Letter to Senator Hatch About Donations and Voting
Nov 18, 2009 Current Events, History
The following is a letter that I emailed to Senator Hatch after learning of his vote to squash a filibuster on the issue of qualifications of Obama federal court Nominee, David Hamilton.
Dear Senator Hatch,
A few days ago, I got a request for donations from the republican party with your name on it. I put it through my paper shredder. If you are not afraid of my vote then maybe you’ll be afraid of my refusal to donate. I did this because the Party continues to not understand who its base is. In NY-23, Scozzafava may have been chosen by the local Republicans, but the national party tried to shove her down our throats. Endorsements from Gingrich and others was an attempt to legitimize her with Republicans, even though she was for card check, gay marriage, unlimited taxation, and was endorsed by ACORN affiliates. My thought when I shredded your donation request was, “Republicans have to clean up their act before I will subsidize it.”
The wisdom of doing this has been confirmed by the fact that YOU voted to squash debate on David Hamilton’s qualifications. While Republicans had the majority, you did not stop filibusters on judges though you could have with the nuclear option. Now in the minority, you vote with the democrats to stop filibuster attempts.
Senator Hatch, the judiciary is the only thing, the one and only thing holding back this Marxist takeover of our country. No longer are the Marxists even hiding who they are. They praise Mao, appoint communist Czars, and quote Marx himself. And you vote with them to stop a filibuster on a man who believes that the constitution is clay in the hands of an Empathetic Judge? How about empathy for the person going before the court expecting to be able to predict the law because it is written down? How about empathy for those that would like this to be a country governed by laws and not men?
Last year I wrote reprimanding your vote for the bailout bill. You wrote me back, justifying it. Do you know when I received the letter in the mail? On the election night of Barak Obama. And who was right about the wisdom of that bill? I was. Look at the damage that Bill and the mentality behind it has caused. Sir, you must have principle if I am to vote for you and support you financially. STAND FOR SOMETHING! You and the Republican party elites don’t stand for anything, unless 10 feet behind the democrats on the same downward slope to Marxism is a stance.
You have to drop Keynesianism and appose the Marxism. A compromise on principle is like a compromise in a ship. You cannot compromise with this flood.
NY-23 showed us that we do not need the Republican party. An independent with little funding and little on-the-ground organization got within 3 points and maybe even less once the votes are certified.
I will never vote for a statist democrat on principle and will put up with only so much statism in Republicans. If I have to vote for the constitution party or a libertarian to explain my dissatisfaction with your statist-light voting, I will. The Dems may gain ground, but it will be your fault for not standing tall, not mine.
Remember, before Abraham Lincoln there was total control of the 3 branches by the Democrat populists (looting the public coffers and oppressing whole segments of the population for their own gain). That changed in sweeping victories over the next 10 years. If I have to bid farewell to a party with such a noble past because of the non-courageous leaders letting it sink into statism-light, I will bid it adieu. America may become statist in nature, but it will not be by the party or platform I support.
Tags: Bailouts, Judiciary, Letters to Politicians
“Healthcare for All” and Other Stupid Phrases
Nov 5, 2009 Current Events, History
We are on the cusp of socializing our very bodies. Government controlled healthcare is literally submitting to a far-away bureaucrat the power over your life and death in the arena of healthcare. Once the central government in Washington has the power over your life and you don’t like it or you think it is corrupted, what would you do? You have to beg, but not just about something like public schooling or building good roads. You have to beg for your life.
In terms of classical liberalism versus statism, with federal mandates on healthcare you are beholden to the state. Your life is in the hands of another to grant or not. What if a Stalin-like individual gets into government or the bureaucracies become so large and in-transparent that impersonal life/death decisions are the norm? How do you get back the power that you gave to government in a time when things looked like they’d be different? You are stuck along with your fellow citizens.
Healthcare is expensive as it is and will only get more so. But why is it expensive? Has it always been like this?
Many say that healthcare is expensive because of healthcare insurance companies taking huge profits. So what are their profits? According to Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics, the health insurance industry ranks number 86 in profitable industries, below garbage collection, cleaning products, personal hygiene products, and many other industry categories. The whole health insurance plans industry shows an average profit of 3.3%, less than 4 pennies for every dollar. Yet, healthcare insurance continues to rise at the rate of about 12% on average every year. How does an average profit of 3.3% translate into the cause of 12% yearly increase? It doesn’t.
But why should people profit off of the health of others? Many think even 3.3% is just greed over the misfortune of others. Profit is not greed. If it costs you $600 a month to travel to work, eat during the day, and use up your time to work for your employer, is it greedy to expect more from your employer than $600 in compensation? If you take home $1000 for the job you have a profit of $400, which is a 66% profit.
One might say that an individual’s profit for a job done is different than the profit of a company. How? A person desires profit from their job for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with just living hand to mouth. Even the very poor have things. Was it greedy for them to get more than what they needed to merely live? Well a company must do more than merely live. They have to prepare for the future and they do it through profits. When there is a downturn in the economy, a lack of investors, an epidemic health crisis, or whatever, the only thing standing between you continuing to get insurance through your company and the complete failure of that company is the 3.3% that they had in former years.
Of course governments are never greedy, right? Only people who admit they are out for a profit are greedy, right? Governments are greedy for money and power.
When bureaucrats spend all of the money that they had left in there budgets at the end of the year so that their records show they spent everything, they do so to make sure they are considered for an increase the next year. Spend what you can so you can get more? Is that not greed? It is more greedy than a profitable insurance company. That profitable insurance company can’t simply spend and charge what it likes as the bureaucracy does; it must compete in a market where their competition could exploit their inflated prices. Bureaucracy has no competition in that sense.
A politician may get into office raise spending and do so at the expense of others with out even asking them if they can afford the increase in taxes. That politician may have money in mind when taxes are raised, but for what end? Charity? No, if charity were the goal, then the politician could give funds to charities or even raise no taxes and use his position and popularity to encourage voluntary charity. The statist politician seeks public options, because ultimately those options give the statist politician power.
Perform a thought experiment. Obama says that he wants GM jobs to survive and uses the government loans used to “save” GM as an excuse to commandeer GM shares and property. He does so because he didn’t like the plan that GM had presented on its own to save the company. What was he seeking when taking over 48% of GM shares? He didn’t like what they were doing, thinks his own people and he know better, and therefore seeks control. What is control? Power.
Right now there are about 1300 health insurance companies in the US. Every American can only access those companies in his or her state by federal law. If insurance is too costly in California and not too bad in Wyoming, forget being able to buy insurance in Wyoming unless you move there.
Does it make sense to limit competition like that? If you think that a store in your area is charging too much for computers, you can go online and buy from somewhere else. Insurance is a service that is much more portable than computers. You can pay your premiums online and the company can pay claims across the country. Why would anyone limit your access to a service that can be performed from anywhere? Power. The statist had an opinion about cross-state competition and sought the power to prevent it because the statist wanted control. Statist politicians are greedy for power over others, no matter what else is their motivation.
The question still remains. Why is insurance so expensive?
BIG REASON NUMBER ONE: It isn’t insurance.
Insurance is a prearranged agreement for one person to pay upfront for a promise that the other will pay for greater unforeseen expenses should they occur in the future. Car insurance is insurance in the true sense for the most part. You pay a company and then try your darnedest (if you are smart) not to ever need that company’s service.
Examine the agreement of most health insurance plans. You pay part of the money against some catastrophe that you knock on wood to avoid, but the rest goes to paying for things that you actually expect to pay. It is not out of the norm for a person to see a doctor once a year. It costs you and the insurance company an average of $152 for that visit with the average co-pay share of that being $20. Health insurance costs and average of $13,000 a year and plans that provide for routine visits cost usually two or more times the price of catastrophic only coverage. So rather than pay the $152 out of pocket or savings, you payed someone else more to pay it.
So lets say, as was the case with me when shopping for insurance, you are presented with “Plan A” that only covers catastrophes at about $2100 a year and “Plan B” that covers catastrophes and all kinds of routine things like checkups, prescriptions for any ailment, etc. at a cost of $4200 a year. If I choose Plan B, then I have literally just payed twice as much money for things that I can reasonably expect that I may need to pay for during that year. Will all of the extra $2100 go straight to paying for the doctor visits or drugs? No. A large portion of it will go to pay for billing and other administrative costs by the insurance company, doctors office, and pharmacy. If you can reasonably expect to pay for routine things during the year, why pay someone else to pay them for you? You could have just chosen Plan A and used the saved $2100 during that year to pay directly to the doctor or pharmacist.
Most Americans have chosen Plan B when presented with it, because it sounds nice to not have to worry. That means that we are not paying extra money for healthcare, we are paying extra for worry-care.
BIG REASON NUMBER TWO: People most of the time have no clue how much they were charged.
If you had iTunes insurance that you pooled with 1000 other people that would pay for any possible iTunes expenses, all of the prices for each buy were unknown, there was only a fixed small co-pay for each buy, and you buy all you wanted as long as you had enough for all the small co-pays, what would happen to the price of the iTunes insurance for every participant? What an audiophile may have reasonably spent on straight purchases would increase rapidly and it would do it for every participant in such a ridiculous policy.
That is what we have chosen to do for health insurance. People have no clue how much visits cost, they have no clue how much drugs cost, they have no clue how much administration costs, but they pay it collectively every month in the form of a ridiculous scheme that is really not insurance—it’s concierge payment service. We have decided collectively act like we’re all contestants of Super-Market Sweep Healthcare Edition where the twist of the show is that the host gets to ring up the full baskets.
The excuse for healthcare cost rises is often said to be technological advances. If that is true then how come technological advances mostly cost more in the “I-have-no-clue-how-much-this-is-going-to-cost-me” model? La-sic eye surgery does not have the huge increases in costs that other innovations have even though the technology is better and better and the procedures are relatively new. Plastic surgery has come down from the enormous costs of its early days to where they continue to fall today—this occurring with greater and greater technological advances. However, anything in the “I-have-no-clue” model is more and more expensive.
Where else do we say technology makes things more expensive? Only in government endeavors and healthcare. Harvesting wheat is cheaper with technological advances. Manufacturing cars is cheaper with technological advances. Is it cheaper to have a machine and tech that probe your guts for a blockage or probe the old fashion way by opening you up with a staff of payed medical professionals, rented operating room, rented hospital room, etc, etc? The per-unit cost for a machine is more expensive if all you would ever have is one guy to use it on, but most medical machines are bought to perform on multiple patients. So, is it the technology or the fact that people have no clue of how much they are billed that made it expensive? They have no clue is the answer.
BIG REASON NUMBER THREE: Tort, tort, tort.
What product or service would not be expensive if the providers or sellers were to be shaken down by sharks in suits? If a sandwich shop had to pay half its income paying to protect itself from the occasional mobster coming in to break everyone’s kneecaps, how much would the sandwich cost?
People see former Senator John Edwards running for president with the money he made from suing doctors, nurses, and hospitals for a since disproved cause of cerebral-palsy, and only think he is a scoundrel when he cheats on his sick wife. He is a scoundrel on both counts and probably more.
more to come…
Tags: Consitution, Healthcare, Liberty