Hillary Clinton and the Rule of Law in Honduras

I see on Fox News tonight that Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State, is concerned about ousted President of Honduras, Mel Zelaya, attempting to re-enter his former country. Why is she concerned?

Because she is desperately trying to restore the Rule of Law to Honduras and such confrontational actions on the part of Mr. Zelaya will be counter-productive.

Well. As we learned here, the ouster of Mr. Z was in fact an act pursuant to the Rule of Law, including the Constitution of Honduras. It was an act by the military pursuant to an order of the Supreme Court of Honduras lawfully issued and confirmed by the elected Congress of Honduras, including a sweeping majority of the members of Mr. Zelaya's own party.

You don't get much closer to the Rule of Law than that, especially among the thugs and miscreants in Latin America and Cuba that our Secretary of State is in solidarity with on this issue. Nor, come to think of it, among our own government, which thinks nothing of taking TARP money authorized for Bank Bail-outs and using it to buy government stakes in car companies, to name one among many gross violations of the Rule of Law in our own country.

So, if Ms. Clinton succeeds in forcing the re-instatement of Mel Zelaya as President, it will not be the restoration of the Rule of Law in Honduras, but instead a grotesque breach thereof.

For my money, if it comes down to a decision between Hillary Clinton, Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro versus the people of Honduras, then I will just have to stand with those wise Latinas and Latinos of tiny Honduras.

Headlines You Won't Ever See

Major Media headline and story here.

Disorderly Conduct Charges Dropped
Against Friend of President
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Presidential weight too much for Scales of Justice
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Professor
Gates of Harvard gets a boost from his close friend
in the White House.
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Others see this as more of the same, social and political elite
like Professor Gates of Harvard getting favored treatment,
while average Americans must toe the legal line. Says Carlos
Manzetti, Italian-American dockworker, "The day I mouth
off to a cop investigating a reported crime in progress is
the day I get my ass thrown in jail."
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White House official admits, "This is going to be hard to blame on Bush."

National Health Care STAT!

Previous Post(s) in this series here.

In other words, the insurance companies are trying to perform the function that would naturally occur between doctor and patient in a normal market: to set a proper price for medical services that balances the doctor's ability to supply the service with the demand for the service by patients. But the insurance company is not in the market for the services in question, it is in the market of providing money to pay for the services on behalf of others. So it has no first-hand knowledge of what any individual patient wants or needs, only wonkish statistical studies of its policy-holders' expenses, and its own profit or loss in the aggregate of all transactions.

So, I advocate a simple change to the system by requiring all doctors and hospitals to publish line item fee schedules for all services they perform, right down to that nurse practitioner who takes my blood pressure and temperature before any visit with the doctor. This will be another bit of paperwork that the medical establishment will have to produce at a time when it is inundated with paperwork from all sides, but the effects would be important.

With this information, I and others could begin the process of weaning ourselves from the insurance policies we are now forced to purchase and begin the process of self-insuring over normal and necessary yearly medical expenses that shouldn't require an insurance company at all. Right now, I know I am getting screwed; I am paying much more in premiums than I am incurring in actual medical expenses. The reason this is so, however, is that I am uncertain as to what my actual medical expenses might be. If I had full cost information, I could better fine-tune my out-of-pocket medical expenses, producing, I am sure, a large reduction in my medical expenses over a years time.

Ultimately, the result of the change I am proposing would be a system whereby health savings accounts would receive most of the money that is now devoted to insurance premiums, with a supplemental premium being paid to insurance companies for true catastrophic coverage. Those that like the current system whereby the insurance company bargains for health care services on their behalf would be able to continue in that system, preferring, in essence, the convenience of not having to perform the exacting pencil work on medical expenses that enervates the rest of us Scotsmen-like people.

Before I close, a quick word on Health Savings Accounts as set up under the Bush Administration. This was a great concept, reflecting almost exactly what I am proposing herein, but a joke in actual implementation. For one, as I state above, the medical marketplace lacks the information that I or anyone needs to decide whether to switch over from the current system. But more important, it limits the amount of health savings anyone can have to $3,000.00 per annum. Why does this make sense? I have one stress test in a hospital clinic, coupled with a hemorrhoidectomy in the same year, and my out-of-pocket expense will easily exceed $3,000.00. Therefore, I can only start on an HSA when I feel reasonably assured that no such twin devils will occur for at least the next two years.

Which is to say, HSAs would have to be changed to accommodate the better healthcare system I envision, as would a whole host of tax and regulatory perversities that mangle up our day-to-day health services today. The problem is that most proposals for healthcare reform see the solution as in some way fine-tuning the existing perversities, eliminating some, modifying others, tacking on additional mandates and requirements, in a process designed to graft some grand vision of healthcare over a rickety, worn out structure. One classic example: the Obama Administration believes that HSAs are a problem within its new national healthcare model and is proposing they be eliminated. Why this is so and what they think it will fix to eliminate an option for citizens to self-insure against normal medical expenses can only be described as an insanity induced by ideology.

What’s needed is not incremental or even radical changes to the existing systemic perversities, but to root out the problem at the source, which is the Cone of Silence surrounding the doctor and the insurance companies, leaving the patient on the outside with no real knowledge as to what his healthcare costs are and how much he is paying therefore.

The simple change I propose herein would be the fundamental first step in changing the system as a whole to something that makes sense. It leaves the doctor as the primary determinant of healthcare and allows the patient a greater degree of involvement in his own healthcare and its costs. And it promises to reduce costs as the choking inefficiencies are weeded out of the system over time.

National Health Care STAT!

Previous Post(s) in this series here.

So too with medical care. It's not as if I am saying my doctor is conspiring with the insurance company to keep his or her reimbursement rates secret. I don't think my doctor knows the cost of his services, nor do I think anybody in his billing department knows either. Because, you see, my doctor's medical clinic deals in aggregates of revenue versus expenses and predominantly they are negotiating with insurance companies who are doing the same. My local clinic has certain expenses, the largest being payroll for doctors, nurses, para-doctors and para-nurses, receptionists, appointments secretaries, billing clerks and insurance reimbursement professionals, and the notion of individually pricing particular services to attract a customer or class of customers is foreign to the profitability of the firm. More important is the overall reimbursements that it can receive from any given insurance company, and the overall drag on the resources of the clinic delivering the range of services necessary to get those reimbursements. And the same is true on the insurance companies side, just in reverse.

Well. Like the grocery clerk asked, So what? Why don't I simply go with the system, pay my co-pay and move on?

Because it is this one fact about the system that causes me to use my insurance policy in a quite perverse fashion. My health insurance policy in this type of system is not an insurance policy at all. An insurance policy hedges the risk of future unplanned events that might be substantial (e.g. my house may burn to the ground). But what I am really paying for with health insurance is a hedge against inchoate but foreseeable future health expenses. I will have x-number of doctor visits this year, purchase x-number of prescription drugs, get x-number of blood tests, undergo x-number of surgical procedures, and I select my insurance plan so that generally speaking, I will pay the monthly premium and have little or no other medical payments of significance in any given month. Since these are relatively normal medical events, the insurance premium I will have to pay will, on average, equal the costs of these procedures, with the profit added on that the insurance company needs to stay in business.

This is not an insurance plan, it is a medical savings plan, in which I deposit my premium each month in an account which is then used to defray my actual medical expenses as they come due. And the whole rigamarole of co-pays, partial co-pays, covered and non-covered expenses, deductibles, generic v. brand name drugs, and the rest are simply what happens over time as an insurance company learns what kinds of expenses its existing customers desire, and attempts to provide incentives to steer people towards less costly alternatives.

In other words, the insurance companies are trying to perform the function that would naturally occur between doctor and patient in a normal market: to set a proper price for medical services that balances the doctor's ability to supply the service with the demand for the service by patients.

To Be Continued......

Witness Unprotection Program: Diversity, FBI Style

Continue .....

National Health Care STAT!

Since the National Health Care debate is upon us, I want to suggest that there is only one simple change needed to fix the system. This simple change will not cost anything, will not require a giant Federal bureaucracy to enforce it or taxes to pay for it, and will not in itself alter anything else about our existing system (for those 70% of you that are satisfied with your health care).

Are you ready? All the healthcare system needs is a law mandating that doctors and hospitals publish a schedule of costs for each and every service they offer. Such information is just not available currently and its lack is a major cause of the twisted shape of our healthcare system.

Oh, there are some procedures, especially major ones like hip replacements and the like, for which it is possible to get some sort of estimate. However, if I go in to a doctor for general purposes, a check up, a blood test, a specialist referral, a prescription, whatever, I rarely if ever ask, much less get an answer, as to what the cost of the services will be. That is because what I am most concerned about is the co-pay or deductible, or some other charge as stipulated in paragraph XX.4(c)d52.32xx of Endorsement 5 of my policy, issued 07-23-2005, effective 10-01-2006, which doesn't alter or amend paragraph (7) of Endorsement 3, issued 03-15-2003, effective 09-01 2003. As difficult as it is to piece together what my portion of the charges will be from the obscure puzzle that is my insurance, I can usually ball-park what the policy will require me to pay, and when I can't, most insurance companies have a helpful Hot Line to someone in India who can fill in the gaps. But at no point will I be able to consistently get from any health care provider what my medical care costs would be if I had no insurance.

Think about it. If we all had Grocery Insurance, here is what our considerations would be as we walked the aisles. Under the policy, canned vegetables are 100% covered, so long as I buy generic. Brand-name veggies are subject to a $ .15 co-pay, and tastier, locally produced corn will carry a $ .25 co-pay per item. Meats and fish are generally covered by a $ .75/lb. co-pay, but custom butchered beef, free range chicken or Alaskan Salmon are only covered 80% up to $500.00 and 100% thereafter, subject to the satisfaction of a $250.00 deductible in any given calendar year. Milk and eggs carry a co-pay, as does orange juice but only if its made from concentrate. White bread is 100% covered; any other bread is not. Chips, dips, nuts, and other "luxury non-necessary grocery items" are not covered, unless you elect to go with the Premium Personal Choice Option B policy, in which case they will apply towards your deductible up to $500.00 in any calendar year, and be covered 100% thereafter with a $ 2.65/lb. co-pay.

Well, that's enough of that. I think you see the point. I might become very well versed in what my grocery charges will be on any given trip, but I will not know what the various food items actually would cost in the absence of insurance. That particular factoid will only be known within the inner secret sanctums of the Insurance Company and the Giant Food Chain. And if I tried to find out what the actual cost of the food was, I would be met with blank stares and a "What do you need to know that for? I told you your co-pay will be $ .15."

Can you imagine the distortions that would develop in the food industry from such a twisted system as this? A system where consumers were purchasing food based on their needs as filtered through a bureacratic maze of co-pays, deductibles, premiums, exclusions and endorsements?

To Be Continued.....

Affirmative Racism

Easy: If I may put my two cents in on the topic of your excellent posts.

The political program known as Affirmative Action is actually two very different things, and this fact confuses the public debate in many ways. Originally, Affirmative Action proper was first articulated decisively by a previously obscure Federal District Court Judge in the case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971). In a decision I opposed at the time, this personally mild, gentlemanly man of the South affirmed a sweeping Constitutional right of the Federal Courts to mandate racial discrimination in order to remedy past racial discrimination. Judge James B. McMillan thereby entered into legal history, as his opinion was affirmed by the Supreme Court and taken up as the law of the land. But more importantly, he touched off a political movement which styled itself "Affirmative Action."

As I said, I disagreed with Judge McMillan's ruling at the time on many different grounds, but I always granted him the fact that he articulated the one ground upon which explicit governmental racial discrimination might very well be Constitutional: where it is clear that past racial discrimination, violative of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, could only be remedied by favoring the injured parties. A simple example: If a black man is thrown out of his home by a Sheriff because of a government policy excluding blacks from owning homes in certain neighborhoods, then clearly the Federal Courts have the perfect right to reverse this situation and give the black man back his property. No one in their right mind would call such affirmative action by the Federal Courts anything but Constitutional, even though in some daft sense it could be described as reverse racism.

Where it gets a bit more tenuous is where the argument moves away from actual individuals and seeks to apply itself to an entire class of people, i.e. that blacks in general have been deprived of Constitutionally protected rights and the Federal Courts have the right to step in and grant a remedy to put them in the position they would have been in if the initial discrimination had never occurred. This is properly speaking what Judge McMillan ruled.

Now, I say "tenuous," but it is important to note that Judge McMillan's was a solid Constitutional argument, even if you disagree with it. It is a fact that blacks suffered as a race from deprivations of their life, liberty and property in untold and manifold ways since the conclusion of the Civil War, and that the remnants of this unconstitutional behavior in the South did not disappear with Brown v. Board of Education, nor with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There are plenty of good faith arguments that Judge McMillan was wrong in his ruling, not least those rooted in the consequence of his decision, which was the degeneration of the Mecklenburg County school system for both blacks and whites (that continues to this day). But it is undeniable that his version of Affirmative Action was rooted not only in the Constitution, but also in the wider and more important ethics and morality of the American culture. Blacks as a race had been discriminated against for many generations; some remedy based on the fact of their race was necessary to make them whole.

That's affirmative action as envisioned by Judge McMillan, the version of Affirmative Action in American culture that I submit is the most persuasive to those people who don't devote their lives to following either legal or political hair-splitting. But as in most things over the past century or so, the political Left co-opted the concept and bent it to their own particular agenda. For willful partisans such as these, Affirmative Action has become Affirmative Racism, with a new politically privileged class entitled to special benefits.

The arguments in favor of Affirmative Racism mouth the formula of Affirmative Action, but are devoid of interest in the question whether any actual discrimination has occurred. They just take it as given, and that's that.

Continue .....
In the Ricci case, it was clear that the local government was favoring the local blacks in rejecting the results of the firefighters promotion test, but there was no corresponding evidence anywhere that any of the blacks involved had ever suffered actual discrimination, whether at the hands of the City, the State, the Federal Government, the local City Council, the Police, the educational system, the Governor, the PTA, the Elks Lodge, the Realtors Association, the Master Gardeners, the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, the YWCA, or .... anybody. Compare this situation to Charlotte-Mecklenburg at the time of Judge McMillan's ruling, when 100 years of the Jim Crow South was coming to an abrupt end.

To sum up, Affirmative Action that is based on the reality of actual discrimination that has taken the life, liberty or property of a whole class of people is solidly grounded in Constitutional law, ethics and morality, and the only argument between people of good will concerns the often problematic details of implementation. Affirmative Action that is based on some version of statistical representation of a particular race simply because it is a politically favored minority without regard to any real evidence of actual discrimination is in fact Affirmative Racism, just as much as Jim Crow was in the Old South.

Affirmative Racism is a pox on our society, and a growing threat to our way of life. To this day, the Affirmative Racists in our society practice their devilish trade in the halls of government and in many of the most prestigious educational institutions, oftentimes in violation of actual court orders!

So, Easy, I agree with you that the Sotomayor hearings are a perfect time to make the point "again and again, that this kind of racist thinking has no place on the Supreme Court or in any other branch of government entrusted with the responsibility of upholding the Constitution." The fact that Ms. Sotomayor will be confirmed anyway is irrelevant. This type of thinking will not be stopped unless it is first dragged out of the sewers and exposed. These Senate Hearings are an ideal time and place to cast the harsh glare of the public eye on this grotesque philosophy.

Deregulatory Stimulus

Now this article is encouraging. It's by Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is responding to Newt Gingrich's latest call for a real stimulus plan. Mr. Crews says:

"We do need tax reforms like we see in the [Gingrich] outline, but also need to reduce the scope of government that leads to the calls for taxes in the first place."

He then goes on to list 8 proposals, amounting to what he calls a "deregulatory stimulus" for the economy:

"–A freeze on government regulation;
–A “Regulatory Reduction Commission” to weed out decades of bad rules;
–A radical abandoment of so-called “antitrust” law, a step essential to getting government off the backs of our economy’s greatest wealth-creating sectors
–Limiting the scope of meddlesome, turf-expanding agencies like the Federal Communications Commission
–A more ambitious “R3″ program at the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy to give entrepreneurs an avenue to protest onerous rules pouring out of more than 60 agencies;
–The beginnings of “regulatory budgeting”;
–Ends to unfunded mandates on lower-level governments;
–Requiring congressional approval of any major or controversial new agency rule, henceforth."

I don't know exactly what all these items mean, but I like the sound of his program.

See my previous posts on this topic here.

Derivative Regs: Failure is the Only Option

As of last week, our Regulators were continuing their interest in Derivatives, which according to them is that-which-caused-the-greatest-Recession-since-the-Great-Depression.

Here is a nice simple history of concern for greater regulation of Derivatives by our Best and Brightest:

"Administration officials want to establish a central clearinghouse for OTC derivatives, bulk up their regulatory oversight and require reporting for all derivative trades. They also want to determine which products can be considered standardized, and thus traded through the clearinghouse. Geithner and regulators from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission outlined their ideas for OTC derivatives in May. A month later, the administration detailed these plans more fully when it rolled out its proposal for overall financial regulatory reform ... Nonetheless, lawmakers will seek details on the many vague components of the plan on Friday."

Not clear yet? Let me unpack it for you. The "greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression" was noticed by the Best and Brightest last Fall almost a year after it started. Playing catch-up, the Best and Brightest then began working furiously on the problem and finally settled on Derivatives as the culprit. After months and months of work, however, they were only able to float an "outline" of the problem. Thereafter, in June, they finally produced what they called a "detailed plan," which turned out a mere month later to be only the "vague components of the plan."

Here is the real problem: our Regulatory Guardians don't have any idea what Derivatives are, or were, or might be in the future, and so they really don't know exactly what kind of regulation is appropriate. In such a situation as this, the correct approach would be to regulate what you understand and leave the rest for the market. A simple bench-mark might be: identify those financial companies that are Too Big to Fail and prohibit them from indulging in such things. Then let anyone else who wants to play with Derivatives or Hedge Funds or any number of other financial buzz words that most of us normal citizens do not understand play their games with their own capital, and win or lose as the case may be. If a Big financial firm wants to play with such exotic financial products, then they can simply quit taking deposits of normal citizens, quit advertising themselves as Banks insured by the FDIC (aka you, the taxpayer), and simply opt out of the regulatory world, to sink or swim as the case may be.

This is, of course, almost exactly how our former regulatory system functioned before the Big Collapse. Investment Banks (do you remember them?) were financial players that never opted into the banking system of the United States and were therefore free to play any financial game dreamed up by the Best and Brightest wonks they could hire. Along about 2007, however, the merciless market, which had been so good to them for so long, turned on them with the ferocity of an ex-wife and they saw their precious capital disappear almost overnight. Following the logic of the market, which says that there will be winners AND losers, our government Best and Brightest let Lehman Bros. fail. But then they lost their nerve in an election season, and from then on it was Bail-Out City for any and every financial firm that had the foresight to hedge their portfolio with massive contributions to powerful Washington politicians (e.g. Senator Schumer, in this story from last December).

Government by the Best and Brightest of Government is an idiocy that has been inflicted on this Republic periodically since the Great Depression. It never works and in fact always leads to greater harm. Hopefully the public will wake up sooner than they usually do and thunderously rebuke these arrogant people at the next most convenient election.

Congress Anachronistes: CIA Assassination Plots

A big CIA flap is abrewing again, and it has all the earmarks of a classic Democrat talking point. It involves a secret CIA program, assassination of foreign leaders, willful failure to disclose to Congress which might arise to criminal violations of the law. And to top it off, there are indication that it was all orchestrated, planned, produced, created and/or directed by none other than Darth Vader himself, Dick Cheney.

The italics portions are the sum and substance of a typical Democrat talking point on these matters. The rest is mere fill-in, taken from whatever handy square "facts" the Left can wedge into the round holes of a pre-packaged narrative. Please note also that this particular narrative dates from 1975 when a Democratic Congress banned assassination by the CIA, which means that by this point its getting rather worn around the edges from all the square pegs jammed in over the years by the Democrats.

Here are just a few of the Democratic Party leaders running with this talking point football:

"Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, hinted that the Bush administration may have broken the law by not telling Congress ... Withholding such information from Congress, she said, 'is a big problem, because the law is very clear' ... Ms. Feinstein said Mr. Panetta told the lawmakers that Mr. Cheney had ordered that the information be withheld from Congress ... The Senate's second-ranking official, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, echoed those concerns and called for an investigation ..."

So, what are the real facts about this matter? There is actually only one fact that explains all of this. After 9/11 the U.S. was at war with a radical muslim group known as Al Qaeda. Pursuant thereto Congress authorized and the President issued orders to everyone under his command to seek out and kill every Al Qaeda soldier and leader they could find. These orders were directed to all military personnel, of course, but also, we now learn, the CIA. Are you shocked at this revelation? Or would you be more shocked if the President had told the CIA to lay off killing Al Qaeda operatives?

The Democratic Party leaders apparently are just now finding out about this war against Al Qaeda, and so they are shocked that they had no briefing from the CIA about its role. That, I guess, is the price they pay for living in talking points rather than the real world, especially when those talking points are some 30 years old. The rest of us, who actually keep up with the news on at least a yearly basis, eschew such anachronistic concerns about CIA assassination programs and wonder why after 8 years the CIA's role in the war against Al Qaeda was still only in the planning stages, never operational.

The real bottom line is that this incident makes it clear once again that the Democrats are willing to use whatever fodder they can dredge up to make political points, no matter how absurd, how outrageous, or how harmful to our national security. They are bratty, spoiled children pretending to be leaders of the most powerful country in the world, and an embarrassment to themselves and us.

And don't think the supposed Bush-Haters in foreign capitals don't notice. Their hatred was always of America, not Bush, and finding our great country being led by such light-weights as Reid, Pelosi, Feinstein, Durbin and Leahy, believe me they are licking their chops.

There will be consequences, consequences that will take a long time and hard work to fix, once real adults get back in charge.