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From a reader: Jonah, The following quote from your column was spot on: "This suggests that the White House still thinks it has a communication problem, and if only it dispels the cloud of “lies” belched up by the opposition, there will be nothing but blue skies ahead. Funny how the people who run the most sophisticated communication operation in the history of the presidency keep concluding that their difficulties stem from their inability to get their message out and never from what their message actually is." Marketers make this mistake all the time, which ensures that marketing consultants like...

Health Care Reform: A study by the British Patients Association tells the true story about socialized medicine in Britain. It's one of willful and woeful neglect of millions, missed diagnoses, and elderly patients left in pain.BD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For FailureWhile reading this disturbing analysis of the pitiful state of medical care in Britain in the Daily Telegraph, the Vincent Price horror classic "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" came to mind. Price portrayed a man who used bizarre methods to dispatch his victims. The abominable British National Health Service, based on this report, is only slightly better. The...

Health Systems: Health care in France is often held up as a model the U.S. might follow. Yet the French have their own problems that show there's no such thing as a free lunch — or a free doctor's visit.Call it the grass-is-greener syndrome. Advocates of national health care, acknowledging the flaws in ObamaCare yet despising the current U.S. system that has the best medicines, the best medical equipment and the shortest waiting lists, have turned their eyes lovingly to places like France. As City Journal contributing editor Guy Sorman notes, the French would also love to have the low-cost,...

Forget the recession and the "uninsured." Obama has bigger fish to fry.If we believe that Obama is trying to end the recession or fix the health-care system, we’ll miss his real agenda. The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt? Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence? Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious? But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of...

Reform: If Massachusetts is any guide, the passage of ObamaCare is almost certain to increase demand and worsen the shortage of doctors. Access to health care doesn't mean much if there's no doctor to provide it.Suppose health care reform passes and all are insured, by force or otherwise. The U.S. will be short 124,400 front-line physicians by 2025, according to the Association of Medical Colleges. That does not include the 15,585 new primary-care providers the administration plan is estimated to require. The Massachusetts reforms enacted in 2006, designed to provide universal coverage, provide an insight into what we might expect...

Medical Care: A leaked report shows that Vancouver's health authority is considering cutting thousands of surgeries to balance the budget. However organized, government-run health care inevitably leads to rationing.Defenders of ObamaCare continually point out that their plan is not like Canada's, that holding that country's system up as an example of impending medical doom is invalid. Canada's system is different. Instead of having a single national plan, Canada's national health insurance, a kind of public option, is composed of 13 interlocking provincial and territorial plans, all framed under the Canada Health Act. But based on a report leaked to the...

Health Care: The administration uses the "46 million uninsured" as a reason to nationalize health care. But the Census Bureau says about a fifth of those aren't U.S. citizens. In fact, a goodly number are illegal aliens.At a town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wis., last week, President Obama spoke of the need to cover the "46 million people who don't have health insurance." At another point he simply referred to the "46 million uninsured." At neither point did he refer to them as "Americans." That was wise, because not all them are, the Census Bureau says.According to "Income, Poverty,...

Reform: If the world's most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, is a shining example of British health care, how is it that others in the U.K. are repeatedly denied critical care and medicine?In commenting on efforts to overhaul American's health care system, we have tried to pull back the curtain and pay attention to those trying to clone the systems of Canada and Britain. But supporters of government-run health care frequently ignore some of the less-pleasant facts. Much has been made of this statement in one of our Aug. 3 editorials: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance...

President Obama for a third time has misstated the number of Americans who lack health insurance, this time doing it in an op-ed piece published Saturday by the New York Times. “I don’t have to explain to the nearly 46 million Americans who don’t have health insurance how important this is,” Obama said in the op-ed about his efforts to reform the American health care industry. In a July 22 primetime press conference, Obama falsely said there were “47 million Americans who have no health insurance.” At an August 11 town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., he falsely said “nearly...

The debate over health care reform — what constitutes it and what public opinion of such reform really is — has become more polarizing as the summer has gone on. Below are five key liberal talking points about health care “reform” and an accompanying dose of truth their peddlers so desperately need to hear.1. Republicans, who either believe the health care status quo is perfectly acceptable or are in the pockets of lobbyists who pay them to say so, are opposed to the very idea of reform and want to block any effort to fix our health care system. This...

A brilliant must see video - 9min - by Bill Whittle    More:Afterburner with Bill Whittle Beyond the Angry Mobs: Only You Can Bring Congress Back From the Abyss of Corruption Aug 10 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   9min BizarroBurner: Where Black is White and Racists Don't Get a Pass Aug 3 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   8min The Media, The Left and GOP Elitists vs. Sarah Palin: A Lesson on How to Destroy a Leader Jul 27 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   13min LunarPalooza Part 1: The Future of Space Exploration Is In Your Hands...

Suddenly, a RevolutionWhy public disagreement with the Obama administration rapidly became fury. The approval ratings on nearly every one of the President’s key policy initiatives—cap-and-trade, health care overhaul, government take over of industry and finance, deficit spending, stimulus—are already less than half of polled voters. Obama’s own popularity has fallen dramatically and hovers near fifty percent. A number of well-publicized town meetings have erupted in shouting, as administration and congressional representatives try, often in condescending fashion, to explain the Obama agenda. The Republicans—written off just a few weeks ago as an obsolete party headed for oblivion—are now often polling...

Rationing: In the recesses of the House health care "reform" bill is a provision for end-of-life counseling for seniors. Don't worry, granny, they're from the government and they're here to help.At a town hall meeting at AARP headquarters in Washington, D.C., President Obama was asked by a woman from North Carolina if it was true "that everyone that's Medicare age will be visited and told they have to decide how they wish to die." At first, the president joked that not enough government workers existed to ask the elderly how they wanted to die. The idea, he said, was to...

1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea? What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget? Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to "pay for itself," let alone get smaller rather than...

Health Reform: If Democrats in Washington think their health care reform with a public option is a good thing, why have they exempted themselves from it? Why isn't what's good for their constituents good for them?During ABC's June 24 infomercial for government-run health care broadcast from the White House, President Obama was asked if he and his family would abide by the restrictions and limitations that came with his proposed reforms. In what Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com called "Obama's Michael Dukakis moment," President Obama refused to make such a pledge and confessed that if "it's my family member, if it's...

July 23, 2009, 0:00 a.m. Big-Government MedicineEven after the financial meltdown, history is still running against collectivism. By Victor Davis Hanson Big new taxes. Big new spending. Big new government. This seems to be the proposed cure for the Wall Street–inspired recession. The government now runs major banks and companies, and plans to take control of the American health-care system. And it aims to tax energy use in the United States to reduce production of carbon dioxide. But wait! Recent financial rescue and stimulus plans, together with other new government initiatives, have already led to the largest dollar deficits...

It's crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It's even crazier to do it by August. Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, "to reinvent the nation's health care system".Let that sink in. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system. Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based...

Health Reform: A Senate health care bill will force Americans to buy health insurance whether they want it or not. Where the extra doctors to treat them will come from is anybody's guess...Debby Smith, the uninsured cancer patient hugged by President Obama, is also a Democratic operative. She is a member of Organizing For America, a group that is a project of the Democratic National Committee, and Smith was invited to the event by the White House itself...Acknowledging that many are uninsured because they choose to be, a Senate version of medical reform imposes fines of $1,000 for uninsured people...

Health Reform: A Senate health care bill will force Americans to buy health insurance whether they want it or not. Where the extra doctors to treat them will come from is anybody's guess.When even the venerable Helen Thomas gets upset at an Obama show and tell, you know the sales job for health care reform and other goodies is not going well. "I'm amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency," said Thomas, a view we share. Thomas accused the White House of "controlling the press" and said just about all Obama events are "prepackaged." White House press...

Health Reform: A critically ill premature baby is moved to a U.S hospital to get the treatment she couldn't get in the system we're told we should emulate. Cost-effective care? In Canada, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's — or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario, it seems.