Monthly Archives: August 2009

Initial returns on Obamanomics

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Mark Steyn has a good piece up on “Why the Stimulus Flopped” which dissects the president’s economic approach with his usual panache (Steyn’s, that is; the president’s not bad on panache himself, but he’s no match for Mark Steyn):

The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several “stimulus” projects—every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT.” There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned, scarified pavement, followed by an “END OF ROAD WORKS” sign, until the next “stimulus” project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop. . . .

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted—and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

As Steyn sums it up,

The “stimulus” . . . didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.

For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about—and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that.

Read the whole thing—it’s vintage Steyn. The only point he doesn’t make is that we shouldn’t have expected the “stimulus” to work, because we had immediate prior evidence that it wouldn’t: namely, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out a while back, the effect of similar political and economic approaches in New York, New Jersey, and California.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

If “high tax rates on the rich, lots of government ‘investments,’ heavy unionization and a large government role in health care” haven’t worked for these states, why would we expect them to work for the country as a whole?

A dissenting view on health-care spending

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There is general agreement that our country spends too much on health care. I’m not so sure that’s actually true.

Why? The key here is recognizing the truth of David Goldhill’s distinction: “Health insurance isn’t health care.” This points us to another distinction, that of spending on care vs. spending on insurance. We tend to run them together, and I would certainly agree that we spend too much on these two things in combination; but we need to understand that in fact they’re two very different things—and I would argue that we should view spending money on them very, very differently.

Money spent on health care proper is money that goes to local businesses, perhaps a local non-profit organization (that would be, perhaps, your local hospital), and to other businesses that employ people to make things and to design new things to make. Money spent on healthinsurance is spent on bureaucrats who generate paper; indirectly, it also goes to subsidize trial lawyers and their campaign contributions to Democratic politicians. A good chunk of what you pay for health care also goes to this purpose, of course, in the percentage of your bill that is used to defray insurance costs for your doctor, your hospital, and so on.

Do we spend too much money on health care? No, what we spend too much money on—far too much money—is bureaucrats and trial lawyers. This is what needs to change most of all if we’re going to bring down the combined cost of health care and health insurance; and if we focus instead on reducing the cost of health care, we’re going to reduce the quality of our care without ever addressing the real problem and the real inefficiency of the current system.

This is, I think, what has happened to health care in Britain under the National Health Service. British cyberfriend David Riddick defends the NHS, in part, on the grounds that the UK spends less on health care than the US, and certainly the share of GDP spent on the combination of health care and health insurance is lower there; but given that they spend a higher percentage of that on bureaucrats, I don’t think that’s actually a good thing. That doesn’t drive good care, because the money isn’t being spent on care, and it doesn’t help the British economy any, either. Bureaucrats aren’t productive for the economy—they don’t create wealth, they don’t create jobs, they don’t create innovation; they just create red tape and paperwork.

The same is not true of much of the rest of the health care sector in modern economies. To take one example, the community where I live is the home of a cluster of orthopedics-products companies that make artificial joints, spinal hardware, and the like—products that relieve people (mainly, but not only, older people) of a great deal of pain and greatly improve their quality of life. These companies employ a lot of people, offering good manufacturing jobs as well as a lot of design and engineering work, and they drive research, as they’re always working on developing new and better products. So far, they’ve weathered the financial storm quite well; people will put off luxuries and elective purchases in tough economic times, but if you’re in pain and you can’t walk right, you’re not going to put off getting a new knee or a new hip if that will solve the problem.

Right now, though, they’re deeply worried about the push to nationalize our health care system, because it’s going to devastate their business. That artificial hip that the president keeps talking about, the one that he thinks might have been a waste to put in his grandmother, didn’t come from nowhere; it probably came from Warsaw, and it employed a number of people. His idea of how to cut health-care costs isn’t going to reduce the amount of money that goes to bureaucrats—it’s going to increase that spending, because we’ll need a lot more bureaucrats to run his program and decide which people are allowed to get new hips and knees. Instead, it’s going to reduce the amount of money that goes to companies like Zimmer and Biomet, which means it’s going to reduce the number of people they employ to design and build their products.

Health care “reform” as envisioned by the Democrats will take money out of their pockets to pay even more bureaucrats; it will shift money from a profitable sector of our economy, one that creates jobs that pay good wages and new products that improve people’s lives, to an unprofitable sector (the government)—and all in the name of spending less money. The contrast with the “stimulus” package is ironic. There we were told, “Spending money is good—increasing spending is good for the economy.” When it comes to health care, though, the government is telling us that spending money is bad, and so we need to hire lots and lots more bureaucrats so that we can cut down on the money we spend on actual health care. In the spirit of the “stimulus” package, wouldn’t it make more sense to increase the amount of money going to companies like Biomet and Zimmer so that they can hire more people and help the economy?

We tend to talk about the cost of health care as if cost were the only side of the coin, and it just isn’t; the money we spend doesn’t just vanish into thin air. Instead, that money goes to actual people, and much of it drives good things in our economy. Health care spending creates economic growth; it’s good for our country. We don’t need to spend less money on care; we need to spend less on bureaucrats and trial lawyers. Unfortunately, the president’s plan gets this backwards; we need to put it right way ’round.

 

Morning prayer

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Take, O take me as I am; summon out what I shall be;
set your seal upon my heart and live in me.

—John Bell

This is a simple little musical prayer written by the Iona Community’s John Bell, with a reflective melody that ends on an unresolved chord (the melody ends on re); I’ve seen it used most often as a congregational response, either to Scripture readings or during a time of prayer. For whatever reason, it floated into my mind this past hour, and has been flowing through it ever since. I guess this is the prayer of my heart this morning, for myself and for our congregation.

True Riches

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(Proverbs 23:4-5, Jeremiah 9:23-24; 1 Timothy 6:3-10, 17-19)

I admit it’s a little odd, chopping up the last chapter of 1 Timothy like this; but we have to in order to keep Paul’s thought together. Remember, he wasn’t sitting at a desk writing these letters—he dictated them; and maybe it’s just projection on my part, but I’ve always imagined him walking up and down the room, waving his arms, talking faster when he got more excited. Though for the letters he sent from prison, he was chained to two Roman soldiers, one on each side, so I have no idea how that worked.

In any case, this gives his letters a certain stream-of-consciousness quality, including Paul remembering he’s forgotten something and doubling back to pick it up. I think he did this in chapter 3, interrupting himself for a moment to add a note on women in leadership, and we see it here as well. Paul makes his comments about the false teachers in Ephesus, then goes on to give a personal charge to Timothy—and then suddenly realizes that his comments in verses 9-10 could be taken as an attack on the rich in general, which isn’t his point at all. To prevent that, he changes course for a minute to add say a few more things to those who are rich about how they should handle their riches.

The key thing here is that money is not the problem, and being rich is not the problem; the problem is one’s attitude toward wealth, and that’s something that can be as much of an issue for the poor and the middle class as for the rich. The issue isn’t having money, but wanting money, desiring riches, until that becomes the most important thing in your life, and the dominant factor in your decision-making. That is the kind of attitude Paul is talking about here; that’s the attitude which was the downfall of the false teachers, which led them to their ruin. Remember, these were people who had earned the respect of the congregation, whom the church had trusted enough to accept as leaders; clearly, they were people of great gifts and considerable wisdom—until they went off the rails.

By the time Paul writes this letter, of course, the false teachers have fallen a long way; their wisdom and understanding have faded to clueless foolishness, they’ve grown conceited, and they’re the sort of people who start arguments for the fun of it, simply because they enjoy making trouble, especially if they can make other people look silly in the process. And what was the root of their fall? Greed. They wanted to use the church to get rich. The irony of it is, they were probably being paid by the church—they were already making money off their position. It would be bad enough if some of our elders and deacons started doing this—not that I can imagine it—when they put a lot of blood, toil, tears and sweat into this church, and we don’t give them a whole lot back; but these folks were drawing a paycheck for being leaders in the church, and that still wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more; they wanted to be rich. And following that desire, following their greed, led them away from Jesus, and to their ruin.

But then, as Paul notes, if the desire to be rich is driving your thinking, if that’s what’s controlling your decisions, you’re going to wreck yourself sooner or later. The proverb he cites in verse 10 has often been misinterpreted, as if he were saying that the love of money is the source of all sin, or as if money were the root of all evil, neither of which is the point; indeed, letting ourselves be captured by any sort of strong desire, whether for wealth, power, praise, sexual pleasure, revenge, or anything else, will lead us into ruin. Paul’s point here is simply that greed falls into that category, and that the love of money doesn’t lead to good things, but only to evil. If we seek true wealth, and a truly good life, we must put aside the desire for money and look elsewhere.

This isn’t always easy for people to believe, especially with the current economy; but last fall’s crash underlines the truth of our text from Proverbs that financial security is really just an illusion, because material wealth is all too likely to disappear before your eyes. It’s simply too vulnerable to the vagaries of this world for us to count on it. Jesus doesn’t promise us that we’ll have a lot of money, or that we’ll be rich in things—instead, he promises that we’ll have enough in this world, and that in him we will find true gain, something this world can’t take away. As Paul defines that here, the true gain offered in Christ is godliness combined with contentment.

That word “contentment” is an interesting one, because in its normal Greek usage it meant “self-sufficiency” of the sternest kind, the ability to rely completely on one’s own internal resources Paul defines it in Philippians 4, where he declares, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” What Paul means by “contentment” is not self-sufficiency but Christ-sufficiency; it’s the power Christ gives us to trust him completely to meet our needs, rather than relying on our own efforts and abilities and possessions. Contentment is living free, emotionally, from our circumstances, whether we’re rich or poor, married or single, powerful or powerless, praised or scorned; it’s depending wholly on Christ, trusting wholly in him that he is with us taking care of us, that he knows where he has led us, and why, and what he is doing in and through our lives.

This, Paul says, is true riches: to be content in Christ, to know that Christ is sufficient for us in all circumstances, and to be living in accordance with his will. Anything else is less, and to spend our lives pursuing anything else is not to enrich our lives, but to impoverish them. Thus in verse 17 Paul turns to those in the church who are rich, and whose help in supporting the church is no doubt of great importance, and applies it specifically to them. There’s nothing wrong with their being rich; indeed, what they have, God has given them to enjoy, and to use to help others, as he gives us all good things. There is no moral status either to wealth or to poverty; but both create certain responsibilities and challenges. The rich must be careful not to look down on others, and they must be careful not to put their trust in money instead of in God. They must remember the words of Jeremiah, who warned us not to take pride, or put our stock, in earthly things: “Let not the wise boast in their wisdom, nor the strong boast in their might, nor the rich boast in their riches; but let them boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the LORD.” That’s the only thing, really, that matters; the rest are just tools God has given us to use in his service, nothing more.

And so, to the rich, Paul says, be diligent to use your riches in that way—do good works with your money, and be generous to others, and in that way, store up treasure for yourselves in heaven, which is the only treasure that will last. They need, as we all need, to be able to say to God—and mean it!—“Take my silver and my gold; not a mite would I withhold. Take my life—take all of me, everything I am—and may it be ever, only, all for you.”

Reflections on John Piper and the tornado

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In case you somehow missed it, there was a tornado in Minneapolis earlier this week—or perhaps we might say, there were two tornadoes in Minneapolis, one of winds and one of words; the original storm inspired a blog post from John Piper, “The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality,” which caused quite a storm of its own.

Piper’s post begins with this description of the circumstances:

A friend who drove down to see the damage wrote,

On a day when no severe weather was predicted or expected . . . a tornado forms, baffling the weather experts—most saying they’ve never seen anything like it. It happens right in the city. The city: Minneapolis.

The tornado happens on a Wednesday . . . during the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s national convention in the Minneapolis Convention Center. The convention is using Central Lutheran across the street as its church. The church has set up tents around its building for this purpose.

According to the ELCA’s printed convention schedule, at 2 PM on Wednesday, August 19, the 5th session of the convention was to begin. The main item of the session: “Consideration: Proposed Social Statement on Human Sexuality.” The issue is whether practicing homosexuality is a behavior that should disqualify a person from the pastoral ministry.

The eyewitness of the damage continues:

This curious tornado touches down just south of downtown and follows 35W straight towards the city center. It crosses I94. It is now downtown.

The time: 2PM.

The first buildings on the downtown side of I94 are the Minneapolis Convention Center and Central Lutheran. The tornado severely damages the convention center roof, shreds the tents, breaks off the steeple of Central Lutheran, splits what’s left of the steeple in two . . . and then lifts.

He then proceeds to lay out an argument from Scripture—I won’t quote it all here; you can follow the link—leading to this conclusion:

The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners.

Now, as you can probably imagine, a lot of people aren’t very happy with that last paragraph—and not all of them are liberals, by any means. Scot McKnight, in a comment on this post, asked,

The text points us away from the specific sins of some persons or some group and to the fact that we are all sinners. Piper points to the specific sins of the ELCA and only then generalizes. Don’t you see the tension of these two approaches?

My wife, for her part, had a similar reaction, arguing that the concluding paragraph quoted above doesn’t really follow from the preceding five points.

From where I sit, I’m not sure Dr. McKnight is reading Dr. Piper’s post quite correctly, but I do agree with David Sessions that the certainty of Dr. Piper’s final paragraph is overreaching. I’ve pointed out elsewhere (not sure if it’s up on the blog or not) that biblically, whenever God sends a disaster as judgment, he always sends a prophet first so that you don’t have to waste time wondering if the disaster is judgment from God—he’s already told you it is. As far as I’m aware, nobody predicted this; it just happened, which makes me very dubious about efforts to put any sort of specific interpretation on this tornado.

And yet, as uncomfortable as I am with Dr. Piper’s conclusion (and particularly the absolute way in which he presents it), I think his argument has more force than his critics (including my wife) want to admit. If we believe in the sovereignty and the providence of God, then we have to conclude that that tornado did exactly what God wanted it to do—and it couldn’t have been more precisely targeted on the ELCA’s national assembly, and in particular their consideration of that study paper (which they subsequently approved), if it had been a Tomahawk cruise missile. It appeared where no tornado was expected, took a perfectly precise route, hit the target, doing noticeable but (as far as I can tell) superficial damage, and then lifted. Short of actually forming right above Central Lutheran and just yo-yoing down and back up again, I’m not sure how its behavior could possibly have been more suggestive.

But suggestive of what? I think it’s going a step too far to try to answer that question as outsiders. Certainly the passage Dr. Piper quotes from Luke 13 is apt, as the call to repentance is always apt; but I also think Dr. McKnight’s point here is well-taken, if not quite correct: Jesus’ words in that passage point us, not to the fact that we are all sinners, but to the fact that we ourselves are sinners, and that the deaths of those on whom the tower fell should inspire each of us to get right with God. Certainly the Minneapolis tornado, with its reminder that in God’s hands, even the weather is a precision weapon, should similarly inspire us.

Anything more than that, though—anything specific to the ELCA and why God might have hit them, at that particular point in their deliberations, with a tornado—is, it seems to me, between God and the ELCA. He didn’t see fit to tell us what to think in advance, nor does anything in Scripture give us warrant to make any judgments about them from the fact that they were hit with a tornado. There may well be a specific message to the leaders of that denomination in the behavior of this tornado, but if so, it’s for them, not for us. Jesus doesn’t talk to us about others and what they need to do—as Aslan tells Lucy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that’s not part of our story; instead, he talks to us about ourselves and what we need to do.

I agree with Dr. Piper that approval of homosexual behavior by the church is contrary to Scripture and the revealed will of God; but I also note very carefully that in Luke 13, when Jesus referenced those who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, he said, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No.” This is where I think my wife was right, because if we really consider this tornado in the light of those words, what we would have to say is this: no matter how bad we might think the ELCA is, no matter how bad we might think it was for them to take the step they did, Jesus says to us, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than anyone else—including you? No; you too must repent.”

 

Thought on Christian leadership

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To be a leader in the church—and really, to be a Christian in leadership in any organization—is not to be an independent agent, but rather, to be a leader under God. Unfortunately, too often, we don’t realize that. As human beings, we tend to look at leadership positions as a chance for people to make sure things are done their way, to realize their own vision and make their priorities everyone else’s priorities. That’s certainly how we see things done time after time in our politics—frequently with disastrous results, especially for politicians who are unwilling to listen to those who disagree with them and take their concerns seriously. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you see leadership as a form of self-expression and self-actualization.

In God’s view, being a good leader is first and foremost about being a good follower—specifically, a follower of God. Godly leadership isn’t about imposing our will on our circumstances, but about seeking and following God’s will in our circumstances, and doing so in a way that makes the way clear to others so that they can follow us in turn. It’s the sort of thing Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians 11:1 when he says, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.” That’s it in a nutshell.

In the Christian view, leadership is mimetic—which is to say, it’s all about imitation. We learn to follow Christ by imitating others who have learned to follow him more closely than we do, who in turn are following others who are yet further along in their Christian walk, who in turn are following others who went before them; and each of us, as we learn to follow Christ more nearly, lead others in turn to do the same. That’s leadership; that’s also discipleship. For the Christian, the two are inseparable.

(Excerpted from “Fitness”)

Mr. Obama goes to Montana

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and a number of folks in Montana aren’t all that happy about it, or at least about the way it was handled. This letter was written by a resident of Bozeman, Montana; I don’t know them, but I’m confident in the source, especially I’ve had someone else vouch for it as an accurate account as well, so I’m posting it.

Hello All,

By now you have probably heard that President Obama came to Montana last Friday, Aug. 14. However, there are many things that the major news has not covered. I feel that since Bill and I live here and we were at the airport on Friday I should share some facts with you. Whatever you decide to do with the information is up to you. If you chose to share this email with others I do ask that you DELETE my email address before you forward this on.

On Wednesday, August 5th it was announced locally that the President would be coming here. There are many groups here that are against his healthcare and huge spending so those groups began talking and deciding on what they were going to do. The White House would not release ANY details other than the date.

On about Tuesday Bill found out that they would be holding the “Town Hall” at the airport. (This is only because Bill knows EVERYONE at the airport). Our airport is actually located outside of Belgrade (tiny town) in a very remote location. Nothing is around there. They chose to use a hangar that is the most remotely located hangar. You could not pick a more remote location, and you can not get to it easily. It is totally secluded from the public. FYI: We have many areas in Belgrade and Bozeman which could have held a large amount of folks with sufficient parking (gymnasiums/auditoriums). All of which have chairs and tables, and would not have to be SHIPPED IN!! $$$$$. During the week, cargo by the TONS was being shipped in constantly. Airport employees could not believe how it just kept coming. Though it was our President coming several expressed how excessive it was, especially during a recession. $$$$$.

Late Tuesday/early Wednesday Aug. 12th, they said that tickets would be handed out on Thursday 9am at two locations and the president would be arriving around 12:30 Friday. Thursday morning about 600 tickets were passed out. However, 1500 were printed at a Local printing shop per White House request. Hmmmm . . . 900 tickets just DISAPPEARED. This same morning someone called into the radio from the local UPS branch and said that THOUSANDS of Dollars of Lobster were shipped in for Obama. Montana has some of the best beef in the nation!!! And it would have been really wonderful to help out the local economy. Anyone heard of the Recession?? Just think . . . with all of the traveling the White House is doing. $$$$$. One can only imagine what else we are paying for.

On Friday Bill and I got out to the airport about 10:45am. The groups that wanted to protest Obama’s spending and healthcare had gotten a permit to protest and that area was roped off. But that was not to be. A large bus carrying SEIU (Service Employees International Union) members drove up onto the area (illegal) and unloaded right there. It was quite a commotion and there were specifically 2 SEIU men trying to make trouble and start a fight. Police did get involved and arrested the one man but they said they did not have the manpower to remove the SEIU crowd. The SEIU crowd was very organized and young. About 99% were under the age of 30 and they were not locals! They had bullhorns and PROFESSIONALLY made signs. Some even wore preprinted T-shirts. Oh, and Planned Parenthood folks were with them . . . professing abortion rights with their T-shirts and preprinted signs. (BTW, all these folks did have a permit to protest in ANOTHER area)! Those against healthcare/spending moved away from the SEIU crowd to avoid confrontation. They were orderly and respectful. Even though SEIU kept coming over and walking through, continuing to be very intimidating and aggressive at the direction of the one SEIU man.

So we had Montana folks from ALL OVER the state with their homemade signs and their DOGS with homemade signs. We had cowboys, nurses, doctors you name it. There was even a guy from Texas who had been driving through. He found out about the occasion, went to the store, made a sign, and came to protest. If you are wondering about the press . . . Well, all of the major networks were over by that remote hangar I mentioned. They were conveniently parked on the other side of the buildings FAR away. None of these crowds were even visible to them. I have my doubts that they knew anything about the crowds. We did have some local news media around us from this state and Idaho. Speaking of the local media . . . they were invited. However, all questions were to be turned in to the White House in advance of the event. Wouldn’t want anyone to have to think off the top of their head! It was very obvious that it was meant to be totally controlled by the White House. Everything was orchestrated down to the last detail to make it appear that Montana is just crazy for Obama and government healthcare. Even those people that talked about their insurance woes . . . the White House called our local HRDC (Human Resource and Development Committee) and asked for names. Then the White House asked those folks to come. Smoke and mirrors . . . EVERYTHING was staged!!!!!!!!!!!

I am very dismayed about what I learned about our current White House. The amount of control and manipulation was unbelievable. I felt I was not living in the United States of America, more like the USSR !! I was physically nauseous. Bill and I have been around when Presidents or Heads of State visit. It has NEVER been like this. I am truly very frightened for our country. America needs your prayers and your voices. If you care about our country please get involved. Know the issues. And let Congress hear your voices again and again!! If they are willing to put forth so much effort to BULLY a small town one can only imagine what is going on in Washington DC. Scary!!

The death book for veterans

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I’d meant to repost this from Conservatives4Palin yesterday, but I got distracted; I still wanted to mention it here as well, though, because it’s important. The Wall Street Journal‘s Jim Towey has done our country a service (in a piece linked yesterday by Sarah Palin on her Facebook page) by calling attention to a document recently re-promulgated by the Obama administration’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs called “Your Life, Your Choices.” This is a 52-page document for end-of-life planning which was first drafted by the Clinton administration—by an advocate of physician-assisted suicide and health-care rationing, Dr. Robert Pearlman. When the Bush 43 administration got a look at it, they ordered the VA to stop using it; as Towey describes it,

“Your Life, Your Choices” presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political “push poll.” For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be “not worth living.”

The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to “shake the blues.” There is a section which provocatively asks, “Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘If I’m a vegetable, pull the plug’?” There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as “I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being,” “I am a severe financial burden on my family” and that the vet’s situation “causes severe emotional burden for my family.”

When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?

One can only imagine a soldier surviving the war in Iraq and returning without all of his limbs only to encounter a veteran’s health-care system that seems intent on his surrender. . . .

This hurry-up-and-die message is clear and unconscionable.

In my book, George W. Bush did the only decent and honorable thing in pulling this invidious document; for the Obama administration to start using this again with VA patients—all patients, mind you, not even just those who are clearly dying—is nothing short of despicable. Thank you, Mr. Towey, for writing about this; and thank you, Gov. Palin, for using your platform to call it to our attention.

Most-searched posts

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I don’t get huge traffic around here; I don’t call this “The Blog that Nobody Reads” (that would be fellow Palinite House of Eratosthenes, which is ironic because he gets more traffic than I do), but the number of folks who do read this blog isn’t all that large. Which is fine, since I’m not trying to make a living off this—this is a discipline for me, and I write about what interests me, and if it interests others as well, then that’s great.

That said, I do watch the traffic I get, because that interests me, too; I like to see what posts get linked to elsewhere around the Web, and what searches land here. Some of them are pretty strange, though I don’t seem to get as many really odd ones as folks like Hap do. I’ve noticed, though, over time, that some posts get an inordinate number of hits—they just keep popping up in searches, week after week. That being the case, I thought it might be worth collecting them and posting the list.

The parable of the three little pigs
Reflecting on 1 Corinthians 3:10-20, 6:19-20: what are you building your life with?

Midway between luck and skill
On the role of luck in the Battle of Midway—which, from a Christian perspective, looks like the providence of God. I don’t know that most searchers are looking for that perspective, though.

Elemental powers
The ancients believed that the physical world was ruled by spirits (the elements, the stars, the sun and moon, and so on); Christ came to set us free from slavery to such things. In this post and a follow-up, I asked the question, “What powers does our culture think rule the world?” It appears others out there are asking the same question.

“May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!”
This is a video I posted on the two Moravian missionaries who sold themselves into slavery in the West Indies in order to evangelize their fellow slaves.

Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei
I wouldn’t have expected it, but there appear to be a lot of people out there Googling this phrase; I wrote this post for Tim Challies’ Reformation Day symposium, considering the meaning and misuses of this motto, and I hope the various searchers find it helpful.

“Send ’em up, I’ll wait!”
This is a story I picked up from Don Surber of the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, which it appears is still circulating briskly, judging by the number of folks still looking for it.

The OSM (Obama-stream media) theme song
So far, I haven’t seen anyone else referring to the media as the OSM, but a lot of folks seem to be looking for some variation of “Obama theme song.” Not many searches for the Great Big Sea song lyrics I posted, though.

“Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable”
Reflecting on the murder of George Tiller and the old Indigo Girls hit “Closer to Fine”; most of the hits are on searches for the quote.

The Gnosticism of sexual sin
Would we be so casual about our sexual behavior if we really understood its significance? I don’t think so.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom
It would appear that a lot of people want to understand what “the fear of the Lord” means—which is something I’m still working on myself.

Where have all the good men gone? Blame Roe, for starters
This one gets hit from a lot of different angles, but the most common search is what you’d expect: “where have all the good men gone?” Further evidence of the sea change Roe brought to male-female relations, I think.

Ambulance bills subsidize ambulance chasers

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I linked last Saturday to John Mackey’s piece on eight free-market health-care reforms that would actually work and not balloon the deficit. One of the necessary steps he laid out was “Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.” This morning, Sarah Palin elaborated on that pointin a note she posted on her Facebook page:

President Obama’s health care “reform” plan has met with significant criticism across the country. Many Americans want change and reform in our current health care system. We recognize that while we have the greatest medical care in the world, there are major problems that we must face, especially in terms of reining in costs and allowing care to be affordable for all. However, as we have seen, current plans being pushed by the Democratic leadership represent change that may not be what we had in mind—change which poses serious ethical concerns over the government having control over our families’ health care decisions. In addition, the current plans greatly increase costs of health care, while doing lip service toward controlling costs.

We need to address a REAL bipartisan reform proposition that will have REAL impacts on costs and quality of patient care.

As Governor of Alaska, I learned a little bit about being a target for frivolous suits and complaints (Please, do I really need to footnote that?). I went my whole life without needing a lawyer on speed-dial, but all that changes when you become a target for opportunists and people with no scruples. Our nation’s health care providers have been the targets of similar opportunists for years, and they too have found themselves subjected to false, frivolous, and baseless claims. To quote a former president, “I feel your pain.”

So what can we do? First, we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined. For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he’ll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” [1] Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.

Dr. Stuart Weinstein, with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, recently explained the problem:

The medical liability crisis has had many unintended consequences, most notably a decrease in access to care in a growing number of states and an increase in healthcare costs.

Access is affected as physicians move their practices to states with lower liability rates and change their practice patterns to reduce or eliminate high-risk services. When one considers that half of all neurosurgeons—as well as one third of all orthopedic surgeons, one third of all emergency physicians, and one third of all trauma surgeons—are sued each year, is it any wonder that 70 percent of emergency departments are at risk because they lack available on-call specialist coverage? [2]

Dr. Weinstein makes good points, points completely ignored by President Obama. Dr. Weinstein details the costs that our out-of-control tort system are causing the health care industry and notes research that “found that liability reforms could reduce defensive medicine practices, leading to a 5 percent to 9 percent reduction in medical expenditures without any effect on mortality or medical complications.” Dr. Weinstein writes:

If the Kessler and McClellan estimates were applied to total U.S. healthcare spending in 2005, the defensive medicine costs would total between $100 billion and $178 billion per year. Add to this the cost of defending malpractice cases, paying compensation, and covering additional administrative costs (a total of $29.4 billion). Thus, the average American family pays an additional $1,700 to $2,000 per year in healthcare costs simply to cover the costs of defensive medicine.

Excessive litigation and waste in the nation’s current tort system imposes an estimated yearly tort tax of $9,827 for a family of four and increases healthcare spending in the United States by $124 billion. How does this translate to individuals? The average obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) delivers 100 babies per year. If that OB-GYN must pay a medical liability premium of $200,000 each year (which is the rate in Florida), $2,000 of the delivery cost for each baby goes to pay the cost of the medical liability premium.” [3]

You would think that any effort to reform our health care system would include tort reform, especially if the stated purpose for Obama’s plan to nationalize our health care industry is the current high costs.

So I have new questions for the president: Why no legal reform? Why continue to encourage defensive medicine that wastes billions of dollars and does nothing for the patients? Do you want health care reform to benefit trial attorneys or patients?

Many states, including my own state of Alaska, have enacted caps on lawsuit awards against health care providers. Texas enacted caps and found that one county’s medical malpractice claims dropped 41 percent, and another study found a “55 percent decline” after reform measures were passed. [4] That’s one step in health care reform. Limiting lawyer contingency fees, as is done under the Federal Tort Claims Act, is another step. The State of Alaska pioneered the “loser pays” rule in the United States, which deters frivolous civil law suits by making the loser partially pay the winner’s legal bills. Preventing quack doctors from giving “expert” testimony in court against real doctors is another reform.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry noted that, after his state enacted tort reform measures, the number of doctors applying to practice medicine in Texas “skyrocketed by 57 percent” and that the tort reforms “brought critical specialties to underserved areas.” These are real reforms that actually improve access to health care. [5]

Dr. Weinstein’s research shows that around $200 billion per year could be saved with legal reform. That’s real savings. That’s money that could be used to build roads, schools, or hospitals.

If you want to save health care, let’s listen to our doctors too. There should be no health care reform without legal reform. There can be no true health care reform without legal reform.

—Sarah Palin

[1] Seehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350370729883030.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
[2] See http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/nov08/managing7.asp
[3] Id.
[4] Seehttp://www.abajournal.com/magazine/new_laws_and_med_mal_damage_caps_devastate_plaintiff_and_defense_firms_alik/print/
[5] See http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Tort-reform-must-be-part-of-health-care-reform-8096175.html