AlchemyToday

From Baltimore’s fireworks show last night.

Of course the plural of anecdote isn’t really data, but that won’t stop Mark Steyn from spinning the tragic death of a cancer patient in the UK into an indictment of public health care:

When we quote stories like these at NRO, we get a lot of e-mail saying these are just “anecdotes”. And yes, if you look on yourself as being part of a government health system of millions of people, getting a bedsore and dying in hideous pain is no big deal in the scheme of things. But I look on myself as being part of the Mark Steyn health system. So if I get a bedsore and die, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a 100% systemic failure. The difference between government health care and a private system is that, under the latter, you’re free to say, “This dump’s filthy. I’m going to the state-of-the-art joint five miles up the road.” You may have to get out your checkbook, but ultimately the decisions are yours.

The problem is that there actually is data to look at here, gathered by the OECD.  And while I realize Steyn’s tongue is in his cheek, bedsores aren’t just a rare problem in the UK or in the United States.  Thousands of patients die in the United States each year from this almost entirely preventable problem.

In fact, the rate of death from medical misadventures (including bedsores) is 40% higher in the United States than the UK.  It’s higher than every OECD country except Australia, Austria, Greece, and Iceland (I would guess that Italy, Portugal, and Turkey might also compete here, but they don’t have 2004 data).

Beyond that, the “Mark Steyn health system” exists in the UK, too, and out-of-pocket, uninsured costs are lower or the same than in the United States.  As a related example, the cost of removal of a breast lump is £1,200 – £2,000 in the UK ($2,000-$3300) and over $3,000 at one American hospital.

Mark’s also fascinated with maggot therapy:

That’s not a bug, it’s a… No, wait: It’s a bug and a feature! The maggot is apparently the leech of 21st century government health care. But, as with everything else, there weren’t enough of them.

Boy, that sounds scary!  As it turns out, this therapy was developed at Johns Hopkins, reintroduced by the VA, and is used in hundreds of American hospitals (not just unleashed on patients on the government dole, either).  A gross and awesome video of maggot therapy below the fold.

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Today:

While the public clamors for an end to TARP, and while commercial banks of all sizes are trying to pay back their TARP money, the Treasury Department is now proposing to extend bailout funds to life-insurance companies, most of which are really in no danger of failing.

September 2008:

Why should a successful bank — whether large, medium, or small — give up ownership and allow pay-caps for executives?

Even the big guys like BofA and JPMorgan Chase are still solid banks. So is Goldman and Morgan Stanley. And Wells Fargo. And many others.

Bank of American Corporation (BAC)

No clue whether bailing out life insurance is a good idea or not.  Not having the slightest idea about how these things work, my preference would be to provide capital to limp where it’s cost effective and let them fail otherwise, but there’s no reason to take Kudlow at his word that these insurers aren’t hanging by a thread.

In the last few months I’ve had a number of brief, private exchanges with various conservatives who are regularly pilloried from the left for, variously, intellectual dishonesty, boorishness in the face of contradictory evidence, undue hysteria, and backwards morality.  I might’ve even thought those things or cast judgement based on where someone works.  Even though I always led with criticism, these have all been really honest, brief conversations.  As much or moreso as recent conversations with people on the left, frankly.  I’m not optimistic that this will continue once elections ramp up again (although my one run-in with amateur internet detectives wound up alright), but for the moment it’s quite nice.

The alternative budget introduced today by Rep. Paul Ryan somewhat suspiciously presents numbers as a fraction of GDP without specifying exactly what the GOP projection for GDP is under their budget and how it is calculated.  However, one can extrapolate the calculated GDP from the figures for net receipts in terms of dollars and fraction of GDP.  The result is surprising.

Under their favored budget, House Republicans project a GDP that precisely mirrors the intentionally conservative CBO estimate for the next decade.  One would presume that given that the Republican budget posits that its large corporate income tax cuts, capital gains cuts, and income tax cuts (almost all for the rich – 84% to the richest 20% of Americans) will stimulate economic growth, that they would project some improvement.

Furthermore, the Heritage Foundation simulation that underlies the GOP budget shows that even by their accounting, the Republican plan increases the deficit relative to the current law baseline.

By the logic used to sell the GOP budget (comparing deficit as a % of GDP to Obama’s budget), this budget is worse than doing nothing.  The GOP budget increases the deficit at the expense of cutting a huge chunk of government spending with no benefit to the broader economy over the projected time period.  The only benefit would be fewer taxes for most, although the savings for the majority would be smaller than their cut in the stimulus bill and many would see a tax increase.

Rich Lowry thinks this was Lieberman’s “killer line“:

Senator Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who can do great things for our country in the years ahead. But eloquence is no substitute for a record — not in these tough times.

The whole point of having a Democrat speak is to cross lines that’d be troubling for a Republican primetime speaker at a Republican convention.  Here’s and handful of far, far more cutting lines in Zell Miller’s 2004 speech:

Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.

And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.

…

I could go on and on and on — against the Patriot Missile that shot down Saddam Hussein’s scud missiles over Israel; against the Aegis air-defense cruiser; against the Strategic Defense Initiative; against the Trident missile, against, against, against.

This is the man who wants to be the commander in chief of our U.S. Armed Forces?

U.S. forces armed with what? Spit balls?

…

Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide.

John Kerry, who says he doesn’t like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security. That’s the most dangerous outsourcing of all. This politician wants to be leader of the free world. Free for how long?

On top of that, focusing on the language ignores the difference in tone.  If Republicans are happy with the speech that Lieberman gave as an attack on Obama, they don’t have any reason to be sad when they lose in 60 days.  Videos after the jump.

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Sarah Palin is gettings heaps of praise from the right and the left for giving birth to a child with Down Syndrome this April inspite of prenatal testing indicating the defect.  Unlike other possible birth defects, Down Syndrome isn’t something that tests predict will happen; the results are certain, and about 90% of pregancies are terminated when Down Syndrome is found.

This is a seriously prickly question for me, and presumably was for her as well.  As a 44-year-old woman, the chance that any child she delivers will have Down Sydrome is higher than one in twenty.  What are the moral considerations of bearing children at her age without considering abortion if Down Syndrome is detected?  Is the fact that she’d already had four children a mitigating factor?  Does it matter whether or not she was aware of the risks beforehand, or whether she considers contraception or surgically-induced sterility moral?

This isn’t a question about Palin, per se, but rather one that applies to a relatively narrow (but large) group of women to who have access to (and use) prenatal testing, oppose abortion in cases of severe birth defects (and follow through on that opposition when it applies to themselves), are at least a bit older than 40 (when the chance of trisomy 21 rapidly balloons from well under 1% to nearly 10%), and have already had healthy children recently.  It’s inevitably got to be a tortured decision to make, and one that implies a huge amount of future personal sacrifice for yourself and your family, but it doesn’t strike me as something that ought to be universally lauded despite the bravery involved without considering the moral implications of her choice.