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'Getting Out of Medicine'

Posted by Defend America on Saturday, March 06, 2010 12:47:08 PM

March 6, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Getting Out of Medicine
We can burden doctors with red-tape hassles, but we can’t make doctors put up with them.

Some years ago, one of my favorite doctors retired. On my last visit to his office, he took some time to explain to me why he was retiring early and in good health.

Being a doctor was becoming more of a hassle as the years went by, he said, and also less fulfilling. It was becoming more of a hassle because of the increasing paperwork, and it was less fulfilling because of the way patients came to him.

He was currently being asked to Xerox lots of records from his files, in order to be reimbursed for another patient he was treating. He said it just wasn’t worth it. Whoever was paying — it might have been an insurance company or the government — would either pay him or not, he said, but he wasn’t going to jump through all those hoops.My doctor said that doctor-patient relationships were not the same as they had been when he entered the profession. Back then, people came to him because someone had recommended him to them, but now increasing numbers of people were sent to him because they had some group insurance plan that included his group.

He said that the mutual confidence that was part of the doctor-patient relationship was not the same with people who came to his office only because his name was on some list of eligible physicians.

The loss of one doctor — even a very good doctor — may not seem very important in the grand scheme of heady medical-care “reform” and glittering phrases about “universal health care.” But making the medical profession more of a hassle for doctors risks losing more doctors, while increasing the demand for treatment.

A study published in the November 2009 issue of The Journal of Law & Economics showed that a rise in the cost of medical-liability insurance led to more reductions of hours of medical service supplied by older doctors than among younger doctors.

http://article.nationalreview.com/427145/getting-out-of-medicine/thomas-sowell
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Ahmadinejad Says 9/11 is a "Big Fabrication"

Posted by Defend America on Saturday, March 06, 2010 11:51:01 AM

Iran's Ahmadinejad calls Sept 11 "big fabrication"

TEHRAN
Sat Mar 6, 2010 9:47am EST

Ahmadinejad, who often rails against the West and Israel, made the comment in a meeting with Intelligence Ministry personnel.

It came amid escalating tension in the long-running dispute between Iran and the West over Tehran's nuclear program, with the United States pushing for new U.N. sanctions against the major oil producer.

Ahmadinejad described the destruction of the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001 as a "complicated intelligence scenario and act," IRNA reported.

He added: "The September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan." He did not elaborate.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6251AO20100306?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FworldNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+International%29
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Is the White House Forecast Ever Correct?

Posted by Defend America on Saturday, March 06, 2010 11:47:59 AM

National debt to be higher than White House forecast, CBO says

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 6, 2010

President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall.

The 10-year outlook released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is somewhat gloomier than White House projections, which found that Obama's budget request would produce deficits that would add about $8.5 trillion to the national debt by 2020.

The CBO and the White House are in relative agreement about the short-term budget picture, with both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year -- a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy -- and $1.3 trillion in 2011. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits would never fall below 4 percent of the economy under Obama's policies and would begin to grow rapidly after 2015.

Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said. Interest payments on the debt would also skyrocket by $800 billion over the same
period.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/05/AR2010030502974.html



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GOP's Gameplan on Reconciliation

Posted by Defend America on Saturday, March 06, 2010 10:21:13 AM

GOP Strategy: Bleed Reconciliation Fix To Death With Byrd Rule

Senior Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to death and ensure that it never passes.

Senior GOP aides have been studying the rule book in recent days, and they think they have a game plan. Here’s how they hope it will work.

At risk of oversimplification, the Byrd rule is designed to ensure that reconciliation is used to only make budgetary fixes, not policy ones, to existing legislation. Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too.

At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix.

That would force the House to vote on it again and again, stalling the process further.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/senate-republicans/gop-strategy-bleed-reconciliation-fix-to-death-with-byrd-rule/

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Institute for the Study of War has Put Out a Primer on Tomorrow's Iraqi Parliamentary Elections

Posted by Defend America on Saturday, March 06, 2010 10:13:04 AM
http://www.understandingwar.org/files/IraqEveofElections.pdf
Tags: election   Iraq  
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Car Bomb Kills 3 on the Eve of Iraqi Parliamentary Elections

Posted by Defend America on Saturday, March 06, 2010 9:52:36 AM

Car Bomb Blast Kills 3 on Eve of Iraq Elections

Saturday, March 06, 2010

BAGHDAD —  A car bomb exploded near a bus for pilgrims in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Saturday, killing at least three people, including two Iranians, on the eve of key national elections, officials said.

Blasts in other Iraqi cities have killed dozens this week, underscoring warnings that insurgents would attempt to disrupt the vote with violence.

A group of Iranian and Iraqi pilgrims were waiting to board the bus after visiting a famous shrine when the blast occurred about 100 yards away, a witness said.

"I was shocked by the scene, pools of blood and people lying on the ground soaked with their own blood," said Ahmed Baqir, 21, an Iraqi translator who was with the Iranian pilgrims.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,588224,00.html


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