Bob Hayes Online

Boom.

An interesting Craigslist ad for any of my Denver-area bloggy/journo friends.

http://denver.craigslist.org/wri/1502872237.html

Not to dump on Alas, but this is just priceless.

“We have to pretend that we’re not going to fund abortions, but secretly it’s OK, don’t worry, we are totally lying to convince these yokels here to vote with us today, we’ll distract them with shiny objects when it comes time to vote again later For Reals.”

Really? That’s really the strategy?

Good thing there aren’t any Internets or public watchdogs who would notice that kind of behavior, and make the people engaging in it look like sleazy hacks. Luckily all those Democratic congresscritters currently being duped are all illiterate, and will never comprehend (or indeed, learn about) this approach.

My friend Barry is verklempt that the health care debacle stampeding its way over the cliff may well disrupt abortion coverage for many American women.

Because many small employers are expected to switch to using the exchanges, this means that women who currently have abortion coverage through their small employer, will have their coverage replaced with insurance that doesn’t cover abortion.

You mean running health insurance through the government might MESS UP private choices privately negotiated, by putting the whole thing under the control of the political class?

CRA-A-AZY!

OK, so they don’t believe us.

Normally I would say “whatever”, but in this instance what “they” think has some bearing on what we’ll pay.

So I think that perhaps we need to show them a second time.

I was at the rally. I’ll be honest – I don’t think were two million of us there; I somewhat doubt there were one million.

But there were a hell of a lot more than 70,000 of us.

And now they want to PUT US IN JAIL if we don’t want to buy their insurance policies. Man, I wish I was an insurance salesman with that kind of firepower! “Ma’am, I suggest that you just sign the policy. I don’t want Officer Murphy over there to have to put you in the squad car, ma’am.”

Not just no. Hell no.

And so I think, this once, that we do actually have something to prove.

Forgive a personal aside. After the rally, my wife and I took the opportunity to visit Mount Vernon, to pay our respects to General Washington and his wife. Neither of us had been before and it was invigorating to see where Washington had been, where he had lived and led. Yet, both while we were there and after we left, I felt saddened to think of what Washington would think of us today. Perennially indebted, led by rogue after rogue, paying shattering taxes for a debilitating nanny state – what a spectacle we would present to that titan!

Yet, there are things that our Founding Father would approve of, too. One, I think, is that despite whatever initial astonishment he might feel at the prospect, in time he would be delighted to know that the liberty he established has reached the stage where an American of African descent could become its chief executive.

The other is that he would be delighted to know that as the Republic was threatened, there would continue to be brave men and women who would defend her, both on and off the battlefield.

I propose another March on Washington, to make unmistakable what has been mistaken. I propose that two million American patriots, taxpayers, lovers of freedom – at least two million – come to Washington this fall, to demonstrate once again – and this time irrefutably – that there are millions of us, that we are angry at what has been done and is being done to this our beloved country, and that we will not stand by and watch.

I propose that the March be held on December 15, 2009, the 218th anniversary of the day the Bill of Rights became law in these United States. (April 15 would be an even better day, but that’s too far in the future – we’ve got to put a stop to these people now.) October 31, 2009. It’s a Saturday, the last one before the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons take over the memespace. It’s Halloween – the best time to resist The Man. We can have one heck of a barbecue/picnic/protest march/rally in the daytime, and a heck of a party that night.

And I propose that there be a central registry for attendees to sign in, attest their name, address, and citizenship – you know, the things that are impossible for us to expect voters to do – so that whether the media decides to cover it or not, we’ll have proof that we were there.

I’d love to organize it (and will if drafted) but the people who facilitated the 9/12 rally would be the obvious choice. I’ll go. I’ll sell the contents of my garage if I have to to pay for it, but I’ll go.

We have a country to defend.

My wife and I ended up at the huge health care protest today. We hadn’t even known there was going to be an event (cut us some slack, it’s been busy) until I read in the paper (yes, I read a paper – I hope my 75 cents keeps the Post alive for another day or two) that the organizers of the event had a bomb threat yesterday. We decided to go, and it was very interesting.

Capitol police say about 1.5 million people were there; other estimates have topped 2 million. Honestly, that seems (very) high, but it’s notoriously difficult to get a good count when you’re in the middle of the crowd. I would have guessed a few hundred thousand – maybe a million on the high end. It was a very polite crowd, and from what I saw the (tiny) group of counterprotestors wasn’t abused. (OK, I did march along with them for a few moments shouting “I want free money! Free money now!”, but my wife made me come back. Spoilsport.)

99% of the crowd were people who have never been in a protest in their entire life. The crowd was older – lots and lots of vets and cornfed Midwestern types. Interestingly, the Mall was left quite clean when everyone had left – conservatives pick up their trash, I guess. The other half of the mall was reserved for a black family group having a huge “family reunion” and picnic – despite the rampant racism and black hatred, our 2 million didn’t go and beat up their hundred thousand or so. (Maybe the racists didn’t want to embarrass the black people marching with us.)

LOTS of signs, mostly handmade. Some organizations and media figures have been beating the drum for this apparently (I can’t stand Glenn Beck so we never watch his show) but everybody there we talked to had gotten themselves to DC, no astroturf that we could see beyond the scattering of pre-printed signs. I was absolutely shocked at the size of the crowd; we got onto the Metro to go into DC at Shady Grove, the northernmost red line stop, and the line for the farecards filled the entire lobby as a bunch of people who had never been to DC before tried to figure out the system. (It didn’t help that there are now two different kinds of farecards.) The whole Metro system was semi-overwhelmed by the numbers, but they did a great job keeping everybody moving and other than the crowds the transportation situation was quite smooth.

It’s hard to figure the impact of events like this. But if I was a moderate Democrat congressman on the fence, I think I would have just been pushed off. There are a lot more people out there who won’t stand for what they see as socialized medicine, than people had guessed.

Later we went to the National Gallery of Art and looked at the Spanish swords and armor display, which was pretty awesome. Armor-making by the gunpowder age had become a truly refined science, and they had some replica pieces made of stainless steel you could try on. Anyone who wants to see a photo of me clutching a mailed gauntlet to my chest or wearing a visored helmet should check here next week when I get home and get a chance to upload pictures.

I’m currently shopping for a gauntlet of my own.

The pro-health care reform folks are holding a rally in Denver this Friday.

Hey, fellow forces of good, we should get on this and show up. Whaddya say?

I went up to a teaparty event outside the offices of Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-01) in Denver yesterday. There was an event scheduled for my own representative, but it would be rather anticlimactic in staunchly red Colorado Springs. (“I’m Congressman Lamborn. What are you protesting for?” “We demand that you vote against this health care bill!” “OK, will do!” “Oh…uh…well…”) The event at the Democratic office promised more exciting blog action.

It was a gorgeous sunny day and I really regretted that fact that the air conditioning in the Black Mamba isn’t working. (Should have turned it in as a clunker and gotten a shiny new Hyundai, I guess!)

I have a secret parking spot in Denver that I often use for events – it’s a shady street with long-term meters and it’s very close to the downtown core. Less hassles and a healthy walk, what could be better? Unfortunately, this time I must have failed my Navigation skill check, because I thought the rally was going to be at the capitol building. Instead, it was a good ten blocks south, and while my parking spot was in fact only seven blocks or so from the event, my chosen route would end up taking me about twenty blocks all told.

I (mistakenly) walked and walked to get to Capitol Hill, expecting at any moment to come across my crowd of protesters. Instead, just mostly-empty parks:

And historic Denver landmarks:

When I finally got to Grant Street I realized that the rally was the aforementioned ten blocks south. It was too far to go back to the car, so I just trudged it.

And trudged it.

And trudged it.

Finally…up in the distance…could it be? A glimpse of placards waving in the air? Yes:

Here’s our team in various poses. There were between 25 and 35 of us there at any particular time. We had a main group on the north end of the intersection and a smaller group on the south side. The Obamanauts were also on the south side.

Our main team:

Our emergency backup team:

Jed and his fellow members of the Tyranny Response Team: ever vigilant.

Want to see those signs better?

(T-shirt text: There are 10 kinds of people in this world, people who get binary and people who don’t.)

Here’s the Obama group. There were usually about 10 of them. Periodically they sidled up and tried to integrate with our satellite group to try and look bigger, or perhaps they were trying out an anschluss. Note the preprinted signs. That’s the sign of grass-roots activism, you know – having your own union print shop with a standing order of “Hope” posters.

Some of our better signs:

During the rally, cars and pedestrians passed by. We got the bulk of the love, but there were some catcalls too. One driver literally leaned out of his car to shout “Are you giving up your Medicare? Are you giving up your Medicare?” loudly. Alas, the obvious riposte (“No, we’re trying to save it from YOU!”) came too late. Catcallers really should go around the block and come around again so that the slower-witted of us have time to prepare our responses.

There wasn’t a great deal of excitement, but it was good to see the people letting their representatives know their opinions. It was nice to see Jed and the boys again, but the summer afternoon was dwindling and the wife was expecting me home…here’s a last parting shot from this tiny outpost of participatory democracy.

And then a long trudge back to the Black Mamba for the return voyage (and date night with the wife) – I’d post a picture of the car but its sheer awesomeness would make you realize the futility of your own crappy life and you’d have no choice but to end it all, and I don’t want that on my conscience.

My friends on the left (and they are my friends) are angry and upset because so many Americans with employer-provided benefits (and even many without) are unhappy about the existence of a “public option” plan. These liberal folk say “the public option won’t take away your choices. You will be able to keep the insurance that you have.” And it’s true that the plan as drafted in its various forms and trial balloons does permit people to keep their existing plan.

Unfortunately, the plan as drafted will not be dictating the economic reality once the public option is in place. Instead, market forces will. And market forces will push millions of people out of the private insurance market against their will, and could well cause a near-collapse of the private system.

If the public option is in place, employers all over the country will jump at the chance to move their employees out of costly benefit plans and into the public system. The left themselves make this argument about corporations’ willingness to move social welfare expenses onto the public shoulders. Unless the plan is punitive towards employers who do that – and it won’t be, because that would be politically suicidal for Democrats – there will be an inevitable tidal wade into the public system, not by choice, but by expulsion. Leftists will tiredly (and tiringly) argue that “oh look, it worked in THIS Swiss canton for the eight years the study conveniently ran” – ignoring the uniquely American spin that often makes those studies of dubious applicability, at best. Mr. Obama won’t have personally taken away those millions of peoples’ health insurance – he would just have made it impossibly tempting for their bosses to do it to them.

The private insurance system will be further undermined by the fact that employer-provided healthcare has one of the best demographic profiles for health insurers. People who are working tend to be younger, in better health, and to take care of themselves. The customers it will be losing to the public sector will be the profitable ones – the ones who make up for the lady who gets cancer at 49 and spends a lot of money getting better to live to 80. I know, boo hoo for the insurance companies – but without profitable customers, the companies can’t stay afloat. If it takes 3 Healthy Harrys to keep one Ailing Alice going, then anytime the public option takes away a Harry it better take a third of an Alice as well – but a lot more of the workers in those pools and their families are HH than AA. So companies go under, and companies that want to provide healthcare coverage to their workers have a hard time finding a market. The fact is that the government can “fight” for those valuable premium-payers a lot more effectively than a bunch of mopes in Connecticut can – the government has money and tanks and Congressmen. All the company has is money.

There are 88 million Americans with employer-provided healthcare, and most of them like their coverage very much. There’s no reason they wouldn’t; while it’s not a choice I’ve myself made, the security of having medical expenses covered in case of disaster is surely reassuring. That security has value to the families who know Dad getting sick won’t be the end of the world.  Liberals were correct in gauging that there is public support for health care reform – but there is zero support for taking a great whack at the stability and viability of employer-provided healthcare financed through the private insurance market.

That is why people are getting hetted up at town halls. The people waving swastikas, if they aren’t plants, are flecks of crazyfoam on a genuinely large popular upswelling of sentiment. My liberal friends, saying “we don’t intend to do that” isn’t good enough; people don’t believe it’s up to you to decide if that’s what happens. People know that their choices are going to go away, and it doesn’t really matter to them that the cause will be an impersonal market mechanism, rather than the volition of some nervously smiling Congresscritters. The Congresscritters are going to get the blame.

So perhaps Congress – and the liberals in Congress – had better think about proposing some market-reality-recognizing mechanisms that will work to improve American healthcare, without wiping out people’s dreams and security in the process.

Why not start health care reform with tax reform?

There are two key problems that everyone agrees exists with regard to healthcare. Problem one is that it’s really expensive to get old and die. Problem two is that it’s really expensive to have something terrible happen to you and need tons and tons of medical care. There is disagreement about *why* these things are problems, disagreements about motives, etc., but everybody agrees that these two things are problematic.

Problem one we haven’t solved, but we have a quasi-kludge half-solution in place. It can and should be improved, but old people get their medical bills paid for more or less and they don’t have to bankrupt their families in order to pass away decently. So hooray, there, no doubt we’ll work on making it better, but let’s not **** with it right this minute.

Problem two is the problem of catastrophic care. It’s expensive. You get cancer, you lose your house. As has been pointed out to me, if something expensive were to happen, it would be a terrible financial blow. We wouldn’t go bankrupt, because there are assets, but it would surely suck. It would be far worse for people with fewer familial resources.

There are other problems that exist, but everybody agrees these are acute ones, so let’s focus on them for a moment.

Some people are lucky; they have nice health plans that cover even catastrophic events, while also providing good coverage for more routine and preventive care. Those plans tend  to be expensive, making those people relatively expensive to hire, so as a general rule, only people who contribute relatively large amounts of social capital to their employers are able to get this type of coverage. Most people make do with much less impressive plans which provide a partial shield, but still leave patients owing for large sums when disaster strikes. Ironically, the people with the gold-plated policies tend to be the people who could absorb a ten or twenty thousand dollar loss without grievous harm, while the people who are destroyed by such a debt are the ones with the sketchy pay-most-of-it policies.

Some people have no care coverage at all, reasoning (like me) that their best option for healthcare expenses is to pay for it 100% out of pocket for routine matters, and suffer the loss to capital in case of true crisis. Others pursue the strategy, though without the resources, owing to improvidence, ill fortune, or whatever. Some of these people tend to impose big costs on the system as a whole, since they tend to be the ones showing up at the ER. (Hey, I paid my bill.)

Right now all the people with employer-provided care are getting a substantial tax break, because they don’t pay tax on the large income that their plan represents. Some people propose taxing the benefits; I think that instead of doing that, we should extend the tax break to everyone, and we should count health benefits as income.

Anyone who purchases any health insurance plan, whether comprehensive or catastrophic, gold-plated or bare-bones, whichever they prefer – should get to write off 100% of that expense as a deduction from their income. People whose employers provide coverage stay status quo ante – they lose nothing. Their income has gone up nominally (“holy cow, IBM is paying $19000 a year for my health plan?”) but they get $19000 lopped off their income on the 1040, so they end up with no change.

People who buy coverage with their own money will get a whacking great tax cut, depending on their income levels. No idea what this would cost – tens of billions at the very least.

On the other hand, it would require no bureaucracy and no interference with private choice – and it would greatly encourage people to buy health coverage for themselves, particularly as their incomes rise. We WANT people like me to go out and buy expensive coverage which we then never use; it helps pay for the ER visitors.

This proposal doesn’t do much for the poor, I’ll grant you. Fine – let’s do a block transfer with another NIT-style mechanism and issue $1000 “health care credits” to people at 200% of poverty line. It won’t cost all that much, and again, it gives people an incentive to do something smart but doesn’t coerce their behavior.

The result of this policy would be a strong increase in the demand for private health coverage, leading to greater investment in health care capital, human and financial varieties. It requires no federal power grabs, no objectionable redistribution – no human among us objects in principle to helping very poor people see the doctor – and most lovely to those who care about freedom, no coercion or forced behavior. Although it can be sold to Republicans as involving a tax cut, since all these people would start getting a tax break, in truth we should recognize that it would involve a small but real nominal tax increase or reduction in services elsewhere, since we’re giving people money back on their existing tax levels, but I’ll forgive any liberals who choose to finesse that point. I think it’s worth the expense.