This one is televised.

First of two parts

TWO THINGS supporters of a government-run "public option" for health insurance know for sure. One is that private health insurers are raking in obscenely high profits. The other is that only a government rival can force them to compete on price.

In a clever new commercial featuring Heather Graham as an agile sprinter named "Public Option," the left-wing pressure group MoveOn combines both themes, describing insurance companies as "lazy" and "bloated from the profits of raising our health care costs sky-high." Why, it asks, should anyone resist the competition a public option would generate? After all, "competition is as American as apple pie." In a less amusing print ad a few weeks ago, MoveOn charged that "insurance companies are willing to let the bodies pile up, as long as their profits are safe."

President Obama also attacks health insurers as avaricious profiteers.

"The insurance industry is making this last-ditch effort to stop reform," he declared on Oct. 16, "even as costs continue to rise and our health-care dollars continue to be poured into their profits (and) bonuses." When he addressed Congress in September, Obama insisted that only a public option will "keep insurance companies honest." On the White House Blog, ObamaCare opponents are accused of "fighting to protect insurance industry profits."

Indeed, there is no shortage of voices characterizing health insurers as greedy villains. Earlier this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised her party for highlighting "the immoral profits being made by the insurance industry." On CNN last week, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown demanded a public option "so the insurance industry can't continue to game the system and discriminate" against women and the disabled -- tactics insurers have used to "quadruple their profits in the last five years." If quadrupled profits don't seem rapacious enough, the union-backed Health Care for American Now! ups the ante, claiming, according to the AFL-CIO's news blog, that "during the past five years, health insurance company profits have soared by 1,000 percent."

Outbidding them all is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Health insurance companies "are so anti-competitive," he said last month, "because they make more money than any other business in America today."

To such overheated agitprop, the only useful response is a cold shower of facts, and the Associated Press supplied a timely one last week. For all the impassioned talk about obscene profits and bodies piling up, AP's Calvin Woodward reported, "health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent" of revenues, a return "that's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries."

On the Fortune 500 list of top industries, health insurance companies ranked 35^th in profitability in 2008; their overall profit margin was a mere 2.2 percent. They lagged far behind such industries as pharmaceuticals (which showed a profit margin of 19.3 percent), railroads (12.6 percent), and mining (11.5 percent). Among health insurers, the best performer last year was HealthSpring, which had a profit of 5.4 percent. "That's a less profitable margin," AP noted, "that was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach, and Molson and Coors beers."

For the most recent quarter of 2009, health-insurance plans earned profits of only 3.3 percent, ranking them 86^th on the expanded Yahoo! Finance list of US industries. The application-software industry, by contrast, is pulling in profits of nearly 22 percent. Why aren't MoveOn and the Democrats demanding a "public option" to compete with Microsoft and Adobe and drive down their "immoral" profits?

There are certainly industries doing worse than health insurance -- airlines and newspapers, for example -- but the notion that health insurers "make more money than any other business in America today" is preposterous. Advocates of a public option may find it tactically expedient to paint insurers as insatiable predators, swollen with ill-gotten profits. The reality is otherwise.

Still, the critics do have one thing right: More competition would bring down health-care premiums. But the way to increase competition is not by adding a government-run health plan to the 1,300 private firms already providing Americans with health insurance. After all, there's no public option for auto insurance and life insurance, yet they're sold in a highly competitive national market. There is no reason health insurance can't be sold the same way.

Next: More competition, less government

The public's best option: Less government, more choice

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
November 4, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/6...

Second of two parts (Read Part 1 here).

"MY GUIDING PRINCIPLE is and always has been that consumers do better when there is choice and competition." So said President Obama in his address to Congress on health care, making an argument for a government-run "public option" to sell health insurance that many Democrats have echoed.

In 34 states, Obama noted, three-fourths of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies. "Without competition, the price of insurance goes up and the quality goes down." But add a public option "administered by the government just like Medicaid or Medicare," he said, and competition would revive.

No, it wouldn't.

A government-run health insurer would radically tilt the health-insurance playing field. It would amount to a new entitlement program, able to undercut the price of private insurance by squeezing hospitals and doctors, reimbursing them at below-market rates. "Just like Medicaid and Medicare," which also underpay medical providers, the public option would force hospitals and doctors to charge private insurers more. Those insurers, in turn, would be compelled to raise their premiums, eventually losing millions of customers to the government plan.

Obama and other Democrats insist that any public option would have to be self-supporting, properly balancing its premiums and risk and not expecting the government to cover its losses. Sound familiar? The same assurances were made about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

"I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business," the president insists now. As a US Senate candidate in 2003, he sang a different tune: "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. . . . But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately." Has he changed his mind? Or only his talking points?

More competition among health insurers is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are far better ways to get there than a public option.

Here are three:

■ Tear down the barriers to buying health insurance across state lines. Under federal law, states are permitted to regulate "the business of insurance" as they see fit, and most of them have seen fit to allow the sale only of insurance policies licensed by their own state insurance commissions. As a consequence, there is no competitive national market for health insurance; there are 50 state markets instead, most of which are dominated by a handful of insurers. This, says Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, is the "original sin" of health insurance regulation.

When it comes to almost any other product or service, Americans would find a ban on interstate commerce and competition intolerable: Imagine being told that you could buy a car or a computer only if it was manufactured in your state. Consumers in the market for a mortgage are free to do business with an out-of-state lender; those in the market for health insurance should be equally free to do business with an out-of-state insurer.

■ Repeal mandatory benefits that make health insurance needlessly expensive. Compounding the lack of interstate competition is the way states drive up the cost of health insurance by making certain types of coverage compulsory. Consumers and insurers should be free to work out for themselves just how comprehensive or limited a policy should be. But state mandates prevent such flexibility by requiring insurance companies to sell a fixed array of benefits that many customers may not want. Individuals seeking plain-vanilla health insurance -- a policy that will cover them, say, in case of major surgery or catastrophic illness -- may find themselves forced to pay for a policy that also covers acupuncture, in vitro fertilization, alcoholism therapy, and a dozen additional treatments.

When compulsion takes the place of competition, the result is invariably less choice at higher cost.

■ De-link health insurance from employment. Nothing distorts America's health insurance market like the misbegotten tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance. Until that preference is removed, tens of millions of Americans will continue to rely on their employers' health plan instead of buying health insurance for themselves, they way they buy every other type of insurance. Fix the tax code, and no longer could insurance companies routinely bypass employees and deal only with their employers. Instead there would be intensive competition for individual customers -- and the lower premiums such competition would yield.

Yes, Mr. President, consumers do benefit from choice and competition. The key to both is not more government regulation and control, but less.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

-- ## --

Anyone have any idea why, now that I had to reinstall Vista, that every time I try to copy and paste Windows shuts down and restarts?

All my keystrokes and features are ginched up but the sutting down thing is a PAIN!

From time to time people start a blog where we can put poetry or short essays we'vre written.  Please feel free to post yours here.

Bear in mind if there are ANY negative comments here or off topic, they will be deleted.  This is a place to share poetry and prose.

Will Rogers, who died in a plane crash with Wylie Post in 1935

Even if he didn't say all of them, it's still good advice.

 Enjoy the following:
1.  Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco.
2.  Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.
3.  There are 2 theories to arguing with a woman...neither works.
4.  Never miss a good chance to shut up.
5.  Always drink upstream from the herd.
6.  If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
7.  The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket.
8.  There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading.  The few who learn by observation.  The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves.

9.  Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
10.  If you're riding' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there.
11.  Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier'n puttin' it back.
12.  After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring.  He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.  The moral:
When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.

I posted this on a blog here but will be removing it.  I shouldn't have highjacked another blog to show it. 

I am SO fed up with the barbs from the left about how the right hates this and the right hates that when all the whil the left is spewing bile like an overflowing garbage disposal.  First example below.

"Tell ya what fellas, when you guys start admitting that the "hate" talk isn't just on the right, I'll start believing one or two things you say.  Your credibilty is shot when you don't admit things like this.

"Florida Democrat Alan Grayson has a reputation for inflammatory rhetoric, but he took it even further when showing his disdain for Federal Reserve senior advisor Linda Robertson by calling her a "K Street whore" in a recent radio interview.

"This lobbyist, this K street whore, is trying to teach me about economics," Mr. Grayson fumed in a segment for a radio program hosted by Alex Jones on the Genesis Communications Network.
"This K street whore is trying to teach me about economics," Mr. Jones repeated back to the congressman. "Who was that particular K street whore?"

"I don't remember her name," Mr. Grayson, who once worked as an economist and conveyed he did not feel Ms. Robertson was qualified to lecture Congress on financial matters, said. "This was several month ago, but you can look it up, the lobbyist who was the head lobbyist for Enron was hired with our taxpayer money to try and spend this office effort to try and get transparency at the Federal Reserve."

Mr. Jones confirmed later in his show, Mr. Grayson was referring to Ms. Robertson. A short and a long form version of the audio clip have been uploaded to YouTube.

Mr. Grayson's spokesman Todd Jurkowski declined to comment on the exchange when asked by the Washington Times for clarification."

I heard he apologized...I guess that makes it ok but only if a Dem apologies.  If  Rep apologies he still gets ripped apart.

The war against affordable books

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
October 28, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/6...

THE AMERICAN BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATION loves people who buy books. It loves them so much that it wants to protect them from wicked retailers who sell popular titles at affordable prices. In fact, it wants to protect them from themselves. Consumers, after all, are likely to rejoice at the chance to pick up a bestseller like Stephen King's Under the Dome or John Grisham's Ford County for just $9, well below their suggested retail price of $35 and $24 respectively. The ABA, a trade group for independent bookstores, is doing all it can to preserve the republic from such pernicious bargains.

In a letter to the US Department of Justice last week, the booksellers association called for an investigation into the "predatory" behavior of Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target -- behavior it said "is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers." That "predatory" behavior -- what the rest of the world would describe as lively competition -- has taken the form of a price war, with the three retail giants offering 10 of the season's most highly anticipated new books for as little as $8.98 each. At that price, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target are actually losing money, since books generally wholesale for about half their list price. But that's not unusual: Merchants often promote a deeply discounted loss leader in order to attract new customers and stimulate additional sales.

To hear the American Booksellers Association tell it, however, the big online retailers are engaged not in spirited competition, but in an underhanded plot to eliminate competition.

Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target, the association claims in its letter to the Justice Department, "are using these predatory pricing practices to attempt to win control of the market for hardcover bestsellers." Evidence? The ABA offers none, and the proposition is hardly self-evident. Indeed, three paragraphs after accusing the big retailers of trying to monopolize book sales, the ABA's letter acknowledges that "none of the companies involved are engaged primarily in the sale of books" and that they are offering such good deals on bestsellers "to attract customers to buy other . . . merchandise" (my italics).

Odder and more hyperbolic still is the ABA's assertion that Amazon et al. "are devaluing the very concept of the book" and that "the entire book industry is in danger of becoming collateral damage in this war." That is the sort of thing vendors always say when more efficient or productive competitors challenge them in the marketplace. (A decade ago the ABA said much the same thing about Barnes & Noble and Borders, when it attacked them for selling books at a discount.) As in every other industry, innovation and technology have changed the way books are bought and sold -- and in the wake of change there are always winners and losers.

But if "the very concept of the book" is being shredded by low prices, the message hasn't reached the millions of Americans who buy books. Even amid the recession, well over 3 billion books were sold in the United States in 2008, up from 2.3 billion five years earlier -- and from less than 1 billion in 1988. The rise of discount book chains and online book sellers has certainly altered the industry, but it has only increased the American appetite for books.

"While on the surface it may seem that these lower prices will encourage more reading," says the ABA, "the reality is quite the opposite." Right -- just as lower food prices lead to more hunger and inexpensive computers are causing the internet to fade away. Behind the bookseller association's strained logic and high-flown rhetoric is little more but a self-interested plea for the government to hobble its competitors.

As it wrings its hands at the Amazon/Wal-Mart/Target discounts, the ABA groans that "there is simply no way for ABA members to compete." Really? The big online retailers may have a price advantage, but well-managed independent bookstores have always had other advantages to play up: attentive and knowledgeable service, eye-catching displays, a reader- and author-friendly atmosphere, community involvement, the serendipitous joys of browsing.

The ABA does its members no favors by painting them as helpless victims, undone because Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target are discounting some popular books. The best neighborhood booksellers inspire affection and allegiance from customers that no online superstore can match. Prices are important, but they aren't all-important. And not everyone is looking for the latest Stephen King.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

Herb Benham wrote an articcle today that I found really hit home.  If you haven't already, take a look.

http://www.bakersfield.com/...

Oh no!  This is from the dreaded Fox Network.  It can't be true?  Can it?

http://www.foxnews.com/poli...