Montana Public Radio Live Health Care Reform Call-in Show Wednesday, Oct 7 (Missoula: buy, subsidized)

[Walter Greenspan]

Wednesday, Oct. 7th - noon to 1pm
A LIVE Call-in show debating Health Care Reform

The Canadian health care system often comes up in U.S. health care
discussions as either a model to emulate or a disaster to avoid. To shed
some light on that debate, Montana Public Radio is teaming up with the
Canadian Broadcasting Corp. on Wednesday, Oct. 7th at noon, Mountain Time,
for a live call-in program on health care reform.


MTPR News Director Sally Mauk will co-host the program in Missoula, with the
CBC's Donna McElligott in Calgary, Alberta. Canadian health expert Dr. Tom
Noseworthy and Montana neurosurgeon Dr. Carter Beck, a member of the
Coalition to Protect Patients' Rights, will be guests on the program.

Please share your questions and comments!

Montana and Alberta listeners are invited to call in to the program from
noon to 1 p.m. The call-in number is 877-249-1868. We hope you tune in - and
call-in!

To hear the live on-line stream...

Click CBC Radio One Calgary (32 kbps) to access the show on-line, 12:00 to 1:00PM Wednesday,
October 7th:




H/T: DC

[Reziac]

How Congress Is Cooking the Books | Michael D. Tanner | Cato Institute: Commentary

Cato's estimate of $9 trillion is probably optimistic, given that as a good general rule, gov't spends $2 for every $1 it PLANNED to spend.

BTW the cost works out to over $200,000 PER U.S. RESIDENT. (Or 3 times that if you count the fact that debt always costs roughly 3x what the initial expediture did.)

That would buy a lot of individualized health care, no gov't required.

[mtn_viking]

Originally Posted by Reziac

How Congress Is Cooking the Books | Michael D. Tanner | Cato Institute: Commentary

Cato's estimate of $9 trillion is probably optimistic, given that as a good general rule, gov't spends $2 for every $1 it PLANNED to spend.

It seems much more likely the the Cato institute would be pessimistic about the plan's costs. Cato is ideologically opposed to any sort of public health care considering that it bills itself as promoting limited government and free markets.

For all of us living in Montana, I would suggest that free markets are not our friends. Montana receives about $1.50 from the federal gov for every $1 we pay in federal taxes. Quite simply, we have too few people and too many miles of roads to pay for them ourselves. I would also remind you that but for Pres. Roosevelt's socialist Rural Electrification Administration, it is unlikely that most small communities in Montana would have electricity. Again, our land area and low population work against us. under a "free market" economics theory, it makes no sense to expend capital (cost to build roads, powerlines, etc.) to provide services for such a small rate of return.

I'm sure that there will be some who will argue that because Montana produces more electricity than it uses, we would have gotten electricity anyway. This ignores the fact that federal money subsidized the building of the dams. It also ignores the fact that it would still be far more profitable to route all of Montana's produced power to more highly populated urban areas. Africa produced more diamonds than it uses. Does this mean that all Africans have access to diamonds?

For an easy lesson on what happens when we in Montana drink the free market Kool-Aid, look at electricity deregulation and the implosion of Montana Power. Deregulation of electricity has probably also killed Columbia Falls Aluminum Company ("CFAC") although it is still limping on. CFAC depended on the cheap electricity that we had in Montana prior to deregulation.

I do believe that the free market has its benefits. However, most of them would not work for us in Montana. We are too small a population, to costly to get goods and services to, and to spread out. If the free market were Darwinism, we would be a genetic dead end. We simply can't provide the market enough bang for its buck.

I listened to the health care program today and was interested to hear the resounding support from individual Canadians for their health care system. They all seemed to agree that there was room for improvement but genuinely seemed to prefer their systems. This included several calls from people who had experience with both the US and Canadian systems and people who had relatives in Canada.