Medical and tuition cost shifts

The good intentions of liberals to make higher education and health care available to all has had a major impact on costs for the middle class.
Why have tuition costs risen so much faster than the CPI for decades? One major reason is that the expensive, highly selective schools decided to give financial aid to bright, poor students. If you charge $40,000/year for tuition, why not increase it to $44,400 and let 10% of students come for free? It’s the same total revenue and now you’re politically correct. The egalitarian strategy soon spread to all colleges.
The same has happened to medical costs. Medicare and Medicaid pay doctors and hospitals a lot less than private insurers, so the providers shift costs. All you’re doing is squeezing a balloon at one end.
The rapid increase in government programs (now nearly 50%) has caused medical costs to rise dramatically for everyone else.
And what is Washington’s solution for rising costs? More government! (You got to talk real smooth to pull that argument off – but so far half the people are buying it.)
The system can absorb some scholarships for poor kids and some discounts for government-paid medical benefits. It’s the right thing to do in, say, 10% of cases.
But when government dominates the system, and the expectation is ‘free’, nothing good can happen. The balloon goes pop.

Democrats speak with forked tongue

President Obama has said time and again that, if you like your private health insurance, the new reforms being proposed will allow you to keep it.
But wait a minute. That’s not his decision and it’s not yours. Your employer will decide.
Employers have been plagued for years by steep increases in health care benefits, causing most to shift about 25% of the cost to employees in the form of payroll deductions.
The new regs would require employers to insure their employees or pay a tax of 8% of payroll. Employees would then receive Medicare-like government coverage.
My guess is that most employers now pay 6% to 14% of payroll for Blue Cross-like coverage, plus the costs of administering the program and complying with the rising heap of regulations. Given the opportunity to lower costs, they will pay the tax. And employees would - initially - welcome not having $50 to $350 deducted from their monthly pay for health insurance.
Obama may be technically correct that the government won’t mandate the public option, but most employers would eventually elect the government plan. Unless you work for a very profitable company, it will only be a matter of time before you join the estimated 100 million employees who will be moving to government insurance.

Eddie Haskell is in the (White) House

Smooth talk, good looks, wrongheaded

Give President Obama credit for talking; he’s everywhere and his platitudinous comments play well. He carries himself well. And he’s completely off base in thinking that big central government is the solution for everything.
Talks good, looks good and up to no good… who does that remind you of? Eddie Haskell!
You got to have some years on you to remember Eddie in the old Leave it to Beaver shows. He was Wally Cleaver’s best friend, a wise guy who would suck up to adults only to pick on other kids such as Beaver and Clarence “Lumpy” Rutherford.
President Obama doesn’t play pranks, but he’ll do some major damage if he gets his way.
If Eddie isn't Obama in disguise, he must be one of his many czars.

The Myth Myth

I recently canceled my membership to AARP, but they still send that monthly Bulletin that reads like a DNC rag. Their feature story this month is about clearing up all the hype and lies about health care reform - myths such as private insurance disappearing, euthanasia and rationing. It’s bad enough that they miss many key issues, but their responses are all based on what lawmakers say today.
All this spin by the media and special interest groups is getting old, isn’t it?
The basic facts that AARP and other supporters of Obama-style health reform miss is that we can’t trust anything the government says when it comes to social programs. Go back and look at the promises made about Social Security back in the 1930s. Look at today’s catastrophe-waiting-to-happen level of unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security. And the only Democrat plan for illegal immigration (and ensuring that more illegal’s don’t get free health care) is keeping unemployment high.
My biggest complaint about the health care debate is that proponents of reform talk about problems and not solutions. Of course there are issues needing attention, but the Pelosi-Reid-Obama plan just increases the government’s interference in our lives… at the expense of our freedoms.
If you want to bust some myths, ask your doctor what reforms we need. Or ask your employer’s HR department how many people don’t enroll in your company plan because they have other “priorities”.
I sure hope we wake up and stop rushing to a government solution for health care.

Be careful boycotting media sponsors

You don’t have to agree with everything Rush Limbaugh says – he probably doesn’t. He has the biggest audiences because he does his homework, keeps an incredible library of past statements made by officials, and invents/popularizes phrases that capsulize the issues – drive-by media, Breck Girl, environmentalist wacko, chickafication.
Is Rush partisan and acrimonious? Absolutely. But no more so than Couric, Letterman or Matthews are to the ears of conservatives.
Glenn Beck apparently said some things on Fox News that really angered the left. Now they’re organizing boycotts of his sponsors. While this is nothing new, and we are certainly free to shop wherever we want, these boycotts are the slipperiest of slopes.
Can you imagine if the left shopped at Publix and the right at Kroger? Or the left was AT&T and the right Verizon? Or the left drove Toyotas and the right Chevys?
You put an Eveready battery on your shoulder and I’ll put a Duracell on mine, and we’ll dare each other to see who knocks whose off first.
Wide-scale public boycotts of sponsors will destroy what little independence of the press we enjoy today.