America

On Death Panels

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Sarah Palin - ObamaCare - Affordable Heathcare Act - Death Panels

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Normally, I try not to lend this person’s activities any of my time or attention, but Politico reports that Sarah Palin is resurrecting her scaremongering “death panel” message in anticipation of the upcoming US Supreme Court ruling on the new health care law’s constitutionality.

Says Politico:

Palin charged in a August 2009 Facebook post that the Democrats’ health care bill would empower a “death panel” of government bureaucrats who can decide who lives or dies. The 2009 claim earned Palin Politifact’s “Lie of the Year,” but she said today that the president’s health care law’s Independent Payment Advisory Board makes life-or-death decisions.

“It was a pretty long post, but a lot of people seem to have only read two words of it: ‘death panel,’” Palin wrote today. “Though I was called a liar for calling it like it is, many of these accusers finally saw that Obamacare did in fact create a panel of faceless bureaucrats who have the power to make life and death decisions about health care funding.”

No, Palin. People read the whole thing, their minds just stuck on those two words – “death panel” – because it was such an outrageous distortion of one of the best bits about the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare. Requiring health insurance providers to cover end-of-life care discussions between patients and their doctors was an excellent idea, one that would have encouraged thousands of Americans to decide whether or not they would want very aggressive and costly treatment during their final days, potentially saving them or their loved ones from unnecessary and prolonged pain and anguish when the time comes, not to mention saving vast sums of money and lowering insurance premiums for everyone.

Equating this with a room full of stern bureaucrats weighing the value of your life in their hands and deciding whether or not you are worthy of treatment was a case of shameful fantasy and hyperbole, and ultimately resulted in this provision being struck from the finished law – and you think that you are doing the American people a service?

Essentially, this seems to come down to a quibble about which invisible, mysterious forces are allowed to exercise life-or-death decisions over us (for after all, there is potentially unlimited demand for healthcare, and very limited resources to go around). Palin seems to prefer the invisible hand over the faceless bureaucrat, but if she could think in full colour rather than monochrome black/white, right/wrong for just a moment, she might realise that rationing of healthcare inevitably occurs in any system, and that the unchecked free market is little better a solution than the dark room of emotionless socialist bureaucrats created by her fevered imagination.

David Cameron, Werewolf Pacifier

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Anyone watching television in the UK over the past few weeks can hardly have failed to have seen trailers for the soon-to-be-released movie, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”. Apparently the life of Abraham Lincoln was simply not interesting enough, and had to be augmented with vampires in order to make it to the big screen.

From the Amazon.com review of the book that inspired the movie:

Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother’s bedside. She’s been stricken with something the old-timers call “Milk Sickness.”

“My baby boy…” she whispers before dying.

Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother’s fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.

When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, “henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose…” Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.

While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.

Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.

This witty article from Slate.com treats the movie with the contempt that it deserves, and imagines the paranormal or superhuman feats of other past US presidents.

Chester A. Arthur becomes a “Sasquatch Assassin”.

Grover Cleveland becomes a time warrior.

Andrew Jackson takes on a Ridley Scott-style alien in a boxing ring.

This led me to wonder – what dark but noble feats would lurk in the past of alternate universe David Cameron?

The Power Of The Presidency

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…does not currently extend to persecuting or firing police officers who arrest spoiled, washed-up young starlets who drive while drunk. As Jonathan Turley wryly notes:

It is not clear which actress Amanda Bynes is in greater need of: basic driving or constitutional law lessons. After being arrested for drunk driving, Bynes took to Twitter to ask that President Barack Obama “fire the cop who arrested me.” While Obama may be willing to break away from an emerging civil war in Syria and a worsening economy to address the pressing problems of the starlet, he may find it difficult to fire the officer who is a state employee. However, according to the Justice Department, he does have the ability to declare the officer a threat to the nation and have him summarily executed. After all, if arresting a starlet is not an act of terrorism in our celebrity-driven society, I do not know what is.

I think that Obama may have just a couple of slightly more pressing issues to occupy his attention before he gets around to this particular request.

The End Of America As We Know It? Hardly.

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Andrew Sullivan posts an excellent retort to Mitt Romney’s fear mongering that the United States is about to make a binary flip from being a free enterprise nation to having a “government-run economy”, based on this illuminating chart:

As you will note, the line indicating growth in corporate profits (in billions of dollars) obstinately refuses to go in the direction that it would need to point in order to signify the government-led smothering of the private sector that Romney wants us to believe is currently taking place.

The Republican presidential candidate has been giving speeches bemoaning the notion that President Obama doesn’t understand capitalism or the free enterprise system, and that this ignorance is leading Obama to implement policies that are harming the economic recovery. Romney has advanced this line of attack frequently, most recently at a campaign event in St. Louis, Missouri, though to be fair, he seems willing to ascribe Obama’s supposed failures to ignorance rather than malice:

I do not believe this has been done with evil intent or ill will. But for a family watching their house being sold at foreclosure, or the family that is forced to spend their kid’s college savings just to make ends meet, the results are just as devastating.

Oh wait, perhaps not:

I will not be that President of deception and doubt. I will lead us to a better place.

Then, of course, comes the obligatory lie about Obamacare, the Affordable Healthcare act:

Today, government at all levels consumes 37 percent of the total economy or G.D.P. If Obamacare is allowed to stand, government will reach half of the American economy. And through the increasing controls government has imposed on industries like energy, financial services and automobiles, it will soon effectively control the majority of our economic activity.

This line only works if you are ill-informed enough to actually believe that Obamacare effectively appropriates and nationalises the entire US healthcare industry, bringing it under government ownership as opposed to just regulating the industry to a higher degree and increasing the customer base of the insurance companies through the individual mandate. So it’s basically a big fat lie, though Romney is clever enough to choose his words carefully, stating “government will reach half of the American economy”, a quite meaningless phrase, but one that deliberately and incorrectly suggests ownership and control of half of the US economy without actually putting him on the record as having said so.

And finally, the crux of Romney’s argument:

One must ask whether we will still be a free enterprise nation and whether we will still have economic freedom. America is on the cusp of having a government-run economy. President Obama is transforming America into something very different than the land of the free and the land of opportunity.

We know where that transformation leads. There are other nations that have chosen that path. It leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt, and stagnant wages.

I don’t want to transform America; I want to restore the values of economic freedom.

This is what really irritates me about the Romney argument, this idea that there is a binary choice between “free enterprise” and “government-run”, that America has always dwelt on the free enterprise side of the line and that Obama wants an old-school socialist planned economy. It is borne out of the total allergy to nuance or shades of grey currently affecting the Republican party, and is one of the main reasons why I cannot bring myself to support them at the moment.

Of course there is no such binary choice. What percentage of GDP would have to be consumed by government spending for “free enterprise” to officially be declared dead according to the Romney definition? 37%, the current figure? 50% + 1? Something else? All conservatives – myself included – want to see government spending account for as small a proportion of GDP as possible, and most would agree that the current level – in Britain as well as in America – is too high. But the size of government has expanded under both parties, and though Obama may be guilty of failing to reverse the trend, he has at least slowed the rate of increase in the size of government, when the stimulus measures are factored out. For Mitt Romney to suggest that the US is teetering on the brink of becoming a planned economy under Obama when government spending accounts for 37% of GDP is not only the worst type of scaremongering, it also ignores the significant contribution that his own party made to the problem.

And as for this narrative about Obama seeking to “transform” America, to turn it into something unrecognisable from before – while it may be the only narrative that Romney can hope to ride to the White House in November, it is also untrue. Obama is a centre-left politician implementing mostly centre-left policies, some of which would actually have enjoyed a measure of support among Republicans if they had been proposed by a President Bush, Cheney or McCain. But for Romney to get out the vote, he must convince his supporters of something patently untrue, that Obama is a radical, a dangerous subversive trying to alter the fabric of America.

I’m an economic conservative, I believe in a small state and limited government involvement in private markets. But given the choice between someone on the centre left who is making an honest effort along Keynesian lines to solve the economic difficulties facing America and someone on the right who screams “socialism!” where none exists, and who remains in denial about his own side’s complicity in the downturn and the detrimental effect that his policy proposals would have on the recovery, I have to hold my nose and support the centre left guy.

Which is a shame, because it would be nice to have a genuine choice in 2012.

My Turn To Be President

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Politico reports on Jeb Bush’s surprisingly frank confession that he believes 2012 was his “time” to run for the presidency, and that he may now have missed his chance:

“This was probably my time,” Bush told “CBS This Morning,” referring to the ongoing presidential campaign. “There’s a window of opportunity, in life, and for all sorts of reasons.”

 

I think we can all quite happily do without a third member of the Bush dynasty ascending to the presidency and making a mockery of American meritocracy. Thanks for sitting this round out, Jeb.

That said, the Florida Republican doesn’t know whether he ever wants to be president.

“Have you made a decision that you don’t want to be president?” asked CBS host Charlie Rose.

“I have not made that decision,” Bush responded.

Uh-oh.