The Week The Obama Admiinistration Entered Lame Duck Status, Part 1: the Benghazi Coverup and Obama Care Deceptions

It's all about humanity, humility, and integrity. Debra Wilson

It is not often when you can pinpoint the exact time that a U.S. President becomes a lame duck. The evidence usually builds slowly over time until one day you realize that the approaching end of a term means that the ability of a President to champion, convince, cajole, and lead has ebbed away into the sunset of their term.

That may not be the case of the Obama Presidency. In a rapid succession of events, we may have just seen this administration lose its humanity, its humility, and its integrity in a very short time, and with it, thevery quick dawning of the Obama Presidency lame duck era. You cannot lead a country when all traces of humanity, humility, and integrity have left your administration.

The scandals of this Presidency had been percolating under the surface of the nation’s attention for some time. The mainstream press and the administration had done all it could to keep them under the surface.

However, that effort proved inadequate over the past week when any number of scandals erupted into the public space. And the amazing thing about the eruptions, they were not caused by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or other right wing/conservative news outlets. Most of the damage to the integrity and morals of this administration came from members of the mainstream press who had either been overly protective of this Presidency or overly blinded by this President’s charms and false integrity.

It started on a Sunday night in a CBS “60 Minutes” story which had culminated almost a year of investigative reporting. The main story line was that as the consulate attack at Benghazi was underway, members onsite at the consulate were in direct communication with the outside world, telling them that Al Qaeda terrorists were attacking and they needed immediate help and protection. 

Thus, during the attack, both at the actual consulate building and at the annex a mile away, we already knew that this was not a street demonstration that got out of hand. This was a highly coordinated, well thought out terrorist attack on American sovereignty and personnel. We also now know that this attack had already been predicted months in advance.

However, from a humanity perspective, those twenty plus Americans calling out for help in Benghazi were left to their own devices when someone, somewhere in the administration called off the military rescue parties that were geared up and ready to go. 
The heartless inaction of those decision makers resulted in a high ranking military leader to be yanked from leading the rescue mission and directly led to the deaths of four brave Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, Chris Stephens.

Despite knowing months in advance that the consulate and Americans would likely be a target of terrorists, that the Red Cross and British consulate had already been attacked by terrorists, that there had been security warnings from many security experts including British personnel, U.S. armed forces, and local Libyans contacts, and despite the fact that the ambassador had already told Washington that the Al Qaeda flag could been clearly seen flying over Libyan government buildings, nothing was done ahead of time to prevent the attack.

But the real lack of humanity and integrity comes after the attack. Jay Carney insists at a press briefing that there were no forewarnings that an attack was imminent. 

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., goes on  five Sunday television news to insist that the attack was not from Al Qaeda and was not pre planned, that it was a spontaneous eruption of emotions from a YouTube video. 

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton repeat the same lie and deception at the U.N. and elsewhere, despite the fact that the ambassador made the outgoing call DURING the attack that it was a planned terrorist attack, not a YouTube video reaction.

Four Americans die, another twenty or so were intentionally left in mortal danger and Hillary Clinton testifies in front of Congress, “What difference does it make?” Heartless, callow, and lacking of humanity, humility, and integrity. 

Outright lies and deceptions to promote the President’s reelection and protect his campaign position/boast that Al Qaeda was on the run and no longer a factor in the world. For that protection and the deceptions attached to it, four Americans unnecessarily died.

The sobering entire “60 Minutes: report can be viewed at:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50157981n

But the Benghazi scandal and death was just one of the exploding disgraces this week. NBC News, another mainstream media outlet that has been overly soft on the administration, released a very embarrassing investigative report relative to Obama Care. The NBC report maintains that the White House, the President, and others involved in pushing through the Obama Care legislation were well aware for the past several years that millions of Americans were likely to lose their current health insurance policy and coverages as a result of Obama Care. 

How do we know this? NBC News senior investigative correspondent Lisa Myers found buried in the 2010 Obamacare regulation language predicting, “A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate is forty percent to sixty-seven percent.”

  Why is this such a big deal? Well, from an integrity perspective, the President had been claiming numerous times over those years that NO American would lose their current insurance policy or access to their favorite doctors as a result of Obama Care:

“If you got health insurance, it does not mean a government take over, you keep your own insurance, you keep your own doctor.”

“If you like your [health insurance plan], you can keep your plan.”

“Here is a guarantee that I make. If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you have a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.  Nobody is trying to change what works in the system.’

“If you like your plan and you like your doctor, you will not have to do a thing…we are not going to mess with it.”

But this was all a charade, according to NBC News. Those in the White House knew three years ago that millions of Americans (45% to 67%) were going to lose their access to their current plans and their favorite doctors but said nothing about that reality. Instead, the President keep coming forward in different venues with the same message: You will not lose access to the insurance plans and doctors that you want access to.

But millions of Americans will lose access. If you adhere to the definition of integrity that integrity it is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, than this escapade of the Obama administration could not be further from the reality of this definition.

Not only is there a gross lack of integrity on this issue and scandal but there is no humility or humanity either. From a humility perspective, the President is not coming forward to apologize for the deception or misspeaking, no one on his staff or in his press corps are owning up to the lie and deception. They could have at least apologized for the deception and asked for some sort of forgiveness going forward but no, humility is apparently non-existent in this administration.

And neither is a sense of humanity. If the Washington politicians and administration bureaucrats knew of this impending and dire situation years ago, any of them with a sense of humanity or compassion should have come forward then and told the American people that this catastrophe was coming and to make plans. Given a few years warning, most people could have adapted to the disaster of losing their insurance policy and doctors. 

But nothing was said to cushion the blow until just months before millions of Americans were to lose their current, favored insurance policies and doctor access. And if NBC had not done their investigative job, those months might have turned into just weeks for Americans to scramble for new coverage and new doctor access.

Some of the original video clips of the President deceptively stating that happy Americans would not have their health insurance disrupted and the NBC news report can be accessed at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/10/90588-watch-nbc-news-drops-bombshell-president-obama-knowingly-lied-obamacare-years/

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/10/90531-watch-white-houses-truth-video-turns-complete-sham/

And the sad thing, these are not the only two issues that exploded this week and put this administration’s lack of humanity, humility and integrity on full, naked display. We will cover them tomorrow.

If you lose all sense of humanity, humility, and integrity, you cannot lead, you cannot rule. No one will ever believe anything you say. If you make up stories and deceptions to cover up American deaths to protect your reelection campaign, how can we ever trust you on any issue going forward? If you constantly tell us one thing when you know the exact opposite is the reality, how can we ever believe you an any issue going forward? 

And that is the real definition of a lame duck: a leader that cannot lead. A leader that does not tell the truth. A leader that has no sense of humility or compassion. A leader that puts himself before humanity. It is going to be a long three years.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Our Lost War On Drugs, October, 2013 Update: Already In Your Town Today, A Mexican Drug Cartel Presence

Although the nation has recently been focused on the continuing insanity and ineptness coming out of Washington over the past month or so regarding the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care, the narrowly avoided stupid and un-Constitutional attack  on Syria, and the so-called Federal government shutdown, that does not mean our losing “war on drugs” has stopped or wound down. On the contrary, this disaster continues to encourage the rise of violent drug cartels, does not stem the flow or usage of illegal drugs, and still wastes billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth every year in a futile attempt to win a four decade old losing war.

Today we will do a quick update on the continuing futility of our war on drugs:

1) CBS News reported on August 13, 2013 that three more guns from the Federal government’s botched Fast and Furious operation had turned up at violent crime scenes in Mexico. This is just the latest drug cartel violence that was supported by Fast and Furious weapons including:

• Last November when a Fast and Furious weapon was found at a shootout between a Mexican drug cartel and soldiers where a beauty queen was killed. 
• Two Fast and Furious weapons were used in the murder of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata in Mexico on Feb. 15, 2011. 
• Two Fast and Furious AK-47 type rifles were recovered from the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010; he'd been shot by illegal immigrants who were smuggling drugs.

As usual, innocent people die as a result of the Federal government’s vain attempts at winning this losing war on drugs.

2) It used to be that the foreign drug cartels supplied the drugs and local gangs and criminals sold the drugs in the U.S. However, a recent report from the Justice Department reported on how the drug cartels were not only deeply involved in transporting the drugs into this country but also have established their own presence in cities across America:

• Based on a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Post was able to identify the trafficking routes and bases of various Mexican drug cartels throughout the United States. 
• Drug cartels presence has reached into cities like Portland, Denver, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Chicago, Seattle, Louisville, Memphis, Boston, Minneapolis, Dallas and others.
• The cartels transport heroin, marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamines to feed America’s unending drug habit, making billions of dollars in profits every year.
• Almost all pf the major drug cartels were mentioned in the Justice Department report as having a U.S. presence including  the Tijuana Cartel, Juarez Cartel, Gulf Cartel, Federation Cartel and numerous gangs with “unknown affiliation.”
• The Gulf Cartel appears to control much of east Texas while the Juarez Cartel divides up the west. 
• “Cocaine is the most lucrative of illegal drugs. The United Nations estimates that sales of the drug net $88 billion a year on the street. While the largest federations were once Columbian, now it appears they are Mexican. The UN estimates two-thirds of cocaine that left the Andean region of South America for the United States in 2008 passed through the hands of Mexican cartels,” the National Post reports.

This graphic from the National Post breaks down the routes visually and shows where the drug cartels are operating. It also shows the number of drug related deaths in various categories, which now totals more than 50,000 since 2006:

So after forty years of a futile Federal war on drugs, all we have done is create a violent drug cartel/gang presence in most American cities without reducing the usage and desire for drugs.

3) An Associated Press (AP) investigation from this past July confirms  this Justice Department information. The AP reviewed Federal court cases, government drug-enforcement data, and conducted interviews with many top law enforcement officials. 

It concluded that cartel groups have begun deploying agents from their inner circles in Mexico to the U.S. Cartel operatives are suspected of running drug-distribution networks in at least nine non-border states, often in middle-class suburbs in the Midwest, South and Northeast.

Two quotes from the article are particularly concerning: 

1. "It's probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime," said Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago office.
2. "We know that hundreds of cities across America have been infected by Mexican cartels" according to former Immigration and Naturalization Service Agent Michael Culter.

4) As with most issues facing this country, ordinary citizens again seem to have a better grasp of reality relative to the violent Mexican drug cartels than those in the Washington political class:

• According to a recent Rasmussen poll, Americans remain more concerned about Mexican drug violence coming to this country than they are about illegal immigration.
• Only 34% of those polled are more concerned about illegal immigration. Fifty-seven percent (57%) worry more about drug violence.
• Sixty-nine percent (69%) believe the U.S. military should be used along the border to protect American citizens if the drug violence continues to escalate along the Mexican border. Only 16% disagree, another 15% are not sure.
• Seventy-three percent (73%)  think it is at least somewhat likely that this drug violence will spill over into the United States. Twenty percent (20%) feel that’s unlikely. 
• This includes 36% who think the violence is Very Likely to come here and just two percent (2%) who say it’s Not At All Likely.

So why politicians endlessly debate about immigration and the 11 million illegal aliens already in this country, they seem to not understand or do not want to acknowledge that a major issue within the immigration problem is the ease of which drug cartel agents can slip across the border and set up shop just about anywhere in the U.S. 

5) And just as a reminder, let us refer to two recent articles regarding the toll that our lost war on drugs takes on ordinary American citizens, articles we recently cited in our monthly political class insanity series. A recent article from The Week magazine reported that America now jails a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country in the world. 

A lot of those in our prisons are small time, non-violent, not dealing drug users. The overall cost of this high imprisonment rate is a staggering $80 billion a year, a large percentage of which is wastefully spent to jail personal drug users who are hurting only themselves.

Another article from The Week tried to document how wasteful our war on drugs is, claiming that the prisons in this country hold about 100,000 small time, non-violent drug users. This costs American taxpayers about $15 billion a year. The sadder part beyond the record level of imprisonments and wasted money spent is that the thousands and thousands of drug users in these prisons are highly unlikely to get the help they need to kick their drug usage addiction. 

Like we said, Washington politicians have been unwilling or unable to understand that our lost war on drugs is just that, a loser. We waste billions of dollars futilely trying to stop the flow of drugs, we lock up people who use drugs that the government declares illegal, but who are a danger only to themselves, and we have created a dangerous marketplace for drugs, which drives up prices and creates powerful, rich, and violent drug cartels, which have now embedded themselves into this country. 

Others around the world have seen the error of their ways. Some countries in Europe have moved to decriminalize or legalize the use of drugs with the surprising results. The levels of drug usage and addiction actually decline when these steps are taken. This has resulted in more citizens seeking up for their drug addictions once the stigma of being a criminal has been removed.

Uruguay has taken the common sense economic approach of creating the world’s first government-run market for non-medical marijuana. Their strategy is that if the government can flood the market with quality, inexpensive marijuana, the price for the drug will drop significantly and reduce the wealth, reach, and disruption from now much poorer drug cartels  A simple application of the immutable economic law of supply and demand. 

In addition, the government will stand behind its marijuana products as fresher and purer than the cartels’ products, using marketplace tactics to reduce the cartels’ cash flow. Simple, elegant and likely to be effective.

Simple, elegant, and effective are three words that are never used to describe anything our political class does. As a result, we end up fighting a useless war on drugs that solves no problems and creates violent new ones. Step 26 from our book, ‘Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” provided a process for resolving the drug problem in this country. 

However, it is doubtful that our political class will ever get around to implementing this process, they are too worried about their own personal political futures and personal greed. Thus, they need to be replaced with other people that would be willing to admit that a forty year failing policy needs to be replaced. The way to start the process is to implement term limits, something you can help do by visiting the following website:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, forty years of failure, the rise of violent drug gangs, the unnecessary imprisonment of nonviolent drug users, and the corruption of government officials all over the world, how much worse could it be if we started over with new people in Washington?

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

They Lied About Everything Else So Why Not Lie About Inflation?

Many times we have discussed how badly the current set of politicians have managed the economic affairs of the country. Their ineptness, greed, and cronyism has put all of us and the country in the following dire straits: 

• Over 20 million Americans are unemployed or under employed.
• The official unemployment rate for the country has been above 7% for a record setting number of consecutive months. 
• The vast majority of the paltry number of jobs created this year have been part time jobs, a factor heavily driven by the disastrous Obama Care legislation. 
• Over 47 million Americans are on government food assistance support programs. 
• We continue to run trade deficits in the tens of billions of dollars every month. 
• We are fast approaching an astronomical national debt of $17 TRILLION, an individual debt burden of more than $54,000 for EVERY man, woman, and child in the country. 
• America has now fallen to ninth in the world in a major index of economic freedom and is continuing to trend downward. 
• The political class's inability to formulate effective economic policy and programs has caused the Fed to actively step in, resulting in the artificial creation of $85 billion of fake wealth every month by way of their Quantitative Easing programs, programs that could lead to massive inflationary times in the future. 
• Their failure to operate efficient and fraud free social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security costs the American taxpayer at least $200 billion a years. 
• Their failure to operate efficient and fraud free tax collection processes results in the IRS unable to collect at least $380 billion a year from tax evaders. 

But the Fed and others in Washington do not seem to believe such economic incompetence is happening, often pointing to the fact that inflation, as measured by the Federal government, is under control and quite tame. Thus, running TRILLION deficits is okay and creating $85 billion a month in fake wealth is also okay, since inflation is seemingly under control. But is inflation really under control? 

Consider some official government numbers that were published in a recent issue of Business Week. These government numbers measured the rise in prices overall in the country and by specific subsets of typical household expenses, e.g. gasoline, food, clothes, etc. over the past five years. Their findings indicate that overall inflation rose only 7% over those five years, far below the historical average. 

However, if you look at the individual components, from the same government source, it strains the limits of credibility to believe that 7% figure. Our first graph below looks at the household expenses that were below the overall 7% inflation growth rate (click directly on the chart for a larger view): 

 







Thus, if your only concerns in life were new televisions, toys, gasoline, novels, car rentals, wine, vegetables, and girls’ clothes, your household expenses would have been well below the overall 7% inflation rate. But most households have additional expenses beyond televisions, toys, gasoline, novels, car rentals, wine, vegetables, and girls’ clothes. In fact, I would bet that the majority of households never or rarely ever to worry about the price of TVs, toys, novels, car rentals, and girls’ clothes.

The next graph contains the other items that the government reported inflation growth on in the article: 









These categories include those household expenses that grew faster than the overall 7% inflation estimate. These categories include:

• Airfare
• New Car
• Movie Tickets
• Cereal
• Bread
• Ice Cream
• Kids’ Shoes
• Restaurants
• Funeral Expenses
• Liquor
• Cable/Satellite TV Service
• Dental Services
• Child Care
• Nursing Homes
• Beef Roast
• College Tuition
• Hospital Services
• Textbooks
• Cigarettes

A couple of observations on this graph: 

• There were far more household expenses (19) that grew faster than the government's assertion of 7% for overall inflation while only eight grow slower. 
• Many of those items that grew faster than the overall inflation rate are those that most households use on a regular basis, e.g. cereal, movie tickets, beef, bread, restaurant visits, a lot of money on items whose average prices grew faster than 7%. 
• And those items in this latter category that most households rarely or never purchase are more expensive versus those rarely purchased items that had an inflation rate below the overall 7%, e.g. a car purchase is usually going to be more expensive than a TV purchase, dental services are likely to be more expensive than toy purchases, etc.

Thus, I question whether the overall inflation factor in the economy is truly only 7% since many more items that the government measures had a higher price growth rate, the items that Americans are likely to purchase more often usually had a price growth rate higher than 7%, and infrequently purchased items tended to have price growth higher than the overall 7%. Throw in the fact that we recently reached a milestone with the average price of gas being over $3.00 for a record set of consecutive months and you can see my doubt.

Thus, given that the government, especially the Obama administration, has consistently lied to us (e.g. if you like your doctor and health insurance plan you can keep it under Obama Care, the cause of the Benghazi terror attack was a lousily made YouTube video, the government is not spying on every American but it actually is), it is not beyond my realm of believability to conclude it is also not being truthful about inflation. 

Which puts another economic nail into the assumption that this current set of Washington politicians has the worst set of economic skills of all Washington politicians that came before them. National debt of almost $17 TRILLION, record high unemployment rates, record lengths of high unemployment rates, etc., and now an apparent misrepresentation or outright lie about inflation. Lord help us and protect us from the liars.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Replacing Obama Care With Something That Actually Works: Part 3

Over the past two weeks we have taken a hard look at Obama Care from a myriad of different angles and have concluded that it is by far, the worse piece of legislation ever created by the Washington political class:

• The first seven posts in that series looked at how many, many Americans were losing their current insurance coverage, how many were seeing their current insurance rates go up substantially along with tremendous increases in their insurance deductibles, how many were losing access to their favorite doctors and hospitals, how the Obama Care processes were accurately deemed to be “identity thieves paradises,” the epic failure of the Obama Care data systems support, the loss of work hours for millions of Americans, how Medicare was getting its budget slashed going forward to fund Obama Care, how the creators of Obama Care never understood the root causes of our rising health care costs, etc., all because of this legislation.
• The next four posts discussed  the valued and expert opinions of four people in the health care industry and the negative ramifications that Obama Care would cause to Americans’ health care, their freedoms, and the nation’s economy.
• The next two posts were our solutions for fixing the true root causes of our escalating health care costs (e,g. obesity in America, smoking in America, the aging of America, etc.) and how to remedy the causes of high health care costs. This approach  was in contrast to Obama Care which never addressed or understood those underlying root causes and instead, created a Rube Goldberg like insurance contraption that moves health care costs around without addressing the root causes.

The first seven posts begin here:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html

The expert opinion posts begin here:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update_21.html

Our solutions to the problem and identification of the root causes begin here:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/replacing-obama-care-with-something.html

Today, we finish our analysis of Obama Care, for this month, by including an article from the National Review Online. The article is a quick review of a proposal from a Republican Congressman, Tom Price, who has put together and has been advocating a far simpler approach and far more rational approach to resolving our health care cost issue in this country. 

The entire article is listed below in its entirety to not give short shrift to his ideas. I include his position for three reasons:

1. It is more likely to work than the unworkable Obama Care legislation.
2. Congressman Price was a practicing orthopedic surgeon for 20 years so he has some real world health industry and medicine background, unlike most of the people who actually wrote the Obama Care legislation.
3. It refutes the argument of Obama Care supporters that the Republicans never provided any alternatives to Obama Care. That is a false statement since Congressman Price has put forth this plan THREE times since 2009. The problem is not that there were never alternative plans, the problem is that Obama and the Democrats never wanted to listen to alternatives and the mainstream media was content to never discuss any alternatives.

Highlights and positive attributes of the plan include the following:

• The proposed Price legislation is only 250 pages long, at least eight times shorter than the cumbersome Obama Care legislation, which probably gives it a better chance of being understood and being implemented.
• It leverages the existing health care delivery systems in place already so that we do not need the Federal government to build out massive new data systems structure and call centers which we already have seen are a joke and an embarrassment.
• It does not expose Americans’ private and personal information to identify thieves and other criminal elements in a faulty Federal government website and data systems debacle.
• Its focus is on leaving the health care decisions of Americans and their families in the hands of Americans, their families, and their favored doctors, not the Federal bureaucracies such as the IRS.
• It does not require the young to subsidize the old like the intergeneration wealth distribution schemes of Obama Care.
• The proposal would provide affordable coverage for every American through a series of tax credits and deductions designed to positively entice individuals into the insurance market with positive incentives, as opposed to Obama Care’s negative solution of fining, criminalizing, and siccing the IRS after those who refuse to purchase health insurance. 
• This approach leaves the doctor/patient/insurance company  preferences intact.
• It increases personal freedom by allowing individuals to opt out of Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for a tax credit, taking financial and administrative stress off of the administration of those financially shaky Federal programs.
• Price’s plan also allows those with pre-existing conditions to afford health insurance, would increase insurance company competition across state lines further reducing insurance costs, and would institute tort reform to reduce malpractice and excessive defensive medicine costs, ideas we proposed yesterday to address the underlying root causes of our high health care costs.

The sane thing about his approach is that he has a set of six principles that his propose rests on, something that I do not believe Obama Care ever had, namely principles:

1. Affordability - Obama Care is certainly not affordable with it adding substantially to the national debt and adding substantially to the health care premiums and deductibles of Americans.
2. Accessibility - Obama Care is not accessible since millions of Americans are losing access to their favorite doctors, favorite insurance plans, and hospitals.
3. Quality - Obama Care is certainly not about quality, if you look at the horrendous quality of their website skills and the horrendous quality of the training they provided to Obama Care “navigators.”
4. Responsiveness -  Check out the Obama Care website responsiveness times to answer this question.
5. Innovation - If anything, Obama Care stifles innovation by forcing Americans onto  “one size fits all” insurance plans and forces decision making upwards to Federal bureaucracies not downwards to the innovators.
6. Choice - Obama Care is providing fewer choices in plans, doctors, hospitals, etc.

Would the Congressman’s plan work? I am not an expert but since it is based on freedom of choice, simplicity of operation, the leveraging of existing industry infrastructure, the protection of personal information, and the above six principles, I do not see any way in the world it could be any worse than Obama Care’s train wreck.

It is a worthwhile alternative to discuss when Obama Care implodes, something that should have been discussed when the Congressman put it forth IN 2009 BUT WAS IGNORED BY DEMOCRATS, THE PRESIDENT,  AND PRESS FOR FOUR YEARS.
*************************************

Congressman Tom Price’s Plan to Replace Obamacare 
He has thrice proposed a comprehensive alternative, but few have noticed. 

By Andrew Stiles August 16, 2013 National Review Online

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich scolded Republicans this week for having “zero” ideas for how to replace Obamacare, a law the GOP desperately wants to repeal. It is an argument often employed by Democrats, who have been on the defensive lately as the president’s signature law has encountered a series of setbacks, and is becoming increasingly unpopular.

Either way, the notion that Republicans have no plan to replace Obamacare is news to Representative Tom Price (R., Ga.), who in June introduced a comprehensive alternative health-care plan — for the third time since 2009. [emphasis added] It was originally introduced as the Obamacare alternative from the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC), which Price chaired at the time.

The 250-page legislation, known as the Empowering Patients First Act, has yet to receive a vote in the House, but currently has 32 co-sponsors, including Representatives Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.), Tim Huelskamp (R., Kans.), Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas), and Tom Cotton (R., Ark.).

The bill is a comprehensive alternative, notes Price, who has more than 20 years of experience as a practicing orthopedic surgeon. His policy proposals, which conservative experts have praised, will probably be familiar to those who have closely followed the ongoing health-care debate.

The bill aims to provide affordable coverage for all through a series of tax credits and deductions designed to entice individuals into the insurance market with positive incentives, as opposed to Obamacare’s solution of fining those who refuse to purchase health insurance. “It’s a carrot instead of a two-by-four,” Price says. 

“Regardless of where one fits in the economic spectrum, there is a financial incentive to purchase health coverage that the individual wants, not that the government forces them to buy.”

The law would allow individuals to opt out of Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health-care-benefit programs in favor of receiving a tax credit; an individual’s health coverage would be “portable” — no longer tied to an employer — so losing a job wouldn’t also mean losing insurance; individuals and small businesses would be able to access insurance pools that reduce risk for those with pre-existing conditions, and they could purchase plans across state lines. Tort reforms would cut down on physicians’ practicing “defensive medicine” and driving up costs by ordering unnecessary procedures in an effort to avoid lawsuits.

The plan is based on six principles: affordability, accessibility, quality, responsiveness, innovation, and choice. “All of those principles are violated by the Affordable Care Act,” Price says. “When you step back and look at those principles, it guides you to a system that allows patients and families and doctors to be in charge.”

And yet when Republicans talk about health care, few actually point to Price’s bill as an alternative plan, which only reinforces the perception that the GOP has no plan beyond repealing Obamacare. “No,” Price laughs when asked if his plan has gotten the attention it deserves. Why not?

“Health care is complex, and most people don’t want to necessarily deal with it until they’re either forced to, or there is a clear path forward for it,” he says. “What we have proposed is a comprehensive solution to the health-care challenges that we face. But as the political winds blow, right now most folks are looking at Obamacare and saying, ‘Well, let’s see what happens.’”

Republicans are divided on the question of how best to achieve their ultimate goal of full repeal and have had trouble reaching a consensus on most issues relating to health care. In April, after conservatives revolted, House leadership was forced to abruptly cancel a vote on a health-care-reform measure championed by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.); the measure would have created high-risk pools for individuals with pre-existing conditions. 

Currently, some Republicans want the demand for a full defunding of Obamacare to become part of the upcoming budget negotiations. Others want to see Obamacare delayed for a year, and there are still others who want to see Obamacare’s major provisions go into effect so that voters can experience the negative consequences of the Democrats’ misguided law. Not everyone believes, as Price does, that Republicans should champion an alternative solution.

“My goal is always to have a positive solution, a positive alternative if the current system isn’t working, and in health care, the current system clearly isn’t working,” he says. “The purpose of this bill is to say to folks: There are principled, patient-centered solutions in the area of health care. Here is our proposal.”

Price is also working with current RSC chairman Steve Scalise (R., La.) on a separate replacement bill that is set to be unveiled when Congress returns from the August recess. But he says that, “as a realist,” he doesn’t think Republicans are ready to unite behind an alternative health-care plan just yet. “I think we will need to see further dysfunction in the current law.”

“Obamacare will need a replacement, because it won’t work,” he adds. “We need all sorts of solutions out there on the table. Let’s have a deliberative process here, not one where something is shoved down the throats of the American people.”

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Replacing Obama Care With Something That Actually Works: Part 2

Over the past two weeks we have been reviewing the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. The first seven posts were the result of our research into real life realities of people getting their work hours cut, their jobs terminated, seeing their insurance polices being cancelled, enduring their insurance premiums going up substantially along with their deductibles,  losing access to their doctors and hospitals, and the pitiful rollout of the Obama Care website.

The next four posts were detailed analyses and research by experts in the health care industry that verified what we had already proven: Obama Care is the worst piece of legislation ever created by the Washington political class. It fails on so many levels: data systems, logic, root cause problem analysis, cronyism, financials, etc,

Yesterday, we started to discuss how to fix what Obama Care has broken. Using the root cause analysis philosophy proposed in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” we started to list out a series of simpler, easier to implement and more effective steps to combat high health care costs in this country. Obama Care provides an aspirin to make the pain of high health care more palatable but with very serous side effects. Our approach attacks the root causes of our high health care costs with no side effects.

Yesterday, we discussed how to terminate two of the leading cause of high health care costs:

1. Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
2. Americans smoke too much.

While resolving those two issues would be a gigantic step forward to a healthier America and lower overall health care costs, several additional common sense steps are required:

Root Cause #3 - Americans do not exercise enough. Yesterday, we discussed a recent piece of research from the Centers For Disease Control that found about one third of American adults are obese. It is very difficult to be healthy and free of medical costs over the long term if you are obese. The strain on the heart and kidneys from obesity leads to heart disease and diabetes.

Thus, a public health effort is needed to get Americans up and moving. Having insurance under an Obama Care scheme does not reduce obesity, get Americans exercising, or reduce health care costs. I am not a public health care expert but here or a few things that could be done to get America moving:

• Make Americans pay more for insurance if they are overweight since they incur a higher level of medical needs than non-obese people, i.e. led the cost causer also be the cost payer, as a little motivation to get in shape.
• Leverage contacts with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB to get those high profile athletes involved in community health and exercise programs. If the leagues do not get involved then do not invite their championship teams to the White House for a photo op as has been the custom for decades. Help us get America in shape and get to visit the White House. 
• Subsidize YMCA and other gym memberships to get people moving, spending a little money now to avoid a lot more money down the road. Set up the program so that if people do not go to the gym, they pay more than if they do go to the gym.
• Make getting in shape a  national priority of the White House with high visibility events with celebrities to get America moving.
• Other efforts that true public health officials can come up with beyond my layman’s ideas.

It took America decades to get into the most obese situation in the history of mankind. Only a concentrated, long term public health effort can reverse that trend and start reducing the cost of obesity related health care costs. Obama Care does nothing of the sort.

Root Cause #4 - The age of America is getting older. With an aging population comes a lot of aging diseases such as dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimier’s, higher incidences of cancer, etc. Without curing or mitigating these ravaging age-related diseases, it makes no difference if Obama care works or not, the overwhelming costs of these aging diseases will crush the health care industry and our economy.

What is needed is something akin to the bold challenge that JFK threw out to the country in the early 1960s when he dared the country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That challenge gave the nation a focus and a drive that eventually was realized.

The same challenge should be laid down in this area: 

• Within ten years, reduce the incidence of breast and lung cancer by X%.
• Within ten years, find cures of dementia and Alzheimer’s diseases.
• Within ten years, find cures for Parkinson’s disease.

I am obviously not the right person to lay out the eventual goals and success criteria for such worthy goals. But somewhere in this country someone is capable of doing so and by putting together a plan, with regular benchmarks, maybe we can duplicate the success of the Kennedy moon dare with a handful of focused health care dares today.

Obama Care does nothing of the sort, making Americans healthier. All it does is provide overpriced, generalized health care insurance without regard to improving health.

Root Cause # 5 - Tort Reform. One of the important drivers of escalating health care costs is the threat of malpractice litigation by an over energetic legal class. This threat of malpractice legal action results in two bad drivers of high health care costs:

1. Doctors over prescribe tests and analyses in order to make absolutely sure that their actions could withstand a review in court even though defensive actions, loads of extra tests,  are usually not necessary or warranted.
2. Outlandish malpractice decisions and settlements increase doctors’ malpractice insurance costs which are  then passed on to consumers of those doctors’ services.

It does not have to be that way. Many states have taken tort reform action, resulting in substantial sanity brought into the litigation arena and the reduction in costs. We examined these success stories in the following post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2009/11/please-do-not-bother-me-with-facts.html

Highlights of that post include the following realities (source: American Tort Reform Association website):

• The state of Texas implemented significant tort reform in the medical field in 2003.
• Soon after the legislation, the AMA dropped Texas from its list of states in medical liability crisis.
• Malpractice claims went down and doctor recruitment and retention are up.
• The five largest Texas insurers actually CUT their insurance rates which saved doctors tens of millions of dollars.
• The Texas Medical Liability Trust, the state's largest liability carrier, reduced its premiums by 17%.
• Fifteen new insurance companies entered the Texas market.
• Health Care Indemnity, the state's largest carrier for hospitals, reduced its insurance rates by 15%.
• The American Physicians Insurance Exchange and the Doctor's Company also reduced their premiums.

Tort reform in Mississippi caused the following to occur:

• The Medical Assurance Company Of Mississippi, which provides malpractice insurance to 70% of the doctors in Mississippi, reduced premiums 5% in 2006.
• This comes on the heels of not raising premiums in 2004 and 2005 after raising them up to 20% a year in earlier years.
• Four other insurance companies returned to Mississippi to do business, likely resulting in more competition and further malpractice cost reductions.

Tort reform in West Virginia caused the following to occur:

• An increase in the number of doctors practicing in the state.
• West Virginia Physicians' Mutual sought permission to reduce malpractice insurance 5% in 2005 while insuring more doctors.
• Woodbrook Casualty Insurance also applied for a rate reduction.

Given these results, why wasn’t tort reform a major portion of Obama Care? Reduced insurance costs leading to reduced health care costs leading to more doctors and more competition, all good things. Want to bet the ABA lobbyists had a lot to do with that?

In our root cause analysis and solutions, tort reform is a major resolver of our high health care costs problem.

Root Cause #6 - Limited insurance company competition across state lines. More competition in any aspect of human events results in better products and lower costs. Unfortunately, in this country, there are a lot barriers to insurance companies competing across state lines. Simple solution: terminate those state line barriers and allow any insurance company to compete anywhere in the country for health insurance customers. There is very little, if any, downside to cross state competition.

Root Cause #7 - Atrocious Federal government inefficiencies in existing health care programs. Many times in this blog we have pointed out how inefficient and disgusting the waste and fraud is in the Federal government’s administration of Medicaid and Medicare:

• Medicaid wastes or loses to fraud and criminal activity between $30 to $40 billion a year.
• Medicare wastes or loses to fraud and criminal activity between $70 to $90 billion a year.

Thus, if Obama and the Washington political class were actually running an efficient government operation, they would have had anywhere between $100 billion and $130 billion a year to either get Americans healthier, leaner, and off of the smoking habit or would have been able to provide health insurance payment support without disrupting every American’s life and destroying the economy.

Consider the math. The latest, reasonable estimate of uninsured Americans I remember seeing is about 40 million. If we take the midrange of the waste listed above, $115 billion a year, we could give every uninsured American almost $2,900 a year to cover their health insurance costs. A family of four would get about $11,500 a year to cover health insurance, more than enough for a good family insurance policy. 

Instead, given the incompetence of Washington, that $115 billion or so is wasted every year and now the same people that cannot manage Medicare and Medicaid want to manage a whole new government program without fixing what is wrong today. Insane. 

There is enough wealth in this country to get everyone covered without new taxes, without cutting worker’s work hours down to under 30 hours a week, without killing job growth, without taking away freedom or choice, and without another massive government bureaucracy. Too bad the President and Congress have no idea how to operate efficiently.

That’s it, resolving the high cost of health care in this country without the idiocy and waste of Obama Care, is simple if you know how to solve a problem and define the underlying root causes:

1. Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
2. Americans smoke too much.
3. Americans do not exercise enough.
4. Americans are getting older on average resulting in a substantial increase in aging-related diseases.
5. There is an urgent need for tort reform to reduce doctors’ operating costs.
6. There is an urgent need to allow more insurance company competition across state lines.
7. There is an embarrassingly high need to force the Washington political class to stop wasting taxpayer wealth today on existing health care program, shifting that saved wealth into helping uninsured Americans survive health crisis without destorying the country and the economy in the process.

Seven root causes, all resolved with simple solutions that we have proposed over the past two days. However, simple solutions is usually a foreign concept to those in the White House and Congress, leaving us with a Rube Goldberg contraption called Obama Care with way too many moving parts, way too many unnecessary parts, and no chance of success. 

Remember, try to pare things down, few moves accomplish a lot. Public health drives, tort and insurance reform and fixing existing health care programs. Those are the only few moves that are needed to resolve a big societal issue. 

Tomorrow we will look at a few alternative solutions, based on work done by Republican politicians, work that the mainstream media has deemed to never show in the light of day.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Replacing Obama Care With Something That Actually Works, Part 1

Over the past two weeks we have reviewed in detail the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We cited dozens and dozens of Americans, industry experts, and the realities of this disastrous piece of legislation. The first in that long series of posts can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html

For a good summary of how bad this legislation is, consider the following general conclusions we have reached over the past two weeks:

• Many, many Americans are reporting on how their health insurance rates and deductibles are going up dramatically as a result of Obama Care despite the promise from Obama that the average American family would see their annual health insurance costs go down by $2,500.
• Many, many Americans are losing access to their doctors and hospitals despite the fact that Obama promised that if you like your current doctor, you would be able to continue seeing that doctor under Obama Care.
• Many, many Americans are reporting that their current insurance policies are being terminated as a result of Obama Care.
• Many, many businesses and other organizations across America have curtailed hiring, stopped hiring, or have fired existing workers in order to stay profitable, a condition severely threatened by Obama Care.
• Many, many Americans are having their work hours curtailed as a result of Obama Care and are being turned in to part time workers.
• The data systems and websites that were deployed to support the sign up process for insurance through Obama Care health exchanges are deplorably designed and fraught with errors, down time, and other technical problems, resulting in extremely low successful attempts to actually sign up for insurance.
• The data systems and websites that were deployed to support the sign up process for insurance through Obama Care health exchanges are likely turning into identify thieves’ paradise because of faulty or non-existent security protocols.
• The expected long term cost of Obama Care has tripled in just three years.
• The legislation will add trillions of dollars to the already too high national debt over the next decade or so.
• Many components of the failing legislation have already been terminated ( e.g. CLASS) for a variety or reasons or have been postponed because of implementation obstacles.
• In order to make the Obama Care financials look good, the legislation steals over $700 billion in proposed funding for Medicare over the next decade, further endangering the financial health of that government process.

Since we reached these conclusions, the situation has gotten even worse as more and more people find out how much more they are going to have to pay for insurance as a result of Obama Care and we learn more and more about what an epic failure the rollout has turned out to be, especially the website where all of the magic was supposed to happen. We will cover those latest instances of disaster in November.

But if not Obama Care, what? There is no debate that health care costs are going higher and higher in this country for less and less quality and service. Something has to be done. Today and tomorrow we will propose a problem solving approach that was first laid out in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.”  The twin philosophies of this approach include the following tenets:

1. Understand the root causes, the underlying causes of a problem because without that understanding you cannot resolve those problems.
2. And a favorite saying, “Try to pare things down. Few moves do a lot.”

These are obviously two tenets that Obama Care never understood. Those that created this monstrosity never understood the underlying root causes of escalating health care costs. Thus, their failure to resolve those causes. Second, the original legislation was over two thousand pages long and the regulations the law spawned are well over 10,000 pages and counting. Remember, few moves do a lot, over 10,000 pages do not.

Today and tomorrow, we will outline what we perceive are the true root causes of our high health care costs and propose steps to address and resolve those causes. After these two posts, we will review three alternatives to Obama Care as proposed by Republicans in Congress that have never seen the light of day because of  the mainstream media bias.

Root Cause #1 - Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food. On October 17, 2013, the health.com website ran an article based on the latest obesity results and research from the Centers For Disease Control (CDC). The CDC reported that about one in three U.S. adults are obese from a body weight perspective. 

This obesity epidemic costs the nation’s economy  an estimated $270 billion a year due to health care costs and loss of productivity associated with obesity and overweight, according to a 2011 report produced by the Society of Actuaries. This cost burdens every U.S. household with an average cost of almost $2,400 a year.

$270 billion a year, unreal. Imagine how much less heart disease, heart attacks, and diabetes health care costs could be avoided if the obesity monster was successfully addressed. Basic economic theory tells us if you reduce the demand for a product or service, in this case medical services for obesity's byproducts, the price of that product or service has to decrease. Obama Care does little, if anything, to address this $270 billion cost. 

Unfortunately, the Federal government is a top culprit in this obesity issue. Go to your pantry and refrigerator and read the ingredients on the label. How many of them of high fructose corn syrup (i.e. sugar) as a main ingredient? 

The U.S. government heavily over subsidizes the growing of corn in this country, resulting in extremely inexpensive fattening corn syrup that often ends up in our food chain, helping make people obese in just about every meal they eat. A quick, thirty second review of my refrigerator and pantry uncovers at least five products where high fructose corn syrup is a major ingredient, from tomato sauce to pancake syrup to jelly to soda to peanut butter.

 For a staggering view of how this fructose obsession and infestation works, I suggest that you view the documentary, “King Corn,” a scary review of how government subsides encourage the fructosing of our food supply.

So, how do we attack this root cause:

• Eliminate Federal government farm subsidies and no longer support the overgrowing of corn which ends up as inexpensive high corn fructose which ends up in our food chain which ends up as an obesity statistic.
• If farm subsidies are needed, they should be target specifically for bringing down the price of fresh vegetables and fruit, not the creation of obesity friendly foods and ingredients.
• Put together a five year plan that encourages food companies to phase out and remove damaging obesity ingredients such as high corn fructose from their product lines. Those companies that decide not to do so would face ever stiffening penalties, taxes, and fines for not dong so. 
• Those fines would be circulated back into education programs on health and diet for consumers. 

This root cause is really a public health issue which requires a change in behavior. It should be treated like the seat belt problem from decades ago to change behavior, steadily and logically over time. You need a rational, long term plan which eventually changes behavior at the farm level, the food processing level, and the consumer level. 

Find a way to leverage the food scientists at the food companies and challenge them to come up with new ingredients that provide the flavor without the obesity, especially since they would no longer be able to rely on cheap high fructose corn syrup. Failure to do so would eventually result in heavy fines, taxes, and penalties for those companies. 

Also, rather than hiring thousands and thousands of IRS agents to track down citizens that do not purchase health insurance under Obama Care, you would only have to hire hundreds and hundreds of government food scientists to ensure that the food companies are making their products healthier. This would result in  a substantial personnel cost savings for the Federal government.

Obama Care never understood this root cause. Even if it was able to get all Americans health insurance, those Americans would still be obese and would still be incurring the heavy medical price of being so. The root cause would be unchanged.

Root Cause # 2 - Americans smoke too much. How much cost savings there would be if no one smoked? Much less lung cancer, much less throat cancer, much less mouth cancer, much less heart disease, and much less of other types of diseases that inhaling smoke into your body causes. 

Much like the obesity problem, this root cause is a public health issue, not a health insurance issue. You can have all of the insurance in the world but if you still smoke, you are still likely to get a variety of cancers and diseases, you have not reduced the demand and cost for medical services. 

And just like with high fructose corn syrup, the Federal government is a major culprit. Every year, American taxpayers allow the Washington political class to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in farm subsidies to …tobacco farmers.. These farmers than grow tobacco that ends up in tobacco products which ends up in people’s bodies which causes costly medical expenses, disease, and death.

According to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, every year the tobacco industry gets about $190 million in Federal money subsidies. This past summer, the Federal Health and Human Services department announced a $54 million campaign to get people to stop smoking. Talk about insanity, one part of the government is paying farmers to grow more tobacco and another part of the government is trying to get people to stop using tobacco. You cannot make this stuff up.

There are five steps needed to address this root cause:

• First, stop the insanity of paying tobacco farmers to grow tobacco. This will drive up tobacco production costs and hopefully stop some people from smoking from an economic perspective.
• Second, put a two prong research effort in place. One part of that research would be to more fully understand the smoking habit and addiction and find ways and treatments to reduce the desire and addiction to smoking, 
• The second research effort would be to find a way to either use tobacco products in non-lethal ways (e.g. bio fuels) or find a way to encourage tobacco farmers to switch to other, more profitable crops, further reducing the supply of tobacco.
• Third, continue and expand existing smoking cessation programs as much as possible, spending a little money up front to keep people from smoking and saving a lot of money down the road from treating their medical conditions from smoking.
• Fourth, put together a sustained public health program that discourages smoking at all ages, specially targeting the younger generation before they start smoking.
• Five, make tobacco users pay substantially more for their health insurance, let the cost causer be the cost payer. Maybe if the true medical cost of smoking was actually borne by smokers there would be less smoking. Obama Care actually tried to institute this type of policy but like everything else in this horrid piece of legislation, this component has been postponed for at least another year.

Public health efforts, supply and demand techniques, scientific research, easier and more effective approaches to this root cause than the Obama Care approach of making sure that people have health insurance but not reducing the levels of medical services needed to treat tobacco related diseases.

Would these public health approaches work? Consider the assertions made by the head of the world renowned Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Delose Cosgrove, in a Forbes magazine interview in 2010:

• In our current health care industry there is no incentive for staying well. 
• Obesity in America accounts for 10% of all health care costs. 
• Smoking, diet, and lack of exercise, according to Dr. Cosgrove, contribute to 40% of premature deaths in this country, 70% of chronic diseases such as heart disease, and cancer account for 75% of the nation's total health care. 
• At the Cleveland Clinic, all deep fryers were removed from the cafeterias, the menus were made healthier, the candy and soda machines were removed, free exercise programs were initiated for Clinic employers, free Weight Watcher memberships were made available, and in the first year of this transformation, Cleveland Clinic employees lost 120,000 pounds of weight, 60 tons. 
• From a smoking perspective, smoking was banned on the entire grounds of the Clinic, free smoking cessation classes were offered to both employees and the entire county where the Clinic is located, a lobbying push was made to ban public smoking everywhere in Ohio, and the Clinic stopped hiring smokers. In four years the smoking rate in the county went from 28% to 18%, a little less than the national average of 20%.

Wow, no 10,000 pages of regulations, no failed and expensive government website, no one losing their current health insurance, just good, old-fashioned  root cause analysis and solutions. In this case, the solution was focused on a public health effort to change behavior for the better and for the healthier, not to install an unworkable Rube Goldberg insurance process that did nothing to reduce the demand for health care services. 

Imagine how much heart disease was avoided because there was 60 fewer tons of fat stressing people’s bodies. Imagine how many cancer cases were avoided because the smoking rate in a county went down form 28% to 18%. Again, simple economics: reduce the demand, reduce the cost and price. Reduce the demand/need for health care services the cost of those services goes way down. Obama Care completely missed this simple fact of life.

For more on Dr. Cosgrove and an example of a town in Minnesota that got their citizens together to get the whole town healthy, go to the following link:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/12/healthy-solution-to-our-unhealthy.html

We will finish up our root cause analysis tomorrow. You will see that addressing the true underlying causes of our high health care costs is not that hard but that Obama Care’s architects missed the boat completely. Remember: "Pare things down. A few moves do a lot." Ten thousands pages of unreadable government regulations accomplish very little.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w