Conspiracy about Conspiracies

Conspiracy theories are a lot like a good Clancy novel. They build to a dramatic finish. They suck in readers and convert them to followers. A good conspiracy theory puts all the pieces together that don’t make sense, ties them up in a neat package and says “You are a hapless victim and it’s not your fault.” Now you can turn off the responsibility and the guilt and go right on being a couch potato. The billionaires and the beautiful people are doing it to me. I’m the downtrodden victim. It may not be exactly comforting, but some how it is compelling.

It’s also a trap.

Let’s see how many doomsday conspiracies I know (please fell free to add your favorites);

1. The Government is ignoring UFO’s. Project Blue Book was a coverup. The first security briefing a new President gets reveals exactly what is hidden in Area 51, then he is sworn to never reveal it on pain of “panicking the masses”. The Government has secret UFO technology that will be used for (pick one) defending the Earth, giving up the human race for slaves, beating down the Soviets.

2. The New World Order, alias the Illuminati, alias the Bilderbergers, owns the Fed and will soon impose world slavery. They are the puppet masters behind the US and European governments.

3. The Bank of International Settlements owns the Fed and all the national banks and controls the world economy money supply and they are about to crash and trash it in order to impose a World Government that will make most of us slaves.

4. Under the direction of a secret cabal the US has built hundreds of internment camps as part of a plan to execute the people who resist and incarcerate all but the faithful slaves. They employ black helicopters and are involved in training our own soldiers and those of foreign nations to enforce their orders when the government suspends the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. The US cabal blew up the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, in order to get the insidious Patriot Act passed, the TSA to do warrantless strip searches and to take our guns away.

5. The Soviet Union is secretly being reconstructed by Putin with the cooperation of the rogue elements in the US and Europe. Their aim is to reduce the living standards of the US to conform with the poorer nations so we can be combined under one Communist state tyranny.

6. China is plotting to take over the world simply by sequestering all the wealth and resources for itself and then annexing first Taiwan, then Korea and Japan. The offshore Chinese are very secretive and have made a deal with Beijing to use their $4 trillion to develop China and consolidate their control. They already have the cooperation of Chavez and Castro, who are their agents in this hemisphere.

7. Iran plans to build many atomic weapons and conduct an atomic jihad in order to create a Shiite Crescent that will stretch from Turkey to Pakistan, and then they will assume the throne in the new Islamic Caliphate and convert the rest of the world to Islam or the sword.

8. Secretly, an industrial consortium is dumbing us down using chemicals and “franken-foods” to make us pliable slaves and ignorant consumer/workers. They plan to reduce the population by starvation and chemical sterilization.

9. None of the above, we will all die by Armeggedon as the Bible says in Revelation, except for the few who have found Grace.

10. Any combination of the above.

Do any of the above conspiracies have a basis in fact? Probably all of them. History is full of conspiracies: Communism, Lao Tzu, the black slave trade, Julius Caesar, Ghenghis Khan, the British Empire. For every one of them that we can list there are hundreds that went down in thorough obscurity. Wars involve conspiracies and so do revolutions. We only record the successful ones.

However, the REALLY BIG conspiracy theories have several characteristics in common: They are huge, generally world-wide. They are secret. There is nothing you can prove because they are secret, There is nothing you can do because no one will believe you because they are secret and you can’t prove anything. The logic is quite circular.

In real life things are not neat. Many events are quite random. The economy, like the weather, is a system in quasi-chaotic state. It has several tipping points and the equilibrium is easily disturbed with unpredictable consequences. Over longer time frames, demographics and the fortunes of nations are also quasi-chaotic. In such systems, a bigger push often does not move the same things a bigger distance, it does something quite different. This chaos upsets conspiracies. There is no deterministic way to deal with these things.

Confronted by all this random activity, our minds try to make sense of it. We script the chaos into a pattern that may not be there. Conspirators try to guide this process for their own ends. Like the Face on Mars or the Man in the Moon, the pattern disappears from another angle. Many conspiracy theories are just false pattern recognition.

One of the uses of conspiracy theories, however, is for disinformation. Someone is trying to influence your decisions. Think of it as an advertisement for a hidden product that you really don’t want. So what are they trying to make you do? Do you really want to do that, or are they trying to frighten you into doing what you should not do?

We are all making plans for something. It may be the next trip or a wedding or a retirement. Your family may be conspiring to hold a surprise birthday party. The really ambitious planners are trying to take over a company, or a state government, or even the world. They may be very good at planning and they may have a lot of resources, but when that plan involves lots of people, lots of time and lots of territory it inevitably runs into the laws of chaos. As my father used to say, those people put on their pants one leg at a time, same as you do. All the various conspiracies and all the conspirators are in competition with each other, and that is going to produce a hodge podge of mixed results. If they succeed even in part, it is more blind luck than plan.

When I’m confronted by an important conspiracy theory I try to ignore it. I stick to my own agenda and refuse the distraction. Sometimes the thing just keeps coming back in my face and stops my progress. Then I have to deal with it, but not as a conspiracy but as a problem to be solved. Can I get any facts? Do I know anyone involved? If the theory is true, can I draw any testable conclusions? The Web is a vast resource, and secrets are very hard to keep.

Don’t be a conspiracy nut. Keep an open mind and learn to think clearly. Dig up real data and discount unfounded opinions. If you can’t do any of that, ignore it - you won’t be able to change anything and you don’t need the distraction.

The Smoking Gun - Warmergate

CO2 a dangerous gas?

The EPA has recently decided to enforce CO2 controls on the absurd theory that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. Chaudhari, a railroad engineer by training, is cheerleading delegates in Copenhagen to decide how much the “developed nations” (read: the US and the EU) must pay the undeveloped nations (read: China and India) to compensate them for their cost to reduce CO2. All over the world the leading broadcast networks are making believe that the science of man-made globe warming is “settled” and going on to speculate what the effects will be.

Not since the Church forced Galileo to recant has any scandal this large set back the cause of truth.

Scientific Consensus

Is there any scientific consensus on man-made global warming? If you are like most politicians and you can’t do the science, how about looking at the opinions of the real experts? Look at the qualifications of these 150 signatories. How can anyone claim scientific consensus of man made global warming?

http://www.copenhagenclimatechallenge.org/

My friends are suing the EPA for exceeding their charter on the CO2 pronouncement. There will be a court challenge on a factual and scientific level. I believe the EPA will lose.

Corrupted Data - the Smoking Gun

In spite of the climategate emails, here are those that say the data, as shown in the IPCC report and the the infamous “hockey stick” curve publicized by Michael Mann, are still evidence of a problem we must address, no matter the cost. But the data behind that report, produced by the CRU group, has never been released and they apparently destroyed it. Of the three remaining data bases, two are derived from that CRU data and the third is at NASA, and is known as GISS.

Willis Eschenbach analyzed the temperature data in the GISS data base derived from the Southern Hemisphere, a critical part of the global warming theory. In order to understand the way that pieces of data were adjusted for any relocations of the stations, missing data, or badly calibrated instruments, he chose the raw data from Darwin, Australia. There were 5 stations, numbered Zero through Four. In order to determine if a station's data was reliable, the data from one station was cross-checked with up to three other stations, hopefully nearby, and the odd man was voted out. Some stations had incomplete data and other data from nearby stations were used to fill in. Al this is compatible with real-life data gathering . Been there, done that.

Willis then reverse-engineered the "adjustments" put into the GISS data from the actual raw data. This was necessary since the actual adjustment codes that went into the IPCC report have never been revealed. What he found was a smoking gun:

All the temperature increase included in the GISS data were caused by "adjustments". The raw data did not show any temperature increases at all. I include a reference to his study for your further research.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

Now others are taking the time to examine the GISS data in comparison with the raw data. The same sort of smoking gun adjustments were found in data from Orland, California, Fairmont, California and Tennessee.

No objective observer can view these "adjustments" with anything but alarm. This isn't any kind of coincidence and it can't be an innocent difference of opinion about global warming.

It's time to get all the IPCC data out in the open and checked thoroughly.

Standard of Integrity, Standard of Care

My highest personal standard prevents me from supporting either the Waxman/Markey cap and trade bill in the US or the UN FCC treaty being discussed in Copenhagen. While they refer to a piece of bad science, their impact has nothing to do with correcting a climate problem and everything to do with creating massive government intervention.

The slightest doubt about the causes of global warming ought to be sufficient grounds to stop these two efforts dead in their tracks. That is the high standard. That is responsible behavior. Everything else is empty rhetoric.

Then we can launch the long-overdue climate satellite and try to recover some of the historical proxy data and get a real baseline and some current and reliable readings. Then we can look at all the previously ignored geo-engineering proposals and set up real incentives for alternative energy and conservation.

Those are the things a person of high standards would require. They make a considerable contrast to what is happening right now.

Extent of the Petroleum Scandal

You are beginning to see the the extent of the energy/greenie/cap&trade scandal. It is the largest fraud in human history, one which underpins many of the the seemingly illogical decisions our elected officials make, and our international policies as well.

My company first handled a small amount of Bakken oil in June of this year. It is a light, sweet oil comparable to Bonny Light, Saudi Light or Louisiana Sweet. No one has yet stepped up to build a pipeline for the delivery of this oil. It was shipped by rail - the same rail company that Warren Buffet just bought. The cost of developing this oil source would be a tiny fraction of the cost of the Waxman/Markey Cap & Trade bill. There is enough Bakken crude to power the USA for 2000 years.

The Bakken is not the only suppressed discovery. An enormous field was discovered a decade ago off Alaska's North Slope, on Gull Island, by Chevron. It was measured, capped and all but one or two who knew of it were silenced. This is the same Chevron who killed GM's original EV-1 electric car and who still controls the company that makes the best batteries, Ovonics. Part of the media message that disparaged North Slope oil was the accidental oil spill of the Exxon Valdez. Every time we hear of North Slope oil now we see dead, slimy seals.

If we had this oil, we would not be funding Wahabbi terrorists with oil money. We would not be paying oil money to Russian oligarchs. Chavez would be bankrupt and unable to pay off his political cronies for a comeback after he was voted out of office. GM would still be in business on its own hook. Our balance of payments would be positive, not negative. We would not be involved in Afghanistan with an insurgency fueled by Islamic oil and opium. Iran would not have the funds for a nuclear weapon. Etc.

Do you get it now?

The relationship between powerful forces in the USA and Saudi Arabia, through the medium of Aramco, is a conspiracy so deep and so large that it is difficult to comprehend.

Richard Nixon was faced with the rising costs of the escalating Vietnam conflict and runaway inflation. Aramco was already in existence, founded by the "seven sisters", the world's largest oil companies, in collaboration with the then struggling Saudi royal family. Henry Kissinger provided the following solution:

The USA would buy huge quantities of Saudi crude oil and maintain a high price for it, in order to make the Saudis wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Remember, crude once sold for under $2 a barrel. In exchange for this, the Saudis would buy bonds issued by the US Treasury, and that money would fund the US economy and the war in Vietnam. So the taxpayer's dollar was circulated to the mideast and then back to the US Treasury. Among the various necessary "adjustments" were:

- Increasing the tax rates on US citizens and corporations partly by allowing inflation to raise incomes into the higher regions of the tax rate schedule

- Increasing both oil usage and gasoline taxes. Note how little incentive there was in 1970's for fuel efficient cars. Auto sales boomed, roads were built, and alternative energy was quashed.

- The dollar was allowed to rise against other currencies to keep the dollar price of oil high. The Fed controlled interest rates and the rate of inflation to control the value of the dollar.

- In order to keep the "deal" in operation, the Saudi royal family had to be protected. When bin Laden became a threat to the Saudi family, he was pursued, but never eliminated because that made the USA essential to the royal family. US forces "failed" to pursue and trap bin Laden at least three times.

The Saudi royal family is observant of the strict Wahabbi traditions only in the public eye. I have heard that the Royals like a good Scotch whiskey, and their behavior in Switzerland and London is hardly traditional. However, they remain vulnerable to Islamic radicals and, being rich and Saudi, they prefer to buy them off rather than to be on the wrong side of a jihad. The royals are constantly worried about maintaining their ruling position. I am informed by a Saudi security agent on that score.

Oil prices are maintained by a mechanism here in the USA where futures are traded on an exchange and the major buyers and sellers are Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, and Citi. The volume of trades on these exchanges exceeds actual world oil production by a factor of ten. How can this be? Many trades are "round trip" trades, where a single party both buys and sells the same lot of oil, affecting the market price but not taking delivery of any product. Very little real product changes hands. This is also part of the "deal". These companies make money on the trading fees, not just the speculation on price changes. They are not hurting. They get sweetheart deals on oil lots as additional compensation. They manage to raise the price of crude far above it's real value. Propaganda about "peak oil" and "global warming" do the rest.

I don't know how much money has been moved around and how much has been extracted from the US economy by these arrangements. I has to be in the tens of trillions. The flow of money from these deals is such a huge part of the banking reserves for every large bank, that they would collapse if it was withdrawn.

No wonder Obama bows to King Faisal.

Carbon Legislation and the Treaty

The duty of responsible government is to document problems, research alternative solutions, and implement the best of those. There is a massive failure of all three principles in the current Waxman-Markey Cap & Trade bill.

First, the US Cap & Trade legislation assumes an anthropomorphic warming effect due to CO2 before any agency is set up to monitor or take fair measurements, and the best of existing evidence is ignored. The legislation sets CO2 goals that have no scientific basis, and then mandates onerous taxes to force some kind of compliance. None of the alternatives, such as geo-engineering or Manhattan-project efforts for alternative energy are even contemplated. Nuclear energy, an obvious solution to CO2 emission, is disfavored.

The bill creates a new currency, the carbon credit, which can be turned into dollars at a variable rate based on legislated escalations, not results or real value. This new currency is inflationary and unregulated by any fiscal agency. At the beginning of the enactment period, this currency is handed out to "deserving" industries in a highly political manner, effectively bribing supporters and generating campaign contributions from those who can pay for favors. Acceptance of these widespread credits by the Government gives them instant value as a form of currency. Winning these handouts is a major lobbying effort, underway right now.

Fact: Goldman Sachs owns 10% of the carbon exchange which will trade carbon credits world-wide. This is a $6 trillion market created out of fiat fake currency and supported on the backs of consumers.

The handouts weaken the effect of the CO2 reduction to the point where it is absurd to think there will be any

measurable effect at all. There will be no global effort, so CO2 reduction by the USA will simply mean that emitting industries that cannot pass on their carbon costs to consumers will simply relocate elsewhere. Since China and India will not pass such a law, emitting industries will go there. That will weaken the American economy and cost jobs, not create them.

The main effect of the bill appears to be to raise another tax and to transfer power over a vast segment of industry to the Federal Government and the politicians who control the handouts. The public will pay with higher costs on necessary things like heat and electricity, higher costs on everything that is made with energy as a major input, such as plastics, steel and cement, and pay again through a net loss of jobs. This cost will be about $1.6 trillion.

A few supporters of Cap & Trade tout the bill as a way to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. This would be a worthy goal but oil is not running out.

Proven reserves can be legally claimed only by drilling a hole and having a geologist certify the findings. The oil majors would rather leave the oil in the ground than drill. It costs nothing to leave it there and it will appreciate in value if it is kept scarce.

At the same time, they are spending millions on 3D seismic surveys, which are so good they are like an underground X-ray of the oil pools. A map of surveyed but unproven reserves shows significant oil fields in almost every country in the globe, and the USA is the richest of them all.

We have more than enough in the US to get rid of suppliers in inimical countries. We don't seem to want to advertise or drill for that oil. I cite Bakken reserves, Gull Island, Alaska, and the Athabasca tar sands. All of these are cheaper sources of energy than wind. They will certainly serve us until we have real substitutes for the convenient, compact, powerful liquid energy of petroleum. However, creating an artificial scarcity in the commodity that provides 75% of all the mechanical power on Earth makes the unproven reserves even more valuable. The oil majors KNOW that cap & trade will not work, they KNOW they can pass on any extra costs to consumers and they KNOW they are going to make more $trillions on the unproven reserves when they finally decide to tap them.

That is a steep price for a non-existent benefit. Foisting this bill on the USA goes well beyond hypocrisy into malfeasance and treason.

The Great Carbon Caper

Question: Why will Goldman Sachs get richer when you exhale?

Answer: Because they own ten percent of the Energy Exchange that will trade carbon credits. (True - they do.)

Well, they aren’t going to issue carbon credits on your breath....yet. Just on your car, your household electricity, the furnace that keeps you warm in the winter, the air conditioner that cools you in the summer, the trucks that take your food to market, the airplane you take on vacation, the cement and shingles in your house, the asphalt on your streets, the dishes you eat from, the nylon clothing you wear, the radio station you listen to, the TV station you watch, the refrigeration that keeps your food fresh, the supermarket you shop at, etc. etc. etc. In other words, just about everything will generate CO2 either when it is made or when it is consumed. CO2 credits, either right off the bat or eventually, will be involved, and these credits will trade on the Energy Exchange. You can thank Messrs. Waxman and Markey for all that. They wrote the Cap & Trade bill that just passed the House last week.

Here’s how you, the public, benefit. Global warming will go down 0.6 degrees C. by 2050. If it works.

I can hardly wait.

A lot of our political representatives, being politicians, think that the laws of physics were passed by the Bush administration. They determine the existence of climate change by headcount, not by working the math. So, here is a little exposure to the people who CAN do the math, provided recently by Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal (excerpted):

Climate Change

The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

The entire case for global warming was based on a computer model of the world climate that had several assumptions about the history of temperature in the last few centuries, know as the “hockey stick” curve. Those assumptions have been heavily debunked. There is no hockey stick curve. CO2 does not correlate to global warming. For most of the history of this planet, there was a lot more CO2 than there is today, and the temperatures were roughly the same as they are now.

Our coal reserves were put down 300 million years ago in the Carboniferous Period, when swamps filled with vegetation, the water level rose to keep up with the filling process, and thick mats of vegetation were layered and finally compressed by overburden to make coal. Coal is the CO2 taken out of the atmosphere by the carboniferous process. Because of this process, the end of the Carbiniferous period was the ONLY time in the last 600 million years that CO2 was as low as it is today (roughly 400 parts per million, or ppm). Typically CO2 was ten times that, at 4000 ppm. Cap & Trade is concerned about a rise to over 450 ppm.

With the CO2 at elevated levels, the Earth’s climate was not that much different. We are in a relatively cold part of the global cycle right now. Historic temperatures were as much as ten degrees C higher. Today’s climate is much like it was at the end of the Carboniferous.

The chart at the beginnig of this article was produced by a computer model, GEOCARB III, by Dr. R.A. Berner and his team. The model takes into account the rate of volcanic activity, the release of CO2 from the weathering of exposed rock (the biggest source), which in turn depends on temperature, the slight acidification of rain due to CO2, the effect of vegetation which covers the rock, absorption of CO2 into the oceans (the biggest sink for CO2), the temperature and calcium levels in the oceans, and the area of land and geologic uplift. In short words, there is no direct relation between CO2 level and global warming. The biggest factors in global warming are due to the shape of the land masses, as they move around by continental drift. When the land masses extend in a more or less continuous link from pole to pole, glaciers form. When they drift toward the equator, the world warms up.

My concern is the economic harm that will be done by a system of CO2 vouchers handed out as political favors to the select few, the creation of a new and uncontrolled currency, the CO2 credits, and the total hypocrisy of the whole charade touted as an environmental measure. My concern is that Cap & Trade gives an already too powerful central government yet another political weapon to beat up opponents, and an unlimited new tax platform with dire consequences.

It is not an environmental measure. It is the single largest piece of pseudo-science charlatanry ever perpetrated on the American taxpayer.

The Perilous Journey From Health Care to Cap and Trade

Having just read the White House Report released by the Council of Economic Advisors on Health Care Reform, I am impressed by the the fact that a group of economists have been first to weigh in on an issue so complex, with little visible reference to the to the medical or scientific issues involved in health care and the emerging fields of biologics, stem cell treatments, advanced medical imaging and diagnostics.

I am not at all opposed to health care reform. The avowed goals of reducing health care costs, covering the uninsured, and repairing the several broken parts of the system are shared among all rational observers. As Larry Summers’ team points out, the rising costs of health care will be 40% of US GNP by 2040. The White House team apparently arrived at this by trending out the historic cost curve using compound interest growth rate (CGR). Their Report presents convincing arguments that the accelerating costs of health care will present a serious drag on employment and on the economy in general. Medicare will be bust by 2040 and the drag on the economy will amount to 8%, a rut we would never get out of.

So much for trend projections. According to the trend projections of the Club of Rome we should be standing shoulder to shoulder all over the planet by now, or starving by the billions. According to trend projections we will be living in a hot scrubland with New York underwater by 2040. Trend projections never take in to account the tendency of all trends to fade due to limiting factors. In this case the limiting factors are the progress of scientific advance and the pocketbooks of people who ultimately pay for health care. We will never get to the dire straights predicted for 2040. People will simply find another way to protect their health.

Going back to the Report, it states that the current health system wastes as much as 30% of the money poured into it. One large source of that waste is that practitioners (doctors) are paid on the services they render. The Report wants them to be paid on outcomes, so the most efficient doctors get paid and the least efficient get paid less, or get paid nothing. That will weed out the least efficient practitioners and methods, leading to reduced costs. That is Economics 101.

In order to determine the most efficient methods, “outcome studies” will be arranged, presumably by a Federal agency at taxpayer expense, that will compare different treatments and determine which are the most effective. I have read two of these studies. One is a study for Type 2 diabetics taking an expensive medicine vs a cheaper medicine. The other is for the use of stents to prop up collapsing arteries and enhance blood flow to the heart, brain, etc. Besides that fact that the cheaper method always wins, I notice that these studies measure efficacy by survival statistics over large study populations. There are two problems with that. Patients measure efficacy by how they feel, by what they can do after an operation. They would not consider a long life of pain and restriction any sort of an improvement in their health care. The other problem is that medicine is not a “one size fits all” thing. The very essence of medical practice is to treat the individual, his or her particular complications, and his or her circumstances. Individual requirements are completely masked by such studies. The newest and best technologies look to the genetic and biochemical individuality of the patient and treat each case with those drugs most suited to that individual, or to that specific cancer tumor, for example. It is not possible to perform mortatlity outcome studies on a drug that completely cures 100% of all pancreatic cancers, but only in people with a certain gene which occurs in less than 10% of the population. No such treatment will ever pass outcome studies. On the other hand, it is not ethically reasonable to deny such a cure to that 10%.

But they will be denied. Doctors who persist in using “low outcome” treatments will not get paid. Who will decide? The Federal agency who decides such things will decide. You will not find doctors willing to risk their livelihood and their licenses, and perhaps their freedom from law suites, by performing unapproved procedures.

Obama wants to set up a public insurer, a Government run, taxpayer subsidized health plan “as an alternative to group and private plans”. The Report takes that as an unchallenged goal. That public plan will, of course, follow all the outcome-optimized procedures. For the 45.7 million people, most of whom are healthy 20 to 35 year olds, who do not have coverage now, this will be their mandated option. There is little question that it will absorb Medicare, because otherwise Medicare will be bankrupt. In fact, THE MAIN REASON OBAMA WANTS PUBLIC INSURANCE IS THAT MEDICARE CAN NOT BE SAVED WITHOUT HEAVY POLITICAL COSTS! Medicare, the program started by President Johnson that his adviser estimated would cost $100 million, is now running a cost of $200 billion per year. As every HMO and co-op plan has discovered, there is a virtually unlimited depth of medical need. Put up a plan, and they will come - in numbers that you will not anticipate, with problems that will drain your resources. The ONLY POLITICALLY ACCEPTABLE way to fix Medicare is to absorb it into another much bigger plan THAT WILL BE THE EXCUSE FOR RAISING HEAVY TAXES!

And the tax that will do the trick is....hold your breath... I mean do not exhale.... CAP AND TRADE ON CO2.

In summary, folks, Medicare is broken, so we will have to have Cap & Trade. Devious, simple and you can find it all on the White House web site, but not all in one place. Health Care will be MANDATED - pay for it or be subject to an onerous special tax. That is needed to drive HEALTHY people to the public health care plan.

There is a constitutional problem as well. Under our constitution, those powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal government are left to the States. A public health care plan, or even a set of mandated Federal outcome standards, are not among the enumerated power of the Federal government. Therefore, an amendment to the Constitution will be required to give this power to the Federal government. There is a possibility that it could be squeezed in under the Interstate Commerce clause, but I think it is too big a deal to pass without a constitutional challenge.