More Health Care Stats

President Obama argues that the United States needs a government-run health plan in order to provide coverage to the nation’s 46 million uninsured. In a recent column, “The Stealth Single-Payer Agenda”, George F. Will deconstructs this statistic ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061902334.html . Here’s what he finds:

About 20 million are without coverage temporarily, in many cases because they are between jobs. In six months they will have employment plus benefits and be replaced among the uninsured by someone else.

10 million are not U.S. Citizens.

14 million could sign up for existing government programs such as Medicaid, but choose not to.

9 million belong to households with income greater than $75,000 per year and could buy insurance on their own, but choose not to.

Mr. Will concludes that the arguments relying on the 46 million statistic are “feeble”. The Logic Critic awards him…

4 Blades - Flawless.

Not Much Gravy on this Train

A reader of my blog left a comment yesterday expressing outrage at the “gravy train” ridden by the insurance industry amid rising health care costs.

The comment got me wondering just how big the profit margins are in the health care biz. I did a little research on finance.yahoo.com and found this data for some of the nation’s leading health plan administrators:

The margins are all between 2 and 4 ½ percent. For comparison, I also looked into some better-loved firms. Here’s the numbers for Forbes Magazine’s Top 5 Admired Companies:

Clearly profitability in the health insurance industry is very modest. To find the cause of high health care costs – so burdensome to so many families - one must look somewhere other than the bottom line of insurance companies.

Wise Latina Woman: Not Racist, But...

racism n. 1. a doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior (Random House College Dictionary, Revised Edition 1979).

As I’ve said before, racism is such a repulsive doctrine that charges of prejudice should not be made casually.

Clearly critics of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, 2nd Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor, do not share this sentiment. I just Googled “Sotomayor racist” and got 2,450,000 hits. The charges of racism come from a Who’s Who of the American Right: Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Tom Tancredo. The accusation is based on the Olmos Memorial Lecture that she gave at U. C. Berkeley in 2001 (for a full transcript, see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15judge.text.html?pagewanted=1 ). Near the end she opined, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”

A glance at the definition of racism demonstrates that this is an unwarranted charge. Although the Judge claims that her own race is superior, the supposed superiority is based on differing experiences rather than inherent differences.

However, even though the speech is not racist, it does raise some questions: To what experiences does she refer? How do those experiences inform her legal decisions? Can a judge be impartial if she has personal experiences that bear on the case in front of her, and shouldn’t she recuse herself from such cases? Is it fair to have a system of justice in which the outcome of a case will vary with the judge’s personal experiences, making it impossible for a citizen to know what the law is prior to going to court?

I urge the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Judge Sotomayor these questions during her confirmation hearings this summer, and I hope that a healthy debate follows. In the meantime, the Logic Critic gives Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck, and Tancredo…

1 Blade - Not even an argument.

Priorities

President Obama is gearing up to push his health care initiative through Congress. He used his Saturday radio address to cover the topic, and then spoke about it to the American Medical Association on Monday.

This would be a good time for conservatives to point out the enormous price tag of this proposal. It would be a good time for conservatives to point out the contributions already made by government run programs to the high cost of health care in the United States. It would be a good time for conservatives to point out the long waits for medical care that exist in countries with government run systems.

Instead, every right wing commentator I tune in to is pointing out the tasteless joke that David Letterman told last week about Governor Palin’s daughter. Rush Limbaugh expressed his outrage. Howie Carr spent over an hour on it one afternoon. Bill O’Reilly brought a non-verbal communications expert on to his show to comment on the body language of the principals.

What are the priorities, guys?