A quote from Bill Clinton about Fred Thompson via Real Clear Politics

"I have an interesting relationship with Fred Thompson. When he was Senator from Tennessee I used to send him cigars."

Tears came to my eyes from laughing so hard.

Universal health care is being promoted by all of the presidential candidates from the Democratic party.  The Democratic candidates are just plain wrong on this issue.  The major flaw of any universal health care proposal is the underlying assumption that resources are infinite. While the health care system resources are vast in this country (expected to consume 1 of every $5 in the U.S. economy by 2015), they are not infinite.

Currently, the health care system has multiple streams of income.  Some of the health care resources are paid by government through Medicare, Medicaid and other programs; some of the health care resources are paid for by private parties like insurance companies, and some is paid for by individuals.

As an example, assume that the average cost of a normal birth is $7,500.  In our current system, the larger payers are able to negotiate better rates than smaller payers, so for the purposes of example, let's assume the average cost of a normal birth is $6,000 for the government.  To make up for their losses, doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers must charge other payers like insurance companies and individuals more than the average cost for a normal birth.  In this example assume big insurance companies have a cost of $8,000 and individuals are left to pay $9,000 for a normal birth.  In all, the average price is $7,500.

Most single-payer (the federal government), universal health care proposals make the assumption that the cost of a normal birth is the same as the current rate the government is paying, $6,000.  So if the government continues to pay $6,000 per normal birth, doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers will either go broke or they will simply stop offering services that are no longer profitable.  To compensate for the decline in service, the federal government will then be forced to create federally funded health care facilities, where the staff is paid directly by the government, in order to meet the need for service.

The ripples then extend to medical schools.  What starry-eyed medical student will want to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal debt for a medical school education, so they can get a government job?  With a decline in med students, health care resources will become even scarcer.  The result is long waits, sub standard care and the rise of a "black market" health care system where the haves get the care they need when they need it, while the have-nots wait.

Of all the presidential candidates, I think Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani are on the right path to creating a health care system that is innovative, effective and robust.  Both candidates promote individual responsibility as the cornerstone of health care reform.  Giuliani and Huckabee want to encourage individual responsibility through tax incentives for individuals to purchase health insurance on their own and Giuliani wants to allow health insurance policies to be sold across state lines.

Rather than provide tax incentives for individuals to purchase health insurance, I think an even better approach is to REMOVE the tax incentive offered to employer-based health insurance.  When individuals start to fully feel the impact of health care costs, a health care consumerism will take hold and real change will begin to happen.

But no matter what approach is taken, whether that be a single-payer, universal system or a system based on individual responsibility, changes in the health care system will not happen overnight, but a real paradigm shift in how we deliver health care in this country will take a generation.

This article is also available at The CommonMan Commentaries

With the campaign for POTUS well underway, the political pollsters, pundits and reporters are dominating the news. A Time magazine article published today, TIME Poll: Faith of the Candidates slipped into absurdity.

One of the questions reported in the consumer poll asked, “Do you think that a president should or should not allow his own personal religious faith to guide him in making decisions as president?”

This is one of the stupidest questions I’ve ever encountered. How can the foundation of a person’s outlook on life be somehow separated from that person? This question is the equivalent of asking a poor person to make decisions as though he were never poor, or a person of color to make decisions as though he were not a person of color. How is it possible to remove the lens through which we see the world?

The religion of the candidates (not their stated religion, but their actual religion), therefore, is of vital importance. Giuliani’s Catholicism, Romney’s Mormon faith, Obama and Clinton’s Protestantism, Huckabee’s Evangelicalism and Gore’s Gaia worship are all of vital importance in understanding the kind of decisions the person will make. Jesus taught,

No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. - Luke 16:13

A person’s stated religion is not necessarily their real religion. The real religion of the candidate is the thing they love. With that in mind, let’s try to understand the REAL religion of a few of the candidates.

Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when the power in a system shifts to a new center? The first thing is the original power center tries to do something to prevent the shift. We have witnessed some dramatic power shifts in political systems throughout the world over the past few weeks and months.

• In the Palestinian Territories, we are finally witnessing the power shifting to Hamas after that faction won the last Palestinian election months ago.
• In Lebanon we are witnessing the shift of power to the Lebanese government and away from Hezbollah, as the most militant holdouts try to bring the government down with a fight to the death.
• In China, we are witnessing the effects of the power of commerce over a a planned society. As people seek prosperity, they also are beginning to seek justice, revealing the human cruelty and injustice that has been the historical underpinning of the current regime.
• In Venezuela, students protest as they realize that all power has been taken from them by their leader, Hugo Chavez.
• Russia continues to grapple with its loss of political power taking a chapter from the oil-rich fascist regimes, using energy and military blackmail to bully its way onto the world.
• Monks in Thailand struggle to maintain their position of religious power in the face of one of the most aggressive religions in the world, Islam, seeking to declare Buddhism as the official state religion.
• Finally, in our own country, our legislative branch struggles to adapt to a far more democratic society than existed even ten years ago as the democratizing effects of talk radio and the Internet begin to truly exert political muscle.

The New York Times reported today about the Senate’s attempt to reintroduce its immigration reform bill. Quoting Trent Lott, who supports the bill, about the barriers to passing a bill, “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

Talk radio is not ruining America, talk radio is ruining the way the Senate operates. Suddenly, the Senate can be filibustered by a force other than its members. What talk radio and the Internet provide is transparency. But the Senate requires that there be a clear line of demarcation between the public persona of politicians and the closed-door conversations of senators in negotiations. In our world of video cellphones, and miniature recording devices, the Senate is losing its ability to negotiate in private. To Senator Lott, this is a bad thing. But transparency will do for this country what no law has yet been able to do, revitalize trust in government as more about government and the processes that run it are exposed to the light of day and into the awareness of the citizenry.

The CommonMan Commentaries

“I think when fair-minded people hear our story, they agree we should have the right to marry,” - Janet Peck

The quote comes from a Fox News story about the push for homosexual marriage in Connecticut.  Without getting into the rightness or fairness of the case in question, let’s look at the logic of this statement.

I don’t recall the technical term for this type of argument, but basically it follows this formula: if “A” then “B”, or if NOT “A” then NOT “B”.  So in this quote, if you are fair-minded then you agree with Janet, therefore if you disagree with Janet, you are not fair-minded.

So based on this logic, you cannot be both fair-minded and disagree with Janet.  So much for fair-mindedness.

The CommonMan Commentaries

There is no such thing as a socially conservative politician.  We've got over a dozen years of recent history to demonstrate that fact.  Politicians, are by their very nature, merely reflections of the majority of their constituents.  When they are not, they lose the next election.  Sometimes this can be mitigated by money and clever messaging, but they will eventually be replaced.

The governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, had an opinion piece posted on politico.com that discussed the REAL issue facing socially conservative Republicans, out of control spending.  Right up there with abortion, heterosexual marraige and stem cell research, fiduciary management is one of the cornerstones of the social conservative agenda.  Since the social conservatives tend to associate with conservative and evangelical Christianity, the idea of fiscal responsibility is in many ways even more important than the other social issues that face our nation.

Fiscal responsibility is the only one of the social conservative platforms directly mentioned and taught about by Jesus.  The Gospels are silent on stem cell research, homosexuality and abortion.  The parable of the talents, while conveying a spiritual truth, can also be applied to a political truth.  Politicians who run on socially conservative principles must govern by those principles.  Running on an agenda that restricts abortion, bans homosexual marraige, and denies federal funding of stem cell research, but fails on the one platform that Jesus explicilty taught about is doomed to failure. 

In order to recapture the trust of the Christian right, the Republicans have finally started to preach a message of fiscal responsibility.  Have they changed their tune in time for the 2008 election season?  Only time and the willingness of the Republican base to forgive will tell.

The CommonMan Commentaries

The recent capture of the 15 British sailors by Iran has provided an interesting study of the war and women’s roles in combat units.  Western society, especially Britain and the United States have military systems that allow for limited participation by female soldiers in combat units.  This event highlighted society’s attitudes toward current military policy.  Interestingly, the most profound statement came from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 

The President of Iran puzzled at why the British military would allow a mother to serve in such an openly hostile environment.  As a corollary, much of the press accounts of the capturing of the British sailors tended to include statements like, “...15 British sailors were captured…, including one woman, Leasing Seaman Faye Turney, who is also the mother of a 3 year old….”

If there is one thing our modern, progressive society has in common with that of the Middle East, is an inherent, subconscious understanding of the roles of mothers.  We know at the core of our being that a mother’s role is to care for and nurture her children.  We know at the core of our being that a mother would not intentionally place herself in harm’s way.  There are many voices in our society that will deny this until they are blue in the face.  They will say that women, mothers, have every right to pursue careers and hobbies that may be inherently risky.  They will say that fathers can be just as nurturing and just as capable to care for children as mothers.  But they are lying.  First they are lying to themselves, and then, to justify the lie they’ve bought into, they yell from the highest mountain about how this thing they preach has to be true.

But buried in the pit of our society’s subconscious, we know that mothers should not be soldiers. 

We can place the blame for LS Faye Turney’s decision to enlist in the British Royal navy on a number of factors.  We can say that she must be a selfish woman, more interested in her own career than her daughter’s well being.  We can say that she was influenced by an element of society that convinced her of the lie.  We can say that all sorts of outside influences clouded her ability to make a proper decision.  We could even imagine that her own personal circumstances gave her little choice in the matter.  All these things we can put forward as the reason for Leading Seaman Faye Turney’s career decisions, but the reason or reasons she enlisted are irrelevant.

What is relevant to Leading Seaman Fay Turney is that for whatever reason, she pursued something that is important to her.  And in that pursuit, she will see that her choices, what she considered important, only reveal the lie.

The CommonMan Commentaries

What a difference an article makes. The way this section of scripture reads in English connotes a general avoidance of all evil, but John’s letter is much more specific. Instead of “Beloved, do not imitate what is evil….” a more accurate reading might be, “Beloved, do not imitate this evil….” The evil John is warning about is that of Diotrephes’ desire for leadership. John is warning against pride, self for self.

Pride (love of self) is the sin that separates us from God. Pride is the original sin, the very basis for every sinful act. Jesus defined love for us,

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” - John 15:13

Read the rest of this entry »

Diotrephes, according to John, seeks preeminence among members of his local church.  He wants to be called pastor, father.  In an effort to maintain his position, he controls the information of his fellow congregants by not allowing others into his circle.  Diotrephes is trying to establish a cult of personality - his.  This is a trap that has plagued mankind from the beginning. 

Eve fell for the trap when she ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Moses succumbed when he tapped the rock twice.  Korah sought preeminence when he rebelled against Moses and Aaron.  Saul slipped into this trap as did David and Solomon and Judas.  Whenever life is going well, and leading to the outcome we seek, the human instinct is to take credit for the good stuff.  But God doesn’t call us to work toward some future goal.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was a different world as the early church spread throughout the known world.  Travelers depended on the kindness of strangers for accomodations.  In return, the traveler brought news, tales and wisdom from faraway places.  The first evangelists faced the same circumstances, having the same thing to offer for accomodation.  But they also brought with them the most glorious news. 

The early evangelists had another aspect to their travels that we may not always realize as we read about their acts and travels: the early evangelists were typically invited by believers.  But where did these believers come from?

Read the rest of this entry »