It’s worth reading the whole thing, but since you won’t, here are the concluding stanzas:

America, with its markets, stands alone as the leading, arguably sole, source of medical innovation. Breakthrough drugs are as American as apple pie.

Every good thing capitalism helps produce — from singing careers to cures for diseases to staggering charity —  is credited to some other sphere of our lives. Every problem with capitalism, meanwhile, is laid at her feet. Except the problems with capitalism — greed, theft, etc. — aren’t capitalism’s fault, they’re humanity’s. Socialist countries have greedy thieves, too.

Free markets are in disrepute these days, particularly by the people running Washington. For them, government is the solution and capitalism is the problem. If they have their way over the next decade, they won’t cure what allegedly ails capitalism — people will still steal and lie — but they will impede everything that makes capitalism great. And that will be bad for everyone, even NPR.

Neo-neocon (owner of my favorite bloggish nom d’pixelle) explains the fundamental difference in world-view that underlies the highly partisan health care debate (link and emphasis added):

Americans on both left and right are unhappy with the current health care reform bills.

Neo-neocon

The left is upset because neither the House nor Senate version goes far enough towards putting government firmly in control of our medical decisions, with the goal of providing equal coverage for all no matter what the price. The right is upset because we see the bills’ provisions as unwarranted intrusions on our liberty that create a “right” where none existed before. We believe that reform would be better handled by fostering competition in the private sector rather than increasing government intervention in vital decisions that should remain between doctor and patient….

[E]mbedded in the second paragraph of this article is the most basic division between left and right, embodied in the phrases “providing equal coverage for all” and “unwarranted intrusion on our liberty.”

The first expresses the left’s push for equality of outcome, while the second speaks to the right’s concern with safeguarding liberty while providing equality of opportunity. Even if it were possible to put aside for a moment all the highly valid concerns about the way this bill has been advanced against the will of the American public — the lack of transparency, the fiscal fudging, the vote-buying, and the lies — this deep and primary philosophical difference between left and right would still remain.

The battle cry of the left is that “health care should be a right, not a privilege.”  This is brilliant framing — it sneakily implies that the right believes health care should be a privilege.

The problem, of course, is that no health care system can provide every treatment for every person for every malady.  Health care expenditures have to be rationed, either by government, by the marketplace, or — as in our current system — by an imperfect combination of the two.

Thanks in large part to Joe Lieberman, the most pernicious element of the left’s health care agenda — the single-payer stalking horse known as the public “option” — has been eliminated from the current bill.  But the legislation still represents a massive shift of control, over one-sixth of the economy, from the marketplace to the government.  It’s a move in the wrong direction, and it will stifle competition and lead to higher, unsustainable costs.  (There still remains a faint hope that the reconciliation process between the House and Senate versions may scuttle the legislation altogether.)

You should read all of Neo’s article, but since you won’t, I’ll give away the ending.  Riffing on Churchill, she writes:

Our government has had to choose between liberty and social justice. They chose social justice. They will get neither.

It seems clear after Saturday’s Senate vote that America will avoid the worst excesses of the various Democratic proposals to remake the health care system.  The Senate voted 60-39 to allow the debate to reach the Senate floor, but although the vote was a nominal victory for the Democrats, they had zero votes to spare as they (temporarily) averted a Republican filibuster.

In particular, while stalwart Independent ex-Democrat Joe Lieberman sided with the Democratic caucus on this procedural vote, he has made it clear he will join Republicans in blocking any bill that includes the single-payer stalking horse known as the “public option.”  A few Democrats have also signaled that the party cannot necessarily count on their votes on an actual bill, while I’ve seen no signs that any Republicans are likely to break ranks.

Thankfully, the public “option” appears to be dead.

But just in case it attempts to lurch zombie-like from the grave, I’m glad to see an increasing number of resources available making well-articulated arguments against the move toward socialized medicine.

The video at the top of this post is perhaps the best of four well-made films available at FreeMarketCure.com, a website “dedicated to correctly diagnosing the problems with the U.S. health care system and promoting solutions which preserve and extend individual liberty.”  Three of the films feature Canadians describing why America should not emulate Canada’s health care system, and the fourth examines the famous battle cry of  “45 million Americans without health care” and shows how it vastly overstates the problem.

The other health care system we’re told we should covet is the fully socialized European model.  Here, too, there is a helpful video, this time from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity,  titled “Don’t Copy Europe’s Mistakes: Less Government Is the Right Way to Fix Healthcare.”  (Hat tip: America on the Rocks.)

Another great resource, although a more cumbersome one, is James Taranto’s “Great Moments in Socialized Medicine” — a frequently recurring feature in his trenchant Best of the Web Today column on the Wall Street Journal‘s website.  These items cite news stories describing instances where the bureaucracy of the British health care system has impeded quality health care, and often are set up by Taranto’s trademark dry wit.  From an example last week:

If women are discouraged from getting mammograms, as a U.S. government panel recently advised, some will die, but at least others will be spared the discomfort of getting mammograms. There isn’t a similar upside to the following decision by Britain’s socialized medical system, described by London’s Daily Mail:

Liver cancer sufferers are being condemned to an early death by being denied a new drug on the Health Service, campaigners warn….

Each individual item could be dismissed as anecdotal evidence, but Taranto has posted dozens of such items, and the recurring drumbeat is quite effective.  It’s a pity that it’s so hard to find them.

Taranto is an important pioneer of the blogosphere — I’ve been reading his BotWT every weekday since before 9/11, and he continues to polish his craft.  Unfortunately, his site hasn’t kept up with innovations in blogging software.  His primitive format doesn’t even provide a way to link to individual items within his daily roundup, let alone make use of elementary organizational tools like tags, and the search function is highly unsatisfying.  But a jerry-rigged Google roundup of his columns that include “Great Moments” posts can be found here.

Rep. Artur Davis

This is a bit of a tangent, but one last hopeful sign can be found in a particularly flagrant example of rhetorical over-reaching.  Jesse Jackson, who long ago squandered whatever moral authority he might once have had, last week said at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting, “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”  This was a reference to a vote against Pelosi-care by Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama, who does call himself, and who from his photo appears to be, in fact, a black man.

If the increasingly desperate proponents of health care “reform” continue to serve up this type of poisonous rhetoric, it will only serve to stiffen the spines of Americans across the country who have been pressuring their representatives to tread carefully in remaking one-sixth of the economy.

The ad certainly provokes thought.  Well-scrubbed youngsters in a classroom place their hands on their hearts and start to recite the pledge — but it’s a different pledge from the one I learned in school:

I pledge allegiance to America’s debt…and to the Chinese government that lends us money… And to the interest… for which we pay… compoundable… with higher taxes and lower pay… until the day we die.

My first thought was to link this 30-second ad with the manufactured controversy over President Obama’s back-to-school message — using children to make a political point.  But the well-produced ad was released September 1, and clearly was created before Obama’s planned speech became a target.

I learned of the ad from Matt Miller’s latest podcast, which I listened to shortly after posting about Miller yesterday.  He approvingly called it a “fascinating fake ad” with a “chilling message from an advocacy group.”

The advocacy group turns out to be the Employment Policies Institute, which SourceWatch.org describes as “one of several front groups created by Berman & Co., a Washington, DC public affairs firm owned by Rick Berman, who lobbies for the restaurant, hotel, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries.”

They make that sound like a bad thing.

Berman was profiled a couple of years ago on “60 Minutes,” which noted that he relishes the nickname opponents have pinned on him: “Dr. Evil.”   The Debt ad is a bit of a departure for EPI, whose primary mission seems to be arguing that increases in the minimum wage hurt poor people by stifling entry-level job creation. Other Berman-related ads compiled by “60 Minutes” focus on attacking unions and America’s “war on obesity.”

But as long as no laws are broken, lobbying is another form of free speech, and industries have every right to advocate for their own interests.  Berman’s messages should be evaluated on their merits — and in some cases, those merits are considerable.  I love the Pledge ad — our children really are going to be subjugated throughout their lives by the national debt we are recklessly accumulating, and the ad drives that message home in a memorable way.

My main quarrel with the Dr. Evil story is esoteric and parochial. The concept of evil inspired the name of this blog, and the word shouldn’t be trivialized.  People who fly airplanes into buildings are evil.  People who take sides on public policy issues are not.

Matt Miller is the host of my favorite treadmill companion, KCRW’s weekly podcast “Left, Right and Center.”  The four (sic) participants might more accurately be described as “Left, Left, Left and Right,” since Miller, who represents the nominal Center, is a former Clinton White House aide — although I’ll concede he’s more of a centrist than Arianna Huffington and Bob Scheer.  But I digress.

Miller is out today with a sensible op-ed titled “Why Liberals Should Drop the Public Option” in the Washington Post.  He argues that universal coverage can best be achieved by market-based means — pointing to Switzerland and the Netherlands as models, rather than “fully socialized systems, such as those in Britain and Canada.”

I respect those in my party who seek the single-payer system into which the public option might eventually evolve. But I don’t agree that it’s the best answer for the United States. Though single payer has merits, especially in administrative efficiency, it is also likely to freeze in place our fragmented, uncoordinated system of fee-for-service care. It would encourage providers to goose volume (to boost their incomes) rather than improve quality and would offer greater rewards for providers of acute care when we need a fresh focus on chronic disease management. Single payer also asks government to do things I don’t think it is competent to do, such as setting prices across a large swath of the health sector in ways that seem certain to create damaging rigidities or resource misallocations (as happens in Medicare).

Finally, if government is the sole payer, provider payments will become even more politicized than they are today. On the eve of beneficial innovations in drug therapies, devices and cost-effective ways to deliver better care, it is ill-advised to make the government’s hand too rigid. Private health plans have many flaws, to be sure, but if sensibly regulated they’re likely to respond more nimbly to disperse medical innovations.

Liberals should make peace with the notion that a regulated market of competing private health plans can be the vehicle for getting everyone covered.

This argument resonates for me — even though in a single paragraph (see boldfacing), Miller opines that single-payer would be more efficient, then notes that Medicare (a limited single-payer system) causes resource misallocations.

No system will be perfect, but to me it’s axiomatic that competing, regulated insurers will be more responsive to change and innovation than a government bureaucracy.

BTW, I found Miller’s column via “The Slatest,” Slate‘s new thrice-daily compilation of the hottest stories in the current news cycle.  My politics have moved to the right since 1998, when I (and perhaps a few dozen other people) shelled out $19.95 for a year’s subscription to Slate, but I still give them props for online innovation.  I also like their weekly political podcast, “The Gabfest” — even though it could be described as Left, Left and Left.

An article in the September Atlantic does the best job I have ever seen of describing why health care is so resistant to cost-control efforts.  At 11,000 words, “How American Health Care Killed My Father” is not a quick read, but it’s not a dry policy treatise by any means.  (Hat tip: TigerHawk.)

When David Goldhill’s father died from an infection he contracted in the hospital, Goldhill went looking for someone to blame.

But my dad’s doctors weren’t incompetent—on the contrary, his hospital physicians were smart, thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead because of indifferent nursing—without exception, his nurses were dedicated and compassionate. Nor from financial limitations—he was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense was never once raised. There were no greedy pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers, or other popular villains in his particular tragedy.

As a business executive, Goldhill is no enemy of capitalism or market-based systems.  As a self-identified Democrat, he is no enemy of government.  And while he may have started his year-long research effort in anger over his father’s premature death, he has produced an absorbing essay that is remarkably measured and clear-eyed. Anyone of any political stripe who cares about America’s health-care system would benefit from reading it.

Some excerpts, with emphasis added:

But health insurance is different from every other type of insurance. Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is. We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance.

…

Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share. An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no?

Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee—more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else—by ourselves.

…

The unfortunate fact is, health-care demand has no natural limit. Our society will always keep creating new treatments to cure previously incurable problems. Some of these will save lives or add productive years to them; many will simply make us more comfortable. That’s all to the good. But the cost of this comfort, and whether it’s really worthwhile, is never calculated—by anyone. For almost all our health-care needs, the current system allows us as consumers to ask providers, “What’s my share?” instead of “How much does this cost?”—a question we ask before buying any other good or service. And the subtle difference between those two questions is costing us all a fortune.

…

How would the health-care reform that’s now taking shape solve these core problems? The Obama administration and Congress are still working out the details, but it looks like this generation of “comprehensive” reform will not address the underlying issues, any more than previous efforts did. Instead it will put yet more patches on the walls of an edifice that is fundamentally unsound—and then build that edifice higher.

You get the idea.  Read the whole thing.

(Illustration from The Atlantic.)

Bernie Madoff got the maximum sentence of 150 years in prison for stealing billions in what the judge called his “extraordinarily evil” Ponzi scheme. Probably it should now be renamed a Madoff scheme — Mr. Ponzi has been dead since 1949, and his take was denominated in mere millions. He was sentenced to only five years in prison in his initial trial for the scheme that made him famous, and upon release he promptly returned to a life of crime.

Madoff, 71, will never draw another free breath, and that’s probably the way it should be.  I hereby repent from my smug earlier post, “Sorry, No Tears Here for Madoff’s Clients,” written just days after Madoff’s arrest, when it seemed like the victims were primarily high-rollers who got too greedy chasing returns that were too good to be true.  It turns out many of the victims are clearly worthy of sympathy, and besides, even high-rollers don’t deserve to be cheated in a highly sophisticated scheme.

Interestingly, Madoff’s attorney had suggested a sentence of 12 years, a duration one year shorter than his expected lifespan according to the actuarial tables.  You know you’re in trouble when your own lawyer wants to put you away for 12 years.

The group of secured lenders who were holding out for fair treatment in the Chrysler bankruptcy has disbanded, after two more defections in the face of pressure from the Arm-Twister in Chief.

“After a great deal of soul-searching and quite frankly agony, Chrysler’s non-TARP lenders concluded they just don’t have the critical mass to withstand the enormous pressure and machinery of the US government,” [said] Thomas E. Lauria, … the lead lawyer for the group. “As a result, they have collectively withdrawn their participation in the court case.”

Welcome to our new, nationalized banking industry.  Think twice before relying on contractual guarantees or the rule of law, especially if you’re doing business with a Democratic constituency like the UAW.

At least one of Chrysler’s “secured” lenders is vowing to stand fast against President Obama’s efforts to bully the lenders into abdicating their fiduciary responsibility.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Plans for a quick sale of Chrysler to a new company majority-owned by a union-aligned trust is “patently illegal” and will be fought in bankruptcy court, one of the holders of the automaker’s secured debt said on Thursday.

“We don’t succumb to pressure and don’t agree to unfair and illegal payment schemes,” said George J. Schultze, the managing member of Schultze Asset Management. “We’re not conflicted by TARP money or active stress tests.”

Good for him.  I just hope he has bodyguards.

Obama is all too willing to stir populist anger in support of his favored constituencies.  It’s important to understand just how perversely Obama is framing the debate — and why his cram-down tactics make it less likely that future troubled borrowers will be able to raise the capital they need.

In criticizing the “hedge funds” that refused the terms that might temporarily have kept Chrysler out of bankruptcy court,  he said:

I don’t stand with them.  I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities.  I stand with Chrysler’s management, its dealers, and its suppliers. I stand with the millions of Americans who own and want to buy Chrysler cars.  I don’t stand with those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.

OK, Mr. President, I got it: hedge funds = bad, families and communities = good.  But at Pajamas Media, Tom Blumer reminds us that hedge funds manage money not just on behalf of rich people, but also on behalf of retirement funds, pensioners, college endowments and other constituencies that are every bit as much a part of the fabric of America as the UAW is.

He also describes the legal duty these secured lenders owe to the ultimate owners of the securities.

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), passed in 1974 with strong bipartisan support, subjects retirement plans to a very strict standard of fiduciary duty, specifically:

(1) … a fiduciary shall discharge his duties with respect to a plan solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries and —

(A) for the exclusive purpose of:

(i) providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries; and

(ii) defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan

There is nothing ambiguous about this requirement and nothing about the word “solely” or the term “exclusive purpose” to misunderstand.

Mr. Schultze and the secured lenders are trying to protect their investors by enforcing the agreement that was made when the capital was supplied to Chrysler.  In a bankruptcy, secured creditors are entitled to recover 100% of their money before unsecured creditors receive a penny.  That’s the deal they signed up for, and that “security” is why they were willing to supply capital to a basket-case company.  That protection was baked into the terms of the funding agreements.

In Chrysler’s case, as in many bankruptcies, the secured lenders were willing to settle for less than 100%, even while letting the unsecured lenders share in the settlement, for the purpose of trying to nurse the company back to health.  Blumer explains:

In a normal bankruptcy, first-lien creditors get paid what they are owed before anyone else. Since assets rarely fetch their ongoing-use value in liquidation, it appears reasonable that Lauria’s group [the secured creditors] would have come down in negotiations from 100% to 65%, and then to 50%, in the interest of avoiding bankruptcy. Presumably, 50% is a reasonable estimate of what might be realized in liquidation.

But if the secured creditors think they can recover more money for their investors by forcing a liquidation, they have a fiduciary duty to do so.  If they don’t get a higher payout than the unsecured creditors, they are betraying their investors, and making it less likely that troubled companies will be able to raise capital in the future.   That’s what Obama is trying to force by demonizing the holdout creditors.

The big TARP-program banks that agreed to the Chrysler deal had already had their turn at being beaten into submission less than a month earlier, when Obama told their CEOs “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”   In the face of that fairly explicit threat from the most powerful man in the world, it’s unsurprising that they would fall into line the next time push came to shove.  I’m just glad that at least one smaller, less conficted creditor is willing to stand up for the rule of law.

Now that the Automaker-in-Chief has fired the CEO of General Motors and instructed Chrysler to sell itself to Fiat by the end of April,  he’s turning his attention to a variety of other essential American industries, from blue jeans (“Levis yes; Wrangler no”) to toothpaste to ballpoint pens.  President Obama also graciously acknowledged the important consultative role played by former President Clinton.

Here’s hoping that the president’s next step will be to instruct corporate America to make greater use of independent consulting services.