Dr. Krauthammer's Cure

Health Care is a complex issue. Throwing bureaucratic armies and thousands of pages of new regulations at it will only make things worse.

Charles Krauthammer, brilliant mind, lawyer, medical doctor, and writer who knows how to cut through the crap, has a remedy. He recounts how President Reagan and Democratic Senator Bill Bradley reformed the tax code by stripping out inefficiencies, giving everyone a tax break while increasing the amount of money flowing into the US Treasury.

He contrasts that successful minimalist approach to the hellish freakshow Obama and the Dems are trying to foist upon us.

This is all quite mad. It creates a Rube Goldberg system that simply multiplies the current inefficiencies and arbitrariness, thus producing staggering deficits with less choice and lower-quality care. That's why the administration can't sell Obamacare.

His solution? Tort Reform that includes abolishing the current jackpot lotto system, and Insurance Reform that decouples insurance and employment.

Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant -- $20,000 for a family of four -- to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance).

The health care benefit exemption is the largest tax break in the entire U.S. budget, costing the government a quarter-trillion dollars annually. It hinders health-insurance security and portability as well as personal independence. If we additionally eliminated the prohibition on buying personal health insurance across state lines, that would inject new and powerful competition that would lower costs for everyone.

The sincere liberal will ask, What about sick people being dumped by their insurance company, catastrophic caps, family bankruptcy due to medical bills?

These are all issues we must address. Krauthammer's rationalizing of the system would put us on a firm fiscal and regulatory footing, allowing us to address these problems without creating bureaucratic monsters and breaking the bank.

You can read his article  here

Somebody had to say it...

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News:

Europe has been sucking on America's tit for 60 years, parasitically.

It's paraphrase. See the video here.

Obama's Embryonic Ideas: The New Anti-Intellectualism

Embryonic Stem Cells: The science is not settled and neither are the ethical questions

Both sides of the stem cell debate have brought up valid arguments, but the President is seemingly uninterested in them. In a dramatic rhetorical flourish, he has imperiously declared that he is throwing back the curtain on President Bush's scientific dark ages. Good politics, but bad for our humanity.

While our still-Christian society in the US grapples with concepts like euthanasia and abortion, the President blithely brushes these issues aside. His attorney general wants us to stop being cowardly and to start talking about race, but this administration runs and hides from deep moral questions concerning life, how we view it, and what that says about us a a society. Who's the coward now?

Let's put aside the ontological and meta-ethical questions, which we obviously won't settle here. The intellectual argument over what constitutes life, and if and when it may be taken, will always exist.

Let's also put aside the inflated hope of embryonic stem cell research. This article from the NY Times deflates the hype and conjecture about saving Christopher Reeve and curing President Reagan's Alzheimers. Sadly, it also faces the reality that hundreds of thousand of chronically sick in this country will not get the miracle cures that some non-scientist political types have so recklessly promised them.

“People need a fairy tale,” Ronald D. G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explained to The Washington Post in 2004.

Recently, Nicholas Wade in the Science section of The New York Times summed this all up: “Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.”

“In private, however,” the article continued, “many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells.”

Where do we draw the line, and what does that say about us as a society?

Science, like fire, a knife or a piano, is morally neutral. It is a wonderful tool in mankind's hands. How we use it says much about us as a society.

Charles Krauthammer, doctor, lawyer, and a conservative agnostic paraplegic who supports embryonic stem cell research, has written a good criticism of this administration's approach.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science, and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike President Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

President Obama has provided no moral, philosophical or logical framework for his decision other than the pharaohnic "So let it be written, so let it be done!" Compared to President Bush's nuanced approach and detailed explanation to the nation, President Obama looks downright anti-intellectual. This is what Krauthammer critiques in his article. Please take a few moments to read it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/us/14beliefs.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=all
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/13/AR2009031303058.html
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/using_embryoswithout_limit.html

Gibson's Palin Interview

Martin Sieff at UPI has a good summary of Charlie Gibson's interview performance. The consensus is that he was trying to show his fellow lib reporters how tough he could be.

Tactically, she made the mistake of trying to be friendly and informal with Gibson, who assumed a superior, professorial and critical stance toward her.

Gibson's aggressive approach appeared to take Palin by surprise: He was clearly attempting to put her on point by presenting her as having extreme religious views. This again, however, appears to be a double-standard, as Palin grew up in the Assemblies of God, one of the largest Christian denominations in America with 16 million members, and is now a member of the Wasilla Bible Church. Even now, Obama has yet to receive any comparable grilling on his 20-year attendance in the congregation of the notoriously racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Liberal Democrats predictably will cite the interview as evidence that Palin is not prepared for the vice presidency. Republicans will equally predictably cite it as evidence that she is. How centrist voters will react to it remains to be seen. One thing is clear: This isn't a transformational election on either side. Whoever wins, the ugly old cultural and political divisions in America remain -- and they are deeper than ever.

The NY Times chimed in with a decidedly Democratic point of view:

"At times visibly nervous . . . Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of 'anticipatory self-defense.' "

Bane of the left Charles Krauthammer swats down the biased NY Times analysis and shows Charlie Gibson to be the one who is ignorant of the Bush Doctrine:

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed "doctrines" in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.

Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.

Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.