From Daily Mash, made me laugh.

" A Conservative spokesman said: "We're not really sure what Daniel Hannan's problem is with the NHS. Perhaps they were unable to save his hair." "

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/americans-without-health-insurance-attack-plan-to-give-them-health-insurance-200908141981

Some good has come from the Eurovision Song Contest in the former Soviet Union. Ukraine won in 2004, which meant they hosted it in 2005. In order to make it easier for people to attend, they dropped the visa requirement for western Europeans to visit the country. No catastrophe occurred because of this, visa requirements were not brought back, and the policy was extended to include people from the US, Canada, and Japan.

Unfortunately, when you actually get to the Ukrainian border their officials are still overly determined to process you very slowly and/or send you to the back of the queue if you haven't filled out the correct form in the correct way, but I suppose you can't have everything.

So glad I quit supporting the Conservatives when Cameron joined (I used to help out a PPC with their website for free).

To call Hannan's views "eccentric" is a disgrace and shows Cameron yet again as shallow and cowardly. I'm sure he knows full well that Hannan is keen on the Singapore system, but rather than engaging with Hannan's ideas, or trying to shift the debate forward on health simply wants to say "no, no, you don't need to be frightened, we'll take care of the NHS".

Anyone who thinks Cameron is going to do anything about anything is sadly deluding themselves. Voting Conservative is a wasted vote.

Before 1997 all the deaths and suffering connected with the NHS were explained away as due to the "Conservative government" (that the Conservative party administration had vastly INCREASED NHS funding since 1979 was covered up by the broadcasting media - who endlessly talked of "cuts" instead).

Well we have had a Labour party government for 12 years - and so blaming the Conservatives for the thousands of people the NHS sends to an early grave every year will not work.

So now the plan (of the leadership of all parties) seems to be to pretend that these deaths do not occur and to blame opposition on people being upset about baldness.

Very "funny" indeed.

As for the Eurovision Song Contest:

The reply should have been a simple one:

"I thought it was a the best performance - and so voted for it. I am not interested in the nationality or ethnic origin of the singer".

The Daily Mash is often a good read, but that article is rather disappointing really, supporting the general idea as it does that anyone resisting the loving embrace of the Planned State is some kind of idiot, or evil. I thus find the chuckle quotient of it rather low.

I know this may make me seem rather lacking in a sense of humour, but it's tacit support for the enemy like this in the general culture that is our biggest enemy. It's basically reinforcing the idea that only stupid people aren't lefties.

And - in the U.S. the POTUS is openly saying that opponents of his policies should "stop talking!"

Do these "attitudes," nationalism, arrogance and constraints not sound more than reminiscent of what presaged events some 70 years or so ago?

The healthcare bill, analysed all the way in tweets.

Besides that... something crossed my mind today. There seems to be this generally accepted idea that the US system wastes a lot of money with unnecessary tests and treatments, blamed (choose your theory) on the litigation culture, or evil corporate profiteering etc.

But how is the judgement made when analysing such a system which tests and treatments were "unnecessary"? By what benchmark? That is, one doctor may consider a test unnecessary, while another may consider it being thorough. Is at least some of the "unnecessary" tests and treatments simply a case of greater thoroughness compared to the slapdash standard of the NHS?

(To give a personal anecdote, my mother, who had suffered rectal cancer in the 90s, when suffering more bowel problems, had to seriously pressurise her GP into arranging her overdue 10 year colonoscopy, while he insisted she just had "old person's tummy". When the colonoscopy was done, another tumour was found, which ultimately killed her. In the USA, would "unnecessary" testing have been done earlier?)

I must admit to feeling quite incandescent with rage at the leftie stooges dancing round the maypole about the glorious NHS right now, btw.

Well said, Tim. I'd already pretty much decided it, but today is the day the Tories finally lost my vote. Twenty years ago I came within a whisker of joining the party.

Essentially the Conservatives are being led by a man who has adopted the whole gamut of Blairite policies but who will probably be roughly half as effective as a leader. Nice.

I'm sorry to say it but the way this has been dealt with in the media has made me very glad I'm not a subject of Her Majesty the Queen.

I can't help feel Britain's a bit of a lost cause for Liberty, although I suppose despondency gets us nowhere.

John: Sadly, that also describes Labour.

As for the original article, calling your opponent unpatriotic is about as old as politics. I suppose hauling them in to the authorities is too, but I'm willing to be a bit more lenient towards stupid rhetoric than towards police intimidation.

Also, what is it with the Eurovision contest anyways? It has got to be the stupidest organized competition this side of the Rock, Paper, Scissors Championships.

The question has been raised as to "Who wrote this Bill?" (HR3200 in the U.S.)

The answer is simple. It has been compiled by a coterie of persons whose ultimate goals are places in the bureaucracies to be established for implementation of whatever is finally excreted from Congress.

Who better to claim expertise and "understanding" of "legislative intent" than those who participated in the drafting of vague and chaotic wordings?

See, BUREAUCRACY, Gordon Tullock, 1965
(Vol 6 Collected Works, Liberty Fund, 2005). If memory serves, 1965 brought Medicare.

We are governed by the unelected, each of whom has their own objectives.

To call Hannan's views "eccentric" is a disgrace and shows Cameron yet again as shallow and cowardly.

I have to disagree with the first part. It is eccentric. The NHS is such a bizarrely unassailable sacred cow that for quite some it has been totally off anything like the mainstream political agenda. It's a strange sort of collective hallucination like being a Newcastle Utd fan. Indiviually we all have had bad NHS experiences and individually we've all agreed that Newcastle are bad but at some sort off collective level we accept these things. Folly of crowds?

And that is the biggest problem with setting-up any half-way decent healthcare system.

Cameron is though shallow and cowardly. You're damn right about that.

The thing is I have not seen a great rising of people demanding Hannan's head.

The BBC (for obvious reasons) has been defending this state bureacracy as much as it can - but most people know it is not much good.

They may not be out demanding an end to it (something that is "free", even if it is not much good, is welcome to people who would rather not pay for stuff - and think other people pay more taxes than they do). Also the high cost of American health care is known to the British.

What they do not know is that it the subsidies and regulations of the government that make American health care so expensibe - but then the "mainstream media" (and the "education system") try and keep that truth away from Americans also.

As for Americans and the N.H.S.

You already have government hospitals - "free at the point of use" they are called (in most States) "county hospitals".

"But they are terrible" - yes, that is the point.

If course Comrade Barack has a "plan B".

Demand that the health insurance companies cover even more stuff than the government already demands they cover - and forbid them to raise insurance rates.

As the medical insurance companies (contrary to what Hollywood and the "news" media teach) tend to make profits of around 1% of turnover, such extra regulations would bankrupt them.

Thus giving America a government monopoly by the backdoor.

But such a policy would not be British - such regulations do not exist here.

Demand that the health insurance companies cover even more stuff than the government already demands they cover - and forbid them to raise insurance rates.

Didn't they do something similar with the banks to allow poor people to buy homes?

It was a blinding success I seem to recall.

You already have government hospitals - "free at the point of use" they are called (in most States) "county hospitals".

Sort of.

Every hospital with an emergency department is like that, required to provide emergency care including childbirth regardless of payment.

They are unlikely to provide much beyond that. Hell, thanks to the advent of drug-seeking[1], EDs are unlikely to even provide much in the way of analgesia to uninsured walk-ins. (A doc with a DEA license[2] isn't going to risk it to give a seeker vicodin rather than ibuprofen.)

Few hospitals will provide non-emergency care for the uninsured, and those that do will usually charge double or worse, or make other arrangements to make sure that they get paid. If Mid's around he can probably go into excruciating detail on this point.

The few that do have to ration care as it is. As with any other commodity, when price is fixed below what it would be in a free market, supply runs out fast.

As an aside, I was listening to "Democracy Now," an hour of ignorant socialist nonsense on NPR, on Friday Night. Amy Goodman was interviewing Ralph Nader about health care. RN, as you might imagine, was livid about Barry Soetoro's having caved in to the capitalist insurance companies. And, as usual, the man is a liar when he's not actually impressively stupid.

[1] People who go to hospitals, complaining of 'pain,' in order to obtain narcotic pain drugs to quiet an addiction. I don't know what they're called in the UK but I imagine they exist there as well.

[2] In the US, in addition to a state license to practice medicine, doctors are required to hold a license from the DEA in order to prescribe any scheduled controlled substance. DEA mandates certain record-keeping and will sometimes take action against doctors who are caught prescribing controlleds that are 'medically unnecessary.'

Your wish . . .

“In the 1950s, the uninsured and poor were charged the lowest prices for medical service. Today they pay the highest prices, often two to three times more than what a person with health insurance would pay for hospital care,” said Anderson, a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Anderson’s analysis determined the ratio between the prices hospitals charged self-pay patients and Medicare-allowable costs, which are the costs that Medicare has determined to be what it costs to provide care to all patients. In 2004, the ratio was 3.07, which means that for every $100 in Medicare-allowable costs, the average hospital charged a self-pay patient $307.

The charge-to-cost ratio was greatest at for-profit hospitals—4.10 compared to a 2.49 ratio at public hospitals.

I don't have enough time to get excruciating, though I will mention that a man I worked with lost his (paid for) house.