Does Not Exist

Sorry Leftist Americans, Your Swedish Utopia Does Not Exist

The Scandinavian countries are regularly praised for their income equality, quality of life, gender equality, maternal care and many other traits, not just by leftist politicians and activists, but also by left-leaning economists like Paul Krugman. The Scandinavian model, they believe, is the ultimate proof that you can combine a high-growth economy with a generous welfare state.

The problem is that much of the praise is wrong.

True, the Scandinavian nations are very successful in many ways. Quality of life is considerably higher there than in most other parts of the world, and equality is a strong social norm. But despite what many in the American left who idealizes Scandinavia might wish, the success was not achieved thanks to the welfare state model, but perhaps despite its existence.

In the new book Scandinavian Unexceptionalism, Swedish author Nima Sanandaji dispels many of the popular conceptions about the Nordic countries. Scandinavia’s success came before the welfare state, not after it. Between 1936 and 2008, when much of the welfare expansion occurred, Sweden’s growth rate dropped to being the 13th highest out of 28 industrialized countries.

During the decades before, between 1870 and 1936, Sweden had enjoyed the highest economic growth in the entire industrialized world. Moreover, in the most intense period of “third-way” policies of market socialism, between the 1970s and 1990s, Sweden’s economic performance was exceptionally low. This period, however, was an exception: for most of its modern history, Sweden has been anything but a socialist mecca. The government has usually pursued free-market policies and free trade. If anything, high taxes and extensive social policies have hindered Scandinavian economic performance, which would most likely have been much higher without them.

Instead, Sanandaji shows, the root of Scandinavian success can largely be found in culture. These countries, and Sweden in particular, have historically had remarkably high levels of social trust, family values, a strong sense of work ethic, and social cohesion. The notion of the “Protestant work ethic” goes back far longer than the modern welfare state. Scholars like Max Weber, Sanandaji shows, long ago noted that the Protestant countries of northern Europe had an overall higher living standard and economic success than most. The often-celebrated equality of Scandinavian countries, too, began well before the welfare state was developed.

Again, these traditions and values by no means came with the welfare state. Sanandaji shows that these Scandinavian values follow people as they move abroad, even for generations: Americans of Scandinavian descent, whose ancestors left way before modern welfare states were established, tend to carry many of their norms with them. The median incomes of Americans with Scandinavian heritage is 20 percent higher than average income in the U.S. as a whole, and poverty rates in this group is roughly half of that of average Americans.

The Scandinavian utopia of many leftist Americans, as Sanandaji shows, primarily exists in their own fantasies. In many ways, holding up the Scandinavian welfare state as an example has become a way of arguing that there doesn’t have to be a choice between growth and prosperity on the one hand, and high taxes and social transfers on the other.

But that tradeoff still stands. If anything, the Scandinavian countries are good examples of how important it is to uphold social values and virtues that work. When Swedes voted a center-right coalition into government in 2006, they did so based on a platform that emphasized hard work and individual responsibility in a society where all too many healthy people of working age were living on welfare. This tradition of individual responsibility goes back all the way to the time when Sweden was largely a rural, farming-based country with individual tillers, Sanandaji points out.

The lesson isn’t only that the Scandinavian model is difficult to copy, but that it would even be outright unwise of a country like America to do so. What left-leaning people in America and other countries should ultimately learn from the Scandinavian model is that for redistribution of wealth to be possible, there must first and foremost be enough wealth to distribute.

Economic Lessons from Scandinavia - Daniel J. Mitchell - Townhall Finance Conservative Columnists and Financial Commentary - Page full

Economic Lessons from Scandinavia - Daniel J. Mitchell - Townhall Finance Conservative Columnists and Financial Commentary - Page full

In my younger years, I oftentimes would have arguments with statists who wanted me to believe that countries in Northern Europe like Sweden “proved” that generous welfare states were compatible with economic prosperity.

That doesn’t happen as often today because the Nordic nations in recent decades have not enjoyed rapid growth. Moreover, some of the nations – such as Sweden in the early 1990s and Iceland last decade – suffered from serious financial downturns.

So I stand by my position that free markets and small government are the recipe for prosperity.

Our first story is from the Washington Post, and it’s authored by a British journalist who lives in Denmark. He starts by noting the inordinate amount of praise these countries receive.

....

But he then points out that these is trouble in the Nordic paradise.

....

Now let’s look at our second story, which was published by the New York Post.

The tone is more negative, but it basically has the same message.

Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism – Telegraph Blogs

Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism – Telegraph Blogs

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.

Per Bylund: What Sweden Can Teach Us About ObamaCare - WSJ.com

Per Bylund: What Sweden Can Teach Us About ObamaCare - WSJ.com

Other stories include people waiting many hours before a nurse or anyone talked to them after they arrived in emergency rooms and then suffering for long periods of time before receiving needed care. A 42-year-old woman in Karlstad seeking care for meningitis died in the ER after a three-hour wait. A woman with colon cancer spent 12 years contesting a money-saving decision to deny an abdominal scan that would have found the cancer earlier. The denial-of-care decision was not made by an insurance company, but by the government health-care system and its policies.
This is why Swedes over the past two decades have been rushing to purchase medical coverage through private insurance, which guarantees and delivers timely and qualitative care. Insurance Sweden, the country's national insurance company trade organization, reports that in 2013 12% of working adults had private insurance even though they are already "guaranteed" public health care. The number of private policyholders has increased by 67% over the last five years, despite the fact that an average Swedish family already pays nearly $20,000 annually in taxes toward health care and elderly care, including what Americans call Medicare.

Sweden has started to self-correct, choosing a more sustainable path: private health-care options that allow for competition, customer choice and better overall care for Swedes. America should learn from Sweden's experience and follow the Nordic country's recent example, turning away from government-controlled health care to embrace a free-market solution.
It is possible to have truly affordable, qualitative and accessible care. But the only way to get this result is through a system where providers freely compete with each other to lower costs and raise quality. There is no short cut to well-functioning, affordable health care. Sweden's undesirable experience shows this very clearly.

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/372197/nazis-still-socialists-jonah-goldberg

Nazis: Still Socialists
Tim Stanley’s definition excludes basically all real socialists, past and present.

The Volokh Conspiracy -- How Private Property Rights Saved the Pilgrims

Link: http://www.volokh.com/2012/11/22/how-private-property-rights-saved-the-pilgrims-2/ (via shareaholic.com)

Today is Thanksgiving, and there is much to be thankful for. Not least on the list is the institution of private property, without which the Pilgrims might not have survived, and we would not have this holiday. Economist Benjamin Powell recounts the story here
Tom Bethell gave a more detailed account in this 1999 article.
In my 2010 Thanksgiving post on this subject, I noted that Thanksgiving is also a good time to disabuse ourselves of the longstanding myth that Native Americans had no private property rights and opposed the concept when it was supposedly first introduced by whites. In that post, I also explained why the lessons of the Pilgrims' experience with private and communal property are in no way negated by the fact that the Plymouth Plantation was a corporation.

http://www.volokh.com/2010/11/25/how-private-property-rights-saved-the-pilgrims/

UPDATE #2: For the benefit of various commenters, it's worth nothing that, contrary to popular mythology, Native Americans made extensive use of property rights too. Other commenters try to defeat my point by noting that Plymouth Plantation was a corporation. However, corporations had a very different status in 17th century England than today. They were not purely private organizations, but individually chartered by the government to carry out purposes specifically mandated by the state. Until the establishment of general incorporation laws in the 19th century, it was not possible for any private party to form a corporation at will for the purpose of pursuing its own goals. More to the point, this corporation, like some others at the time, was specifically created to carry out governmental functions: it was given a monopoly of force, control of the justice system, and every other power typically wielded by the state. Local governments in England were legally referred to as "corporations" and regulated by such laws as the Corporation Act of 1661. The fact that a government is called a "corporation" for legal purposes does not change its nature. If the United States government changed its name to "USA, Inc." tomorrow, it would not thereby cease to be a government.

http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_15-2009_03_21.shtml#1237224869

Like many property teachers, I sometimes encounter the persistent myth that Native Americans don't believe in private property, had no concept of property rights before Europeans arrived, and so on. But, as Anderson explained in this 1997 article, many Indian tribes used property rights for a wide range of purposes long before whites arrived. Ironically, the myth of Native American hostility to property rights was first developed by 18th and 19th century whites as a justification for dispossessing Indians of their land on the grounds that they didn't really own it. In the 20th century, the myth was taken up by some left-wing environmentalists and others in order to show that Native Americans had a supposedly superior collectivist ethic that whites should emulate.

http://perc.org/articles/american-indian-collectivism

In the past, most if not all North American indigenous peoples had a strong belief in individual property rights and ownership. Frederick Hodge (1910) noted that individual private ownership was "the norm" for North American tribes.
Likewise, Julian Steward (1938, 253) asserted that among Native Americans communal property was limited, and Frances Densmore (1939) concluded that the Makah tribe in the Pacifi�c Northwest had property rights similar to Europeans.' These early twentieth-century historians and anthropologists had the advantage of actually interviewing tribal members who had lived in pre-reservation Indian society.
By the late 1940s, however, these original and fi�rsthand sources of information had died, and false myths and historical distortions began to take dominant shape. By the mid–1960s, the tone in many college history books, history-inspired fi�lms and novels, and even speeches had completely changed (Mika 1995). A typical historical distortion, for example, is found in Baldwin and Kelley's best-selling 1965 college textbook, The Stream of American History, where they write, "Indians had little comprehension of the value of money, the ownership of land . . . and so land sharks and grog sellers found it easy to mulct them of their property"(208).

Terry Anderson (1995) attributes the beginning of the myth to settlers seeking farm land in the Great Plains, who interacted only with nomadic tribes that did not view land as an important asset. These settlers mistakenly generalized the lack of interest in land to infer a lack of property rights among all tribes. We argue that this fi�ction was further propagated in the nineteenth century by a virtual army of East Coast newspaper journalists, dime novelists, and Washington politicians who, in spite of writing about Native Americans, often had little contact with tribal groups. Reported, retold, and unchallenged, these incorrect perceptions ended up as the basis for later laws and institutional codifi�cation.

German Solar Subsidies to Remain High with Consumers Paying the Price

Link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-solar-subsidies-to-remain-high-with-consumers-paying-the-price-a-842595.html (via shareaholic.com)

...Photovoltaic power plant operators and homeowners with solar panels on their rooftops are expected to pocket around €9 billion ($11.3 billion) this year, yet they contribute barely 4 percent of the country's power supply, and only erratically at that.
When night falls, all solar modules go offline in one fell swoop; in the winter, they barely generate power during the daytime. During the summer, meanwhile, they sometimes generate too much power around midday, without enough storage capacity to capture it all. The distribution network is also not laid out in a way that would allow the country's thousands of owners of photovoltaic arrays -- a term used to denote an installation of several panels working together -- to feed into the grid as well as draw power from it.
To keep the lights on, Germany ends up importing nuclear power from France and the Czech Republic.

Say No To Socialism � Romania’s 20-Year Nightmare: Unraveling Socialized Health Care

Link: http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/2012/07/06/romanias-20-year-nightmare-unraveling-socialized-health-care/?singlepage=true (via shareaholic.com)

In my other life in Communist Romania, I managed a large intelligence organization that, among other tasks, was charged with keeping alive a nationalized health care system which in the end bankrupted the country and generated popular contempt. That system, very similar to the Affordable Health Care for America Act, was a bureaucratic nightmare. And it still is a nightmare in the former Soviet empire.

There is no better way to visualize the eventual disaster that a nationalized health care system can generate than to watch The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. This movie was inspired by the heartbreaking true story of Constantin Nica, a real retired Romanian engineer who had the misfortune of growing old in a country that still maintained a nightmarish government health care bureaucracy twenty years after its last Communist dictator was gunned down by his own people.
The movie’s script follows the fictional Mr. Lazarescu as a Romanian government ambulance shuttles him from one government-owned hospital to the next. At the first three hospitals, although the doctors determine that he does need surgery, the government bureaucracy refuses to take him in because he is too old and does not have enough money to give baksheesh to the hospital personnel. Mr. Lazarescu stubbornly refuses to give up, but at the fourth hospital, the evil bureaucrats win — he dies after a delayed and botched surgery. (The real Mr. Nica was in fact dumped by an ambulance onto a park bench and left there to die.) Mr. Lazarescu’s real enemy was not his illness, but the uncaring and authoritarian attitude so deeply ingrained in bureaucratic practice. The whole movie is so realistic that even The New York Times — a strong supporter of government-run health care — had to admit that the movie “absorbs you into its world”.

You Don't Have to Support Universal Health Coverage to Support Caring for th...

You Don't Have to Support Universal Health Coverage to Support Caring for the Needy

via Hit & Run by Peter Suderman on 6/27/12

Liberals often accuse opponents of universal health coverage legislation of wanting to let the poor go without coverage — and suffer and die as a result. Let's be charitable and assume that liberals actually believe that this is the only possible alternative to universal coverage orchestrated by the government.
The problem, of course, is that it's not.
It is possible to oppose both the current fiscally rotten entitlement system and expansions of that system — like the 2010 health care overhaul now awaiting a Supreme Court decision — and still favor a basic safety net for the truly needy.
What might such a safety net look like? Here are a few basic principles.
It would focus effort and resources on providing care for the truly needy rather than on providing subsidies for seniors or the middle class. Right now we subsidize the health insurance of the middle and upper classes through the tax system, which has distorted the market for medical care for decades. The health care overhaul, should it stand, will add an additional layer of subsidies for households earning up to 400 percent of the poverty line, or nearly $90,000 for a family of four. Medicare is not means tested, and provides taxpayer-financed health coverage for the wealthiest cohort of Americans. It's a hefty transfer from the poor and young to the rich and old. Medicaid, meanwhile, is a deeply dysfunctional program that regularly fails the poor and, thanks in part to the perverse incentives of its joint financing system, is the subject of constant squabbling between state authorities and the federal government. American health care policy today offers lopsided benefits to politically influential groups like seniors at the expense of the poor and vulnerable.
It would do as little as possible to control prices or suppress price signals. Since World War II, medical prices have been systematically distorted and suppressed all over the Western world. As National Center for Policy Analysis president John Goodman extensively documents in his new book, Priceless: Curing the Health Care Crisis, individuals, employers, providers, and even payers — public and private — have been shielded from seeing the true costs of care, which has helped generate cost inflation and excess spending. A better health care system would be far more transparent to all parties, ensuring clear prices for specific services and service bundles throughout each layer of the system.
It would emphasize catastrophic coverage instead of subsidizing routine care. Rather than attempt to cover relatively predictable health expenses, a better safety net would focus on ensuring that health care expenses did not lead to financial ruin for the most needy. In other words, the focus would be on providing insurance against disaster rather than day-to-day comprehensive coverage, encouraging individuals to take responsibility for care that can reasonably be expected in advance while also offering some peace of mind that worst case scenarios are covered.
It would allow for flexibility and experimentation when possible. Because the price system has been suppressed for so long, and because so much of medical practice is directed or heavily influenced by government payment systems and regulations, any system would have to emphasize freeing providers and patients to experiment with new models of care, payment, and administrative practice. Experimentation should be locally driven rather than centrally planned, and, whenever possible, should not require obtaining advance permission, which tends to give competitors an opening to block competition. It would also need to free state and local governments to experiment with competing public health policies.
Would a system based on these principles be perfect? No, not even close. But it would provide more effective help to the truly needy while allowing and encouraging the sort of market-driven innovations that are desperately needed in the health care sector. Perfect, anyway, is not possible. It is unfortunate but true that people slip through the cracks in universal systems all over the first world: Cancer patients fight for access to treatments in the United Kingdom's politically driven socialized health care system; Canadians in excruciating but not-quite-life-threatening pain wait months for treatment and cost the country billions in productivity losses. Coverage, as we have also seen in the U.S., is not always a guarantee of care. It is not necessary to support government-driven universal coverage in order to support finding more sustainable and effective ways to care for those who need it most.
The Mercatus Center's Tyler Cowen laid out some suggested principles for supporters of free-market health care here. Reason's Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy make the case against the current entitlement system in the cover story of Reason's August/September print edition, which is currently on newsstands. So subscribe now!

The Reality Of Canada's "Free" Health Care

The Reality Of Canada's "Free" Health Care

via Advice Goddess Blog on 6/15/12

The Reality Of Canada's "Free" Health Care
On PsychologyToday.com, Gad Saad, a Canadian academic whose work I follow, advises Americans not to romanticize the Canadian health care system:

(1) Our healthcare is anything but free. We are levied some of the most punitive and exorbitant tax rates of all industrialized nations. The average Canadian will pay extraordinarily more taxes to subsidize the "free" healthcare system then he/she will ever receive in return in terms of services rendered.

(2) Margaret Thatcher famously quipped "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." Let's see how this played out within the Canadian healthcare system. For decades, the Canadian medicare card did not include a photo ID. In other words, when an individual presented his/her card to obtain "free" medical services, seldom did anyone ensure that the card belonged to the individual in question. The running joke among many Middle Eastern communities (recall that I was born in Lebanon) is that the whole of the Middle East obtained free healthcare in Canada. The Canadian government eventually smartened up to this astonishing scam by altering the medicare cards to include a photo ID. That said, the politicians did not have to worry about the billions of dollars stolen (which I paid for), as there is always a passive citizenry willing to absorb additional tax hikes. You see, we have "free" healthcare in Canada.

(3) The Canadian healthcare system is so overburdened that it is difficult to find a family physician willing to take on new patients. In our "free" system, one has to beg and plead to be taken as a patient. You are made to feel as though you are personally indebted to a physician who accepts you as a patient. "Thank you, doctor. I will never forget your infinite kindness for having accepted to provide me the 'free' service that I pay thousands of dollars per year in taxes to have. You are a mensch doc." Good luck finding a specialist in due time. There are endless anecdotes of patients being told that the next available date for an important surgery is many months down the line, given the scheduling backlog.

(4) Let us suppose that you are facing a medical emergency. Have no fear, as our Canadian system is free and generous. You'll only have to wait 8-14 hours in a hospital waiting room (as did my wife when she experienced a medical situation whilst pregnant with our first child). You might die while waiting but at least it is "free."

(5) The failure of our Canadian healthcare system is so apparent (and so unsustainable) that in the last few years many Canadians have had to enroll in private health insurance programs! I recently experienced debilitating lower back pains rendering me nearly immobile for several days. I could have sought the services of our "free" healthcare but this would have meant that I would have likely waited six months to see a physiatrist. He/she would have then ordered me to have some MRI images done, which would have taken a few more months at the "free hospital." On the other hand, since I pay for private healthcare insurance, the problem was addressed in less than one week. Hence, not only do I pay exorbitant taxes to fund a healthcare system that is utterly broken but also I must enroll in private healthcare programs (as would the average American) to avoid having to participate in the "free" system that I already paid for!

Socialized medicine articles

From National Review Online Socialized Failure by John C. Goodman

The health-care systems of all developed countries face three unrelenting problems: rising costs, inadequate quality, and incomplete access to care. A slew of recent articles, published mainly in medical journals, suggest that the health-care systems of other countries are superior to ours on all these fronts. Yet the articles are at odds with a substantial economic literature.

What follows is a brief review of the evidence. As other writers demonstrate elsewhere in this issue, the American health-care system has plenty of problems. But it is not inferior to other developed countries’ systems — and we should therefore not be looking to these systems, most of which are characterized by heavy government intervention, for inspiration.

Scott Atlas at the NCPA concludes:

Conclusion. Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries.

Wall Street Journal

But the comparison between public and private plans is a false comparison. Private insurance and public benefits are not the same business. For all its warts, private insurance tries to manage care. Medicare is mostly about paying the bills presented to it.

Many who favor a public plan as part of comprehensive health-care reform dismiss the administrative "overhead" of private plans as having little or no value. Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Pete Stark (D., Calif.), for example, insists that "most private plans are poorly managed." Contrasting them with the supposedly sleek and efficient Medicare program, he labels commercial insurance "the General Motors of medical care."

In fact, the administrative expenses of private insurance plans represent money well spent for their members. Here are four reasons:

First, private insurers must build provider networks. These networks can include high-value providers and exclude low-quality providers. Except for certain circumstances, including criminal acts, Medicare is forbidden from excluding poor quality providers. It lets in everyone who signs up. So one question to ask is, will the public plan have Medicare's indifference to quality -- or invest in the cost of a network?

Second, private insurers must negotiate rates. Medicare just fixes prices using a statutory and regulatory scheme. And anyone who imagines a public plan would be less costly than private plans must keep the following issue front and center: In the many procedure categories where Medicare's statutory price does not cover full provider costs, shortfalls are shifted to private payers who end up subsidizing the public program. So, will a public plan negotiate rates or simply use fiat as a means of gaining subsidies from private insurance?

Third, private insurers must combat fraud -- or go out of business. Indeed, these payers have every incentive to invest in antifraud personnel and strategies down to the point where return and investment are equal. But anyone who thinks that a public plan could serve as a "yardstick" for the private sector needs to consider Medicare's dismal record with regard to fraud, waste and other abuse.

....

Fourth, private insurers must incur the administrative cost of marketing. Medicare, of course, does not need to market. A public plan competing with other alternatives would have to market itself to the public, and this means tax dollars used to advertise against private plans. Or the public plan could "compete" by using heavily subsidized marketing channels not available to private insurers, such as Social Security mailings, welfare offices, unemployment check stuffers, and the constellation of government-funded "advocacy organizations."

Health Care Mythology

There has been much recent debate about the merits of traditional capitalization weighted indexing, the chief propents being Jack Bogle and Burton Malkiel, and newer “fundamental weighted” indexes advocated by the likes of Rob Arnott, Jeremy Siegel, and

Myth #1 Health Care Costs are Soaring

You cannot judge the “cost” of something by simply what you spend. You must also judge what you get. I’m reasonably certain the cost of 1950’s level health care has dropped in real terms over the last 60 years (and you can probably have a barber from the year 1500 bleed you for almost nothing nowadays).

Myth #2 The Canadian Drug Story

So, repeat after me. We could go with the Canadian system and have super cheap drugs, if only we can find a much bigger, more medically advanced, freer country right next to us to make miracle drugs for themselves, and then we insist that we pay them only a bit above their variable cost for our share, and then they in turn agree to let us be their parasite. Mexico, would you mind helping us out?

Myth #3 Socialized Medicine Works In Some Places

This is a corollary to the “Canada as parasite” parable above. The funny part is socialized medicine has never been truly tested. Those touting socialism’s success have never seen a world without a relatively (for now) free US to make or pay for their new drugs, surgical techniques, and other medical advancements for them. When (and I hope this doesn’t happen) the US joins in the insanity of socialized medicine we will see that when you remove the brain from the body, the engine from a car, the candy from the striper, it just does not work.

Myth #4 Socialized Medicine Is Better Because Their Cost/GDP For Health Care is Lower

* Measuring cost/GDP is inaccurate as it leaves out most of the cost, the cost of lower GDP growth. As one would expect, countries with larger government sectors (including socialized medicine) generally seem to experience slower GDP growth. People are great at measuring costs that they easily can look up, but those are not all the costs!

* If I’m right about the US subsidizing the world of course their costs would be lower!

Myth #5 A Public Option Can Co-Exist with a Private Option

The government does not co-exist or compete fairly with private enterprise, anywhere. It does not play well with others. The regulator cannot be a competitor at the same time. It cannot compete fairly while it owns the armed forces and courts. Finally, it cannot be a fair competitor if when the “public option” screws up (can’t pay its bills), the government implicitly or explicitly guarantees its debts. We have seen what happens in that case and don’t need a re-run.

Myth #6 We Can Have Health Care Without Rationing

Rationing has to occur. This sounds cold and cruel, but it is reality. A=A. If you have a material good or service, like health care, that is ever increasing in quality, and therefore cost, there is no way everyone on Earth can have the best at all times (actually the quality increases are not necessary for rationing to be needed, it just makes the example clearer). It’s going to be rationed by some means. The alternatives come down to the marketplace or the government. To choose between those alternatives you judge on morality and efficacy.

Myth #7 Health Care is A Right

Nope, it’s not.

Socialized medicine in China

The Volokh Conspiracy » BBC Objectivity? The BBC intereviews a Chinese citizen on how much better medical care was when it was free.

Reporter: But didn’t medical care used to be free?

Chinese Citizen: It was free, but it was terrible. The “doctor” assigned to our village had only a sixth grade education, and was more likely to kill you than to heal you.

Reporter: But didn’t everyone have equal access to this doctor?

Chinese Citizen: Sure. We were all poor, and we were all free to die in this quack’s care.

I'm reminded of a joke. A man is asking the price of some item at the store. When told, he exclaims that the store down the street sells it for only half the price. When asked why he doesn't buy it from that store, he explains they're out. "Oh, well," says the clerk, "When it's out, it's half price here, too."

A Marxist indictment of capitalism — and why the indictment must be wrong

A Marxist indictment of capitalism — and why the indictment must be wrong

The Anchoress posted at her blog a semi-animated video by a self-avowed Marxist explaining why Marxism, not capitalism, will save the world.  I have to admit that I didn't watch it.  It wasn't the content that drove me away, it was the choppy visuals, which trigger migraines.  Having just beaten back a migraine, I wasn't willing to go for round two.  If you want to watch it, though, please do so, here.

Without having seen the video, though, I can still tell you that anything it says is fallacious, to the extent that it tries to argue that Marxism is a better system than Capitalism.  I know this because I've had a lifetime to consider that argument.

My father, who was raised a Communist before dying a Reagan Democrat, kept believing to the day he died that Communism could somehow work, if it was just done right.  The problem, in his Communism steeped brain, was that the Russians, and the Chinese, and the Cubans, and the North Koreans just weren't doing it right.   Back in those days, since I was young, and hadn't refined my thoughts, I argued with him simply by reiterating that because Communism hadn't yet been done right, no matter the time or place tried, that alone was a pretty good indication that it couldn't be done right.

Those arguments are long gone, but I have finally distilled the principles that, in my mind at least, establish conclusively that Marxism, which draws all power away from the individual and vests that power in the State, can never be done right.  A few epigrammatic statements about the State are all I need:

• The State has no conscience.
• The State will always put its collective survival ahead of the living, breathing "cogs" that animate it (and it will dehumanize those cogs to the status of disposable cockroaches if need be to maintain its survival).
• The State is incapable of rapid response to changing situations (with the federal response to the Gulf Spill being the ultimate example of the rigidity that renders it incapable of abandoning its perfect standards in the face of an overwhelming amount of spilled oil).
• An all-powerful State, without any competition, has no incentive to provide good service, whatever that service may be (health care, housing, etc.).  Competition is the spur to quality.
• Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  This was true before Lord Acton said it, and it will be true in perpetuity.  If you vest all power in the State, you inevitably have, not only absolute corruption, but you have absolute corruption with unfettered life-and-death power over every living and breathing "cog" under its control.

Your comments about either the Anchoress' video or my conclusions?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The death rattle of the welfare state

The death rattle of the welfare state

via PrairiePundit by Merv on 5/10/10

Robert Samuelson:

What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn't Greece's problem alone, and that's why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

Americans dislike the term "welfare state" and substitute the bland word "entitlements." The vocabulary doesn't alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul de sac. To be sure, Greece's plight is usually described as a European crisis -- especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries -- and this is true. But only up to a point.

Euro coins and notes were introduced in 2002. The currency clearly hasn't lived up to its promises. It was supposed to lubricate faster economic growth by eliminating the cost and confusion of constantly converting between national currencies. More important, it would promote political unity. With a common currency, people would feel "European." Their identities as Germans, Italians and Spaniards would gradually blend into a continental identity.

None of this has happened. Economic growth in the "euro area" (the countries using the currency) averaged 2.1 percent from 1992 to 2001 and 1.7 percent from 2002 to 2008. Multiple currencies were never a big obstacle to growth; high taxes, pervasive regulations and generous subsidies were. As for political unity, the euro is now dividing Europeans. The Greeks are rioting. The countries making $145 billion of loans to Greece -- particularly the Germans -- resent the costs of the rescue. A single currency could no more subsume national identities than drinking Coke could make people American. If other euro countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy) suffer Greece's fate -- lose market confidence and can't borrow at plausible rates -- there would be a wider crisis.

But the central cause is not the euro, even if it has meant Greece can't depreciate its own currency to ease the economic pain. Budget deficits and debt are the real problems; and these stem from all the welfare benefits (unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, health insurance) provided by modern governments.

...

We are seeing a preview of what the Democrats are bringing to the US if we do not stop them. It is clear that we need to repeal the new health care law as a start toward a return to fiscal sanity. We will need to cut government spending in myriad ways to get the deficits under control. We don't have huge deficits because we are under taxed. We are overspending and over borrowing.

Fun with statistics

Dr. Linda Halderman looks at the charge that US health care is inferior because of the high infant mortality rate.  I'd love to see footnotes or links to solid references, but she states:

U.S. infant mortality rates (deaths of infants <1 year of age per 1,000 live births) are sometimes cited as evidence of the failings of the U.S. system of health care delivery. Universal health care, it's argued, is why babies do better in countries with socialized medicine.

But in fact, the main factors affecting early infant survival are birth weight and prematurity. The way that these factors are reported — and how such babies are treated statistically — tells a different story than what the numbers reveal.

Low birth weight infants are not counted against the "live birth" statistics for many countries reporting low infant mortality rates.

According to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a premature baby weighing <500g is not considered a living child.

But in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live births. The mortality rate of such babies — considered "unsalvageable" outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive — is extraordinarily high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews U.S. infant mortality statistics.

When Canada briefly registered an increased number of low weight babies previously omitted from statistical reporting, the infant mortality rose from 6.1 per 1,000 to 6.4 per thousand in just one year.

According to research done by Canada's Bureau of Reproductive and Child Health, "Comparisons of infant mortality rates by place and time should be adjusted for the proportion of such live births, especially if the comparisons involve recent years."

Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. But when the main determinant of mortality — weight at birth — is factored in, Norway has no better survival rates than the United States.

I mentioned in a comment, and will repeat here:

Apparently, the World Health organization has defined "live birth" as:

A live birth occurs when a fetus, whatever its gestational age, exits the maternal body and subsequently shows any sign of life, such as voluntary movement, heartbeat, or pulsation of the umbilical cord, for however brief a time and regardless of whether the umbilical cord or placenta are intact. (Wikipedia)

If low birth weight babies aren't being counted in a nation's statistics, it is at odds with this definition. I'd love to see a link to a definitive source.

Now, I suspect this definition doesn't have much legal force, but I'm sure lots of people would be happy if everyone simply infers that this definition is universally used.

Fun and games with health care accounting

Megan McArdle looks at some of the unintended consequences of trying to limit an insurance company's profits.

Igor Volsky at WonkRoom has just discovered that when you arbitrarily set restrictions on what sorts of expenses companies can take, they will arbitrarily reclassify those expenses as something else.  Specifically, government officials think it would be nicer if insurance companies spent a higher percentage of their revenues on medical care rather than administrative overhead.  Without particularly investigating whether this was sound, or even possible, they enacted a rule dictating that the "medical loss ratio" had to be a fairly high percentage of revenues.  Predictably, companies are reclassifying administrative expenses as medical in order to make their numbers.

Now, maybe this is an example of evil companies struggling to hold onto their profits.  But you certainly couldn't prove it by Volsky's post.  He seems to confuse administrative overhead with profits, and further seems unaware that overhead (apart from profits) is usually higher when dealing with a lot of small clients rather than a few big ones.  He refers to the MLR rules as "one of the few ways to prevent insurers from earning outrageous profits before most of reform's provisions kick in", even though the health insurance industry isn't particularly profitable.

It is true, of course, that profits are part of the overhead targeted by the medical loss ratio rules.  But it does not therefore follow, as night to day, that if you raise the percentage of money that you spend on treatment, you lower profits.  It certainly doesn't follow that you lower profits the way you want to--by taking money from greedy executives and giving it to nice folks seeking treatment--rather than, say, by forcing companies with high overhead out of the market entirely. 

He seems blind to the other obvious way to meet your MLR requirements:  stop searching for fraud on either the customer or provider end, and let costs balloon.  If you stop paying attention to controlling costs, your overhead goes down, especially relatively to your costs.  Normally, this is a recipe for bankruptcy, as your competitors undercut you.  But when your competitors are all subject to the same rule requiring them to let this happen....

I do think that the most dangerous weakness on the pro-reform side is a broad ignorance of how companies actually work.  There seem to be a lot of assumptions that are intuitively satisfying, but blatantly silly to anyone who has ever managed a company (or spent much time talking to those who do).  The assumption that lower overhead is invariably better is one of these, but not the only one.  Others include a fairly persistent confusion about how companies make investment decisions, and how capital markets work; the belief that price rationing and government rationing are somehow economically equivalent because they both contain the word "rationing"; and the belief that having more the one product in a market is obviously wasteful "me-too" competition which is bad for consumers.

Elsewhere, Jonah Goldberg cites William Buckley's favorite quote: 'The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.'

One might just as easily say that the problem with socialism is capitalists, too.

If by "capitalist" you mean someone who cares more about his own profit than yours; if you mean someone who cares more about providing for his family than providing for yours; if you mean someone who trusts that he is a better caretaker of his own interests and desires than a bureaucrat he's never met, often in a city he's never been to: then we are all capitalists. Because, by that standard, capitalism isn't some far-off theory about the allocation of capital; it is a commonsense description of what motivates pretty much all human beings everywhere.

And that was one of the reasons why the hard socialism of the Soviet Union failed, and it is why the soft socialism of Western Europe is so anemic. At the end of the day it is entirely natural for humans to work the system -- any system -- for their own betterment, whatever kind of system that may be.

And likewise, it's perfectly natural for corporations, including insurance companies, to so arrange their affairs so as to minimize the impact of government regulations on their business.

On the Road to Serfdom

Linked from Patterico's blog:

"...This is also an income shift. it's a shift -- a leveling to help lower income middle income americans . Too often of late, the last couple -- three years, maldistribution of income in america's gone up way too much. The wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy. And the middle income class is left behind. Wages have not kept up with the increased income of the highest income americans. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that maldistribution of income in America, because health care is now a right for all americans, and because health care is now affordable for all americans."

And here's Howard Dean:

Steyn on ObamaCare

Mark Steyn gives his take on ObamaCare in Cross the River, Burn the Bridge.

My Republican friends often seem to miss the point in this debate: The so-called “public option” is not Page 3,079, Section (f), Clause VII. The entire bill is a public option — because that’s where it leads, remorselessly. The so-called “death panel” is not Page 2,721, Paragraph 19, Sub-section (d), but again the entire bill — because it inserts the power of the state between you and your doctor, and in effect assumes jurisdiction over your body. As the savvier Dems have always known, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you can endlessly re-reform your health reform until the end of time, and all the stuff you didn’t get this go-round will fall into place, and very quickly.

As I’ve been saying for over a year now, “health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture. The unlovely Democrats on public display in the week before Christmas may seem like just a bunch of jelly-spined opportunists, grubby wardheelers and rapacious kleptocrats, but the smarter ones are showing great strategic clarity. Alas for the rest of us, Euro-style government on a Harry Reid/Chris Dodd/Ben Nelson scale will lead to ruin.