Kill the Health Care Reform bill

Yes, just kill it. Don't renegotiate, water it down, try to fix it, or try to work in a new philosophy.

I remember the Hillarycare initiative, and I was jumping for joy when it died. This bill is about the same, and I'll be just has happy when it's dead.

The worst and fundamental flaw Congress' approach in the bill is that it ignores free market principles. There is not some special properties box around health care that causes market principles not to apply. Markets exist, and incentives and free will apply, in this area as much as any other.

These markets are substantially distorted now, and have been for a very long time, numbered in decades. But to argue that the fix is having a government behemoth "competing" with private insurance companies, surrounded by other new bureaucracies, is heinously wrong.

I personally am not happy with the health care system as it is. I have many complaints. But this direction is not the correct one.

What do they do with all the money?

Forgive me for not posting for awhile. I've been alternately busy and having a slight sinus infection. I have written my representative politicians on a couple of issues in the meantime. There's been so much to follow that it makes my head spin, and it's been yanked to the left a lot lately. I'm not pleased.

On hearing that the federal deficit for June was $94.32Billion, I couldn't resist doing a little arithmetic. That equates to $3.144Billion a day, or $2.18Million a minute, or $36,388 a second. It takes real chutzpah to overspend (not just spend) $36,388 a second, every second of a month, wouldn't you say?

And yet most of our stimulus 1.0 money (forget about the Bush stimulus 0.0) sits around in coffee cans somewhere. I favor pulling the money out of the coffee cans and using it for an immediate payroll tax cut, if they can't dispense it any faster than that. Meanwhile President Obama flogs the Congress to pass a gargantuan medical spending bill.

Oh, and the promise of government largess already has distorted the renewable energy market. It seems negotiations on new projects and plants have stopped or slowed, because providers of private capital need to wait to see who gets the government funds, and how much, and under what terms.

This all is definitely change, but not that which I can believe in.

I noticed that the overall movement after the credit debacle started to unfold was called deleveraging. That means that in general entities are moving out of debt. Yet massive government debt dominates the news. Maybe just the owners of the debt have changed. And there are solid signs a commercial real estate debacle lurks in the not-too-distant future. It seems to me the government would be wise to cool it a little so it has some ammo left for that one.