The Truth About Medicare

With the nomination of Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has guaranteed that the much needed debate about the future of Medicare will take place in the upcoming campaign.  Leftists argue that Paul Ryan's voucher plan "guts" Medicare.  Ryan argues that he plans to save Medicare.

Let's start with the fact that the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) projects that the changes in the Act will "cut" (i. e. reduce the otherwise expected increase in Medicare costs) 500 Billion from Medicare.  There is no real debate that the planned changes to Medicare are supposed to save money and supposedly will be used to fund the expansion of care to younger persons.  Both the left and the right agree on that.  What they disagree about is how that will happen.  Supporters of the Affordable Care Act contend that they will achieve these savings through innovative payment plans, increased efficiency and elimination of fraud, waste and abuse of Medicare.  One of the benefits, costs of being a senior citizen is that when someone tells a lie, you may have heard it before.  Maybe they even believe it.  What they have done in the Affordable Care Act is to create a bunch of panels, and particularly one which will have the job of deciding what medical care Medicare will pay for.  We got a preview of the approach these panels will take when Obama talked about his grandmother's hip surgery.  I have no opinion about that hip replacement surgery either way because I don't know all the facts.  What I suspect is that such surgery will not be paid for under the Affordable Care Act.  When they say eliminate "waste, fraud and abuse" they mean eliminate the provision of that medical care that their panel deems unnecessary.

Paul Ryan's plan takes a different approach.  It is derided as a "voucher" plan.  And it is.  What they means to those of us covered by Medicare is that, rather than a panel of faceless bureaucrats making the decision as to what medical care our share of the government Medicare dollars will pay for, we will decide.  The limit on our discretion is that we get the same amount of money to pay for our medical care as is spent now.  We decide how that is spent.

Much of the hysteria you hear coming from what seems like the left in support of the current system is really coming from a bunch of government subsidized fat cats.  Big insurance companies make money off of Medicare by being the processor of Medicare claims.  And it is a big business.  They don't want to see anything change it.  Medical equipment manufacturers and people employed in  providing services that you and I might not choose to pay for if we had to make a choice are not happy about the institution of a system in which patients start asking how much something costs and whether it is really necessary to their health.  Just as an example:  yearly mammograms for women over 40/  Huge cost associated with that, but when you start looking at the numbers and the science it is not at all clear that any lives are saved by doing it every year and no accounting is made of potential damage by the extra exposure to x-rays.

Ryan's plan will allow the individual Medicare participant to decide between plans that offer that benefit versus other benefits.

People being guided by their human nature will approach a free buffet (Medicare) and eat all they can.  When you charge by the piece, they will scale back and eat only what they like or  want or need.  It's that simple.  The question is, as Ryan asks in the linked video,

Keeping the Faith

A conservative following politics these days can have a hard time keeping the faith.  Saint Paul wrote the words at the top of the page in what were also trying times.  Those of us who care deeply about our country and are political activists can get discouraged.  But Paul was giving us an important message.  God is in charge.  Even of politics.  There have been much worse times than these.  In the (looking at the whole panoply of history) comparatively recent time of pre WWII Germany, think how hard it must have been to keep the faith.  The world is nowhere near as badly off now as it was then.  So those of us faithful need to keep praying and keep trusting in God even when it seems impossible to trust.  Dear Lord, give me the ability to let go and let You be in charge.

My Ongoing Experiment with Bento 4

I am a long time Filemaker user.  My first copy of Filemaker was Filemaker.  Yeah.  They don't name an application Filemaker 1.  So I have used it since it was a flat file database.  But its getting expensive.  $299.00.  Compared to a lot of other products, still a bargain, but I am trying to semi-retire.  And you need a separate Filemaker License for each computer that uses it.  So, to keep using it in my practice is $600  because I haven't upgraded in several years.  So I decided Bento at version 4 might have the features I needed.  Some of it I love.  It automatically links to my addressbook and calendar.  And some of it seems really kludgy.  (My new word).  The main problem is printing.  There is very little user control over how it looks.  There are a bunch of "themes" but you can't alter them and you have very little control over font size.

The Real Unemployment Rate

The Obama administration is playing with the numbers.  How is it that the unemployment rate is falling when there are few new jobs?  Simple.  People are leaving the workforce.  They are applying for disability benefits in ever larger numbers.  Am I saying they are not really disabled? No.  and Yes.  Social Security disability is measured, in part, by physical inability to perform one's regular and customary occupation.  In addition the ability to adapt to a new and available occupation is taken into account.  What this means is that if, for example, your regular and customary occupation is warehouseman involving lifting heavy boxes and you have a back condition that precludes heavy lifting for the rest of your life, you meet one prong of the disability definition.  The second prong is are there jobs that you could, based on your education and abilities, reasonably be expected to do.  In a down economy there are few such jobs.  So disability benefits become a realistic option for creating a secure income.  The down economy even affects worker's compensation.  In an expanding economy an employer might be willing to train the warehouseman to become a dispatcher, a desk job not requiring heavy lifting.  That decision would save on the payment of worker's compensation benefits in the long run.  But in a stalled economy, where expansion looks pretty iffy, an employer might just bite the bullet and pay the worker's compensation, thinking, short run its the insurance company's problem.

The reality is that the labor force participation rate is the lowest it has been since 1981.  The labor force participation rate is a measure of the number of people between the ages of 16 and 64 who have a job or who are looking for one.  The labor force participation rate is shrinking every month.  The economy is stalled.  It is, looking at GDP, slightly growing but just barely.

Indulgences and Carbon Credits

In the middle ages, the Catholic Church developed the  practice of granting indulgences.  The idea of an indulgence was this, you had committed a really bad sin ( i. e. a mortal sin) like cheating on your wife or stealing money, not something trivial.  You had confessed your sin and received absolution.  But the priest thinks that now you need to do penance.  Penance can be something small, like saying the rosary 50 times or something big like walking on your knees to the nearest saint's grave.  Penance is imposed for the good of your soul not just punishment.  You are supposed to develop a change of heart because of the penance.  The thing was that penances could be pretty rough, so the church began to allow people who were old or disabled or otherwise unable to pay someone else to do the penance.  This system rapidly degenerated into the indulgence system where you just paid your way out of the penance.  As so often happens with  well meant penalties (think cigarette tax) the stream of money generated by the penalty (which penalty is meant to discourage the bad behavior)  becomes so attractive that the original purpose is lost.  The church began to depend on the money generated by the indulgences.  The whole system came to a halt when Martin Luther objected.  His trenchant observations about the pope, the pope's jurisdiction over purgatory, and the primacy of the Gospel to Christian belief spread like wildfire, igniting the reformation.

Carbon credits are really just like indulgences.  In the new religion of global warming, exhaling too much carbon dioxide is sinful.  But you can buy your way out of an anemic electric car and living in the dark by buying carbon credits.  Carbon credits are like indulgences.  They allow you to pretend to care about your new creed of low carbon emissions while simultaneously creating enormously more carbon dioxide than anyone else.  Even left leaning Snopes.com admits, for example, that Al and Tipper Gore use about 12 times as much electricity as the average American home.

Those of us who are not devotees of the new environmental religion see the whole thing as ridiculous.  Because it is.

GCB:ABC attacks the idea of Goodness

First, no, I have never seen the series and I don't intend to watch it ever.  The whole idea of the series is not just an attack on Christianity.  It is an attack on the idea of goodness.  The first proposed name of the series, Good Christian Bitches, says it all.  People who call themselves "good" are, in reality, nasty mean and evil.  The purpose of the name, and of the series, is to blur the differences between good and evil.  Whether the series creator has this goal specifically in mind is irrelevant, it is a social meme which he has picked up and is carrying out.  Sort of like when rappers call women "hoes"  they do not think gee, how can I belittle women.  They just do it.  

We have several generations in our society who live in almost complete ignorance of the true history of Christianity.  They have absorbed so many false memes from an anti-Christian popular culture that they believe them without even thinking about them.  They think, for example, that it was the church that brought on the so-called "dark ages".  In fact, the so-called "dark ages", i. e. the medieval period after the fall of the Roman Empire, were brought on by non-Christian hordes from the North who  invaded and physically destroyed Rome. The keepers of the intellectual flame during the medieval period were, largely, church related institutions, including monasteries and the Vatican.  Oxford University's motto reflects its religious origins.

The anti-Christian left is, in truth, against all religion, but it attacks Christianity first and foremost because Christianity is the world's largest religion.  Leftists claim to be moral relativists, but really, what that means, is no morality at all.  What is moral, to a relativist, is that which benefits him or her most.  So killing a baby is okay because it makes the mother feel better.  The baby might inconvenience the mother.  Old people might inconvenience younger people so kill them.  

An Open Letter toSandra Fluke, Nancy Pelosi and their Friends at NOW

Dear Ms. Fluke et. al.

Last week presented what some might call a teachable moment.  That is, there was a lot of debate about the cost of contraception.  Ms. Fluke, unfortunately, you and your friends assumed that women should have to pay for contraception.  That is just plain wrong Ms. Fluke.  I can understand how a young woman in high school might fall for that argument, but you are a law student at a highly regarded law school, Ms. Fluke, and I had hoped for better from people who have made it to that elevated status in society.

Here's the thing, Ms. Fluke.  Condoms not only prevent conception, they also prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.  Okay, they don't completely prevent such transmission, but they cut the risk very significantly.  And I hope you will pardon my old fashioned attitude Ms. Fluke.  Men should pay for condoms.  Now I can already hear the young women moaning and complaining that some of the men they sleep with don't like to wear condoms, much less pay for them.  As a woman who has had a few years to mature, Ms. Fluke, you had the opportunity to tell other women and particularly young women who have not yet learned this lesson, if he doesn't even want to pay for the condom, really, don't have sex with him.  He doesn't care about you.

Even if you are in to sex without commitment, surely you want to restrict your sexual partners to that group of men who actually have the decent regard for your well-being that a friend would have.  Don't you.  I mean, would you even voluntarily have lunch with someone who made his or her disdain for your welfare as clear as a cold, still lake in the morning?  To put it crudely, if he won't have sex with you if you require that he wears a condom, you're just a vessel for his penis to him.  Such a relationship cannot be classified as friends with benefits, because, really, he's not your friend.  I know what I am talking about.  I won't get specific, but I have a known more than one or two men.

Save yourself from a broken heart.  Don't even be involved with a guy who refuses to wear a condom when he has sex with you.  If he won't even wear a condom, where do you think he will be when you have gonorrhea or chlamydia or, God forbid, get pregnant out of wedlock?   Gone with the Wind.

So this is a teachable moment for young women.  Don't trust men who won't wear a condom, because they are not trustworthy.  They will treat you like kleenex and throw you away when they are done.  This leads to feelings of low self esteem, shame and failure to make the phone call the next day.  Trust me, if he didn't respect you enough to wear a condom, he sure as heck isn't going to respect you in the morning.  This doesn't mean anything at all about your value as an individual.  Men who have that attitude toward women are jerks and other things I am too polite to put on this web page.  The person whose personality is stunted in that situation is the guy who refuses to wear a condom so as to protect you.   Instead of the litmus test, it's the condom test.

Follow my advice and you will see that this simple test will screen out  at least some of the loathsome gigolos and losers who have been befouling your lives.  And, in the long term, you will feel better about yourself because you will be acting like a girl who is not so desperate for male companionship that she will allow some man to endanger her health or change her life completely.

Sandra Fluke is an anti-Catholic Bigot

Sandra Fluke KNEW that Georgetown University did not provide for contraceptives when she enrolled there.  For a little background, Georgetown University is a very expensive private lawschool.  The tuition alone at Georgetown Law is $47,000 per year.  It is also a top tier law school.  If you can get in to Georgetown, you have many options for attending law school.  Sandra Fluke says, in the cited article, that she chose Georgetown law knowing that it didn't provide for contraception services and intending to "challenge" that policy.  She surely knew that Georgetown is a Catholic university.  It is not a public school.  It is a private school.  In my book that makes her an anti-Catholic bigot.  And let me just say that I am not a Roman Catholic.  But her intent, all along, apparently, has been to impose her views on an instrument of the Catholic church.  And to make it perfectly clear, we are not talking about a lot of money for birth control.  Ms. Fluke and her fellow students can purchase generic birth control pills from Target pharmacy, inter alia, for $4.00 per month (yes four dollars.).  If you can afford the tuition at Georgetown, you can afford $4.00.  No one is telling Ms. Fluke that she cannot take birth control pills.  This very Catholic university is not imposing its views on her.  They are just saying they won't pay for it.  It is Ms. Fluke and the feminists who are trying to impose their views on Georgetown by using the Courts and the power of the Health and Human Services administration.

The First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits government from interfering with the free exercise of religion.  Isn't Georgetown's decision not to include contraception services part of its free exercise of religion?  Ms. Fluke's view is that free exercise does not include anything that has to do with how you act.  The right to  control of your actions, in Ms. Fluke's view is reserved to the state.

Somehow, I don't like that.

The War is On

Every day when I read the news I feel like I am under assault.  The liberal media and Obama really are out to get me.  Oh, I know they will laugh and call me paranoid.  Because, of course, they don't even know my name.  That is the horror of it.  I am nothing but dust to be ground under their feet.  I don't even count as a human being in their lexicon.  They have arranged my life and the lives of millions of others like me as if we were nothing but a bunch of boxes in a warehouse.  To be kept and used when useful and dumped when past our expiration date.  We are not humans to them.  We should have no more rights to make decisions about our lives than boxes in a warehouse do.

These are people who think that the strategy and tactics  of the states described by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley in those author's anti-utopian fantasies are a guide to how states should work.  Lie when telling the truth won't work.  Call something by its exact opposite name.  So "good death" becomes the new description for euthanasia which was a word invented to hide the murder of people who are a burden.  Love and loyalty mean nothing to these people except as emotions to be used to control people. So women's choice is NEVER to have the baby.  It must ALWAYS be exercised to kill the baby.  And, oh by the way, it isn't a baby.  That is far too human a word.  It is fetus.  Because, somehow, a fetus sounds less like a person who can breathe and see and feel and cry and, yes, smile.

So while they pursue their strategies my taxes go up and my income goes down and my pension stays the same.  I have pretty much outlived my usefulness so I should plan on another couple of years before the state administers its good death to me in a comforting cocktail which will save Obamacare a lot of money.

On Birth Control, Rush Limbaugh ETC.

The whole contraception issue is a phony issue created and pursued by the liberal press in an effort to re-elect Obama. But, for the record. Birth control pills can be purchased in their generic form from Target Pharmacy, among others, for $4.00 per month. These are facts the liberals don't want you to know. So Sandra Fluke is a less than honorable person. She is an Anti-Catholic bigot being helped by the liberal press to impose her views on the Catholic Church. And why? The statists believe in the First Commandment even more than Jews and Christians do. For the religiously illiterate, the first commandment is "thou shalt have no other Gods before me". The statists believe that no other institution than the State may be allowed to have any claim on your behavior. Not the church, not your family, not any religious belief. That state must be all and rule all in their view. They will permit you to express your religious belief in private behind closed doors while they freely mock you in public. How do they square their fawning over Islam with this view on religion? They erroneously believe in their elitist fantasies that the Muslims are such primitive people that when properly educated, Muslims will stop believing in Islam. These are the sort of people who learn nothing from history. Chechyn rebels anyone?

Low Carb Thoughts

So, I am a low carber because it works.  That is, I limit my consumption of carbohydrates in hopes of a) maintaining a lower weight and b) not developing diabetes as my sister, mother, father and cousin did.  So far, no diabetes and lost 25 pounds.

Now to the helpful hints:  If you live in the Southern California area you can  buy either Sara Lee Lite breads or Oroweat light bread.  Both have substantially reduced carb counts, taste pretty decent are available at lots of stores and don't cost a fortune. The net carbs for two slices of bread range from 8-10 Its the bread I eat.  Several slices a day.

It's important, if you want to stay on a low carb diet, to identify foods that feel like treats.  So, bread can definitely be one of them.

Another hint:  Avocados, peanut butter (the kind where the ingredient list says peanuts, salt and NO SUGAR) frozen strawberries without sugar added.  Real coconut milk that comes in a can and is very thick adds a nice creamy taste to shakes and not a lot of carbs.

Swiss Miss Diet cocoa with half and half, cream or coconut milk can be very tasty as well.

CAN YOU PLEASE LEARN TO SPELL

OKAY.  Trying not to shout.  Really.  Trying.  You rein in spending or anything you are trying to slow down or cut.  You don't reign it in.  Why?  Both are metaphors.  The first, rein, is what you use to control a horse.  Oh my. Oh my.  I am so old.  I have actually, in my lifetime, ridden a horse.  That's how I know.When you pull back on the reins, you are pulling the horse's mouth closer to its neck, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for him to run.  (Conversely, when you " give it it's head" -- referring again to a horse, you loosen your grip on the reins, which allows the horse to stretch out its head and allows it to run if it wants to.)

Second.  People who do what they are told, toe the line.  They don't tow the line.  Again, we are talking metaphor.  You know what actors do when the director yells "places"? There are little lines painted on the stage.  The actors put their toes on the line for their place.   They toe the line. I don't know where this "tow the line" comes from.  Pulling a rope behind you?  I don't know.  If you have any other important questions please let me know.  It's my inner English teacher.

Clinton Seeks to Pretend to Be What She is Not

The New York Times > New York Region > Clinton Seeking Shared Ground Over Abortions: "Clinton Seeking Shared Ground Over Abortions"

The Democrats remind me of some of the clients I have had in the past. I am a lawyer. These clients would ask me, with all sincerity, to simply explain in detail with all of my persuasive powers to the people on the other side of the case why they, my clients, were right, and why the people to whom they were opposed were wrong. My clients were often absolutely convinced that my eloquence could prevail and save everybody a lot of money.

Well, 99.9 percent of the time my clients who believe that mere persuasion can prevail are wrong.

Hillary Clinton is not seeking common ground on the abortion debate. She is seeking to persuade people with whom she has deep and fundamental disagreements that the disagreements aren't important and that she is really, after all, right.

It didn't work in the last election and, God Willing, it won't work in the next one either.

One of the reasons George Bush won and John Kerry lost is that George Bush DID stake out the middle ground. And there is, unbelievably enough, a middle ground. Without abandoning his oppostion to all abortions, Bush nevertheless promised not to try to accomplish his goals without a democratic vote of the people. Secondly he picked an issue on which there is a high level of agreement among the American people-- partial birth abortion.

A year ago on this date, I was privileged to be present when my first grandchild was born, to stare in awe and wonder at that complete and fully formed human being who could already grasp my finger.

At this time, 5:06 AM on January 26,2004, if the partial birth abortion advocates had there way, it would have been legal for some doctor, with proper authorizations, to kill him. All because he was not completely out of his mother's womb until 6:35 AM. The Democratic die hards, the ones who accuse us conservatives of being ignorant boobs who do not believe in science, refuse to acknowledge that there is a living human being in that womb. The people who have so much sympathy for the murdering fanatic Al Zaqari have no sympathy for an innocent child whose only crime is to be not wanted.

My grandson was and is very much wanted and loved. But what about the other babies. Do they have, very simply, a right to continue living if they don't die on their own?

Bush understood that a very high percentage of the American people are very certain that late term abortions are wrong. They may not be sure exactly where the line should be drawn, but they know it should be drawn somewhere before 6 months gestation.

The Democratic party which is in thrall to NARAL and Planned Parenthood doesn't get it. You can SAY anything you want. But we learned a long time ago not to look at what people say but at what they do.

So here it is Hillary. How are you going to vote the next time an abortion issue comes up on the senate floor?

The last time you had a chance to do the right thing you voted against it.

BlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest