No words needed

Obama's healthcare address

I am watching the President's address on healthcare reform. As usual, the President gives a good speech, and the first half hour or so contains little to complain about. Anecdotes about insurance companies who (and they do) cut people's coverage off when they get diagnosed with cancer, deny people because of pre-existing conditions etc.. These stories speak for themselves, and the President does have a point when he says that there is no place for behavior like this in the USA. When you think of the kind of money that gets thrown around in this country, the size of executive bonuses, it's hard to dispute this point. It's hard to rationalize a woman with breast cancer being cut off insurance and having to haggle to get it back while the cancer spreads. It's hard to rationalize an insurance companies motive to "cherry-pick" it's customers, to actuarialize people like figures on a table, to better their bottom line, to show wall street that they were more profitable than the previous quarter. It's hard to rationalize the kids that die because they did not have access to medical care for dental problems (this also happens).

At any rate, I'm a good bit through the speech and my only major CONCERNS about this are as follows:

1. Will this whet the appetite for a socialistic minded administration to decide to make other things 'mandatory?' Healthcare coverage becoming mandatory like car insurance? Well if you don't want car insurance then don't buy a car, but if you don't want health insurance...then what? What's next? Will the administration come out and say that guns are bad and kill people and we all have to pay so let's suspend your constitutional right to bear arms? In other words, don't tread on our freedoms!

2. On a related note, what gives the government the right to dictate to insurance companies what they will do? They must cover people with pre-existing conditions, no annual or lifetime caps, must cover preventative care (makes sense though) etc.. I know the insurance industry is highly regulated anyway, and there is obviously a place for government to regulate, as I don't believe unbridled capitalism usually generates proper ethics (look at how globalization has caused a race for the bottom in wages and living standards, jobs go to China where working conditions for the employees are wretched)...but what effect will this have on business? How do we know that this won't reduce insurance companies, and limit the options? How do we know if a non-profit insurance company can run well? If it can, why don't we have any number of them?

One thing is for sure: We tend to get the best results when people act in their own best interest. As shocking as this seems, think about how likely you are to get what is true, what is fair, from a haystack of bureaucrats, some of them peeking their heads out of someones pocket? If you doubt this, look at how our government let the financial industry rape the taxpayer, and how the CEOs of so many companies collect million dollar payouts while their companies lose money (not to mention ruin this country, cause unemployment, general misery, suicides, abuse etc).

The Horatio Alger Myth

The Horatio Alger Myth (also mentions references in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger_myth
"In Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Horatio Alger is mentioned as what could be interpreted as a guide for the protagonist: "How would Horatio Alger handle this situation?" (70). The novel itself is focused around a week-long attempt to discover the American Dream through drugs, degeneracy, and honest curiosity. Thompson references Alger in other scenes, but is most profoundly referenced in the very last sentence of the novel: "I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger ... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."

Hopefully Thompson visualizes himself as a reincarnation of Horatio Alger due to the fact that in the novel he is in a drug induced manic frenzy. I prefer Miller's comment, below, from his book Moloch. The quoted phrase is in reference to a request by one of his bosses at Western Union requesting he write a Horatio Alger novel about the lowly Western Union Messengers Miller hired and fired at his job there.

Every day now the Horatio Alger myth grows more ironic. Or at least the way the myth is taken - in terms of the American Dream.



Reference from Henry Miller:
http://cosmotc.blogspot.com/search?q=horatio+alger
I will give you Horatio Alger, as he looks the day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared away”


Horatio Alger Wikipedia Entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger,_Jr.

What's up

I'm surprised I remembered how to log in here. See you in San Diego, suckers!

The Art of Seduction and the Welfare State

Strange bedfellows?

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_051409/content/01125109.guest.html

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_051809/content/01125106.guest.html

~The "Low Art of Political Seduction," and Obama as a master of it.

Rush does a good job on these. I had no idea, never having paid any mind to him. My own commentary to follow soon...