More Health Care Nonsense

As usual, Charles Krauthammer finds the truth instead of listening to the rhetoric. This time it's about the myth of preventive medicine saving money. More Health Care Nonsense (via Real Clear Politics) goes through the CBO's dispellation of the idea that preventive medicine saves money, as the President claimed in New Hampshire.

The conventional wisdom; which CK points out is wrong via math; is that if we provide the preventive care for everyone to keep them from having some disease, we save the money we'd have spent treating that disease, therefore saving money. Except, not everyone will get the disease in the first place.

So, if we take 100 people, and spend $500 on each for preventive care, it costs $50k. So long as five people are prevented from getting the disease, where the care costs $10k, then we've done okay. But if only 3 people are prevented, then we've spent $50,000 to save $30,000.

Here's part of what Charles published on this:

"That's a hypothetical case. What's the real-life actuality in the United States today? A study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, "if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success," the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country's total medical bill by 162 percent. Elmendorf additionally cites a definitive assessment in the New England Journal of Medicine that reviewed hundreds of studies on preventive care and found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs."

Elmendorf is the director of the Congression Budget Office. A guy who's getting little love in Obamaland because he won't tow the line and say that the Democrat's health care reforms are going to save us money or make care better.

"In an Aug. 7 letter to Rep. Nathan Deal, CBO Director Doug
Elmendorf writes:
"Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness."

Thanks Charles, for looking at the math, and past the rhetoric. We need more people involved in the debate over 15% of our economy who actually look at the costs of what's going on, instead of spewing skewed numbers.

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Krauthammer's Idea

Charles Krauthammer has a couple of brilliant ideas for the start of health care reform. Neither have a snowballs chance in hell, which is too bad because they make sense.

The first is extreme tort reform, get rid of jury trials for malpractice suits and have them settled by a medical panel of experts. Why do this? Because doctors admit we waste $200 billion a year on "defensive medicine"; tests designed not to necessarily cure you, or find your ailment, but keep them out of court.

You can see this has no chance with Democrats in power. Trial lawyers are some of their biggest donors, and telling them that the jury jackpot system could go away isn't going to keep that cash flowing into election warchests.

The second is eliminating the tax benefit to employers for your insurance, and instead having the money go to YOU to purchase coverage yourself. That would immediately make your coverage portable, which is supposedly one of the things ObamaCare is supposed to bring us.

Unfortunately, as Charles points out, this won't happen either. Obama spent so much time berating John McCain for the idea of taxing that benefit that he can't do it. Just ask Max Baucus.

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Reflecting On The Speech

After a few days of reflection there is more reaction to the Barack Obama race speech, and it's not all as good as the earlier, glowing reviews.

Dan Schnur, John McCain's 2000 communications director, writing in his NY Times Blog see's Obama's standing going up in peoples eyes because of the speech, but that they'll be less likely to vote for him.

His arguement is somewhat compelling. He say's the speech definitely shows Obama's skills as an orator, and leader on a tough subject, but also reminded people of how much is still unknown about him. The unknown is what he thinks makes Obama harder to elect than say, Hillary Clinton, who's been through this wringer before, and has less unknowns.

He also correctly (I believe) points out that Obama probably played the Jeremiah Wright problem the only way he could. While many of us would have preferred that he toss Wright under the bus, not his Grandmother, that would have angered a much larger group of his supporters. His denouncement of Wrights words, but not the person, mollified the middle of the road folks, and kept the African-American constituency happy. Yes, conservatives were left unsatisfied, but then he wasn't going to satisfy conservatives anyway.

Charles Krauthammer was less impressed by Obama, giving his column the title "A Brilliant Fraud". Charles want's to know why Obama didn't leave a church that he obviously knew was run by a man with some strange beliefs and horrible rhetoric.

He takes Obama to task for tossing Grandma under the bus, noting that the example of her saying she was afraid when she passed black men on the street was something that Rev. Jesse Jackson has admitted to in the past. And while she may have said some things in private that bothered him, she wasn't standing on a stage, trying to incite a thousand or so when she said them, as Wright was.

His criticism of Obama for staying in the church is well placed (IMHO), if as he said on Tuesday, Wright is a man rooted in the past, and spewing vitrol from an era gone by, why did he expose his daughters to it?

It's a good question, if you are a man of "hope and change", they why not find a better spiritual venue for raising your children than a place that claims nothing has changed and there is no hope? I'm not an expert on African American churches, but my guess is there is one out there that more closely aligns to the Senator's hope and change mantra than Trinity UCC. In fact, I pray that there is one, because if there isn't, the black community is in much more dire straits than anyone can imagine.

If you need a totally useless comparison, though one that makes some sense in the context of Obama's assertation that Reverend Wright lives in the past, read E.J. Dionne's column. He spends his time comparing Wrights current demeanor with that of Rev. Martin Luther King. Great comparison, if King were speaking today, or Wright were preaching in 1968. However, they are 40 years, and eons separated.

What I gleaned from Dionne's column is something Krauthammer pointed out in his; because of "white guilt" the liberal elite would love and defend Obama's speech, and Rev. Wright. Dionne proves it his column, becoming the apologist white guy for the Reverend.

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Why Do I Know Barack Obama?

As I read Charles Krauthammer's column today "The Great Non Sequitur", about how Barack Obama has played the voters, and is now getting called on it, I was reaching to think of where I'd seen this character before.

Then it came to me. I saw him at the theater 20 years ago. He was on screen with Holly Hunter, I had to do a IMDb search to find the movie I was thinking of, but did.

Barack Obama reminds me of Tom Grunick, the character played by William Hurt in the 1987 movie Broadcast News. He seems with it, all knowing, and caring beyond belief. Then, when you get behind the scenes as Holly Hunter did, you find out that he can cry on queue and knows what makes good TV news. He doesn't really care, he doesn't trancend anything, he just knows how to get ratings.

Unfortunately for the country as a whole, this seems to play well. But then, since we insist on our news being condensed to 30 second sound bite aired over and over each 24 hour news cycle, we shouldn't be suprised that Grunick might be our next President, it's what many of us want.

In his column today Krauthammer sums up the Obama pheonomenon quite well with this line:

It goes like this. Because Obama transcends race, it is therefore assumed that he will transcend everything else -- divisions of region, class, party, generation and ideology.

He then goes on to bash that myth, as it should be bashed, not with name calling, but facts about Obama and his record in the US Senate.

The Obama campaign has sent journalists eight pages of examples of his reaching across the aisle in the Senate. I am not the only one to note, however, that these are small-bore items of almost no controversy -- more help for war veterans, reducing loose nukes in the former Soviet Union, fighting avian flu and the like. Bipartisan support for apple pie is hardly a profile in courage.

(emphasis mine)

I pointed this out last Sunday in "Building Bridges out of Nothing", commenting on a David Ignatius' column. Hopefully more people will point it out over the next seven weeks until the Pennsylvania primary.

Krauthammer also brings up the fact that while the strategies to bring Obama to earth failed on many levels, the one that seems to be working is a simple question,"do you know this guy?" It's a legitimate question, and as the Rezko trial gains steam, senate voting records get scrutinized, and his own background looked at more closely, it's likely many folks won't know the guy they voted for.

If it becomes more and more clear to those who've already voted that Obama isn't (as James T. Harris calls him) "The Black Jesus", then what happens? How will the Democratic electorate behave if they find out the messiah was a snake oil salesman? What does that do to the party as a whole?

It's a question that those who haven't yet voted should be looking into closely. Is he really the great uniter or; as his Senate voting record, and Chicago political background suggest; is he a guy who's really only interested in winning for his side and his gain? Are we electing a true agent of change, or are we electing Tom Grunick, with fake tears and all?

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