Jay Reding.com

The New York Times has a piece on the state of the Canadian healthcare system, held by many in America as a model for how a national healthcare system should be run:

The country’s publicly financed health insurance system — frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity — is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine…

Canada remains the only industrialized country that outlaws privately financed purchases of core medical services. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other politicians remain reluctant to openly propose sweeping changes even though costs for the national and provincial governments are exploding and some cancer patients are waiting months for diagnostic tests and treatment.

But a Supreme Court ruling last June — it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists — appears to have become a turning point for the entire country.

“The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services,” the court ruled.

The reality is that many of the problems with American healthcare are problems that have to do with too much bureaucratic centralization rather than not enough. Single-payer, government-run healthcare doesn’t scale well. Canada has just over a tenth of the population of the United States. A system that can’t provide quality care for 30 million people would collapse even faster when having to provide care for 300 million. As the Canadian Supreme Court found, the public system was not able to deliver a reasonable level of services. Getting cancer in Canada means waiting for months for treatments - if you’re able to get them at all. It’s now become a virtual truism in economics that governments are simply not as efficient in provisioning goods and services. A market has the nervous system of prices that help regulate supply and demand in a way that governments simply can’t match. Trying to build a centralized system is like trying to build a mainframe that can outperform the Internet - an ultimately futile effort.

The way to fix the problems in American healthcare don’t involve emulating the models that are failing everywhere else. Healthcare needs to be allowed to respond to market forces to drive costs down and continue to provide access to care. That means decoupling employment from insurance coverage - there’s no reason why the system should discriminate against the 50% of the American workforce who are employed by small businesses. The idea that your employer should provide you with services outside of work is an idea that should have died off with the company store. If you lose your job, move to a different job, or start your own small business, your healthcare coverage should remain yours. Programs such as Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSAs) move the system in that direction, but they still don’t address all the problems. A system where individuals can have an HSA for basic care and a supplemental catastrophic care plan would help fill the gaps left by the current system.

Canada’s slow collapse of single-payer care should be warning to the US about the perils of such a system. Healthcare will always be expensive - it takes years of training for someone to become a doctor or nurse, and medical equipment must be made to incredibly exacting standards. Government cannot wave a magic wand over the healthcare system and lower prices - it inevitably must ration healthcare to make up for its own inefficiencies - which is exactly what the Canadian system does. That kind of model simply doesn’t provide the best level of care. Markets can do better, which is why US policymakers need to reform the US system to allow individuals to own their own healthcare and make their own healthcare choices regardless of employment situation.

Gerard Baker has an excellent piece on resignation of Larry Summers at Harvard and what it implies about the academy in America. Baker observes:

Though a liberal Democrat, Summers had a traditional view of what a university should be doing, pursuing truth and excellence wherever it led.As he surveyed the vast ranks of well-paid academic celebrities at Harvard, puffing out their ideologies on women’s studies and black history, he wondered what it was all about. His first run-in was with Cornel West, the black professor, who had produced more rap music in recent years than he had books or papers. After a very public row, West left for the more forgiving pastures of Princeton.

Mr Summers quickly challenged the other pillars of political correctness on which most American universities sit. He opposed an effort to block university investment in Israel and condemned attempts to ban the US Armed Forces from recruiting on campus. Note that these were not assertive steps designed to enforce a particular world view, but the opposite — attempts to keep minds open to the possibility that their accumulated prejudices might need to be re-examined.

But his campaign was a challenge to the view that the approved answers of America’s academic elite to the great issues of our time and history were the whole truth, never to be reopened or re-examined.

The fact is that the academy, especially in the humanities, is less ideologically diverse than nearly any institution in American society. Doctrinaire political correctness is enforced with a zeal that would make the most committed Jesuit look like a slouch. While the academy is supposed to be about the values of the free expression of ideals, intellectual curiosity, and observing the world as it is, the reality is quite the opposite. The secular Trinity of Race, Gender, and Class are the foundation for a worldview that pits the Oppressed against the Oppressors in the kind of Gramscian-Marxist morality play that has long been the hallmark of the New Left. Questioning such ideologies is strictly out of bounds in the academy - the equivalent of thought crime that can quickly see an academic career cut short.

The Summers case indicates precisely why the academy is in desperate and dire need of reform. You can’t achieve the goal of encouraging free discussion in the marketplace of ideas when there is a stultifying climate of ideological repression. When Larry Summers can be dismissed for being political incorrect while Ward Chamberlain can commit academic fraud and lie about his credentials with impunity, it shows exactly how the academy has lost integrity.

It is sad that an institution whose very purpose is supposed to be to encourage free thought and expression seems to be pathologically unable to live up to their own values.

Jeff Goldstein has a great piece on the ongoing flap over the Mohammed cartoons that begins with this brilliant WaPo op-ed by William Bennett and Alan Dershowitz. There’s one statement in there that is so incredibly, utterly, and hopelessly idiotic as to quite possibly be one of the dumbest observations ever made:

The Boston Globe, speaking for many other outlets, editorialized: “[N]ewspapers ought to refrain from publishing offensive caricatures of Mohammed in the name of the ultimate Enlightenment value: tolerance.”

This statement deserves the following:

Which Allah (the blogger, not the deity) returns with:

The ultimate Enlightenment value is tolerance? I thought it was, er, knowledge. Free inquiry. With a dash of secularism. Which would seem to point in favor of publication of the cartoons.

Or am I being intolerant again?

The idea that the Enlightment was all about "tolerance" is one of those one would expect from a pseudo-intellectual college student trying to impress his way into some doe-eyed co-ed’s pants with a bunch of meaningless pop philosophy. The fact that the Boston Globe is the one issuing such idiocy makes me wonder about what they put in the water over there. Goldstein observes:

And nothing makes that more clear than this frankly stunning admission by the Globe and its major media allies that tolerance is the “ultimate Englightenment value,” especially when “tolerance” has clearly become, to the press’ way of thinking (and this thinking now permeates the academy and has insinuated itself into vast swatches of public policy), an unwillingness to offend those whom they believe they have no right, as cultural outsiders, to offend.

Can this really be? Is Edward Said the new Alexander Hamilton?

The thought of that makes me weep for Western civilization.

The fact is that “tolerance” is an empty virtue. Tolerance of what? The suppression of free speech? Barbarisms such as bride burnings, honor killings, and female genital mutilation? Tolerance of death camps? Tolerance of the violence that has resulted in the publication of a few cartoon images? Tolerance of an ideology that would stifle all dissent? Should we “tolerate” an ideology that demands that we all follow a strict interpretation of shari’a law or be killed?

The “virtue” of tolerance is a virtue for the cowardly, the craven, and those too weak to defend their values. It has no intrinsic moral worth to it - quite the opposite, in fact. To tolerate acts of evil is to become complicit in evil.

Is the mainstream media and the academy tolerant of dissenting values from their mainstream? Just ask Larry Summers what happens to dissenters in the cloistered halls of academia. What makes Piss Christ free expression but a cartoon of Muhammed an affront against the sacred virtue of “tolerance”? The idea that “tolerance” is the supreme virtue of the Enlightenment coming from such a group is not only puerile, but hypocritical as well.

The fact is that “tolerance” doesn’t mean that we should close our minds to anything that challenges the sensibilities of “oppressed” groups. The fetishization of “tolerance” and the laughable argument that it is the supreme value of the Enlightenment only shows how intellectually vapid the media has become. This stupidity wouldn’t be so bad if it were not so pernicious and so dangerous to the ideological war we’re fighting. We can’t win a war if we’re worried about merely offending the enemy. We should build bridges with moderate Muslims, but doing so by compromising the very values we’re fighting for is an act of surrrender, not a step towards victory. As Goldstein writes:

To win the war on terror, we must continue to push the message—as the administration has done all along—that freedom is universal and belongs to each individual. That is, we must push back against the clannish tribalist impulses of our enemies with a message of inalienable individual rights.

But to do so, we must first believe in it ourselves. And for that to happen, we must return to our strong roots in classical liberalism—which elevates the individual and stresses personal freedom.

And free press that actually believes in these things would be a good start.

Iraq The Model has much more on the aftermath of the bombing in Samarra. Meanwhile, Iraqi blogger Zeyad paints a very distressed picture of the situation. American blogger Bill Roggio doesn’t think that civil war is all that likely.

We can’t afford to be too sanguine. There are plenty of positive developments - Ayatollah Sistani has called for calm, the Sunnis don’t seem to fighting back, and some of the reports of violence may be exaggerated. At the same time, Sunni clerics have been killed and kidnapped, there’s unquestionably large numbers of Shi’a militants causing problems, and the whole situation is a powderkeg waiting to go off.

In all depends on the Iraqis. If they choose civil war, they’ll get it. If calmer heads prevail, the Iraqi people can unite against the terrorists who wish to divide them. Whoever is responsible - be it al-Qaeda, the Mujihadeen Shura Council, Iran, or a yet unknown band of terrorists, they deserve to be brought to justice. Violence and bloodshed in Iraq will make that much harder to achieve. The people of Iraq must not allow this event to play into the hands of criminals and terrorists.

The South Dakota Senate has voted to ban nearly all abortions in the state in a deliberate effort to challenge Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court.

This bill will fail in its objectives.

In fact, my prediction is that this stunt will be quickly overturned in the federal Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court will deny certiorari in this case, ensuring that the law is thrown out. I don’t see the Court as being willing to deal with Roe in such a head-on manner. Even if this law makes it all the way to the Supreme Court, I’m not entirely sure that Roe would be overturned.

This is a stunt, pure and simple. It is a stunt that was done rashly, without consideration, and will cost the state of South Dakota millions in legal fees. Gov. Rounds should veto this bill when it reaches his desk.

I consider myself pro-life. I believe that all innocent life should be treated with the utmost respect. At the same time, any bill that tries to override the judgment of physicians on issues of the health of the mother or does not make exceptions in the cases of rape or incest is not a reasonable bill. The radicals who pushed for this bill represent a minority of even those who are opposed to abortion. The proper place for the abortion battle is not in the political realm but in the personal and moral realm. Abortion should always be a “choice” of absolute last resort when all other options have failed, and the money spend by radical anti-abortion groups would be far better spent education women on the physical and emotional risks of abortion, providing pre- and post-natal care for mothers who would otherwise be forced into abortion, and encouraging more effective adoption laws. Trying to push an abortion ban down the throats of the American public is the same mistake that has led to three decades of acrimony over the issue - and will only push those on the fence over this issue towards the side of supporting the malignant practice. The real battlfield on this issue should be the hearts and minds of the American people, not the courtroom.