So last night, I read all about this cool thing the TV folks are using at the Olympics. The WSJ had a half-page story explaining how a clever, but simple, device called the DiveCam enables viewers in their homes to see the following:
On TV, a diver walks out onto a platform. The camera fixes on him. He
waits. He leaps. And then — somehow — the camera stays with him as he
plunges. In the instant it takes him to break the water’s surface, the
picture suddenly cuts to an underwater shot — and we watch in
disbelief as the dive culminates in a burst of bubbles.
This sounded very cool, so I went into the TV room and lo and behold, diving was on at that very moment. So I watched, and — basically saw the same kind of camera angle I saw when I watched Olympics back in the 60s, except that we had a black-and-white set then. So I asked my wife, who had watched a LOT more Olympics than I had, whether she had seen the DiveCam shots, and I explained what that meant. No, she hadn’t.
So I looked at the WSJ story again, and then noticed something in the lead paragraph:
BEIJING — High-tech televisual bells and whistles have carried
couch-based Olympic watching way beyond the mere reality of being here.
Thousands of cameras are catching the action in China — every one of
them high-definition. Yet for a feat of engineering magic that dazzles
as it baffles, nothing beats the DiveCam.
Did you see it? "every one of them high-definition…"
So I ran back in and told my wife that the problem was that we don’t have an HD television! You know what she said? She told me she heard from her friend Mary this week, and Mary wanted her to be sure to tell me that she’s really enjoying watching the Olympics!
I told you about Mary in a recent column — remember? She’s my wife’s friend from high school whom we stayed with in Memphis when we went to that wedding. She had a very nice 42-inch, 1080-resolution flat-panel HDTV set that she had recently bought for $800 from Sam’s Club. I enjoyed watching it while I was there. This was before our $1,200 "economic stimulus" check came from the gummint. This seemed highly fortuitous, until the check actually came, and Mamanem said we had to spend it on a health care bill — a health care bill that we wouldn’t have had to deal with if we had a proper national health plan like other civilized countries (the "why" is complicated, having to do with a brief period during which my youngest wasn’t covered by my insurance that I pay a heap of money for; she’s back on it now). This led me to assert that the gummint could keep its blasted check, and use the money toward a national health plan … the lack of which is now preventing me from properly appreciating the Olympics.
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Brad,
Besides the gunmint sending $1200 back to citizens to “stimulate” the economy, the guvmint is also giving citizens up to 2 “credit cards” worth $40 per household to buy digital-to-analog converter boxes to use with NTSC (analog) Televisions.
Yes, our household has cable, but we also have an outside antenna. When we moved, cable was not an option. Then Star Cable wired up where we live; Star Cable was very unreliable. Time-Warner bought them and brought the reliability up with time. Requiring an HDTV antenna is hype. We picked up the local HDTV stations with an antenna that’s 20 years old.
I will have to watch diving using the HDTV converter instead of cable to see the DiveCam this Saturday.
Gee, no one should have to go without a 42-inch HDTV in order to pay for their own medical care….
Since the Census Bureau data shows that only 7% of those “without health insurance” are actually without it for long periods of time due to low income, this is another non-crisis being hyped by the fear-mongering socialists.
The only people who want “government” to pay for their medical care, are those who don’t want responsibility for their own lives. They are willing to accept mediocre treatment if it’s “free”.
Taxpayers know it’s cheaper for them to control their own medical budget than to let bureaucrats control anything.
The Olympics? What Olympics? All they have is swimming, gymnastics and beach volleyball.
Lee’s not following. Here’s the point. Every two months, I pay almost as much as that $1,200 for medical insurance. Still, we find ourselves in these gaps, such as when my kids are no longer eligible for my insurance, and don’t have their own yet.
With a national health system, I would pay my money, and they would pay theirs (my kids always work), in TAXES, and we would always be covered as we went from job to job, or from school to job, or whatever. No transitions, permanent coverage. They might even be able to take some risks and start their own businesses or something.
But not now. Now, we are slaves to a system in which we pay through the nose for years, and still are sometimes not covered.
This sucks, people. It’s crazy. There’s no reason for civilized people to live like this.
Or, to put it more simply, I am as usual poking a little fun in order to make a very serious point. Did the rest of you get it?
If you are going to be paying as much in TAXES as you now pay for medical insurance, why would you do that, just to turn over control to faceless bureaucrats?
If you are paying more than $550.00 a month for insurance for a family, you must have some serious chronic medical problems AND be paying way too small a deductible. A $3,000 deductible makes it real insurance, and very cheap.
It’s stupid to still have your insurance and retirement attached to a job. That is a relic of World War II, when companies were trying to circumvent the wage controls of the socialist FDR government.
Germany is phasing out their socialized medicine and their government retirement welfare (like our Social Insecurity). For decades, their workers have owned their own health insurance and pensions, so job changing is just about the job.
Brad –
I hear ya and know that you’re honking our goose and it’s one of them ones from Canada, the ones full of poop that get the “free” healthcare back where the come from.
I’d like somebody to pay my medical expenses too. Sure, I’ve got health insurance through my employer, but I still have co-pays and the like, and I sure could spend that money on something more enjoyable. Heck, my blood pressure medicine costs so much I’ve had to start buyin’ my Slim Jims by the case at Sam’s Club… And the price of bacon is so high, I might have to switch to vegetable oil for fryin’.
There is another option, Mr. Warthen. Rather than relying on a national health care plan to fill your gaps, thus forcing Lee, Doug, Mike, bud, Karen and I, not to mention the rest of those who blog here, to pay for your health care, you could simply make more money, buy HD plasma like lightning forced me to purchase, and lose yourself in all those sharp but shallow images.
Thank goodness my TV enjoyment doesn’t depend on Divecam.
But thank heaven for instant college football replays.
To each his own.
Yeah, Brad…it really is too bad that you are responsible for your daughter’s well-being.
Of the industrialized world, the us has the highest infant mortality, shortest life expectancy, highest incidence of cancer, heart attack and aids rates. If you don’t thin that is mediocre, you must love President Deficit. We do have more cosmetic surgeons. Yay!!
p.m. – I don’t really get this notion of why you are against the idea that you might be paying for someone else’s healthcare. Are you not doing that now? The only difference is that you’re paying insurance companies to pay for others healthcare. If you don’t get sick for years, then that money is going somewhere, to pay for other peoples medical bills. I just don’t see that as a persuasive argument against universal healthcare.
Jay,
We are also paying the majority of the healthcare costs for Medicare recipients and all the healthcare costs for Medicaid recipients.
Medicare pays roughly 30% of the actual cost of service and is also responsible for paying BILLIONS of dollars in fraudulent claims due to having zero accountability. Every time I see those ads for the little scooters where the announcer hints that they can find a way to get Medicare to pay all the costs, I want to throw my remote through the TV (the non-HDTV one).
Brad’s focus is on free healthcare for everyone because he pays more for his insurance than many of the rest of us do.
He won’t ever accept that millions of Americans are perfectly happy with our insurance. He won’t acknowledge that because it would mean the healthcare cost issue would then become a Brad issue instead of a “everybody else” issue.
Every month or so Brad gets on this kick and then refuses to delve any deeper into the questions of how a national healthcare system could be implemented that wouldn’t
a) ration care b) force the best providers to set up private practices outside the system and c) discourage innovation in the medical world.
Profit motivates progress.
There are incremental solutions that don’t involve the government taking over (and destroying) our healthcare economy. It can be done with legislation, not bureacracy.
Deal with the issues that restrict the free market. Tort reform for medical malpractice, drug patents, letting hospitals like Lexington Medical decide what services they want to provide instead of a government agencies… the list goes on and on.
It is wrong if I am paying for someone else’s health care against my will, just like it is wrong to force me to pay for their vacations, TV, air conditioning, housing, vehicles and food.
The solution isn’t to have the government rob me directly. The solution is to get freeloaders out of the system. If the doctors want to give away free care (they already do), or the churches want to provide clinics (they already do), that’s good.
Government robbing me to pay for delivery of the anchor baby of some wetback, or heart surgery for some morbidly obese abuser of Food Stamps, is just wrong.
“Government robbing me to pay for delivery of the anchor baby of some wetback, or heart surgery for some morbidly obese abuser of Food Stamps, is just wrong.”
But how do you really feel?
Actually, forcing anyone to pay for the medical care of any stranger is wrong, but I don’t think we need to itemize every example. Removing the 30,000,000 illegal aliens and the majority who can afford insurance but choose to freeload would be a good start.
I’m a retired engineer with a master’s degree, have paid more than my share of taxes and, yet, I’m on Medicaid. Whuuuuuuuuut? During all the years I paid my insurance company to pay the bills for other folks, I wasn’t in need of the coverage. While in a lapse-of-coverage period, I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure so, guess what? My pre-existing condition has kept me from receiving conventional medical coverage and I’m forced to live a rather poverty laden life in order to retain Medicaid coverage. Trust me. There are millions out there like me. It’s embarrassing and shameful. Average out the costs of insurance payments and co-pays vs. taxes and there’s practically no difference. Replacing our corporate healthcare/Medicare/Medicaid system with a universal system and our healthcare can weed out the noncitizens by requiring proof of citizenship as the base critereon for full healthcare. The rest of the civilized world uses our current biased healthcare system as the model of how NOT to do it.
Steve,
I’m sorry to hear of your condition. However, do you believe you will get better care if the government runs the whole system? How long do you think it would take for our country to make that transition?
How about instead if the government simply said “No insurance company can refuse to cover anyone willing to pay for coverage at a rate no higher than what U.S. government employees pay for their insurance”.
I can’t figure out why Brad doesn’t push his buddy Lindsey Graham on this issue. Why should Lindsey Graham not have to worry about his insurance costs when the people paying for it don’t have the same option?
And maybe we should find out just how much it cost for Strom Thurmond to live in Walter Reed hospital for so many years… who paid THAT bill?
Why not replace insurance as a corporate benefit with private plans? People could buy it through other groups, like their church, or individually.
Either let individuals deduct the cost of insurance, just like they can (sometimes) deduct the actual medical bills, or take away the tax deductions get for providing benefits, or tax the employees for the benefits.
Right now, a small percentage of people who work for large corporations or the government receive preferential tax treatment for their benefits.
We’ve been down this path before, with Lee writing about how bad it is to get sick in Europe and people being left to die, all of which is right-wing hagiography.
But I can’t go Brad’s route, either. Germany’s health plans treated us as a family well, and I will always be grateful to that system. It was quite a shock to come back here and not be rejected by the insurance companies who didn’t want someone who had lived in Europe.
But I fear what would happen if we try and set up the same system here. Maybe Doug has an idea–certainly some good government regulation of the insurance industry would be in order–that is more in the direction of the German system, than say the British national health plan(although I personally had superb treatment while in England, but it can get frustrating there, needing an operation, but having to wait forever for it).
If we could keep a national health plan fairly lean, it probably would work fine. But who is to keep the politicians from padding it all the time, in order to get votes? That is a problem that Germany has run into, and they have not been able to keep the system funded.
We will never have the perfect solution. But if we need a system where everybody pays in, and can’t put it off until they get sick. At the same time, some private initiative has to remain. Hard to do.
It’s not hard to have a totally private, first-class medical care system in a country as wealthy as America. Just take the non-working freeloaders out of it.
The only part of the medical system with increasing costs is the 58% of the industry under control of the government. The other 42% which is highly competitive, has seen costs not increase, or actually decrease, over the last 30 years.
In 2007, the GAO found $17 BILLION of fraud in Medicare. We can’t trust the government employees to not cheat us – in one year, the Dept of Education employees under Dick Riley stole $114,000,000 from their agency credit cards without a single person being disciplined, much less fired or prosecuted.
I have most of the official data comparing European, Canadian, and British socialized medicine in waiting times, treatments available, and mortality rates. The USA is an order of magnitude better, which is why those people over there who can afford it carry private medical insurance, and fly to America for medical care.
I wrote a long piece with several links in it, but can’t get it to post. Oh well.
Suffice it to say that, when Germans complain about their system, it is often about things like not having free taxi rides to the hospital any more, or having $10 doctor co-pays. Nobody I talk to, and that includes business people, want the American system. Nobody. Maybe Lee knows the upper crust; I don’t run in those circles.
One thing I really liked about being insured in Germany was the yearly coupon from my insurance provider–I trotted down with it to my GP, and got a basic checkup every year, including EKG.
Not having much choice anyway, we turned to a Christian sharing group when we came back from Europe. That’s OK–it fits New Testament principles of sharing among Christians, except that it has the same basic American pattern–no pay for checkups. We share if you get sick, but not for the colonoscopy. At more than $1200 a pop in this country, I wonder how many of us over 50 actually go for this preventative recommendation–probably most, like myself, don’t go, and hope we don’t have colon cancer.
If Dr. Demarco is still reading these threads, maybe he has some up-to-date info on where a Democratic administration might take us, and how it would be funded. Insider insight?
I have already posted the sorry statistics for several socialist “healthcare” systems. Which would would you like to defend?
* The 700 modern drugs denied to French patients
* The long waiting times for heart surgery
* The lack of diagnosis and much higher mortality rates for breast cancer
* The deliberate killing of infants and the elderly in the Netherlands
* Canadian officials coming to the US for medical care
Saturday, John McCain, Rick Warren Saddleback interview:
“Let’s give them a $5,000 refundable tax credit to go out and get the health insurance of their choice. Let’s not have the government take over the health care system in America.”
Amen. What does John McCain understand that Brad doesn’t?
Personal responsibility is necessary for individual liberty.
As is corporate responsibility; there is a balance necessary.
Still, as much as there is attractive with some kind of national health plan, I really wonder about its implementation in the US. There is an infrastructure in place in many other countries that makes the administration of such more feasible.
And a practical problem of passing this legislation. There are powerful lobbies at work here, as other countries have in other areas. Germany can’t get an autobahn speed limit, and we can’t get much gun control of assault weapons, so how are we going to get a national health plan in place?
More realistic may be something in the direction that Doug has suggested, with somewhat more regulation of insurance companies.
And nobody has yet suggested any way feasible to keep from politicizing a national health plan, i.e. padding it with benefits to the point that it is not financially sustainable. This is something that European countries have struggled with, and it is not easy to cut benefits, once they are in place and people get used to them. Nobody wants to be the party in power that has to go lean.
There needs to be a way to help people like Steve Taylor without going overboard. I still don’t know what it is, but it’s up to the leaders to propose it.
The Assault Weapons Hoax of Socialists
There has been registration of real “assault weapons”, which are fully automatic carbines, since 1934. No civilian-owned machinegun or assault rifle has been used in a crime since 1934. There are currently over 260,000 privately owned Class III weapons in civilian hands. There are 25,000 in Canada, which also has no crimes committed with them.
—– and —————-
Whenever lawyers cannot make an intellectual argument, they start talking about “fairness”, “equity”, and “balance”.
Hmmm. Perhaps you would like to explain the foregoing in light of this list of crimes. It will be interesting to at least read the spin put on your answer in order to get out of the predicament.
Nevertheless, my point was the strength of the lobby, not the issue of gun control. I will do my utmost to stay on topic.
There is no “gun lobby”. There are several lobbies of 70,000,000 citizens who are gun owners.
Your link is to a piece of propaganda which uses gross misinformation aimed to cause hysteria among those ignorant about firearms and laws.
None of the firearms listed is an “assault rifle” or “assault weapon”, except for a few that could fire in fully automatic mode. Those all require a license from the BATF, payment of a $500 transfer fee, and they all cost between $6,000 and $16,000. None have ever been used in a crime in the USA.
All firearms sales across state lines, all sales by dealers, even at gun shows, require an FBI background check.
Under socialized medicine, you had better get used to forced sterilization (Sweden) abortion, late-term abortion, killing of newborns with birth defects (Holland), and killing of the elderly and terminally ill by forcible lethal injection and removal from life-sustaining equipment (Holland and England)
A new report by GSA says 31% of Medicare money was stolen by fraud.
Dosage and tolerance to adderall.
Adderall.