Dawn Of Kaos

1. France Boom Boom!
2. Berlin Sqatting
3. Earth First Blockade
4. EnCana Pineline bombed
5. Issues with Health Care Overhaul

First off, I like to thank Karl for having me on here. The easiest way for the establishment to censor ideas is to simply not report on them and with ever increasing media consolidation it’s harder and harder for people to get not only news that matters to them but news that can make them smile. Let me give you an example of what I mean:

• In France the same workers in the Renalt Plant that several months ago barricaded the executive level staff within their board rooms until the board could find a way to save the plant jobs before imminent closure have now armed the plant with explosives and have threatened to detonate it unless international corporation gives each of the workers who’ve worked there €30,000.http://www.france24.com/en/20090712-new-fabris-factory-chatelrault-bankruptcy-worker-threat-explosion-france

• In Berlin Approximately 5000 protesters attempted to squat the abandoned Templehoff airport so it could be used for public works rather than being sold off to developers to be used for high priced yuppie fattening pens.
  Source:
  http://freundeskreis-videoclips.de/squat-tempelhof-die-aktion/

• In Oregon, Earth First! Defenders caused major economic damage to the Logging Industry in by blocking a logging road to Elliot State Forest, home to many endangered special for over a month.
  Source:
  http://forestdefensenow.blogspot.com/

• In BC an unpopular pipe line owned by EnCana, which has been accused of drilling in environmentally sensitive areas has been bombed for the sixth time since last October. The act has been called an act of terrorism by the British Police, but some locals are happy that the repeated bombing has brought media attention to the ecologically hazards of having pipelines so close to residential areas.
  Source:
  http://www.newser.com/archive-world-news/1G1-191625185/canada-fourth-canadian-gas-pipeline-bombed.html

This might give you a sense of the type of news that I read and the kind of things that I support. You don’t know me and I’d encourage you double check everything I say that you don’t believe. We will be setting up a website soon that will have links and references to all the stories I present on our show and you’ll also be able to comment there and join our ongoing discussion.

This week I’m to be discussing healthcare. A lot of other people are commenting about this plan or that plan, they talk about this provision or that provision and I think it’s good that people pick and discuss the finer points but this leaves out the discussions for larger discussions. This is not a discussion of the merits of a single-payer healthcare system.  Instead I’m interested in looking at the merits of either an entirely for-profit system led by market forces or an entirely social system in which the primary objective is not providing government insurance but government healthcare.

I don’t like laissez-faire capitalism – the idea that things get better because of some unseen omni-present market force. I think that Adam Smith was wrong when he said that all markets tend toward equilibrium. As we have all seen some markets tend toward excess, which gives rise to boom/bust cycles. Something Smith never talked about because using pure market principals it wouldn’t happen to the magnitude that it currently does.

But lets Pretend that what we have now is not pure capitalism. That it’s some perverted quasi-fascist system of economics, in which the government supports the constant inflation of prices by providing a bottomless coffer to pillage with the ever increasing costs of healthcare. If the government always pays the bill, then according to economic law they can afford to pay more…another example of where this can be seen, perhaps easier than with health case is with college loans, take this example:

Say college costs $1,000. This is a fair amount of money so the government agreed to pay 80%. You then only have to pay $200 so you can afford to go to pretty much whatever school you want. Schools know that you have an additional $800 that you would’ve spent otherwise and now they adjust their price to reflect the new cost of $1,500 – so you now way 700 out of pocket. This is still $300 less than the thousand you would have paid otherwise so you’re naturally quite happy with the arrangement and so is the country as they’re sending another bright student to classes. The college meanwhile is happiest of all because they get a 50% raise in total tuition collected and both sides are happy with the arrangement. Apply this situation to your school and ask yourself if the costs are going up at extraordinary rates but no one can find out why? As the cycle continues the schools now understand that this rise in cost of education is now assumed and is built into their balance sheets. With an unlimited supply of money in the form of government grants, student loans, and government subsidy the cost of school will never go down because the supply of money is infinite.

Now apply this theory to healthcare, where people tend to want to live and on their death bed will pay an awful lot of money to stay alive. Protective patents and copyrights prevent commercial competition for upwards of 50 to 75 years.  Imagine if you own the patent to some life saving drug, what could you sell it for? According to the laws of pricing that would be whatever people would pay, as we said earlier dying people pay a lot to live.
Worse yet is that a lot of the research done in this country for these life saving drugs and treatments are done at state universities, and state University hospitals, both of which are funded with public funds. Is it right that a private company does research using public funds (in the form of grants or using shared resources) and then gets to keep a price protective patent (which is a monopoly) and then extort the people who funded their research with the cure? That’s insanity; not capitalism.

In a true capital system if a drug company wanted to research a drug than they foot the bill totally and entirely for their own research centers using their own people. If this company developed a treatment that was marketable and they could bring it to market at the lowest cost than they would continue to make money, but if they brought the product to market and were greedy and their profit margin was excessive, or if they were inefficient, another company would soon enter the market and produce the object at a lower cost, which would be beneficial to consumers for obvious reasons. If the company was modest in profits and was able to keep a good hand on their supply and demand, attend to customers and provide good distribution to vendors there would be no need for competition. If they were negligent, competition would rise to take their market share.

A great example as to how totally private healthcare can work is LASIK eye surgery. When LASIK came on the market it was roughly $10,000 per eye and only a few doctors offered it. Private Insurance did not cover it so at first only the affluent or special cases received LASIK treatment. As the treatment proved successful, more doctors entered the practice, costs fell causing more demand. More demand created a larger market for more doctors to improve procedures which over time has now cut the cost to roughly $2500 per eye. It is still not covered by Private Insurance. In an age of rising healthcare costs the cost of LASIK eye surgery has been going down every year. The cost of plastic surgery is also going down at roughly the same rate. At the same time LASIK eye doctors and cosmetic surgeons are among the highest paid doctors in practice. This is partly because they have the ability to set their own rates and operate largely free of government intervention.

Interestingly enough because both of these practices are largely free of regulation there is less licensing required to operate such a practice and less insurance requirements. One obvious side effect is the horror stories of plastic surgery, but you have to ask are these stories worse than the horror stories of any other surgery aside from the fact that their appearance is very obvious? The repercussions of this being that people are very aware who does their plastic surgery and word-of-mouth and personal references are the primary means of advertising for these two niche health services. Do a bad job, and never work again. Good ol’ Capitolism.

Look Mom… No Bailouts.

In a pure capital system market forces control costs while promoting efficiency, however programs such as Medicare and Medicaid with their infinite money supplies guarantee ever increasing health costs. It would be cruel to change the system now and in doing so cut off the people who have paid into these social welfare programs their whole life that had no chance of being able to provide for them. There is no solution that I know of to convert Medicare and Medicaid to moneymaking institutions and still provide the same level of service. Nor is there a way to profitably insure the currently uninsured without government intervention or subsidy to private companies. Inherently these companies have a loyalty to their wall street investors and not the people they claim to serve.

This stems from their main objective being to provide profits and not actual health care. The two are intrinsically opposite directions. Healthcare insurance companies, when they write out a claim right that number in their balance sheet with red ink. This means that every claim they payout is lost money. In their eyes the fulfilling their part of the contract is a net loss. This role of corporations is not a bad thing so long as you recognize that it is the purpose of corporations – to make money. When we give these same profit hungry companies control over end-of-life services; this thirst for profits in a monopolistic government secured marketplace can only be abused no matter how good intentioned.

This is why I would argue that the goal of a national healthcare plan should be to provide healthcare to all Americans instead of mere insurance. Almost every other industrial country in the world offers some sort of basic healthcare safety net to their citizens. While the United States may have had the number one in healthcare system in the past keep in mind this was a system which has since crashed because it was nonsustainable.

A national healthcare plan with the objective provide healthcare to all citizens which drew from a common fund in which all citizens contributed along with other taxes (from booze, cigarettes, and fast food for instance) and other systems would be the only way to provide healthcare for everyone. This does not guarantee advanced treatment for everyone, but this would provide a basic level safety net for all citizens and perhaps even a go so far as to say all residents but that’s a conversation for another article.

Yes this system would cost a lot of money in the short run, but so does whatever they propose now and the net gains of this sort of a plan would undeniably be so immense it would more than offset the short-term costs. Liberating workers to maintain healthcare coverage in between jobs while alleviating the cost of healthcare from businesses and eliminating the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States would catapult the productivity of the American working class while benefiting everyone involved except for the health insurance companies, which under capitalistic doctrine would be bought up piece by piece by other companies. The intellectual property would be resold and the office space used for other now unknown startups.

The end result would be costly but more akin to the American K-12 education system, another system in need of reform but one we can all agree is largely successful in providing at least basic level of education and state indoctrination. Nothing’s perfect, but this assumes a basic level of service in return for what has already been years of payment for all of us.