There are so many good sources of information that don’t get enough press, and I can only flood my facebook so much, that I’m compiling some of my current reads on health care.

Sure, the health care bill is now the law of the land. But that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about it. And actually, most people aren’t. A new Rasmussen Poll shows that Obama’s administration has been suffering from declining public support since May 2009.

A sizable majority (68%) still believe the nation is heading down the wrong track, but that’s down three points from two weeks ago when 71% felt that way. The latter finding was the highest level of pessimism measured in 14 months.

Leading up to Obama’s inauguration, the number of voters who felt the country was heading in the right direction remained below 20%. The week of his inauguration, voter confidence rose to 27% and then steadily increased, peaking at 40% in early May 2009. Confidence has declined since. As is often the case, there was a brief burst of enthusiasm at the beginning of this year when 32% said the country was heading in the right direction, but that quickly faded.

Not surprisingly, “These findings are a sharp contrast to how Democratic voters feel. Forty-eight percent (48%) are confident in the nation’s current course, while slightly fewer (44%) feel the country is heading down the wrong track. Still, in May of last year, 68% of Democrats said right direction, and just 26% said wrong track.”

Even with the passage of the health care sausage it hasn’t appeased many, and the political cost of “transparent” meat packing has been brutal. “Republican candidates hold an eight-point lead over Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.”

Enough of the right-wing crazies. Enough of the left wing socialists. There can be bipartisanship in facts. Besides what terrible reports you may read from lame ducks like USA Today, or the most recent blurb from the nightly news, there is plenty of real, accessible information for people to become educated.

Here is a MUST READ from the bastion Obama Times in the Big Apple titled Checking the Math on Health Care:

Who ever would have thought that after more than a year of vitriol, the whole health care reform question would result in a win-win bill? Actually, a lot of people still don’t see it that way. Why? As the Economist once put it, “As a creature of Congress, the C.B.O. is required to pretend to believe many impossible things before breakfast.” Some would say the same of Ezra Klein.


The governor of my newly adopted home state said this on the troubles Tennessee and others will face from another mega-entitlement:

Bob and Bart, the problem we are facing is simple: by 2013,we expect to have returned to our 2008 levels of revenue and will have already cut our programs dramatically – over a billion dollars. At that point, we have to start digging out — we will have not given raises to state employees or teachers for five years, our pension fund will need shoring up, our cash reserves (“rainy day fund”) will have been considerably depleted and in need of restoration, and we will have not made any substantial new investments for years … In this environment, for Congress to also send along a mandatory bill for three-quarters of a billion dollars for the health reform they’ve designed is very difficult. These are hard dollars – we can’t borrow them – and make the management of our finances post-recession even more daunting than it already is

With states struggling to keep their heads above water, and with the federal government basically being owned by China, how are we supposed to pay for such a Rube Goldberg of an entitlement?

Oh, but the bill is all balanced out, right? How about considering the last entitlement the government set up?

Even “Obamacare’s” worst-case deficit projections are likely to prove overly-optimistic. In 1965, for example, government accountants predicted that the hospital insurance portion of Medicaid would cost $9 billion by 1990. It wound up costing $63 billion. Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s still twice as expensive as the government originally estimated.

Is health care or insurance even an inalienable right? Something so fundamentally a part of the human condition that the government must control it in order to provide it for everyone? This, even at the expense of a redistribution of wealth to the unfortunate? (If you don’t think a massive entitlement fund, requiring healthy/stupid/free people to pay into a system in order to manage risk, is NOT a redistribution of wealth, I don’t even want to talk to you).

Or could it be that through a better, more open health care system, where people are drawn to it’s benefits, could people have an unadulterated pursuit of happiness in the achievement of health insurance? Even our Northern neighbors have come to grips with the follies of an over-managed, one-size-fits-all health care system in this article, with my emphasis added.

The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care,” the Supreme Court ruled. “In sum, the prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services…

Dr. Chaoulli, who was born in France, has long called for Canada to adopt a two-tier, public-private health care system similar to those in France, Germany and Switzerland. Supporters of the current system, however, have argued that a two-tier system will draw doctors away from the public system, which already has a shortage of doctors, and only lengthen waiting lists.

I can’t really sum up better than some classic philosophy from Ludwig von Mises:

The modern revival of the idea of collectivism, the main cause of all the agonies and disasters of our day, has succeeded so thoroughly that it has brought into oblivion the essential ideas of liberal social philosophy. Today even many of those favoring democratic institutions ignore these ideas. The arguments they bring forward for the justification of freedom and democracy are tainted with collectivist errors; their doctrines are rather a distortion than an endorsement of true liberalism. In their eyes majorities are always right simply because they have the power to crush any opposition; majority rule is the dictatorial rule of the most numerous party, and the ruling majority is not bound to restrain itself in the exercise of its power and in the conduct of political affairs. As soon as a faction has succeeded in winning the support of the majority of citizens and thereby attained control of the government machine, it is free to deny to the minority all those democratic rights by means of which it itself has previously carried on its own struggle for supremacy.

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