What Keeps Me Up At Night

I am getting lazy in my blogs, replacing them with quick tweets, but the blog is a better historical for me, so will keep at it.  It drives me crazy when I read good material, then click my way through several more, only to find I’ve “lost” my original starting point.  Backtracking, especially days later, can take a lot of time. So I try to park my links here for future reference (sort of like my favorite links at my website).

What keeps me up late at night is the fact that we have a President that is willing to mislead us.  He misspeaks.  How can this be anything but intentional?  It is equally scary if it is not intentional, as this means it is ignorance.  Either way, it is misleading.

Let’s look at his claim that the AARP endorses his plan.  Not true, and AARP put out a statement clarifying this.  Let’s look at his claim that American medicine as it is today does not result in longevity.  Not true – when we remove the number of deaths from murder and accidents, America does beat out other countries in longevity, indicating American healthcare does outperform other systems.  Mortality from Disease and the American HealthCare System    US Health Report, CDC, 2006
How can you conjure this up?  How can a leader, after stating they don’t have all the facts, proceed with a statement that passes judgement?  And the costs for the reform that the leader is proposing …you just can’t keep issuing platitudes – you must present facts/plans/figures/milestones.  I read earlier today that American banks have hundreds of billions of dollars of unrecognized bad debt hidden in loan portfolios.  Why aren’t we hearing about this from our President? Unrecognized bad debt link
Business Week had a good article a few weeks back about banks continuing down the path of risky loans.  Old Banks, New Lending Tricks
For all the rhetoric from the current administration, nothing has changed when it comes to transparency and oversight.  And I expect this to be perpetuated if any Healthcare “reform” passes.
Despite this, Presidential rating falls, I feel like I am watching my country slip away – shift from government being representative of the people, to a government that outwardly caters to special interests.  Can this really be happening?  Yes.  and I am frightened by it.
An update to this post:
First I lament, then I become engaged again.  I love Thomas Sowell, and just saw his 8/21 column,  Bait and Switch, where he asks Why does it take more than 1,000 pages of legislation to insure people who lack medical insurance?”   His observation:  “Despite incessant repetition of the fact that millions of Americans do not have medical insurance, hardy souls who have actually read the mammoth medical care legislation being rushed through Congress have discovered all sorts of things there that have nothing whatever to do with insuring the uninsured — and everything to do with taking medical decisions out of the hands of doctors and their patients, and transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.”  Read it here.  Bait and Switch