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Carpe Diem with a post on how markets deal with medical care costs. This is a post that ought to be repeated every week.
… in health care markets where patients pay directly for all or most of their care, providers almost always compete on the basis of price and quality. Examples include:
Cosmetic surgery: Since it is rarely covered by insurance, patients pay out of pocket and are thus sensitive to prices; they can typically compare prices prior to surgery and pay a price that has been falling over time in real terms (see chart below). …
… In health care markets where third-party payers do not pay the bills, the behavior of providers and patients is radically different. In these markets, entrepreneurs compete for patients’ business by offering greater convenience, lower prices and innovative services unavailable in traditional clinical settings. What lesson can we learn from these examples of entrepreneurship in health care? The most important is that entrepreneurs can solve many of the health care problems that critics condemn. Public policy should encourage, not discourage, these efforts.
Spengler says Hamas is committing suicide by Israel.
A policeman’s nightmare is the prospective suicide who forces the constable to shoot in self-defense. No matter how justified the killing, others always will wonder whether the shooter had an opportunity to avoid a fatal outcome.
Peoples commit suicide as much as do individuals. The geopolitical cognate of “suicide by policeman” is Hamas’ attempted suicide by Israel. Israel’s objective is to eliminate Hamas rule. There are only two ways to do that: destroy Hamas’ international support, or make its rule in Gaza insupportable.
I hate to be the one to bring up the unpleasant things that no one else wants to talk about, but just what do you do when a substantial group of people would rather die on their feet than live on their knees? For Hamas, to live on one’s knees would be to accept a permanent Jewish presence in the historic land of Israel, an outcome which Hamas was formed to prevent in the first place. …
Samuel Huntington was recently mentioned in passing by Spengler and Steyn. David Warren devotes a column and helps us understand why our favorites were interested in the man.
… The Clash of Civilizations was in some ways a recapitulation and summation of Huntington’s life work. It argued that secular ideological conflict between the “Capitalist West” and “Communist East” had masked deeper conflicts between cultures and civilizations, and that these would re-emerge. He called particular attention to the Islamic realm, as a source of potential world-altering violence, and made his infamous, politically incorrect observation that “Islam has bloody borders” — not only with Israel, but wherever the Islamic realm comes in contact with non-Islamic realms, from West Africa to the Caucasus to the Philippines.
As I hinted above, Huntington was essentially a liberal, but one of the old-fashioned kind who insisted on wrestling with facts and realities, rather than drawing the happyface over them. He was predictably not merely chastised, but wilfully misrepresented and demonized, for calling attention to this problem, well before 9/11.
To people who think that human cultures are the transient product of purely material influences — to “social Darwinists” in the broadest sense of that term — evidence that they are not is deeply upsetting. And to those with a vested interest in the current doctrine of “multiculturalism,” the notion that we should examine a flaw in any civilization, other than our own, is deeply repugnant. …
Debra Saunders comments on the Eric Holder nomination in “Pardons ? Us.”
… A story in the Hartford Courant on Dec. 28, 2008, however, suggests that Holder has more than the Rich pardon to regret. Holder also will have to account for his role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists, most of them members of FALN, the Spanish acronym for Armed Forces of National Liberation, which staged some 130 bombings in the United States from 1974 to 1983.
Why did Clinton remit fines or commute the prison sentences of convicted terrorists? Cynics believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s novice run to represent New York in the U.S. Senate was a motivator. Clintonia denies it, although Hillary Clinton did meet with advocates for these self-styled political prisoners. The Courant story notes that four of the 16 pardonees were convicted for their role in a $7.2 million robbery of a West Hartford bank in 1983. Yet: “None of the four was pressed by the Justice Department to provide information on the whereabouts of the never-recovered money or three participants in the robbery, including Hartford native and inside man Victor M. Gerena. Such pressure is a common precondition for amnesty.”
What’s more, none of the 16 had applied for a pardon, because they refused to acknowledge U.S. authority. …
John Fund with some shorts on Burris and Reid.
Speaking of Reid, we go again with something from the Huffington Post.
I want to play poker with Harry Reid. Really I do.
Rather than call for a special election in Illinois to fill Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat, Reid sends a letter to Blago signed by everyone in the Democratic caucus asking him to step down. They assert that they will not seat anyone he appoints.
Harumph.
Blago wipes his ass with it and appoints Burris anyway. …
Knoxville paper says enjoy the gas prices now. Because next year they will start to move up again.
Times, UK’s Literary Supplement reviews a book on American’s in Stalin’s GULAG.
Mountainous Kolyma, only a few hundred miles west of the Bering Strait, is the coldest inhabited area on earth. During Stalin’s rule, some 2 million prisoners were sent there to mine the rich deposits of gold that lie beneath the rocky, frozen soil. In 1991, when researching a book about how Russians were coming to terms with the Stalin era, I travelled to the region to see some of the old camps of Kolyma, legendary as the most deadly part of the gulag, some of whose survivors I had interviewed. In a country beset by shortages of building materials, all of the hundreds of former prison camps accessible by truck had long since been stripped bare. The only ones still standing were those no longer reached by usable roads, and to see them you had to rent a helicopter. …
… No one knows exactly how many Soviet citizens met unnatural deaths during the quarter-century that Stalin wielded absolute power, but adding together those who were sentenced to death and shot, died in manmade famines, or were worked to death in gulag camps like these, authoritative estimates put the total at approximately 20 million. Like the other great horror show unfolding in German-occupied Europe in the same period, the Soviet story was one of mass deaths on an almost unimaginable scale. But, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets, in their first two decades in power, were partly sustained by great idealism on the part of people all over the world who were fervently hoping for a more just society. The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis is a poignant reminder of this. For his account of the Stalin years and their aftermath is seen through an unusual prism: the experience of tens of thousands of Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many of them, like the Russians they lived among, fell victim. Bits and pieces of this story have been told before, mainly in survivors’ memoirs. But to my knowledge this is the first comprehensive history, and a sad and fascinating one it is. …
Serious business now as the WSJ gives us background on how Natalie rescued Adrian Monk. If you are not a fan of that show on the USA Network, you might want to skip this.
… Ms. Howard’s casting was a variation on the understudy-to-the-rescue bit. Midway through the series’ third season, audience favorite Bitty Schram, who played Monk’s no-nonsense nurse/assistant Sharona, made a precipitous departure. Reportedly, there was a contract dispute. “At the time I was developing my own series — so when my manager said ‘get in on this,’ I resisted,” said Ms. Howard of the “Monk” audition. “I didn’t want to get sidetracked. But he said: ‘Go. It’s good show.’”
In fact, she’d never seen the series, a lapse that became clear when she read for the creative team. “I think it was the way I was pronouncing the names of the characters,” she recalled with a laugh. They said, ‘Take a DVD and look at some episodes.’ I watched and thought, ‘Wow, this is good.’ I’d never been on an hour show. I’d never played that sort of drama-comedy thing.”
She got the job as Monk’s aide-de-camp and partner in crime-solving. She also got a cool welcome from a certain number of fans who were no more fond of change than the troubled Adrian Monk himself. “People would say to me ‘I really didn’t want to like you,’” said Ms. Howard, who understands that they were protective of the show and protective of Monk. “He can be very mean to me. But if I say one little thing to him, people react. When you think about it, he’s very selfish. But he gets away with it.” …