Category Archives: Health Care

Or “health insurance”, really.

Outbreak Of Reason

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SCENE:  Mitch BERG is pondering the tragedy that is his backyard garden when Avery LIBRELLE, riding a recumbent bike, rides up the alley, unbeknownst to BERG.

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Ohhhhhh fuuuuun seeing you Avery…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.  Robert F Kennedy is making Americans sick. There’s a huge measles outbreak.

BERG:  Huh.  And that’s RFK’s fault?

LIBRELLE:  Absolutely.  He’s anti-Vaxx.

BERG: Whereas an enlightened country like, say, Canada won’t have any trouble with that kind of thing.

LIBRELLE:  Of course not. They’re enlightened and progressive!

BERG:  Huh.

LIBRELLE: Wait – is this another one of those things where you…

(BERG opens a link on his iPad):

Surely they must do better than the United States at controlling communicable diseases, right?

Yeah, well, not so much. Quite the opposite, actually.

While the numbers are inherently unreliable to some extent, we can get a rough estimate of the relative risk of somebody getting Measles here vs in Canada. Both have advanced healthcare systems that collect a lot of data, and both have active media environments that love to focus on scary stuff like spreading diseases.

Want to know the relative risk? Americans contract Measles at a rate of 1.1 per million more or less, while Canadians have a rate of 12.2 per million.

Canadians are more than 11 times more likely to get the disease than people in the United States. And they don’t have any mean, nasty conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr. to spread conspiracy theories. The English, a similar society to both Canada and the United States, has a rate 5 1/2 times the US. France and Germany have rates similar to ours, if a tiny bit higher at the moment.

LIBRELLE:  Dammit! Why do you always do that?

BERG:  (Not very interested) Do what?

LIBRELLE:  Shoot down everything I say, and make me look like some kind of idiot?

BERG:  It’s a blessing and a curse.

And SCENE

Unforgiven

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Today’s the anniversary of Minnesota’s Great Leap Backward.

Me? I was on my way home from the office, listening the governor on MPR as he announced the most draconian set of emergency powers in Minnesota history. On the way, I stopped at a Total Wine. The store has eight checkout lines, of which two are normally operating; I’ve never waited in a line longer than three deep, even then.

All eight registers were humming, stacked 6-7 people deep, and the store was packed. 

They needn’t have worried; big box liquor stores, and big box stores of all kinds, found themselves exempted from the Governor’s swerve into autocracy.  

But small businesses were forced to close – unless they were lucky enough to be Walz contributors – and were utterly gutted.

And schools remained closed for a year and a half – and children still haven’t recovered.

And while state government beggared the whole notion of “science”, it was fairly clear early on that the most dire predictions were going to fall flat.

So no. I’m not ready to make nice yet. 

Complicated

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A friend of the blog emails:

Like Justine Bateman, I was thinking that I would see a flood of posts declaring that it wasn’t a host of other issues, but that it was the guns. Nope. Didn’t see a single post.

Saw a few people say no one deserves this, not even an insurance CEO with a lot of “but he’s killing people every day” responses.

I work in healthcare. I see the occasional sad case of someone who is underinsured or uninsured. We don’t let them die. In fact, we do a lot of work for those groups of people in the hospital to try to get them to a point where they can manage outside of the hospital. If they won’t get to that point, we usually find a transitional home for them. There are the even smaller groups of people who actually have a little net worth that would lose everything if they went to a transitional place and we continue to treat them to get them stable for home with the minimal resources we can find.

Yes, there are insurers who make care for patients extremely difficult. There is one Medicare Replacement insurance that many regional facilities will not accept as payment. I don’t know too many people with employer provided insurance, however, who dislike their plans. I’m sure there are some bad plans out there. But, I would guess even in those cases, it is a small minority.

Yet, I look at other areas around the world – I have a friend who in his 40s died in a hospital in Mexico from a heart attack. He was on vacation. Maybe he would have died here, but I feel like the hospitals here would have tried harder. I think of the Chinese father in law of a friend who had a stroke and was sent home to die 3 days later in China. By all accounts of what I heard, he likely wouldn’t have died that quickly here. I think of a Parisian friend who wasn’t well. But, she didn’t fit the narrative of someone who needed medical care, so she wasn’t being treated for anything when she died of a heart attack on a plane. She probably had something that here we might have caught early enough to treat and save her life. By all appearances in these cases, it seems socialized medicine said “we aren’t going to give costly tests and treatments to this person because they don’t fit the formula for those procedures.” So, they died. Is that any different than some private insurers here? The difference is that many of us have a choice in insurers and can choose an insurer that won’t deny that care to us. And while prices are negotiated between care providers and insurance, there is probably a bit of good insurance paying a bit more than is necessary which helps cover the cost of bad insurance/underinsured/uninsured.

Americans could do more to reduce healthcare costs, like manage or avoid some chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, heart disease. But, even when Americans get a chronic illness and even when they refuse to follow any medical advice to get it under control and stay out of the hospital, regardless of income or insurance, we still treat them and value their lives. Despite their own doings and despite some insurance companies. That is truly a difference that I think distinguishes us from much of the world. It is a distinction that I think few on the Team Shooter realize. Or maybe they do realize – maybe to them, not all life has value, much like socialized medicine around the world believes.

Sort of like the parables about democracy, our justice system and the free market – our health insurance system is the worst in the world, except for all the others. 

For The Young Ignorant Lefty Bobbleheads In Your Life

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You know who I’m talking about – the young humanities major at your job; the know-it-all lady witih ELCA hair in the PTA; the angry young relative who deigns to grace you with her presence at holiday dinners anyway.

This one goes out to you.  Use it wisely. 

Reasons American healthcare is expensive:

6. American pharmaceutical and device research and development can’t recoup costs overseas, due to rigid price controls in “single payer” healthcare systems (ironically making all “single payer” systems in effect dual payer systems).

5. Healthcare costs track gross incomes, worldwide. The inflation curve for healthcare is largely the same as the growth in a nation’s standard of living, whether it’s the US, Taiwan or Norway.

4. Americans are terrible drivers.

3. Americans are disproportionally very overweight.

2. As most Americans work during their prime earning years, older folks that used to stay with family in their 80s and 90s are now in assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.

1. The “Affordable Care Act”, and the serial waves of government intervention that came before, stuffed a gob of unfunded mandates onto insurers.

Reasons American healthcare is expensive:

5. Healthcare costs track gross incomes, worldwide. The inflation curve for healthcare is largely the same as the growth in a nation’s standard of living, whether it’s the US, Taiwan or Norway.

4. Americans are terrible drivers.

3. Americans are disproportionally very overweight.

2. As most Americans work during their prime earning years, older folks that used to stay with family in their 80s and 90s are now in assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.

1. The “Affordable Care Act”, and the serial waves of government intervention that came before, stuffed a gob of unfunded mandates onto insurers.

Not reasons that American healthcare is so expensive:

2. Greed.

1. Upper middle dilettantes haven’t shot enough CEOs.

Hope that settles that.

 

2. Greed.

1. Upper middle dilettantes haven’t shot enough CEOs.

Hope that settles that.

 

So Tired Of Winning

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“Life is full of ironies – if you’re stupid”
 — PJ O’Rourke

Remember 2010-2012?   When Democrats snarled that there was no way, no how that there were “death panels” buried in Obamacare?

And those of us with some experience in the healthcare industry responded “of course, there are, and have been ever since government poked its nose into controlling the healthcare system”?

The “people” jumping for joy over the murder of Brian Thompson for running a company that administers the metaphorical institutional “death panel”, exacty as foretold, are the same class of gerbils who said that was no way, no how anything Obamacare was about. Ever!

Fun Facts For Modern People

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Fun Fact #1:  The people cheering the political murder of another citizen – Brian Thompson, CEO of a company who’s one of the modern left’s betes noire – are the same people who want to disarm you.

Fun Fact #2:   The people angry about that insurance companies – UHG today, but surely all the other ones before long – want to force you onto national health insurance, which doesn’t “deny claims” so much as stall, ration and – well, deny treatment, and are actively exploring (and in some cases have arrived at) “euthanasia”, sometimes without asking any kind of consent at all, and above whom there is nobody to appeal.

Did I say “fun”? I meant “illustrative”.

Never Forget

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Since Tim “Mind Your Own Business” Walz and his phalanx of lies are on the ticket next week, let’s make sure people remember this:

They warned us that if we voted GOP, fascism would erupt. And they were right.

This Should Solve Giggles And Piglet’s Problem With Men

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In a campaign full of cringe-y ads, this may be the dumbest:

Treating husbands as the enemy seems like a bit of a tactical error.

From The Upcoming Revision To The Oxford English Dictionary

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“Frumming (Verb):  To compare two radically different things as if they were the same, by leaving out dispositively vital context. 

Example:

Variations: Frummery:  (Noun):  “It was pure frummery to compare the records of the two presidents by dishonestly leaving out the pandemic”. 

Perspective Needed

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Former representative Ryan Winkler has led us down a twisty, turny path with some surprises over his legislative and extra-legislative careers.

He’s swerved from the ridiculous to the, well, occasionally admirable, and back, and forth and back and forth, and backandforth…

And, well…:

Denying the industralized murder of 11 million people,

versus

Legitimate questions and doubts about everything government told us about Covid from the very beginning – remembering that many of the “conspiracy theories” of 2020/2021 turned out to be true: natural immunity works, and for longer than the vaccines; fomite spread didn’t happen; lockdowns were useless at best; the Great Barrington Declaration was right (the vaccines should have been targeted at the elderly and vulnerable), researchers lied even about the intended effects of vaccines or that “Zero Covid” was ever possible, masks made little to no difference, and there’s a pretty significant chance the virus did start as a result of Frankenvirus research in China.

Holocaust denial is a social pathology. Pandemic “denial”, at four years remove, is neither pathological nor especially denying any fact.

Someone needs to take a deep breath.

Lesson Learned

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Israel has always had a paternalistic but pragmatic view of civilian firearms. As a general rule, they are opposed – but there’ve been exceptions. After a series of school massacres fifty years ago, they liberalized teacher carry in the kibbutzim – until they turned the job over to security (successfully, so far, where “success” doesn’t include civil liberty).

And now, as of last week…:

Israel Police will allow civilians to come armed to performances at Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park, Army Radio reported Monday morning. 

This decision comes as huge concert events are set to return to venues, with the first being Israeli star Omer Adam’s upcoming show. The return of these large events brings the need for increased security. Security forces decided to allow civilians to attend events with personal firearms, rather than increasing the amount of security personnel, Army Radio report noted.

Can’t say I didn’t try to warn them, where “them” = everyone that treats self-defense as a privilege.

Snail Mail

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Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I turn 65 this Summer.  I went online to apply for Medicare. Can’t, must apply for Social Security first.  Okay, filled all the boxes, established a strong password, set up two-factor authentication, entered the confirmation code, received acknowledgement of the code, so are we done?

No.  They’ll send me a letter in the Snail Mail with my final activation instructions.  Should receive it in 10-15 days. Then I can finish the set up to have funds direct deposited into my bank account.

Snail Mail?  Does ANYBODY use snail mail for ANYTHING anymore? The entire process is electronic (and soon to be digital currency, as well) except for this step which looks like nothing more than a make-work payoff to the Postal Worker’s Union.  I’d gladly have offered to pay for them to ship it Fed Ex, had that been an option, but no.  Wait for the letter.  Hope for the best.  What could go wrong?  Unbelievable.

It could be worse. It could be run by MN IT.

That Smell

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What is that smell?

Why, it’s the sound of millions of peoples senses of self-righteous indignation, their mode of instant social sorting, their handy form of smug virtue-signaling, and that little knot of terror that they cultivated and nursed into their worldview, slowly smoldering into ash:

A whole lot of Merriam Park harpies are feeling bereft today. Go easy on ’em.

No

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Professor Galloway: I hear what you’re saying.

I do.

And on behalf of all the small businesses strangled by your mistake, all the parents who watched their kids slowly go crazy and stupid, and felt their personal, social and business relationships fraying and breaking?

I reject it.

Forgiveness without atonement is meaningless.

Try again.

Been Down This Road Before

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The DFL wants “assisted suicide”:

Further evidence of Big Left’s contempt for human life.

Fearless predictions:

2024: “assisted suicide” for specific conditions.

2026: “Conditions” list expanded to include depression, fatigue. (Like Canada)

2030: List expanded again to include “state thinks you’re too expensive (Netherlands)

2033: List includes political undesirables.

Ambiguous

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So we’re reliably informed that Downtown Minneapolis is back.

But that it desperately needs Target to force its workers back into the office.

Reporter Brianna Kelly spent months talking to downtown Minneapolis businesses about the flexible hybrid approach of downtown’s largest employer, and the impact it is having on the local economy.

“You know, everyone wants Target to be back; we need Target to be back,” Kelly said. “They’re a huge part of the entire ecosystem downtown.”

The story behind the story is this: if the wellbeing of Downtown Minneapolis is that dependent on a single employer, that whole “Minneapolis is a Cold Flint” comparison is looking better and better, and I don’t say that with any great joy.

Never Forget

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Polls – and the current performance of the DeSantis campaign – shows that, whether from fatigue or bigger fish to fry, Covid just isn’t that big an issue for most people.

That’s a shame.

In the interest of making sure, to the best of my ability, that nobody forgets, here’s what Democrats were thinking…

…not one week into the pandemic, but in their unhinged hysteria 22 months later.

A third believed the unvaccinated should lose their children.

Of all the history – relevant and otherwise – that people barber on about while taking politics, the fact that this bit of the recent past is downright galling.

There Are Too Many Potential Titles For This Post To Choose One, And I’m Trying To Be A Better Person Than That Anyway

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Governor Walz is “turning power over” to Lt Governor Flanagan for a few hours while he has a colonoscopy.

I don’t not expect DFL goons to roam the streets looking for wreckers while she’s in power. Fingers crossed, everyone. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

However, if all goes well, hopefully we’ll get word as to whether the endoscopist found the code for the model that predicted 20-70,000 dead Minnesotans by July 2020.

SITD Bonus: Rejected names for the post:

  • They Found Esme Murphy
  • Endoscopy Discovers Every Metro Newsroom
  • “Nurse, What’s With All The Lip Marks?”
  • Governor’s Riot Strategy Found
  • MN Media Metaphor Alert

But again – I’m trying to be a better person than that. 

He Who Controls The Past, Controls The Future

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Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true.

But if there’s one thing the American media does well, it’s come together to deflect attention away from its collective misdeeds. (emphasis added): .

Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.

In other words, “the truth may change, but it is always what we say it is”.

And nothing changes the definition of truth more than you-know-who:

In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.

Because to the – there is no better term – clique that sees itself as running America’s media and messaging, it’s not even the medium that’s the message. It’s the messenger:

In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”

It’s hard to do anything but taunt big media anymore.

Downtown’s Back, Baybee!

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If proclamations made with muted, Minnesotan gusto were correlated with economic results, Jacob Frey’s exhortations would have downtown Minneapolis humming along like Dallas.

Alas, they do not. Some of downtown’s signature office towers are ailing financially:

 The 30-story LaSalle Plaza in downtown Minneapolis is scheduled to go to auction next week after the previous owner, the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois, avoided foreclosure by transferring the building to its lender, Northwest Mutual.

Nearby Fifth Street Towers is facing the same fate and may also go back to its lender this month, according to Axios’ sources who were not authorized to discuss the matter.

And it’s not just your garden-variety class-AAAAA office space. It’s the big daddy of all the downtown office buildings (emphasis added):

Real estate analytics firm Trepp is keeping tabs on IDS Center — the city’s most iconic office tower — due to a 77% occupancy rate and the loss of Nordstrom Rack from Crystal Court, said senior managing director Manus Clancy

Rumors of downtown’s non-demise appear to be premature.

Countergaslight

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Are you old enough to remember when our Expert Class (TM) sicced it’s PR machine, and Big Left’s army of howler monkeys, from Stephen Colbert down to its horde of demi-human twitterbots, on anyone who expressed even ambivalence about Ivermectin?

“Hahaha, he’s peddling horse medicine!” was about the level and extent of the discourse?

Are you that old?

If you’re a toddler, yes – you are.

If you’re older than a toddler, you remember the “expert” response – from the ridicule…

…to the regulators:

But never mind history; they’re trying to change that:


“Hey, it’s not our fault if you took all that gaslighting and all those insults seriously! We’re the FDA, maaaaan”.

Don’t get gaslit.

Nobody Could Have Known…

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals call for Covid Amnesty.   They say Conservatives should forgive
Liberals for all the bad things resulting from government’s response to
Covid.  They say none of those bad things are Liberals’ fault because
They Didn’t Know.

Nonsense.  We knew when the Diamond Princess docked in February 2020
that Covid afflicted mostly old people with existing co-morbidities.  We
knew the death rate was 2% of those affected while the death rate of the
entire cruise ship population was 14 out of 3711 or .3%.   And that’s
using the phony numbers from counting all respiratory illness deaths as
Covid deaths.  Covid was never a threat to the population at large – it
was never more than a bad flu – and we knew it early on, which is why we
learned to elbow bump and wash our hands while singing the alphabet song.

Yes, but Liberals were forced to impose lockdowns, mask mandates and
school closings because all the best scientists said so.  If there were
alternatives, They Didn’t Know.

Nonsense.  The Great Barrington Declaration was signed in October 2020
by some of the worlds leading experts in epidemiology to codify in a
simple statement what medical and statistical experts had been saying
since the panic began.  Lockdowns, mask mandates, and school closings
were never the correct way to respond to the outbreak – traditional
responses were the correct way – and we knew it within a few months.

Yes, but those people were outliers, malcontents, reactionaries and
nay-sayers.  Liberals were forced to rely on government bureaucrats and
computer models because Liberals had no other source of information. 
Liberals were left with no choice but to implement lockdowns, mask
mandates and school closings to avoid the looming surge of infections
and resulting hospital overloads.

Nonsense.  Governor Walz announced his lockdown based on computer
modeling that was proven wrong within two months.  There was no surge
and hospitals were not overloaded but instead laid off staff for lack of
business, keeping beds open for Covid patients who never arrived.  The
models were worthless and we knew it long before school resumed.  Nurses
knew it too but danced in the hospital to prove how much smarter they
were than those of us watching.  They had time to dance.  They had no
patients.

Yes, but lockdowns, mask mandates and school closings were necessary to
prevent the virus from spreading until we had a safe and effective
vaccine, which was not generally available to the public until after
President Biden took office.  Liberals had no choice but to enact
temporary stopgap measures to keep the public safe.

Nonsense.  There was never any compelling evidence that lockdowns, mask
mandates or school closings prevented the virus from afflicting those it
targeted most – the elderly frail population – and considerable evidence
that warehousing sick elderly with healthy resulted in killing far more
of them. Controlling for age, existing illness, and quality of medical
care, there is very little difference in Covid mortality between states
like Minnesota (strict restrictions) and Florida (few restrictions). 
There is substantial difference in economic difference and, I suspect,
in education outcomes.

The blogger Sundance writing at Conservative Treehouse coined the phrase
“pretending not to know” to explain why Liberals keep doing things which
Conservatives can plainly see are wrong, but never expect to be held
accountable for the consequences.  That’s what’s happening with Covid
Amnesty.  Liberals are pretending they didn’t know so they shouldn’t be
held to account.

They knew.

And did it anyway.

And we’re never going to forgive the damage they’ve done.

Now, let’s talk about the election.

Joe Doakes

Forgiveness without atonement is meaningless.

And that’s what those asking for the “amnesty” are trying to sideslip.

No amnesty. As noted elsewhere, I’ll settle for a Truth and Reconciliation commission.