Thinking bigly

Scott Adams is one of those guys who likes to think and win "bigly." In this Periscope podcast Scott points out that we elected a salesman President of the United States, but when it comes to health care, we have not given him anything to sell! So Scott volunteers his persuasion skills to help sell #People's Health. Wouldn't it be better if the plan came from the people, instead of from the lobbyists for the hospitals, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies?

Scott believes that Trump just pulled off a historic accomplishment, getting Russia and China to join with the United States in sanctioning North Korea.

Maybe it really is a Uni-party!

Ace of Spades is exasperated this morning.

Party of Fail: Senate Pulls Plug on Obamacare "Repeal"
—Ace

I'm having a hard time caring what party controls what any more. It's all really the same party.

House Republicans on Tuesday were seething with anger over the Senate GOP's late Monday decision to pull the plug on a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Lawmakers leaving the House GOP's weekly conference meeting said feelings of exasperation and anger have set in, now that the Senate has dropped plans to vote on an Obamacare replacement bill this month.

As usual, there are many good comments. For example Scogg Dog writes,

There are 51 sitting US Senators that voted for HR 3762 in 2016. The bill that was called repeal by Paul Ryan.

The bill used Budget Reconcilliation to void most of ObamaCare. The bill was short.

That they didn't put it back up for vote on Day One told me all I needed to know.

Read more here.

Remember, Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse has been explaining to us over and over how we really have a Uni-party of political salesmen in the House and Senate, and the legislation is written by lobbyists for big donors who fund the salesmen's political campaigns.

The problem with health care (explained in four minutes, with a solution!)

hat tip Bookworm

"Choosing one suboptimal alternative over another even worse alternative is not "believing" in the suboptimal alternative."

Ace of Spades writes,

For those who ask, "How can you believe in Trump?," I answer, I don't believe in anybody. I now look back on all my past faiths as embarrassments. But, as we're on the subject, How can you believe in the GOP?
Choosing one suboptimal alternative over another even worse alternative is not "believing" in the suboptimal alternative.

Ace links to an article by Christopher Jacobs in The Federalist describing backroom deals on health care legislation.

Fixing health care

Scott Adams believes Congress is incapable of giving us a good health care system. Go here to read his ideas for how we the people can do it.

"We're thrilled with your initial steps to stabilize the health care markets!"

hat tip Conservative Treehouse

Health Care

Fred Reed on medical care:

Military medical care is the obvious, available, and easily studied alternative to Obamacare. So far as I know, nobody thought of this. In the military you go to the hospital or clinic, show your ID card, get done whatever you need, and leave. Thank you, good day. No paperwork. No paperwork. No insurance forms, deductibles. receipts. No insurance companies trying to pay as little as possible, since that’s how they make money. The doctor doesn’t order a PET scan, three MRIs, and a DNA analysis of your grandmother’s dog to run up the bill.

...A Strategic Counsel survey found 91% of Canadians prefer their health care system instead of a U.S. style system.[20][21]”

Read more here.

Stages young people must go through to become an adult

Debra Saunders writes in The American Spectator that there seem to be several stages of legally becoming an adult. When you are 14 in progressive California, you can get an abortion without parental consent. When you are 16, you can get a drivers license. When you are 18, you are considered old enough to vote, enlist in the military, to sign a contract, to buy a gun, to get a tattoo and to get married. Saunders writes,

On Tuesday, the California Senate voted to raise the age when young people can buy cigarettes, from 18 to 21. The Hawaii Legislature has passed similar legislation. A companion California bill would mandate that e-cigarettes fall under the same restrictions as tobacco smokes.

Recreational marijuana? Colorado, Washington, Alaska and District of Columbia say ya gotta be 21.

Here is a map showing the age at which young people may begin drinking, courtesy of Wikipedia.

colors: black = illegal, brown = 25, reddish brown = 21, red = 20, purple = 19, blue = 18, green = 16, grey equals no regulations/no information

When is an American finally recognized as an adult? Saunders writes,

The Democrats’ 2010 Affordable Care Act mandates that health plans provide coverage for parents’ adult children up to age 26. It was a popular provision with parents whose college-graduate children could not get a job with health benefits. But then, to the nanny-state left — with its proposals to squeeze soda drinking and ban single-use plastic bags and smoking (other than medical marijuana) — we are all children, regardless of age.

Read more here.

Reality notes

Victor Davis Hanson is correct when he writes that

Too much of the wrong food, not existential hunger, is the epidemic of the poor.

He is also correct when he observes that,

the liberal view is a make-believe land of elites who are exempt from the wages of their ideology, as others deemed less sophisticated and liberal bear their consequences.

Read his latest piece here, in which he shares a very personal trip to the emergency room, and, well, this:

A farmer 10 miles away, who was a father of four children, was shot and killed this week after investigating intruders on his farm. (The gang-banger suspects are now in custody.) He interrupted a stolen car being stripped, and “they” killed him for being so rude as to drive on his own land. I note that fact because a few weeks ago the dogs barked at 3 a.m. For once I decided to ignore them. And the next morning I found a stripped auto in my vineyard. I had gone back to sleep on the theory that in America today walking out to investigate would have been a politically incorrect sin.

A doctor who cared

Do you hide your impairments by joking around? Caleb Gardner writes at Lapham's Quarterly about a doctor named George. George cared deeply about his patients, and had a wonderful ability to communicate with them.

Gardner writes,

Comedy thrives on contradiction, and the absurdity of life is particularly refined in the hospital. Doctors discuss breakfast as they open someone’s sternum with a bone saw, a delirious patient demands green Jell-O, and an old man dying of neurovascular disease smiles longingly at the woman drawing blood from his arm while his son watches hopefully for those very mannerisms that inflicted silent damage throughout his childhood. Laughter, it seems, is one of the few genuine reactions one can have to such a paradoxical world. But it can be deceiving.

As he spoke to us that day, I thought more about his blunt humor. “Humor is not resigned,” Sigmund Freud said, “it is rebellious.” To me, it seemed that George cared more strongly about other people than anyone else on the team. His humor, sharpened by rage, was a rebellion against an environment where tests and imaging take the place of physical contact, and where computer screens replace human interaction. It was a rebellion against a powerful industry that hides its pettiness and hypocrisy under a thin but seemingly impenetrable veneer of euphemism and empathy. And, to some degree I felt, it was a self-defeating struggle against his own inability to embrace a system that may well be taking patient care, however stumblingly, in the right direction.

The affect he was thus sparing himself was sadness. For it is often easier to be angry than sad, and beneath George’s satire I saw a wound that, even then, I felt might be opening in myself. But on this day he allowed himself some sorrow. “I should have seen it, Caleb,” he said to me in the hall outside of our patient’s empty room.

Thanks to Conor Friedersdorf for linking to Gardner's article.