Your Random Saturday

IBD has some health care costs the Dems don't want to talk about:

Last decade, the Clinton administration added teeth to a little-known Health and Human Services Department regulation mandating that hospitals provide emergency treatment even to illegals...

Many eat losses and eventually go out of business like they're doing in droves in California, which has seen 85 hospital closures in the last decade. An additional 55 facilities have shut down ERs. The state ranks last in the country in access to emergency care and last in ERs per capita, making it woefully unprepared to respond to a major earthquake or terror attack...

Some 80% of the births at Houston's Ben Taub General Hospital and Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital are to illegal immigrants. In Fort Worth, it's about 70%.

Thanks to EMTALA, one hospital near Miami was forced to eat $1.5 million in unreimbursed care for an illegal alien from Guatemala...

Michael Fumento points out the lies in the stimulus=recovery argument:

There was never doubt that whenever the economy began turning around the Obama administration, and especially the $787 billion stimulus package, would get the credit.

"Absolutely" the stimulus package was working, Christina Romer, chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, insisted in an Aug. 6 address to the Economic Club of Washington D.C.

Yet she accompanied that talk with contradictory evidence — which is about par considering that since joining the administration Ms. Romer has herself become a contradiction...

Choose whichever figure tickles your fancy; it remains the case that for all President Obama's personal back-slapping and media crowing of "disproved" stimulus skeptics, the U.S. economy shrank 1% in the second quarter. It was remarkable only in being a major improvement from the previous quarter...

In fact, there were 12 recessions or depressions just from 1850 to 1900, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, and plenty before that. All before government could even pretend to do much about them. And somehow the economy recovered each time...

The only problem with the U.S. government's Great Depression stimulus, she said at Brookings, is that it was too small and too short. Yet there she was, Aug. 6, insisting that a small, short stimulus had "absolutely" helped turn the economy around.

Newt doing what Newt does:

Reason No. 1: Government Can't Be Trusted With a Credit Card
Every family knows about making a budget and living within its means. Government, to put it bluntly, does not...

But that's exactly what the Obama Administration did with their weekend news dump. They announced late Friday that the amount of money they don't have but are nonetheless planning on spending over the next ten years isn't the astonishing $7 trillion they estimated in May but is instead an astounding $9 trillion...

Reason No. 2: Government Can't Even Give Away Money Effectively
As the inimitable Andy McCarthy of National Review put it, "Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money - between $3,500 and $4,500. How hard is that?"...

Last week, cash-for-clunkers ended in a bureaucratic morass of red tape, failed promises and unanticipated costs...

The government wizards who set up cash-for-clunkers initially budgeted to sell 250,000 cars in three months.

The program sold that many in four days.

And because the central planners who think they can provide government "competition" to the private health insurance market failed to accurately estimate how many government workers it would take to administer cash-for-clunkers, they had to take employees from the FAA - air traffic controllers, no less - to help manage the demand.

And what about the car dealerships the program was supposed to help in the first place? Even though the rebates were supposed to be paid within 10 days, only 7 percent of federal promises under cash-for-clunkers have been paid so far, leaving dealers with millions of dollars in unfunded government promises...

Reason No. 3: Government Would Rather Pay Crooks Than Manage Efficiently
There's been a lot of worrying about the inevitability of government rationing health care under the Democratic reform bills in Congress.

Economists have known about this inevitability for a long time. Well, Americans can stop worrying. Government is rationing care already - and doing it in a particularly stupid way.

Studies have shown that early use of home health care after hospitalization - allowing patients to go home and be visited by a nurse to manage their care - saves Medicare billions of dollars.

So here is a case where an innovative government program actually saves the government money. Home health care is both more compassionate and more efficient. It reduces the likelihood a patient will be readmitted to a hospital by allowing her to heal in a more familiar setting.

So naturally bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services cut $34 billion from this compassionate, efficient program last week.

And if the House health care reform bill becomes law, an additional $56.8 billion will be cut from the program - an amount equal to almost the entire federal budget for home health care services in 2007.

More differences between the sexes from Ashley Herzog:

Don’t be fooled. If you have a child in school, you should read “You’re Teaching My Child What?” by Dr. Miriam Grossman. Rather than learning just the facts, students are schooled in gender politics and feminist ideology—an ideology that is highly dogmatic and scientifically unsupported...

To make a long story short: they’re lying. There’s a mountain of scientific evidence showing that biological sex does indeed influence “the way we think”—evidence that Grossman presents in her book.

For example, when researchers in Japan examined the drawings of 252 kindergarteners, “They found significant differences between the drawings of girls and boys. Among them: boys drew a moving object twenty times more than girls. Girls included a flower or butterfly seven times more than boys…Overall, girls decidedly preferred pink and flesh colors. Boys used two colors more than girls: grey and blue.”

That’s because girls are socialized to like flowers and pink, the feminists will respond.

Not true. As Grossman writes, “To control for [socialization], the researchers analyzed the drawings of a third group—eight girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disorder in which the fetal brain was flooded with high levels of male hormones. CAH girls drew cars and buses, not butterflies. And the cars were blue, not pink.” Girls whose brains had been flooded with male hormones in the womb also showed a preference for male playmates and toys typically associated with boys...

Consider the case of Bruce Reimer, who was castrated in a medical accident when he was eight months old. Psychologists—steeped in radical 1960s ideology—assured Reimer’s parents that gender was socially constructed, and he could be raised successfully as a girl.

Reimer, who eventually committed suicide, recounted his life of misery in the book “As Nature Made Him.”

“Far from accepting the gender reassignment, he fought against it tooth and nail from the very beginning,” Grossman writes, “refusing to play with dolls, preferring wrestling over cooking, and even urinating standing up whenever possible.”

When finally told he had been born a boy, Reimer said he was relieved: “Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did.” Coming from someone who knows, gender isn’t as fluid and changeable as feminists want it to be...

For males, “the boy-brain trajectory is set at eight weeks. Not eight weeks after birth, eight weeks after conception—seven months before the pink or blue blanket,” she writes. “A fetus has a boy brain or a girl brain when it is the size of a kidney bean.”

Ann Coulter exposes a bit more:

Thus, here is Part 2 in our series of liberal lies about national health care.

(6) There will be no rationing under national health care.

...Apparently, promising to cut costs by having a panel of Washington bureaucrats (for short, "The Death Panel") deny medical treatment wasn't a popular idea with most Americans. So liberals started claiming that they are going to cover an additional 47 million uninsured Americans and cut costs ... without ever denying a single medical treatment!

Also on the agenda is a delicious all-you-can-eat chocolate cake that will actually help you lose weight! But first, let's go over the specs for my perpetual motion machine -- and it uses no energy, so it's totally green!...

(8) National health care won't cover abortions.

There are three certainties in life: (a) death, (b) taxes, and (C) no health care bill supported by Nita Lowey and Rosa DeLauro and signed by Barack Obama could possibly fail to cover abortions.

I don't think that requires elaboration, but here it is:

Despite being a thousand pages long, the health care bills passing through Congress are strikingly nonspecific. (Also, in a thousand pages, Democrats weren't able to squeeze in one paragraph on tort reform. Perhaps they were trying to save paper.)

These are Trojan Horse bills. Of course, they don't include the words "abortion," "death panels" or "three-year waits for hip-replacement surgery."...

After the bill is passed, the Federal Health Commission will find that abortion is covered, pro-lifers will sue, and a court will say it's within the regulatory authority of the health commission to require coverage for abortions.

Then we'll watch a parade of senators and congressmen indignantly announcing, "Well, I'm pro-life, and if I had had any idea this bill would cover abortions, I never would have voted for it!"

Michael Gerson...well, just read it:

In fact, Obama has a reality problem on health care, and it has begun to threaten his standing as a leader. He staked the success of his early presidency -- perhaps of his entire presidency -- on a health reform both vague and divisive, which manages to anger deficit hawks as well as liberals who believe that compromise has already gone too far. Obamacare has been the political version of the neutron bomb, vaporizing supporters while leaving every structural obstacle in place.

Larry Elder with an interesting fact:

Numerous studies conclude that children of "broken homes" with absentee or nonexistent fathers are more likely to commit crimes, drop out of school, do drugs and produce out-of-wedlock children. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times asked both the poor and non-poor the following question: Do you think those on welfare have children to get on welfare? More poor people (64 percent) said "yes" to that proposition than did non-poor (44 percent).

IBD on how great France's health care isn't:

Sorman notes that a Frenchman making a monthly salary of 3,000 euros has 350 of them deducted for health insurance. Then the employer throws in an additional 1,200 euros. This raises the cost of labor to prohibitive levels and puts a brake on economic growth. This helps explain why French unemployment hovers around 10%...

Drugs developed in America at enormous expense do cost less in France, which decides what drugs are to be used and at what prices. American patients in effect subsidize the French, who take the same pills at half the price because American pharmaceutical companies don't want to lose the French market.

French taxpayers fund a state health insurer, Assurance Maladie. Assurance Maladie has run in the red since 1989, and this year's shortfall is expected to be 9.4 billion euros ($13.5 billion) and 15 billion euros in 2010, about 10% of its budget.

Regardless of the cost, does the French system produce better outcomes? Not always. Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and single-payer systems are better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus.

Official World Health Organization statistics show the U.S. lagging behind France in infant mortality rates — 6.7 per 1,000 live births vs. 3.8 for France. Halderman notes that in the U.S., any infant born that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth. In France — in fact, in most of the European Union — any baby born before 26 weeks' gestation is not considered alive and therefore doesn't "count" in reported infant mortality rates.

Michael at Wizbang with some interesting info that smashes yet another claim about the awful clunkers boondoggle, specifically, that it would help energize American automakers:

By now you might be wondering which car companies have sold the most new cars as a result of Cash for Clunkers. Here are the top ten new vehicles purchased through the program:

Toyota Corolla
Honda Civic
Toyota Camry
Ford Focus FWD
Hyundai Elantra
Nissan Versa
Toyota Prius
Honda Accord
Honda Fit
Ford Escape FWD
Notice who's missing? Yep -- Chrysler and GM.