MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

In Government-Regulated Healthcare, There Is No Competition Like No Competition

Posted by M. C. on November 9, 2022

You thought you could attract custom by charging patients and private insurance companies more fairly, but you just never counted on how much money would have to go to administrators, lawyers, actuaries, and other bureaucrats just to make sure that you were fully in compliance with all the reams and reams of government regulations your hospital had to conform to

Starting thirty years ago I have been told more than once, if the government is involved it costs 3 times more.

https://mises.org/wire/government-regulated-healthcare-there-no-competition-no-competition

Antony Sammeroff

Imagine you are a young, idealistic doctor. After some years in clinical practice at a private hospital you tire of the fact that more of your time is spent filling out forms and attending staff meeting than with your patients. You went to medical school all bright eyed with the dream of making a good living making a difference. You ran the gauntlet during your residency, sometimes working ninety-hour weeks, skipping meals and even showers so you would have more free time to study, because you believed in the end it would all be worth it.

In some ways it is, there are times you love your job—but you are also disillusioned by the fact that you barely get time to really know your patients and give them the quality of care you think could really help them thrive. Speaking to some of your former classmates you notice you’re not the only one feeling the way. You meet a few other idealists at continuing medical education conferences and together, you decide you want to branch out together and create your own little hospital, employing staff that agree with your ethos and want to offer the quality of care that patients deserve. You dream that perhaps your little project with serve as a model to the world of how healthcare can be done, and people will start copying it.

After taking some months off work to plan your little benevolent social enterprise, you and your cofounders discover that opening a new hospital is harder than you thought it would be. For one thing, you find out that in your state (as in most states) if you want to open a hospital you are obligated to obtain a “certificate of need” from the government to open a hospital. You have to present yourself before an official board and prove that your community “needs” another hospital, and that you are willing and able to fund it all by yourself.

As if that wasn’t bad enough—the people on the board include senior administrators from already existing hospitals in the area, and they want the competition from you about as much as a gunshot to the head! You think to yourself: “Imagine I wanted to open up a café, but I needed permission from the local Starbucks and Tim Horton’s!”

In addition to that, Obamacare, passed in 2010, prevents government payments to any hospitals owned by doctors! This puts you at another unfair advantage compared to the existing commercial hospitals in your area who are taking Medicare and Medicaid patients. You are willing to persist though, because you’re an idealist, and you’re starting to think it might not be too great taking government money anyway as this often leads to overtreatment, corruption, and strings attached.

You had the great idea of training your own assistant-technicians on the site to take runaway tasks off the hands of your physicians and save patients money. You soon discovered that you weren’t allowed to train anyone to do anything unless they were fully licensed and qualified to do it at college already—even if these little tasks would only really take a few weeks or months of training.

So there goes your idea of avoiding excessive staff meetings and form filling. You and your specialized colleagues (who also must run the damn hospital) want to tend to severe cases that you were highly trained for. But you are forced to spend lots of time attending to patients with relatively trivial complaints, because no one else is allowed to do it. (See the chapter Getting Schooled for full details.)

You dreamed of offering mentorship programs to college graduates, thinking employing young doctors would keep staff costs down for patients and help graduates get a good start, but because there are so few medical schools due to government restrictions on building them, you found it extremely hard to compete with more commercial hospitals when it came to recruiting new talent. And because medical education is so expensive, and all these graduates were six figures in debt, they expected to be paid handsomely from the off so they could get their finances back in the black as quickly as possible.

You thought you could attract custom by charging patients and private insurance companies more fairly, but you just never counted on how much money would have to go to administrators, lawyers, actuaries, and other bureaucrats just to make sure that you were fully in compliance with all the reams and reams of government regulations your hospital had to conform to. From what you could tell, the vast majority of these did less than nothing to protect patients or improve the quality of care they received.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

UK’s NHS Hires US ‘Spy-Tech’ Firm Palantir To Extract Patient Data Without Patient Consent

Posted by M. C. on November 9, 2022

See this

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

WEDNESDAY, NOV 09, 2022 – 02:00 AM

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

This time it is patient data from UK hospitals that is up for grabs. And patients will have no opt-out option. In fact, without even consulting patients, NHS England has instructed NHS Digital — which will soon be merged with NHS England as part of the UK’s governments accelerated reforms to the NHS’ “tech agenda” — to gather patient data from NHS hospitals and extract it to its data platform, which is based on Palantir’s Foundry enterprise data management platform.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/uks-nhs-hires-us-spy-tech-firm-palantir-extract-patient-data-without-patient-consent

Palantir, with intimate ties to defense, intelligence and security industries around the world, is set to play an even larger role in the UK’s crisis-ridden National Health System (NHS).

Last summer, as readers may recall, executives at NHS England — the non-departmental government body that runs the National Health Service in England — came up with an ingenious plan to digitally scrape the general practice data of up to 55 million patients and share it with any private third parties willing to pay for it. NHS England allowed patients to opt out of the scheme; they just didn’t bother telling them about it until three weeks before the deadline, presumably because if they had, millions of patients would have opted out.

When the FT finally broke the story, a scandal erupted. NHS England officials responded by shelving the scheme, saying they needed to focus on reaching out to patients and reassuring them their data is safe. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, they have waited for the scandal to die down before embarking on an even more egregious scheme.

This time it is patient data from UK hospitals that is up for grabs. And patients will have no opt-out option. In fact, without even consulting patients, NHS England has instructed NHS Digital — which will soon be merged with NHS England as part of the UK’s governments accelerated reforms to the NHS’ “tech agenda” — to gather patient data from NHS hospitals and extract it to its data platform, which is based on Palantir’s Foundry enterprise data management platform.

The pretext for taking such a step is that researching and analyzing patients’ hospital data will help the NHS better understand and tackle the crisis in treatment waiting times resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. But the result will be yet more private-sector involvement in essential NHS processes. And in this case, the company being involved in those processes is one of the darkest in the tech universe.

A Highly Coveted Prize

The NHS is the world’s seventh largest employer. And it is home to one of the richest repositories of patient data on the planet. “One of the great requirements for health tech is a single health database,” Damindu Jayaweera, head of technology research at UK investment bank Peel Hunt told Investors’ Chronicle. “There are only two places as far as I know that digitise the data of the whole population from birth to death… China and the UK.”

As the FT reported earlier this year, Palantir aspires to become the underlying data operating system for the NHS. To that end, it has already lured two senior NHS managers to its executive suites, including the former chief of artificial intelligence. It now has its sights set on the ultimate prize: a five-year, £360 million contract to manage the personal health data of millions of patients.

Palantir’s latest encroachment into NHS operations came to light thanks to the publication of board paper’s just hours before NHS Digital’s latest board meeting, on November 1. Those papers no longer seem to be accessible so I am relying on a report published on Friday 4 by The Register, a British technology news website, as well as a heavily detailed twitter thread by Phil Booth of MedConfidential, a group campaigning for confidentiality and consent in health and social care.

According to Booth, on page 158 of the board papers NHS England instructs NHS Digital to use Palantir Tech’s Foundry platform to “collect patient-level identifiable [hospital] data pertaining to admission, inpatient, discharge and outpatient activity from acute care settings on a daily basis.”

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

The Unintended Consequences of Unintended Consequences

Posted by M. C. on November 9, 2022

Any system that serves the interests of the few by choking off adaptability and the dynamisms of a free-for-all churn lacks the tools needed to avoid systemic collapse. By enabling elites to organize the nation to serve their personal interests, America has been stripped of the dynamics needed to adapt. Without these dynamics, collapse is the only possible outcome.

By Charles Hugh Smith

https://www.oftwominds.com/blognov22/imperial-corruption11-22.html

OfTwoMinds.com

Decades of central bank distortions and regulatory / market-share capture by cartels and monopolies have completely gutted “markets,” destroying their self-correcting dynamics.

Unintended consequences introduce unexpected problems that may not have easy solutions. An entirely different set of problems are unleashed as unintended consequences have their own unintended consequences. This is the problem with complex emergent systems such as economies, societies and global supply chains: the system’s feedback, leverage points and phase-change thresholds are not necessarily visible or predictable, yet these dynamics have the potential to cascade small failures into systemic collapse.

The unintended consequences of unintended consequences are called second-order effects: consequences have their own consequences.

So for example, you juice your economy with massive stimulus after a lockdown that upended consumers and global supply chains, crushing both demand and supply, and suddenly you have rip-roaring inflation as demand comes back while supply chains remain tangled.

Shifting critical industrial production to frenemies so corporations could maximize profits while reducing the quality of goods and services seemed like a good idea until the potential costs of that dependence on frenemies become apparent.

Assuming oil and natural gas would always be in abundance made sense when they were abundant, but geopolitical forces kicked that assumption into the gutter. All the reassuring economic stories we told ourselves–energy is only 3.5% of the economy and the household spending budget, so cost really doesn’t matter–fall off the cliff when availability and supply become the paramount issues setting price.

That 3.5% loses meaning when there’s not enough to supply demand and somebody loses the game of musical chairs.

Then there’s the fantasy that monetary policy imposed by central banks control inflation. The inconvenient reality is central bank monetary policy is akin to building sand castles on the beach: when the tide is ebbing, the castles look magnificent. When the tide is rising, the sand castles are quickly washed away.

Inflation is actually a consequence of much larger forces that central banks don’t control: demographics (labor supply), social changes (quiet quitting, laying flat, let it rot), supply of essential minerals/materials, flows of private-sector capital, and most profoundly, the real-world productivity of capital, labor and state policies.

The tide of inflation has reversed and is now rising. This tide is gradual and will temporarily be reversed by the gluts of supply that inevitably follow artificial scarcities and the deflationary impact of credit-asset bubbles popping. But these reversals will be temporary and misleading: inflation has reversed for structural reasons unrelated to credit-asset bubbles and temporary gluts.

Read the Whole Article

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

“Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You…”

Posted by M. C. on November 9, 2022

We’re entering an era in which some of the world’s most prominent countries will be increasing their migration controls. Even countries that are very free when allowing new residents in, are already passing legislation that will prevent born citizens from leaving.

By Jeff Thomas
International Man

“Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You…”

In his inaugural address in 1961, President John Kennedy gave a stirring speech in which he famously stated, “And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

He then went on to say, “Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.”

Nonsense.

John Kennedy was by most measures, one of the better US presidents. But he did believe in the concept that the role of the people of a country should be to serve their country and to sacrifice themselves to it.

Again… nonsense.

Let’s put this in perspective.

In seeking employment, you don’t seek a particular job because your primary concern is that, in that job, you can “make a difference.” This is a nice thought, but it’s not why you seek a job. You seek it because it will provide you with what you’re after for yourself – possibly a good salary, possibly interesting work, possibly fringe benefits, etc.

You certainly don’t seek a particular job because they need you to sacrifice for them.

For their part, potential employers generally try to provide good working conditions, good salaries and benefits in order to attract the best people to want to work for them.

It’s the same when you seek to buy products. Advertisers appeal to your desires, hoping to convince you to buy their widget, rather than a competitor’s widget. Never do they say, “We want you to buy our product because you have an obligation to provide income for us.” You make your choice solely on whether that product appeals to you.

And in seeking a place to live, you might look for a community that’s relatively safe, or has good schools, or has good infrastructure. You don’t choose a community because it needs you more than another town or city.

Communities try to put on their best face to attract better residents. They most certainly do not say, “Move here so that you can serve us.” That would discourage potential residents, not encourage them.

And yet, for millennia, governments have taken the odd stance that you should serve them – to be “patriotic.” The premise is that since, by an accident of birth, you were born in a particular country, you therefore owe dedication and sacrifice to that county.

Throughout your life, it’s suggested to you that you should not only willingly sacrifice yourself to your country of birth; you should even take pride in paying whatever tax they burden you with.

The supreme example of this is found in countries that wage war against each other. At such times they go all out to remind you that you should take pride in becoming cannon fodder. As stated by the Roman poet Horace, “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.” (Sweet and fitting it is, to die for one’s country.)

Once again… nonsense.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

PA. The New California

Posted by M. C. on November 9, 2022

Shapiro, who is currently state Attorney General, will likely keep many of the policies Wolf has championed such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade program that consumers are starting to notice through their higher energy bills.

In the Senate races, the closely watched contest in Pennsylvania has been called by the Associated Press for Democrat John Fetterman, though Republican Mehmet Oz hasn’t conceded. Due to several election rule controversies in the state, the results may still get challenged in court.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/republicans-see-gains-midterms-red-wave-hopes-fade-democrats-outperform

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Hey Incoming Congress: Try These Three Simple Tricks for a Successful Start – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 8, 2022

First, Republican Party Leadership must vow to end the massive money spigot opened by the last Congress for Ukraine.

Second, Republicans can signal that they will de-fund the Department of Homeland Security.

Finally, the third task an incoming Republican House and Senate can take is maybe the easiest one: pass the Audit the Fed bill.

Fat chance, especially with warparty water carriers Kelly and Casey.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/november/07/hey-incoming-congress-try-these-three-simple-tricks-for-a-successful-start/

Tomorrow is election day and polls suggest that Americans are going to overturn Democratic Party control of the House and Senate. Politicians and the media always say that this is the most important election ever, but all too often once the voting is over and the smoke has cleared, not much changes. The Washington uni-party takes over and makes sure the status quo is maintained.

It doesn’t have to be this way. An incoming Republican House and Senate, for example, could take early steps to reassure their supporters that their votes weren’t wasted on Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum in Washington. Here are three suggestions to get things off to a good start.

First, Republican Party Leadership must vow to end the massive money spigot opened by the last Congress for Ukraine. By some estimates some $60 billion dollars have been authorized for Ukraine to fight a proxy war between the US/NATO and Russia.

This would be a move strongly supported by the Republican base. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed that only 37 percent of Republicans support sending more US aid to Ukraine. Republican firebrand Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene said recently that under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. While I am skeptical that her party leadership would support such a move, it’s clear Republican voters would.

Plus, ending this proxy war would carry with it the benefit of reducing the dangerously high possibility of global nuclear war. That’s not a bad trade-off.

Second, Republicans can signal that they will de-fund the Department of Homeland Security. At the time this monstrosity was created, I said this on the House Floor:

“The list of dangerous and unconstitutional powers granted to the new Homeland Security department is lengthy. Warrantless searches, forced vaccinations of whole communities, federal neighborhood snitch programs, federal information databases, and a sinister new ‘Information Awareness Office’ at the Pentagon that uses military intelligence to spy on domestic citizens are just a few of the troubling aspects of the new legislation.”

Unfortunately all of these things came to pass…and more. As we recently learned, the DHS has been colluding with social media companies to try and prevent Americans from being able to say or post opinions the government doesn’t want others to hear.

They promised that a Department of Homeland Security would keep us safer, but there is nothing that makes us less safe than the destruction of our Constitution.

Finally, the third task an incoming Republican House and Senate can take is maybe the easiest one: pass the Audit the Fed bill. Ten years ago the US House voted in a bipartisan manner to pass my Audit the Fed legislation only to see it stall in the Senate. With Republican control of both houses of Congress there is no reason a broadly-supported bill to open the books at the Federal Reserve cannot find its way to President Biden’s desk. We all support transparency, right?

Inflation is out of control and causing real harm to the American middle class. The Biden Administration seems determined to lead us to a potentially life-ending war with Russia. The Department of Homeland Security has turned into a weapon mobilized against the American people and our Constitution.

A Republican-controlled House and Senate can actually do something to fix these problems and thus make us more safe and more free. Will they?

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Remembering Daniel Webster This Election Day | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on November 8, 2022

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/remembering-daniel-webster-this-election-day/

by Dan McKnight

daniel webster

Tomorrow is Election Day.

There’s going to be a lot of candidates and a lot parties on the ballot—Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, etc.

Someday, when I enter the booth in my local polling station to pull that lever of democracy, I hope to see the words Peace Party next to a candidate’s name.

That’s the label Daniel Webster campaigned under in 1814.

His country was in a war he thought was senseless. His neighbors felt unheard in Washington DC, and his home was becoming impoverished under the heavy costs of war.

So when he ran for re-election to the U.S. House, he wanted everyone to know where he stood, fixed and immovable: Peace Party!

You can soak up a lot of wisdom studying Daniel Webster’s forty year career in U.S. politics.

This man of New England served as a congressman, a U.S. senator, and as Secretary of State under three presidents.

He believed in the United States Constitution as he understood it, and when he would argue in its defense on the Senate floor, audience members in the gallery would weep at the beauty of his words.

Odds are you’ve heard me quote Webster before, when he advised just after that 1814 election that, “It will be the solemn duty of the state governments to protect their own authority over their own militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power [by the federal government].”

That’s the logic behind our cornerstone piece of legislation, Defend the Guard.

After twenty years of the Global War on Terror, where multiple presidents have deployed our soldiers into more than half a dozen unconstitutional wars, it’s time for state governments to defend the integrity of their National Guard.

“It must be admitted to be the clear intent of the Constitution, that no foreign war should exist without the assent of Congress. This was meant as a restraint on the executive power,” Webster articulated in 1847.

He knew that no president of any party had a right “to go out of our limits, and declare war for a foreign occupation of what does not belong to us.”

When such action is committed by the executive, it’s done out of malice, ego, and the aggrandizement of personal power, because “no man is ignorant that the Constitution of the United States confers on Congress the power of making war.”

And the day that a president does foment war for his own agenda, involves his country in a permanent foreign occupation of lands not our own, and Congress proves unable or unwilling to stop this illegal war making, “then the whole balance of the Constitution is overthrown, and all just restraint on the executive power, in a matter of the highest concern to the peace and happiness of the country, entirely destroyed.”

That’s the world we find ourselves in.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Are you truly a Self-Governor?

Posted by M. C. on November 8, 2022

Advocates For Self-Government | World’s Smallest Political Quiz

“Self-Government is the independent, voluntarily-coordinated action of peaceful, self-controlled individuals to address social problems, resolve conflicts, protect others, and make victims whole.”

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

It’s time to break up

Posted by M. C. on November 7, 2022

It’s difficult to know exactly when it happened, but not long ago many Americans suddenly looked around and discovered that they and their neighbors inhabited completely different moral universes.

Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, or teaching gender theory to children, or the usefulness or otherwise of the COVID restrictions, or a wide variety of other subjects, people on one side of the divide have exerted a moral imperialism over the other, refusing even to acknowledge that there can be another side on issues like these, and have instead tried to drive their opponents from polite society through intense social pressure and the outright suppression of dissident voices.

The same people who lecture us day and night about how we shouldn’t “impose our morality” on other people think absolutely nothing of demonizing half of America and imposing their ideas on other people’s children.

Scarcely anyone stops to ask: is this arrangement making us happy? Is it contributing to human flourishing?

To the contrary, it’s causing conflict, suspicion, anger, and frustration – and everyone knows it.

Yet for some reason we carry on, as if continuing down this path will somehow lead to a different result, even though any fool can see that things are only going to get worse.

The media, meanwhile, are happy to fan the flames of social conflict, but never urge us to consider the humane possibility of a world in which we simply don’t do this anymore.

My new eBook National Divorce, which I am giving away for free, offers a radical proposal: how about we just stop?

As I show in the book, there is nothing unconstitutional or “extremist” or unthinkable about national divorce.

What holds people back from considering it is a combination of status-quo bias and the superstitious reverence we’ve all been taught to have for “the Union.”

But as Thomas Jefferson correctly conceived of it, the Union is merely a means to an end. It is not an end in itself. Much less should it be treated as an object of religious reverence. If it does not promote liberty, then we should discard it and try something else.

Now, fair warning: the ideas you will encounter in this book are not to be found on the three-by-five card of allowable opinion. We are not even supposed to discuss the subject matter of this book, dear reader. Why, the New York Times hasn’t approved it for us!

But I’d say the time has come to steel our resolve and be willing to consider – radical though this may sound – ideas that the New York Times tells us are not allowed.

The very nature of totalitarianism involves the intoxicating temptation to create the perfect society through a combination of propaganda, centralized power, and the demonization of dissidents.

Against such a project we ought to set that couplet with which Michael Oakeshott concluded his essay on the Tower of Babel:

Who in fields Elysian would dwell
Do but extend the boundaries of Hell.

Your free copy awaits you:
 

http://www.NationalDivorce.com

Tom Woods

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

Walking Wide Awake into World War III | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on November 7, 2022

Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton agrees; “You call it sleepwalking but everybody’s wide awake. It’s just, they’re stupid.”

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/walking-wide-awake-into-world-war-iii/

by John Weeks

pexels victor freitas 865711

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with rising tensions between NATO and Russia, have drawn comparisons to the outbreak of World War I.

In 2014, back when the open hostilities in Ukraine really began, the journalist Eric Margolis said “We can stumble into a war with Russia. This reminds me of 1914 all over again.”

This “stumbling” of course refers to the “sleepwalking thesis of war” that is part of both popular and scholarly narratives of World War I.

The International Relations realist Stephen Walt warned “the West is sleepwalking into war in Ukraine” the day before Russia invaded. The World Health Organization (yes, that one) has warned the world could be sleepwalking into a nuclear war. And the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network is concerned the world might be “sleepwalking into nuclear Armageddon.”

Unfortunately, it’s much worse than that. The United States is marching wide awake toward general nuclear war.

Princeton University historian Stephen Kotkin has criticized the sleepwalking thesis of war as a comforting myth that remains “close to people’s hearts” to this day.

“Nobody ever sleepwalks into war,” he says.

Kotkin points out that the government and military archives of the Great Powers contain thousands of orders to move horses, hay, and weapons systems into place to prosecute the war years before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. The Great Powers also imposed military conscription to ensure they would have a wealth of young men to feed into the slaughter.

Kotkin says:

You go into the archives, and you see nothing but decisions being made towards war. And somehow this is known as sleepwalking towards war. There was no sleepwalking to World War I. There was only preparation for war. There was nothing but incessant preparation to war.

Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton agrees; “You call it sleepwalking but everybody’s wide awake. It’s just, they’re stupid.”

The stupidity continues.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »