Brilliant Idea
San Francisco Board of Supervisors wingnut Tom Ammiano has a new plan to increase unemployment in the city by the bay.
Posted by Stuart Browning
28 Nov 2005 @ 6:03pm
Putting Them Out of Our Misery
A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed a 93-year-old woman on Vancouver Island in Canada, who had recently faced a near two-year-wait just to get an appointment with a specialist to discuss the possibility of receiving a hip replacement operation. The truth of the matter is that she would have never received the operation and would have waited for the rest of her life in pain had she not gone to the U.S. to get the operation - for which she paid $25K and received in a matter of a few weeks. Her words to me were "I was going downhill fast. I didn't have much of a future. Going to the U.S. for the surgery saved my life."
So, how far off the mark is this piece of satire?
Not long ago the British Government took on a Health Care Hog who wanted to live on a feeding tube ON THE STATE'S DIME! This horrendous man, the so-called English Patient, sued to ensure that he will not be forced to endure death by dehydration when his paralysis kicks in. The socialist system must and will crush him like a bug for the sake of the common good! Indeed, if everyone in England gets a feeding tube, there won't be enough money for social equality programs and global warming studies!
The socialized health care systems in Canada and Europe severely ration health care to those who need it most: the elderly. The proponents of "single-payer" national health insurance here in the U.S. need to explain to us why such a system - that depends on euthanasia as a cost containment measure - should be considered "noble".
Posted by Stuart Browning
27 Nov 2005 @ 9:31am
Political Indoctrination in High School
Political indoctrination is obviously not limited to college campuses. We've had repeated requests to cover incidents in elementary school through high school. While that's outside the scope of our current film project Indoctrinate U, it still deserves attention.
Take, for example, the recent case involving Bret Chenkin, a teacher of English and Social Studies in Vermont's Mount Anthony Union High School. Bret realizes that being a teacher affords many opportunities to slip his political opinions in front of his students. The Associated Press reports that Bret "said he isn't shy about sharing his liberal views with students."
That might explain why he placed the following word choice problem in a recent quiz:
I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes.
Perhaps someone should contact Mr. Above-Average Mind to tell him that ensuring--not insuring--is probably the word he wanted. But who cares if the students aren't learning English from this English teacher? At least they're learning the "correct" political views.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
26 Nov 2005 @ 10:02am
U.S. Soldiers Should Kill Superiors, Professor Says
Professor John Daly of Warren Community College in New Jersey caused controversy for an e-mail to a student where he said, "Real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors."
The e-mail was sent by Professor Daly to freshman student Rebecca Beach, who had been hanging flyers promoting a campus event sponsored by Young America's Foundation. The flyers highlighted the number of people killed under communist regimes. Rebecca forwarded Professor Daly's e-mail to YAF, which has posted an unedited version online:
Dear Rebecca:
I am asking my students to boycott your event. I am also going to ask others to boycott it. Your literature and signs in the entrance lobby look like fascist propaganda and is extremely offensive. Your main poster "Communism killed 100,000,000" is not only untrue, but ignores the fact that CAPITALISM has killed many more and the evidence for that can be seen in the daily news papers. The U.S. government can fly to dominate the people of Iraq in 12 hours, yet it took them five days to assist the people devastated by huricane Katrina. Racism and profits were key to their priorities. Exxon, by the way, made $9 Billion in profits this last quarter--their highest proft margin ever. Thanks to the students of WCCC and other poor and working class people who are recruited to fight and die for EXXON and other corporations who earning megaprofits from their imperialist plunders. If you want to count the number of deaths based on political systems, you can begin with the more than a million children who have died in Iraq from U.S.-imposed sanctions and war. Or the million African American people who died from lack of access to healthcare in the US over the last 10 years.
I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like your won't dare show their face on a college campus. Real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors and fight for just causes and for people's needs--such freedom fighters can be counted throughout American history and they certainly will be counted again.
Prof. John Daly
The line, "I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like your won't dare show their face on a college campus" is quite telling. Unfortunately, Professor Daly is far from the only one in academia seeking to stamp out intellectual diversity on campus.
Update: Rather than defend his actions, Professor Daly has chosen to resign.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
23 Nov 2005 @ 3:50am
The Noose Tightens
The slow strangulation of American doctors is proceeding apace under the Bush Administration as the New York Times reports (Nov 20, 2005):
The Bush administration is headed for a clash with the nation's doctors over a federal plan to cut their Medicare fees by 4.4 percent next year, even as the government tries to measure the quality of care they provide.
[...]
Doctors said it was absurd for Medicare to cut their fees at a time when their costs were rising. The effects of such cuts will be compounded, they said, because many private insurers and some state Medicaid programs link their payment rates to the Medicare fee schedule.
Dr. Duane M. Cady, chairman of the American Medical Association, said: "Physicians cannot absorb the pending draconian cuts. A recent A.M.A. survey indicates that if the cuts begin on Jan. 1, more than one-third of physicians would decrease the number of new Medicare patients they accept."
[...]
Dr. Stephen C. Albrecht, a family doctor in Olympia, Wash., said 20 percent of his patients were on Medicare. If payments are cut next year, he said, it would be "economic nonsense" for him to continue participating in the program.
We are seeing the inevitable consequence of government funding of health care. Once the idea of health care as a "right" becomes ingrained, people will want the "best health care that someone else's money can buy". Costs soar, governments demand sacrifice, and doctors are reduced to the role of civil servants. As physicians continue to leave the field, supporters of increased government involvement in medicine would do well to contemplate the future likelihood of themselves lying on a table being operated on by a new breed of surgeon ... one with the mentality of a postal worker.
Posted by Stuart Browning
22 Nov 2005 @ 5:29pm
Canadian Freedom Fighters
Don Copeman, a Canadian businessman has just opened Canada's first members-only, primary health care center in Vancouver where doctors will actually be paid well for their life-saving skills and patients will pay an enrollment fee and an annual charge to get timely and high-quality care that is not available to them under the Canadian health care system. Such an event would not be particularly newsworthy here in the U.S. - however, in Canada, the notion that some people would be allowed to pay for better health care is at odds with a thoroughly ingrained egalitarianism that would rather see everyone suffer equally rather than have a "two-tier" medical system. His hybrid business model mixes private payment for extra services while conforming to the Canada Health Act for services paid for by the government - and has drawn fire from predictable quarters, some of whom would like to see the government shut the clinic down.
Patients who need surgical procedures covered by the Canada Health Act may be out of luck however, unless they like waiting in line - or enlist the services of Rick Baker's Timely Medical Alternatives, a Vancouver-based firm that specializes in negotiating surgical rates and taking waiting and suffering Canadians across the border to the U.S. to get timely medical care. (Viewers of our film Dead Meat may remember that Rick Baker is briefly profiled there).
Posted by Stuart Browning
22 Nov 2005 @ 6:13am
Waiting and Dying in Ontario ERs
Apologists for the Canadian "single-payer" health care system consistently point out that people only wait for elective surgery not for emergencies. Of course, "elective" surgery can mean an urgently needed bypass operation like the one that Diane Gorsuch - whose son Sean appears in our movie Dead Meat - waited two years for and died without getting. However, if you want an up-to-date report on the truth of this claim read Christie Blatchford's article in today's Globe and Mail which enumerates some of the victims of socialism in Ontario emergency rooms in the last few months. To summarize:
- An elderly woman triaged as 'Level 3' meaning she should be seen within 30 minutes, waits three hours in the ER, gives up, goes home and dies.
- An otherwise healthy man in his 60's with bleeding in the brain requires a transfer to another hospital, however, that hospital has no available beds, he is sent home to wait for a bed, waits four days, comes back again with emergency bleeding, and dies.
- A 61-year-old woman arrives with abdominal pain, she is deemed too ill to go home, no beds are available however, gives up and goes home, comes back the next day, suffers a heart attack and is now on life support.
- A 50-year-old man arrives with chest pain, symptoms deemed 'life-threatening' meaning that he should be seen in 15 minutes. Waits one hour and 40 minutes before being seen by a doctor who discovers that he had a heart attack and experienced greater heart damage due to waiting.
The average Canadian - not just the rich - pays almost 50% of their income in taxes while the defenders of the collectivist status quo invariably protest that the system has been starved of funding and that an increase in taxes is what is required. One has to wonder what level of taxation they would consider too high.
Posted by Stuart Browning
21 Nov 2005 @ 5:57am
Politicized Health Care
Lots of health care policy discussions over at Dr. Helen. I find this comment especially insightful:
I would never want my healthcare determined by the government--just think of the political ramifications of it--women with pink ribbons would be advocating for their "rights" to more money spent on breast cancer and being a big voting block--they might get more money for treatment than say, people with heart problems etc. It is a mistake to politicize healthcare more than we already have.
If you doubt it, consider this transexual advocacy group campaigning to have Sex Reassignment Surgery covered by the provincial health plan in Ontario - a province where elderly people go blind waiting for rationed cataract operations. Don't laugh - they have a powerful friend in Health Minister George Smitherman:
Health Minister George Smitherman had promised to reinstate coverage when the Liberals were in opposition, and he criticized the Mike Harris Conservatives for delisting sexual reorientation surgery in the late 1990s.
"I have considerable empathy with the situation that's there for those individuals," said Smitherman, who is openly gay.
"I know many of them personally, and I think they are some of the most courageous people that I know in society."
Also, check out this story about a four-year-old boy in Newfoundland, Canada with cancer who faced a two and a half year wait for an MRI scan - and imagine if a private-sector business like Walmart distributed inventory in this way:
With politicians concerned about waiting times, Health Minister John Ottenheimer says help is on the way for patients waiting for MRI services.
Ottenheimer says a new MRI machine will be available, in Corner Brook.
However, that new machine will operate 800 kilometres away from the Oldfords, on the west coast, in Premier Danny Williams' district.
Dawe says the location of the MRI was picked for political, not health reasons. The MRI is far away from the province's cancer clinic, tertiary hospitals and most medical expertise.
Indeed, in a politicized, government-run health care system like Canada's where market forces do not operate, it's all about pull, influence, connections and raw political power. Advocates of health care freedom would do well to remember this when confronted by the proponents of government-run medicine who describe their proposed system as a "noble idea".
Posted by Stuart Browning
20 Nov 2005 @ 7:41pm
Chronicle of Higher Education on BW201
The Chronicle of Higher Education covers Brainwashing 201: The Second Semester in its latest issue:
"Unfortunately, all too many campuses are quite antagonistic to multiple points of view," [director Evan Coyne Maloney] says. In higher education, there should be as much respect for diversity of viewpoints as there is for diversity of everything else, he says, which is why he made the film.
Mr. Maloney appears in it himself, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Tall and thin, he looks younger than his 33 years. He could easily pass for a student and usually does, until he walks unannounced into the offices of college administrators and politely asks questions about university policies that he believes condone the liberal indoctrination of students. Administrators, not surprisingly, typically refuse to answer. His unflappable demeanor and deadpan tone frustrate them so much that sometimes they threaten to have him arrested.
Film has an immediacy newspaper articles do not. In Brainwashing 201 we see the people who feel they have been discriminated against and the hurt on their faces as they tell their stories.
[...]
When colleagues found out she was Republican, [Cal Poly professor Laura] Freberg says, she was removed as chairman of her psychology department. (She says that she sued the university and reached a settlement, but according to Robert C. Detweiler, interim provost at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, her charges alleging political and gender discrimination were thrown out.)
"I'm talking about neurons," Ms. Freberg continues, but students told her they knew all along that she was Republican. When she asked them how they could tell, she says, they told her, It's "because of what you don't say."
A murmur of sympathy from the audience, but soon the film elicits more laughter. "I'm learning in geography class that gender is socially constructed," one student tells Mr. Maloney.
"I never knew that carbon chains had anything to do with politics, but they do," says another student.
But what really makes the crowd howl are the shots of Mr. Maloney randomly asking students to direct him to the men's-studies department and the men's center on various campuses. They look at Mr. Maloney like he's crazy, telling him, sometimes while laughing, that such things don't exist.
At the University of California at Santa Cruz, when Mr. Maloney asks a female student the purpose of the women's resource center she tells him it "promotes feminism" and tries to get women "involved in politics." At this, the words "Warning: Truth Detected" flash on the screen, as her word "politics" echoes several times.
The audience loves it. After the film, Mr. Maloney receives a standing ovation.
Note: The publicly-accessible link to the article above will be active for one week; after that, the article will be available only to Chronicle subscribers here.
Posted by webmaster
14 Nov 2005 @ 11:50am
Diagnostic Tests for Waiting Canadians?
Imagine that you and your doctor strongly suspect that you may have cancer. An MRI or a CAT scan will tell the doctor whether to perform a biopsy. In Canada, where the government provides all funding for medical technology - and where there are severe shortages of such diagnostic machines, the wait for an MRI or CAT scan is often measured in months - and sometimes years!
An American entrepreneur is betting that mobile diagnostic imaging clinics - MRI machines on tractor-trailers - would be in demand among Canadians who are currently on waiting lists. (See MRIs on wheels proposed for Canada.) He's seeking permission from the government of Ontario to bring in three to five trucks providing this service. Alas, there may be a problem. Paying for your own health care is not allowed in Canada - and Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman wants to make sure that it stays that way.
A spokesman for George Smitherman, the Health Minister, said the province would be unlikely to give a green light ... "Entertaining this sort of idea is not something we're interested in," said David Spencer, an aide to Mr. Smitherman.
In Canada, you can spend your own money on a large home, a luxury car or a grand European tour. You can spend your own money on pornography, alcohol or tattoo parlors. However, when it comes to your own body, you must get in a long line for "free" government health care.
Posted by Stuart Browning
9 Nov 2005 @ 7:14am
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