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The Daily Dose/February 27, 2010
By Gaylon Kent
The Writer's Shack
Notes from around the Human Experience...
SOME THOUGHTS ON HEALTH CARE: President Obama held a health care summit this week. In what is hardly the upset of the year, it offered nothing of substance.
Leading Off: The first thing that everybody should acknowledge is that the very best health insurance plan is a healthy body. We think half of this country's health care problems would vanish if two-thirds of this country wasn't fat and the average American didn't spend four-and-a-half hours everyday watching tee vee and if every man, woman and child in this country didn't spend an average of $494 a year on fast food.
FunFact: It is not surprising that Americans eat more fast food than any other nation on Earth. What may well be surprising, and should be disturbing, is that the other nine nations in teh Top10 combined do not eat as much fast food as Americans do, with Americans consuming almost two-thirds of the fast food eaten by the top ten fast food eating nations.
SuperSized FunFact: Double disturbing is that the other nine nations of the fast food Top 10 have ten times as many people as the United States! We are not making that up. The combined populations of - in order of total fast food spending - Japan, Canada, the UK, China, South Korea, Germany, Australia, Brazil and India - is roughly three billion people!
Back On Message: As noted in Michael Moore's really good movie Sicko, the current US health insurance system works for a quarter of a billion people. So let's not worry about them. Let's worry about the people for whom the system is not working, either because they cannot get access to it or because it isn't delivering the treatment they need.
Big Picture Me Here: We think the government should not bother insuring these people, or purchasing medical care for them, like Medicare does. Instead, we think it would be cheaper for the government, on a per patient basis, to actually open clinics and hospitals and deliver the care themselves.
More Holes Than Swiss Cheese: We did some research on this a while back, before we went on 2009's hiatus and that research showed it was cheaper for the United States government to deliver care to its veterans through VA hospitals and clinics than it was for the government to pay for the treatment of its Medicare recipients. This was hardly scientific research, but it was enough for our purposes.
Unfortunately the results of this landmark, groundbreaking research has been lost to the ages. But don't take our word for it, do your own research and see if you, too, don't find that it is cheaper for the government to provide medical care than it is for them to purchase it for someone else.
Moral Qualms: Some people say it is morally wrong to have the lives and deaths of private citizens in the hands of for-profit businesses. We can see their point.
We don't agree with it though. Doctoring has always been a for-profit proposition in this country. In colonial times a doctor would come over and put some leaches on you to suck your illness away and you'd give him some chickens or tobacco as payment.
Dry, Technical Matter: Medical insurance in this country dates back to the mid-1800's when a company in Massachusetts began offering coverage for railroad and steamboat accidents. From there, sickness and disability coverage evolved and the modern health insurance industry came about in the second half of the 20th century.
To Repeat: It is not really government's job to fart around with the free market. For-profit medical evolved in this country? Okay, we can work with that. Official Writer's Shack policy states the purpose of government to preserve the liberty of its citizens, and that includes providing a free market for businesses to offer their goods and services in.
You do not, however, want the goddamned government taking it over completely. A government program would be only to serve those who cannot get access to the current system or who are not getting the treatment they need. As NASA has shown, you give the government a monopoly on anything and they will eventually screw it up. Like space, government needs private business in the medical field.
NOW HEAR THIS: On this date in 1860, Abraham Lincoln made a speech at the Cooper Union in New York City that is widely credited with bringing him to national prominence and greatly contributed to getting him the Republican Party's nomination for President of the United States.
Start Spreading The News: The speech was widely reported in newspapers and distributed on the 19th century's version of the Internet, the printed pamphlet.
Dry, Technical Matter: Lincoln's speech that day was not short, 7,717 words, about the length of seven of these columns and 7,448 words longer than his Gettysburg Address. The purpose of the speech was to give his views on slavery, specifically the rights of the federal government to limits its expansion in federal territories. Lincoln's view was that yes, the federal had that right.
And it was not one of those write-on-the-back-of-an-envelope speeches either. To support this view, and to show that the Founding Fathers intended for the government to limit slavery in the territories, Lincoln did an enormous amount of research. In the months before the speech, Lincoln - who certainly must have had a sense of what the speech could mean to his prospects - researched the careers of the 39 men who signed the United States Constitution
Of those, Lincoln found that 23 of them had occasion to vote on the right of the federal government to limit slavery in the territories in either the Congress of the Confederation before the Constitution took effect or in the United States Congress after it took effect.
Of those 23, 21 voted in favor of the federal government's right to limit slavery in the territories.
With Malice For None, With Charity For All: As usual, Lincoln knew how to end a speech:
…neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Thought For The Day: Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances…such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man. Abraham Lincoln, Copper Union Address, February 27, 1860.
Answer To The Last Trivia Question: Napoleon is buried in Grant's Tomb. We're kidding. Napoleon is buried at Les Invalides - a complex of museums and and monuments to French military history - in Paris.
Today's Stumper: Of the current ten most populous countries, which of them were also in the top ten of the list of the most populous countries in 1900? - Answer next time!
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