I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Health Care Costs Better Than Stimulus Packages
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Craig S. Karpel, author of The Retirement Myth, has written a great opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago pointing out a very glaring—yet somehow overlooked—contradiction in Obama’s position regarding the economy.
Obama has said, “make no mistake: the cost of our health care is a threat to our economy,” referring to the 20% of our GDP that we spend on health care. Yet, as Karpel points out, one person’s expenditure is another person’s income and the $2.4 trillion that Americans spend each year on health care goes to pay other Americans which, to use Obama’s own logic, is an even better stimulus to the economy and to job growth than his own stimulus proposals can ever dream of accomplishing!
A little-noticed feature of the current recession is the role of the health-care industry as a resilient driver of the general economy. Health-care now accounts for 10.4% of nonfarm employment. Health-care employment grew by 19,600 jobs in July 2009, on a par with the average monthly gain for the first half of 2009, which was down from an average monthly increase of 30,000 in 2008. Remarkably, these gains occurred in a period during which total employment shrank by 6.7 million.
Furthermore, our health care industry—into which our world-leading medical and pharmaceutical research companies pour billions of dollars annually—is one of our greatest exports! Other countries license our technology, lease our equipment, buy our drugs, send their medical hopefuls to our schools and companies… all of which brings in an incredible amount of foreign currency and strengthens our economy.
And that’s to say nothing of the actual health care that we provide to “medical tourists”, people from other countries (read: socialized medicine countries), like Canada, for example, seeking better health care here in the United States and traveling here to obtain it—in the process infusing our economy with payments for their health care, their accommodations, their airfare, and everything else they (and their travel companions) do while here.
Karpel writes:
The U.S. health-care economy should be viewed not as a burden but as an engine of growth. Medical and orthopedic equipment exports increased by 65.1% from 2004 through 2008. Pharmaceutical exports were up 74.6%. The unprecedented advances expected to come out of American stem cell, nanotechnology and human genome research—which other countries’ constricted health sectors cannot support—will send these already impressive figures skyward.
A study by Deloitte LLP has found that more than 400,000 non-U.S. residents obtained medical care in the U.S. in 2008, and it forecasts an annual increase of 3%. Some 3.5% of inpatient procedures at U.S. hospitals were performed on international patients, many of them escaping from Canada’s supposedly superior health system.
How does something so obvious escape the notice of the president? (We can already imagine how it escapes the notice of the mainstream media: they’re too busy fawning over the Great One’s glorious presence.) How is it that he can give one speech after another about how important it is to stimulate the economy and—more so—to spend tons of money to stimulate the economy, and yet when it comes to health care it suddenly becomes a bad thing to spend money—money which results in jobs and economic activity?
It can only be because of purely political reasons, i.e., because in order to get socialized medicine, he must first demonize the system enough to rally enough people for change.
The problem, though, is that too many people are actually happy with their health care and are just not buying into this demonization.
This obvious-yet-overlooked aspect of it is yet another reason for people to stop and consider what Obama’s real motives are for fast-tracking so many of his bloated proposals through Congress.
(A tip of the ol’ fedora to my sis for spotting this great WSJ article!)