Category Archives: Health
DEA NFL
Here’s a new headache for the NFL, and this time it’s not from concussions.
DEA agents raided traveling NFL team docs and trainers last Sunday. They snooped through their bags searching for painkillers. The idea being that since they were traveling from out of state, the docs might be prescribing drugs without a license.
Interestingly, being out of state doesn’t prevent the players from being hit with local taxes in the state where a game is played.
Silly Shirt Season
World leaders showed up at the APEC summit in China last week wearing silly shirts. It’s an annual tradition to distract us from the silly stuff they do.
China is filled with with smog. You can taste the PM 2.5 – little particles that go into your lungs to kill you. So what was the signing event of the week? A deal to reduce the carbon dioxide you exhale to cough those little buggers out. And the Chinese don’t even have to do it until 2030. If they’re still alive.
Silly Season
The agreement is for America to set the example by cutting co2 emissions right away. The really silly part is that it’s a deal about nothing. Carbon dioxide emissions in the United States have been falling due to increased use of natural gas and a decreased role for industrial production. We’re expected to reach the goals of the agreement by doing nothing. China will reach peak population growth by 2030 and it’s co2 emissions are expected to fall naturally by then too.
The other big news of the week was the revelation that our governing elites lack a positive attitude toward us voters. They think we’re stupid. Ok, so maybe they’re right. It’s certainly not a problem shared by China – a situation much admired by Tom Friedman of the NYT.
Stupid Voters
The administration whose foreign policy is “don’t do stupid shit” thinks we’re stupid.
Here’s why.
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to decide King v Burwell. The case is about the survival of ObamaCare. The plaintiff says the Affordable Care Act only permits subsidies on state run health care exchanges. The IRS allows subsidies on federal exchanges as well. Without subsidies ObamaCare is no more.
The reason the law was written that way was to create an incentive for states to set up exchanges say law professors Jonathan Adler and Jonathan Turley. Apparently it wasn’t incentive enough because only 16 states set up exchanges.
The administration argument (not surprisingly) is that the law doesn’t mean what it says. The intention of those who wrote it was to offer subsidies on all exchanges. And good intentions are everything.
Enter one more Jonathan, MIT egghead Jonathan Gruber. He’s the architect of the law and he says the plain wording is just a type-o. His intent was indeed for federal exchanges to offer subsidies.
Unfortunately for Gruber a video emerged in which he claimed that if a state doesn’t set up an exchange not only will its citizens not receive subsidies, they, as taxpayers, will have to pay for other people’s subsidies on other state exchanges.
Gruber, wearing his egg on his face, called that a speak-o.
Stupid is as Stupid does
But that’s not all. More videos have surfaced starring Professor Gruber. One of his most memorable lines is that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage”. He says that if voters understood that healthy people would be paying for healthcare for sick people they would oppose the bill, because they’re stupid.
Ron Fournier of National Journal and an ObamaCare supporter now says the law was built on a foundation of lies.
Progressives believe in government by experts. Gruber is an expert. For him, telling the truth would have been nice but he’d rather “have the law than not”. Jonah Goldberg wrote a great book called Liberal Fascism. Gruber fits the bill.
You may be wondering who was the crack investigative reporter who dug up these videos. It was some guy in his basement. He’s an investment adviser named Rich Weinstein. David Weigel has a great story in Bloomberg about him.
Panic Attack
Even hysteria is politically polarizing these days. Ann Coulter has a column claiming the media, usually purveyors of panic , now want everyone to chill about Ebola. It doesn’t appear that an epidemic is imminent. “The Science” is predicting an additional 1-130 new Ebola cases in the U.S. by the end of the year.
Ebola Workers
President Obama was all kisses and hugs for civilian Ebola workers returning from West Africa. As for the military he’s all 21-day quarantine.
The rest of us got the usual stern Professor Obama lecture about “The Science”, complete with docs in white coats as props. Obama says “The Science” tells us we don’t need to quarantine Ebola workers because they’re doing “God’s work”. And, like the mayor of Toledo drinking a glass of Lake Erie, he shook hands and hugged his doc props to prove his point.
So why are the apparently Godless troops he sent into Ebola harms way going to be quarantined? Joe Scarborough calls this “Obama’s Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker moment”:
…for the president on the Ebola front. I know there are people that like to feel superior to others and say the American people are just hucksters or idiots.
James Taranto in the WSJ (Doctors Without Scrupples) notes that 80% of respondents in a CBS poll want to quarantine everyone coming into America from Ebola Land. So why opposite policies for civilians and military?:
What is at issue, then, is the administration’s purely discretionary decisions to order quarantines for servicemen and lean on states not to order them for civilians—a contradiction with no obvious basis, and no basis the World’s Greatest Orator and his spokesman have managed to articulate, in philosophy, law or science.
Either servicemen are being subjected to burdens with no basis in “science or best practices,” or the administration is risking public health by prioritizing the personal comfort of civilian medical workers. Why in the world are they doing this?
Ebola Workers and God’s Work
Taranto answers his own question with two possibilities: 1.) He didn’t want to make a decision to overrule his Joint Chief of Staff. 2.) The Scarborough analysis – he’s a snob:
The second is snobbery. Recall that quote from Nurse Hickox’s lawyer: “She’s a very good person.” She and others like her, according to the president, are doing God’s work, and—in pointed if inaccurate contrast to military servicemen—are “experts.” The logic would go something like this: You can’t quarantine her. She’s one of us.
