LEAD US DOWN THAT PRIMROSE PATH….. CANADIANS UNITE

 

CANT WAIT  to see what the canadians have to say about this one. i guess if you live in canada commenting on blogs is your only escape. REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO AUSTRIA?

DEMS NEW MANTRA FULL OF HOLES

TRHE TALKING heads are using medicades low overhead in their new arguments this article explains how this is a hoax….typical

Medicare’s (true) Administrative Costs

July 27, 2006 in Medicaid/Medicare

A common justification for Medicare is that the public health insurance system has an overhead cost which is about 2% of claims, while the private sector has administrative costs between 20%-25% of claims.  This tells us that Medicare is the best system for America…right?

Merrill Mathew’s of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance (CAFI) summarizes the findings of Mark Litow’s paper “Medicare’s Hidden Administrative Costs.”  Litow finds that taking into account extra legal costs from Medicare adjudication and CMS salaries, the administrative cost ratio increases to 5.2%. 

Private Insurance on average has administrative costs of 16.7% (varying between 30% for individual policies to 12.5% for large group policies).  Yet these figures are inflated.  If we exclude taxes and profits, as well as sales commissions, then the total administrative costs decrease to 8.9% overall and 8.0% for large group policies.  I do not agree that commissions should be deducted from this this figure but profits and taxes certainly should.  Medicare does not pay taxes and does not make a profit so any fair comparison should exclude these items.  Further, tax revenue from insurance companies adds to the public’s coffers; profits should be seen as a cost of capital. 

Even with Litow’s manipulation of the numbers, Medicare seems like a better deal.  Let’s see why:

• Economies of scale: There are large economies of scale in the insurance business; however ,large insurance companies can certainly replicate the majority of the scale economies Medicare enjoys.
• Cost of Capital: Medicare incorrectly counts its cost of capital as 0.  The true cost would take into account the direct cost of hiring IRS workers to collect the taxes which pay for Medicare as well as taking into account the distortionary effects of income taxation on workers labor supply decisions.  For the private sector, the costs of capital is transparent: it is simply the interest rate. 
• Demographics: Medicare serves the elderly population and thus has a high cost per enrollee.  In 2003, the average medical cost for Medicare was $6,600 per person per year, while the same figure for private insurance was $2,700.  Thus, if public and private health insurance had the same administrative cost per person, Medicare would still be seen as ‘more efficient’ since Medicare’s administrative cost ratio would be less than half the size of the private insurance’s cost ratio.

Finally, we need to realize that administrative costs are like people: some are good, and some are bad.  What if a private insurance company raised its administrative costs by 1% , but was able to reduce fraudulent claims by 10% and reduce the premium charged to customers by 8%.  This is an example of how an increase in the administrative cost ratio can add value.  It is likely that private companies try to avoid paying for unnecessary medical treatment and are more vigilant to detect fraudulent claims then Medicare. 

UNION THUGS EATING THEIR OWN

The Tactics of intimidation used by SEIU Thugs has taken a turn.  The usual Tactics used by SEIU normally range from Beatings in Parking lots to Cussing out Moms in Town Halls but this time they changed it up.  Instead of throwing punches and verbal abuse SEIU thugs are now throwing Water Bottles and Eggs.

Several Days ago in San Francisco, SEIU members pelted Teachers, from the United Teachers Union of Los Angeles, as they tried to enter  an Event that honored NUHW. 

One of the Vicitims of the Egg attack was a Vice President from the Teachers Union, according to an Article on Beyond Chron.org.

The several hundred SEIU Members where bused in to Stand in front of the Head Quarters of the Los Angles Teachers Union, where the event was held,  in an attempt to intimidate people from attending.  When that Failed, SEIU Members began to lob Eggs and Water bottles at those entering.  Several Members from the Union, UNITE HERE, were also assaulted with Eggs and some claimed to have even been “Roughed Up”. 

The Dispute between NUHW and SEIU began when SEIU Presidnet, Andy Stern, Took UHW into Trusteeship after the members refused to follow Stern’s Orders and Split their Local in Two.   Because of this, UHW successfully seperated themselves from SEIU and Formed NUHW.

This may be the First indication that SEIU is on the Decline as more and more Unions and community organizations support the efforts of NUWH and their separation from the Union Megalith SEIU.

But what should be concerning to everyone, is that if Andy Stern is willing to do this to Other Union Members, imagine what Advice he is Giving to the President, on how to deal with People like the Tea Party, during his 22 Visits to the White House.

If he will “Eat his Own” for the sake of Gaining Power, then there is nothing that SEIU will not do.

To Read the Articles Pertaining to this Posting Go To:

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2009/11/nuhw-supporters-brave-eggs-bottles-los-angeles

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/BREAKING_SEIU_Throws_Eggs_at_NUHW_Supporters_in_Los_Angeles_7568.html

FROM PURPLE PEOPLE BEATERS BLOG

WHERE ARE YOU COLDWARNING?

SO WHERE ARE THOSE  liberal sheep that attacked conservative blogs this summer? where are all the global warming nuts now? where are they with their doctored tables and charts? no more quoting stats no more claiming unity unless its unity to spread lies. this will set the scientific community back 100 years. no one will take anything they say seriously no one will look at their charts with awe anymore. not just climatologists all scientists will be looked at with dubious disdain. was it worth it? was it?

OH WHERE OH WHERE HAVE THE NITWITS GONE

Media Missing the Plot on ‘Climate Gate’: It’s the Fraud, Stupid!by Christopher C. Horner
To the credit of the New York Times, Associated Press and Washington Post — reliable outlets for promoting global warming alarmism, protecting those who craft it and marginalizing those who point out its weaknesses and excesses — they all ran stories in the past 48 hours addressing the documents somehow obtained from the computers of a UK university serving as the warming movement and industry’s Mother Ship. My great surprise is even greater because these outlets have demonstrated a pattern of only giving ink to embarrassing controversies after a week or so, once it appears that damage control is needed and the alarmists have gotten their story straight.

I documented this pattern in a book published one year ago this month, subtly titled “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.” The title says it all, including all that surely seems to have been affirmed by the documents posted, by “anonymous” on a Russian server and otherwise covering his tracks.

Since this affirms, not “reveals”, the scandal that so many have been explaining is the global warming industry, it also raises the issue of how can each of these media outlets still miss the plot? Well, they are doing so in a fashion so uniform, and in the face of such outrageous exposition of the scandal that is unfolding, that I conclude it is nonetheless yet another exercise in damage-control.

The emails, let alone the data still being combed over by the pointy-heads, plainly affirm everything I wrote, in detail, about the scams being run by the booming industry of Big Academia and Big Science suckling at the teat of the “global warming” panic they are also fostering.

I was by no means without company, but I did name and go into detail about all of the stars of this alleged correspondence, and how they are engaging in everything these documents appear to confirm. None of them lawyered up to challenge what I wrote. I suspect, however, that each and every one has retained counsel in the past few days, and not because they plan on suing anyone. They — rightly in my opinion — fear legal consequence as a result of what has been revealed. And not for writing nasty emails about people who disagree with them.

Yet the media have defined the story down, focusing on sideshow issues such as conspiring or hateful commentary about those who cause problems for the authors. Think of the wisdom of that approach: whose emails do not somewhere include such things? Surely this will also be proved with more emails stolen from skeptics’ computers, dispatching the story with an “everybody does it” narrative that entirely elides the meaning of the far more important admissions. Heck, Greenpeace used to peddle emails taken from my trash to the press, and got the Guardian and others to excerpt sections, out of context, with phony context padded around them and without calling me before running their “story”. That’s how they roll. They’ve no room for outrage. Still, that poses no resemblance to what’s going on now.

How it is possible that these media outlets’ regular “issue” reporters do not recognize the import of the fraud admitted to in the emails which, broadly, have been acknowledged as genuine?

Incidentally, also note how all of these outlets emphasize as fact, up front, that these documents, codes, data and emails are the product of “hackers” (this has grown from “a hacker” when the story first ran, though no outlet has offered any explanation for that change let alone evidence of the hacking). They simply accept that the University of East Anglia’s computers were hacked, on the word of people who are shown by what was hacked to be liars and charlatans and who have an interest in making the story be something other than the substance of the material.

I do not know if the computers were hacked. I do know that there is just as much reason to suspect that the documents were posted by someone on the inside who still possesses a conscience, a “whistleblower”. Remember that this incident occurred after the most recent and audacious twist in the university’s Climatic Research Unit refusal of access to basic raw data and other material necessary to validate their claims serving as the basis for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol (and Kyoto II), “cap-and-trade”, and so on. This was a four-year campaign to hide material — a campaign whose tactics were also admitted to in the alleged emails now made public.

After running out of excuses, in September CRU’s Phil Jones simply claimed that he had lost the data so, sorry, no, no one can check it. Implausible beyond comprehension. And if the emails are real and any indication of the way this group operates, deeply dishonest.

Soon thereafter someone went and downloaded material that, again if real, says enough, you are scandalizing and perverting “science”. This shall stop. Someone took it upon themselves to enforce a UK freedom of information act that its targets allegedly and apparently admit to subverting.

No matter how many stories seek to distract you with the shiny objects of prurient dialogue between sniveling, petulant and nasty global warming alarmists, that isn’t the story. The story is the exposition . Not the revelation, in fact, but merely the revelation of their affirmation of it.

I’m told by a cable news producer that, across the board, the green pressure groups, the supposedly “Concerned Scientists” (the even have a Union!), all of them are refusing to come out and speak to the issue. That could be because they understand that what is out is described by the material’s anonymous source as “a random sample.” There could be many more shoes to drop. Why hitch your organization further to the anchor threatening to sink a $7 billion per year (that’s just federal taxpayer-funding) industry? Live to fight another day. There will always be a new Man-as-agent-of-doom theory attracting college kids, Statists and wealthy elites.

This cannot simply be a three-day story about titillating emails. The edge seems to have been turned up on information proving everything we have been saying, often in great detail if to no media interest, for years. Kyoto II, “cap-and-trade” and EPA must all be stayed, at least so far as the U.S. is concerned, until the truth is outed and admitted to.

OBAMA TRANSPERANCY AS BLACK AS HIS SKIN

THIS SUMS UP THE “SETTLED” SCIENCE

The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is “value added” by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny. 

why would the “PUBLIC”  need to file freedom of information act lawsuits to acquire publicly funded science reports? why would the consensus of scientists refuse to show their information? why shouldnt it be scrutinised? this whole thing smells of a dead fish.

BOW BEFOR YOUR WHITE MASTERS

OOOPS I MEAN YOUR ASIAN MASTERS

THIS GUY IS A JOKE AND ITS JUST NOT FUNNY ANYMORE

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/11/obama-emperor-akihito-japan.html

QUICKEST EXECUTION EVER?

By DENA POTTER Associated Press Writer JARRATT, Va. (AP) – John Allen Muhammad stepped foot into Virginia’s death chamber and within seconds was lying on a gurney, tapping his left foot, his arms spread wide with a needle dug into each. “Mr. Muhammad, do you have any last words?” the warden asked the mastermind behind the D.C.-area sniper attacks that killed 10 in 2002. Muhammad, calm and stoic, was defiant to the end, refusing to utter any final words. The 48-year-old died by injection at 9:11 p.m. Tuesday as relatives of the victims watched, reliving the killing spree that terrorized the Washington, D.C., area for three weeks that October. Victims’ families sat behind glass, separated from the rest of the 27 witnesses, who were quiet, looking straight forward, intent on what was happening. “He died very peacefully, much more than most of his victims,” said Prince William County prosecutor Paul Ebert, who witnessed the execution at Greensville Correctional Center, south of Richmond. Muhammad was executed for killing Dean Harold Meyers, who was shot in the head at a Manassas gas station during the spree across Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Answers to why he and a teenage accomplice methodically hunted people going about their daily chores, why he chose his victims, including a middle schooler on his way to class, and how many there were went to the grave with him. Meyers’ brother, Bob Meyers, said watching the execution was sobering and “surreal.” He said other witnesses expressed a range of feelings, including some who were overcome with emotion. “I would have liked him at some point in the process to take responsibility, to show remorse,” Meyers said. “We didn’t get any of that tonight.” After the first of the three-drug lethal cocktail was administered, Muhammad blinked repeatedly and took about seven deep breaths. Within a minute, he was motionless. Nelson Rivera, whose wife, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, was gunned down as she vacuumed her van at a Maryland gas station, said that when he watched Muhammad’s chest moving for the last time, he was glad. “I feel better. I think I can breathe better,” he said. “I’m glad he’s gone because he’s not going to hurt anyone else.” J. Wyndal Gordon, one of Muhammad’s attorneys, described his client in his final hours as fearless and still insisting he was innocent. “He will die with dignity _ dignity to the point of defiance,” Gordon said before going inside to watch the execution. The terror ended on Oct. 24, 2002, when police captured Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo while they slept at a Maryland rest stop in a car they had outfitted for a shooter to perch in its trunk without being detected. Malvo, who was 17 when carrying out the attacks, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing Linda Franklin, a 47-year-old FBI analyst who was shot as she and her husband loaded supplies at a Home Depot in Falls Church, Va. The men also were suspected of fatal shootings in other states, including Louisiana, Alabama and Arizona. The U.S. Supreme Court turned down Muhammad’s final appeal Monday, and Gov. Timothy M. Kaine denied clemency Tuesday. Muhammad’s attorneys had asked Kaine to commute his sentence to life in prison because they said Muhammad was severely mentally ill. “I think crimes that are this horrible, you just can’t understand them, you can’t explain them,” said Kaine, a Democrat known for carefully considering death penalty cases. A small group of death penalty opponents gathered on a grassy area near the prison and had a sign reading, “We remember the victims, but not with more killing.” Muhammad was born John Allen Williams and changed his name after converting to Islam. He had been in and out of the military since he graduated from high school in Louisiana and entered the National Guard. He joined the Army in 1985. He did not take special sniper training but earned an expert rating in the M-16 rifle _ the military cousin of the .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle used in the D.C. shootings. The motive for the attacks remains murky. Malvo said Muhammad wanted to extort $10 million from the government to set up a camp in Canada where homeless children would be trained as terrorists. Muhammad’s ex-wife said she believes they were a smoke screen for his plan to kill her and regain custody of their three children. Sonia Hollingsworth-Wills, the mother of Conrad Johnson, the last man slain that October, sat in the back seat of a car outside the prison before the execution, which she chose not to witness. But she said she wanted to be there and was counting the minutes until Muhammad’s death.

http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=25&sid=1763813

IM OPPOSED TO THE DEATH penalty i think it means more to keep people like this in a cage for as long as they hold out. was this the fatest execution ever? ive heard that in appeals alone it will take a state 20 years to execute a person why so fast in this case?

HELP A DYING CHILD OUT

Please read the following and help out: My friend’s facebook friend has a 5yr old son Noah. He is in the last stages of a 2 1/2yr battle with neuroblastoma cancer. The family is celebrating Xmas next week, & Noah’s request is to get lots of Christmas cards. His favorites are angels. Please send cards to: Noah Biorkman 1141 Fountianview Circle South Lyon, MI 48178 USA (please feel free to repost this and help the kid out) How often do we get to do so much for so very little. Please help me give joy to a sick little boy.

RECEIVED THIS FROM A FELLOW BLOGGER NO MONEY ASKED FOR JUST A CARD