According to President Obama, government health insurance will create competition in the health insurance industry. It simply would provide another alternative to existing plans offered by private companies, the argument goes. Like many Americans, we simply don't believe it. Whenever the government enters into a market, it will try to expand its share and take over the sector.
During a town hall meeting last week at Portsmouth, N.H., Mr. Obama pointed to the U.S. Postal Service as evidence that private companies don't need to worry about competition from the government. "If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It's the post office that's always having problems."
If the president considers the Postal Service as an example, we should all be scared. The Postal Service is a classic example of both inefficiency and extreme monopoly power.
The Postal Service has staunchly resisted competition from UPS and FedEx since their infancy. Even though the Postal Service loses money in the overnight delivery business, it resisted infringement on its turf. The Postal Service has often increased its first-class mail rate to be well above cost, then used those profits to subsidize its overnight delivery service. For example, it raised first-class stamps to 33 cents in January 1999 and simultaneously reduced the price of domestic overnight express mail from $15 to $13.70, even though it was already losing money at the $15 rate.
Despite numerous advantages that FedEx and UPS could only dream of having, the Postal Service loses money. In addition to direct subsidies, the Postal Service is exempt from paying state sales, property and income taxes. It uses some of the most expensive real estate in the country rent-free. Perhaps Mr. Obama has not noticed, but nobody else but the Postal Service is allowed to deliver regular first-class mail, and only the Postal Service has access to Americans' mailboxes.
The Postal Service has not managed to kill off UPS and FedEx because these private companies have better on-time delivery and much lower costs. But that is not because the government postal business did not try to squeeze out the competition. When a government agency gets into an industry, it tries to get bigger, even when it is not profitable.
The competition that Mr. Obama envisions between government and private insurance companies won't be fair. Many proposed regulations, such as eliminating caps on what insurance companies will pay out or preventing insurance companies from discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions, will eliminate private insurance. But even if the government only tilts the playing field partially in favor of a government insurance plan, making it artificially cheaper, a lot of Americans will give up their private insurance to save money. Government insurance gradually will take over, and service will deteriorate.
#2
About ten years ago while waiting in line at a local branch of the Post Office, I tried to remember the last time I hadn't had to wait in line at any Post Office I had ever visited and couldn't remember ever not waiting. I have kept rough track since and my record is still intact, I always have to wait in some line. Fast forward to Obamacare, if you think the Post Office is bad wait til you take a number in your local ER. Just remember to bleed slowly.
Posted by: Total War ||
08/17/2009 18:43 Comments ||
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#3
One major difference that hampers the USPS, however, is the government mandate that says they will deliver to "every household, every day at the same cost" in the case of First Class Postage.
Try shipping "business to consumer via UPS/FedEx and see the pricing differences to ship across town, as well as to your Uncle NaNook at the edge of "Palin Country" or to your cousin down in the Bayuo.
#5
Slightly off subject, while I've never seen Bicycles like that, it would fix a huge problem High-wheelers had, if you hit a small bump you went over on your face, with front stabilizers that won't happen
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
08/17/2009 22:39 Comments ||
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Opponents of Barack Obama's healthcare proposals are using the tactics of Saul Alinksy, the legendary leftwing activist who helped inspire the US president when he was a young community organiser, says Dick Armey, head of Freedom Works, a group fighting against universal healthcare.
Mr Armey, who was the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives for most of the 1990s, said his group, which is behind many of the "tea party" protests that have disrupted town-hall meetings in the past two weeks, draws consciously on the forms of agitation pioneered by Mr Alinsky.
Mr Obama, who worked as a community organiser among unemployed steel workers on Chicago's South Side in the late 1980s, was heavily influenced by Mr Alinsky, who inspired a generation of radicals in the 1960s. Mr Alinsky believed that packing public meetings with highly vocal activists would sway their outcomes and give people a taste of the power they could exercise when they showed up in numbers.
"What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," said Mr Armey, who was one of the leaders of the "Contract with America" Republican landslide in 1994.
"What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good," Mr Armey said. "We don't organise people to turn up at these town-hall meetings -- we don't provide buses to get them there. But we tell them about the meetings and we suggest good questions they could ask."
Mr Armey, whose group works closely with the Tea Party Patriots and other conservative organisations round the country, said he thought the anti-reform protests against Mr Obama's healthcare proposals exceeded the temperature during the August 1994 congressional recess when the Clinton administration's healthcare plans were shot to pieces.
On Friday Mr Armey announced his resignation from DLA Piper, the Washington-based lobbying firm that he has advised since stepping down from Congress in 2002. Both DLA Piper, which has big healthcare clients including Bristol Myers Squibb, the pharmaceutical company that opposes elements of Mr Obama's health reforms, and Mr Armey said he had decided to quit in order to spare the firm any further embarrassment by association with Freedom Works.
"We are sorry to see Dick Armey leave," said DLA Piper in a statement. "But we appreciate his taking the initiative to clear up confusion concerning Freedom Works, [which is] a separate and distinct entity from DLA Piper."
Mr Armey, 69, predicted that the "grassroots" backlash against what he called Mr Obama's "hostile government takeover of a sixth of the US economy" would cause the reform to fail spectacularly. But he predicted that supporters of reform would attempt to win over the "bed-wetters caucus" -- a group of wavering lawmakers who spanned both parties, he said -- with a fear campaign in the autumn.
"In September or October there will be a hyped up outbreak of the swine flu which they'll say is as bad as the bubonic plague to scare the bed-wetters to vote for healthcare reform," said Mr Armey. "That is the only way they can push something on to the American people that the American people don't want."
Democrats have portrayed groups such as Freedom Works as demagogues out to disrupt town-hall meetings rather than enter into civil debate. Mr Armey said he doubted members of Freedom Works attended meetings to shout down people with whom they disagreed. "I know people have been doing that but that is not the tactics we recommend," he said.
#2
Of course the vast majority of Americans didnt like 60s radicals when they were not only aggressively disagreeable, but attempted to drown out debate. At least some mainstream congressional Repubs seem to have learned that lesson. Of course to some on the right, shrinking the GOP fits their agenda of dominating it.
Posted by: liberal hawk ||
08/17/2009 16:25 Comments ||
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#3
LH; it worked for the Democrats, they just don't like it when they are the "Power" in the phrase "Speaking Truth To Power".
The AP and the Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times cover Obama's town hall on Saturday, where he told the story of his own grandmother to illustrate a point about health care. Since Obama is re-spinning the lesson he took from that experience this creates a bit of awkwardness for the Times, as we will explain.
So on Saturday in Colorado the point of Obama's story about his grandmother was that he was opposed to any sort of government role in "pulling the plug" on her or deciding that some treatments simply didn't pass a societal cost/benefit test, and to suggest otherwise was "dishonest". "Dishonest"?
That is very much at odds with Obama told the David Leonhardt of the Times in April when he talked about his grandmother.
The President: "It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. "So we're trying to sneak it by the rubes before they know what's going on."
And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance." In Sarah Palin's other words, Death Panels.
O.K., I'll be honest - the main reason I posted this it to be able to point out one of the all-time classic comments: "That primed the pump for Silky Ambulance Chaser and his Lady Macbeth wife who's been on death's doorstep for so long that death has filed a restraining order." ROFLMAO! :-D
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
08/17/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Is this the same Grandmother that during the campaign he said he heard using racial slurs?
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
08/17/2009 14:26 Comments ||
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#2
This is the grandmother that's too dead to tell the truth.
He is, of course, the author of last weeks Human Rights Watch report, which claimed that IDF soldiers murdered white-flag-waving Palestinian civilians in cold blood. He is also the deputy director of HRWs Middle East and North Africa programs. We already knew from NGO Monitor that he hasto put it politelya rather extremist history on all matters Israel.
But now there is a better accounting. Ben-Dror Yemini of the Israeli newspaper Maariv has a blockbuster article laying out the ugly truth of Storks history. The Hebrew is available here; below is a complete English translation. That HRW would place in a senior position someone who has written in explicit support of terrorism against Israel, lauded the murder of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 as providing an important boost in morale among Palestinians, and stated that Zionism may be defeated only by fighting imperialismthis should be the final verdict on a cretinous organizations already tattered credibility.
Long story follows with the English translation from Maariv.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/17/2009 00:00 ||
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When Hillary Clinton visited eastern Congo this week, she stepped into a land of fairy-tale beauty and incredible potential. I remember vividly the day in 1982 when my incoming "class" of Peace Corps volunteers made the same trip. Eastern Congo may be the most magical place on the planet; I remember thinking it did not even belong on this planet, so surreal were its mountains, lakes, volcanoes, and lush forests and farmland.
Unfortunately, the tragedies and turmoil afflicting this area have no place in this world, either. For much of the time that Mobutu Sese Seko ruled then-Zaire, the eastern region was poor but reasonably stable. Since the early 1990s, however, it has been on a rapid descent. Genocide in Rwanda spilled over the border; the Democratic Republic of the Congo's own conflicts accelerated, fueled by the region's mineral wealth; health-care infrastructure disappeared; sexual violence became worse than anywhere else on Earth.
Clinton has taken the first step by calling attention to this region and its terrible problems. But the United States has shown interest in Congo before to little avail. If the situation is to improve, we need to do the one thing that is required above all others -- strengthen security, especially in eastern Congo. And by now we should have learned the hard way that there is only one way to do so -- by leading through example, with the deployment of at least modest numbers of American troops, to spark a broader strengthening of the current U.N. mission. If the Afghanistan mission was undermanned last year with only 60,000 NATO-led troops in a country of 30 million, how can a U.N. mission of 20,000 address the challenges of Congo and its 60 million people?
Yet how can the U.S. military, so overstretched in strategically crucial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, spare any troops for this type of primarily humanitarian venture? The dilemma is similar to that faced in recent years in Darfur, where we wanted to do something but did not have the forces. Admittedly, there may not be a solution tomorrow. But by tapping into President Obama's call for a new spirit of volunteerism and national service, there may be a way to make a difference sometime in 2010. The idea involves a new type of military unit that the Pentagon should propose during its ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review.
For crises like those in Congo and Darfur, the United States should consider a radical innovation in recruiting policy. We should create a peace operations division in the Army with individuals enlisting specifically for this purpose. There would be risks in such a venture, to be sure. But they are manageable and tolerable risks, especially since most such deployments would be legitimated by the United Nations, carried out with partners such as key allies, and backstopped by the U.S. armed forces in worst-case scenarios.
The notion is this: Ask for volunteers to join a peace operations division for two years. They would begin their service with, say, 12 weeks of boot camp and 12 weeks of specialized training and then would be deployable. They would receive the same compensation and health benefits as regular troops, given their age and experience. Out of a division of 15,000 troops, one brigade, or about 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers, could be sustained in the field at a time.
This type of training would be modeled after standard practices in today's Army and Marine Corps. To be sure, soldiers and Marines in regular units usually go beyond this regimen to have many months of additional practice and exercise before being deployed. But the peace operations units could be led by a cadre of experienced officers and NCOs -- perhaps some of whom would be drawn back to military service after leaving (or being booted out because of the obsolete "don't ask, don't tell" policy).
The dangers of deploying such units to missions such as the one in Congo, would be real, but the risks would be acceptable. First, those volunteering would understand the risks and accept them. Second, in most civil conflicts such as Congo's, possible adversarial forces are not sophisticated. Soldiers in the new division would not need to execute complex operations akin to those carried out during the invasion of Iraq or current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They would largely monitor villages and refugee camps, inspect individuals to make sure they did not have illicit weapons, and call for help if they came under concerted attack. Their jobs could be somewhat dangerous and would require discipline and reasonable knowledge of some basic infantry skills -- but they would not be extremely complex. Care would have to be taken in deciding when to deploy this force, but it generally would be, given the scars of recent difficult American experiences in places such as Somalia.
Problems like Congo, Darfur and Somalia tend to get solved only with U.S. leadership. And the United States cannot truly lead on this issue while resisting any role for its own ground forces. It is time to recognize the contradiction of pretending otherwise and get on with a solution.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at Brookings, is the author of "Budgeting for Hard Power" and "The Science of War."
#4
Wow, O'Hanlon has really outdone himself here. Too many jaw-droppers to even begin. Perhaps the other 6 billion people on the planet could "lead by example" in this case - just for a change - by actually doing something. We've been leading by example for decades. With a few small exceptions, nobody's been following.
#5
But they are manageable and tolerable risks, especially since most such deployments would be legitimated by the United Nations, carried out with partners such as key allies, and backstopped by the U.S. armed forces in worst-case scenarios.
What's the point of providing forces if you are not willing to defend anything such as Iraq?
This guy seems to think "6 months of military training and we'll have a military force for peace operations"
Where will they get NCOs and will the focus of the NCOs be their charges, or will the focus of NCOs be a non-military agenda? Because liberals believe in sacrificing for your goals as long as you can get others to do the sacrificing.
If liberals want a peace division, hows about increasing the number of high readiness real military divisions.
Better yet and a better value, how about increasing funding for a missile shield against any south Asian or African mobocracy that want to launch a missile attack against the US and its allies?
#6
Well, yeah, it could work under the auspices of the UN!
After all, no one's ever taken potshots at the guys in blue helmets, or threatened to eat them if they capture them after their ammo runs out, or hack at them with machetes if given the chance....so I'm sure if we sent out some cannon fodder, er, peace warriors, it would all work out well as long as the locals understand they are not under the command of the icky Pentagon, right?
They'll get the locals joining hands, singing kumbaya and driving hybrids in no time flat!
#8
Clinton has taken the first step by calling attention to this region and its terrible problems...since the MSM cast a blind eye to Bush's efforts for most of his Presidency in order to further their own preconceived personal animosity and hatred.
#9
You know, the headline "A New Kind of Force Could Provide Security" prompts me to ask, "You mean the Dark Side?"
If you look at this, it seems they want to reinvent the wheel, only they'll be both cheaper and more successful (and have less collateral casualties) than a regular military force because... well, they don't seem to get around to that.
People who listened to every bit of propaganda and believed most of it about the traditional 'square' military believe they could reinvent it and not have all the problems the regular military does, because they're better people, gosh darn it!
I'd give their division two weeks in theater before they're busy covering up their first My Lai massacre.
#11
Come on, you know what they really want and will never admit. Mercenaries. That's what they're really after, but after the way they go after Blackwater and other contractors, it's not going to happen.
At least, not with quality people. If all you want is gun toting bodies, I'm sure you can hire that quick enough.
#13
O'Hanlon also is ignoring the real and effective missions our 'battle-hardened' troops are doing among the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, going house to house in the villages, drinking tea and handing out school supplies, and enlisting tribal help in flushing out extremists.
#14
So there's not enough infighting among the current branches of the service? We need another one to really confuse things?
Posted by: Matt ||
08/17/2009 11:24 Comments ||
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#15
The Farce is with us.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
08/17/2009 12:03 Comments ||
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#16
I'm thinking that anything that thins the 'Birkenstock' herd can't be a bad thing.
Rough outline:
overseas training and deployment only, no base in US;
Keep them together (segregated from regulars);
must undergo psyche tests to ensure they have the 'proper' caring mindset;
prior military service is an absolute bar to entry;
let them do their own training and establish their own training doctrines (can't you just feel the love?);
arm them with non-lethal weapons only; no arty or area weapons, maybe Tasers and their ilk
ensure that they are direct-funded only by MoveOn, DU, and maybe the Kossacks (so they aren't 'tainted', of course; keep 'em pure and sweet) and must not add to tax burden or divert funds from existing services;
add your own ideas
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
08/17/2009 14:20 Comments ||
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#17
and self-defense training by Robert Fisk
Posted by: Frank G on the road ||
08/17/2009 14:30 Comments ||
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#18
"backed up by regular troops" "call for help".
From whom?
If the Big Boys are available for help, they're not someplace else. This does nothing to help spread our forces, but only to tie down more.
What a maroon.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
08/17/2009 15:16 Comments ||
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#19
What's the recruiting poster? "Uncle Sam wants YOU to become a hostage in some third world hellhole!"
Posted by: Matt ||
08/17/2009 16:17 Comments ||
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#20
This is objectively psychotic.
The Iraqi *regular* military had more training than this clown is talking about. How did that work out?
Moving up a level, the afghan mujahideen could best soviet regular forces and at least keep spetsnaz on its toes...
THERE IS no question that the meeting was a success for the Fatah establishment and for the PLO, and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas in particular. But like many such successes, it will be paid for by an inability to move toward peace as well as Palestinian suffering. Yet despite the fact that rejecting peace will hurt their people more than those of Israel, on every issue where it had to choose between peace-oriented flexibility and intransigence, the Fatah leadership chose the latter. For example, Fatah has now officially adopted the al-Aqsa Brigades as its armed wing.
What happened to all their previous armed wings?
What happened at the Fatah congress? It was largely successful at maintaining the status quo, but the outcome is unlikely to be conducive to a comprehensive peace. And there's one terribly dangerous issue - the next Fatah leader - which could blow up everything.
Once Mahmoud Abbas appoints four more officials to form a Fatah central committee of 22 people, at least two-thirds will be old-style Fatah bureaucrats, with almost all the rest members of the younger guard. Of the 18 elected, at least five are hard-liners who don't even accept the peace process and the Oslo Accords and the rest are Abbas's allies or lieutenants. The latter are not extremists by Palestinian standards; they are happy to negotiate with Israel and don't want to go to war, for now at least. But they will insist on having all Palestinian refugees who wish to do live in Israel, adherence to the 1967 borders, no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and perhaps they won't support a formal ending of the conflict and will give very little, if anything, on security arrangements.
In other words, not extremist Palestinians are happy to negotiate, but have no interest whatsoever in actually making peace. A hudna, in other words.
Only two men can be called moderates: Muhammad Shtayyeh, a private sector reformist type who was last to get into the committee, making it by a single vote, and Nabil Sha'ath, a Fatah loyalist.
And only one of the 18 men elected has been an important critic of the establishment: Marwan Barghouti, who is currently serving time in an Israeli prison. Call him a practically-minded radical who believes Israel must be driven out of the West Bank by force.
I assume Mr. Barghouti will not be involved in actually running Fatah, jailed in another country as he is.
But there's one more thing that should be the main headline.
Fatah has apparently chosen as its next leader a man who rejects the 1993 Israel-PLO (Oslo) agreement and the ensuing peace process. Muhammad Ghaneim was so passionately opposed even to negotiating with Israel that he refused to go to the Gaza Strip and West Bank with Arafat in 1994. He also refused to participate in the PA as long as it was involved in the peace process.
So can Ghaneim participate now because he has changed his mind, or rather - as seems more likely - that Fatah no longer takes the peace process seriously? This situation is equivalent to Russia picking a hard-line Stalinist as its next leader.
Why did two-thirds of the delegates vote for him? Ghaneim got 33 percent more votes than Barghouti, who not only has a personal base of support but the chic of being a prisoner. Ghaneim is not that personally popular. I speculate that he's the chosen candidate of hard-line Fatah chief Farouk Kaddoumi, a man close to Syria's radical dictatorship, who is popular but too old to run himself.
The key reason is that Abbas and his colleagues told delegates to vote for Ghaneim. Why? Part of the answer might be that he has a good personal relationship with Ghaneim. In addition, Ghaneim seems able to bridge the two groups which make up the Fatah leadership: radicals who thought Arafat too moderate, and hardliners who supported Arafat and now back Abbas.
Finally, the West Bank warlords and political barons find it hard, as so often happens in politics, to give up their own ambitions and accept one of their rivals as chief. It's easier to accept an outsider who hasn't been in the West Bank at all and with whom one hasn't personally quarreled or competed. Abbas may well retire in the next year, and Ghaneim would then become leader of the PA, PLO and Fatah, too. This is incredibly important, far more so than the minor changes which are monopolizing debate over the meeting.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
According to President Obama, government health insurance will create competition in the health insurance industry. It simply would provide another alternative to existing plans offered by private companies, the argument goes. Like many Americans, we simply don't believe it. Whenever the government enters into a market, it will try to expand its share and take over the sector. 
