Rampant anti-Americanism in the Middle East: The Consequences of Obama weakness t

DECKER: Consequences of Obama weakness - Washington Times

"The murder of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Libya on Wednesday is the direct consequence of President Obama’s weakness as a leader. His administration’s support of Islamist uprisings across the Middle East has led to a destabilized region where radical anti-Americanism is running rampant. The images being transmitted across the planet today give a glimpse of what the world looks like absent strong U.S. leadership in international affairs: Rioting mobs ripping down the American flag from our embassy in Cairo and a diplomat’s brutalized body being dragged through the streets of Benghazi. These are not isolated incidents but the predictable result of four years of Mr. Obama meekly trying to “lead from behind.

Read more:  DECKER: Consequences of Obama weakness - Washington Times

Docs4PatientCare Physician's Prescription for Health Care Reform

The Docs4PatientCare Physician's Prescription for Health Care Reform

"The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) neither protects patients, nor does it lead to affordable care.  The two fundamental problems that drive up the cost of health care in the United States are the lack of true competition in the health insurance industry and the isolation of physicians and patients from the true costs of health care.

Rather than addressing these problems, ObamaCare aggravates them by limiting choices of insurance, increasing regulation, and centralizing decision making.  It is the wrong prescription for health care reform in America.  A majority of Americans, particularly physicians, recognize this and thus oppose the new health care law and support its repeal.

Docs 4 Patient Care is an organization of physicians dedicated to the preservation of the doctor-patient relationship.  What follows is our prescription for health care reform in the United States.  Our primary concern is the health and well-being of our patients.  An additional concern is the health and well-being of our country –physically and financially.

Accompanying each of the following eight recommendations is a rationale.  These recommendations are intended to serve as a framework on which responsible legislation can be constructed...."

See below for the health care reform policy recommendations.

http://docs4patientcare.org/prescription

ACO's in Health Care? "Bigger Is NOT Better"

We Stand FIRM: Domenech on "Bigger Is Better":

"ObamaCare law explicitly drives increasing consolidation of doctors, hospitals, and providers.  Proponents argue this allows of increased efficiencies of scale.

But the real agenda is that it allows greater government control.  It's much easier for the government to regulate 100 large "Accountable Care Organizations" than 100,000 individual hospitals and private practices.

Such consolidation is merely a continuation of a much older strategy. Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism described how the Roosevelt administration sought similar consolidations of American agriculture and business during the New Deal. As Goldberg noted:

[If] you want to use business to implement your social agenda, then you should want businesses themselves to be as big as possible. What’s easier, strapping five thousand cats to a wagon or a couple of giant oxen?

Bigger may be "better" for the government, but not for patients or doctors."

Check out: 
"The Obamacare Fallacy: Bigger is better".

Vdieo: Dr. Jill Vecchio Explains ObamaCare Pt 1: Who Will - and Will Not- Be Covered?

One page summary against Obamacare

One page summary against Obamacare

"Having someone else pay for your medical care is the most expensive way to pay for it because it adds insurer overhead costs to the cost of the actual service. "

Fighting ObamaCare: " What Can One Do?

"What Can One Do?"
by Ayn Rand

"This question is frequently asked by people who are concerned about the state of < today's health care system and the looming imposition of government -run ObamaCare > and want to correct it. "How can an individual propagate < the correct ideas> on a scale large enough to effect the immense changes which must be made in order to create the kind of ideal social system < or American health care system > which you picture?"

If this is the way the question is posed, the answer is: he can't. No one can change a country single-handed. So the first question to ask is: why do people approach the problem this way?

Suppose you were a doctor in the midst of an epidemic. You would not ask: "How can one doctor treat millions of patients and restore the whole country to perfect health?" You would know, whether you were alone or part of an organized medical campaign, that you have to treat as many people as you can reach, according to the best of your ability, and that nothing else is possible.

People approach intellectual issues in a manner they would not use to deal with physical problems.
They would not seek to stop an epidemic overnight, or to build a skyscraper single-handed.  Nor would they refrain from renovating their own crumbling house, on the grounds that they are unable to rebuild the entire city.

But in the realm of ideas, they still tend to regard knowledge as irrelevant, and they expect to perform instantaneous miracles, somehow or they paralyze themselves into inaction by projecting an
impossible goal.

If you are seriously interested in fighting for a better < US health care system and against government -run health care>, begin by identifying the nature of the problems. The battle is primarily intellectual (philosophical), not political. Politics is the *last consequence*, the practical implementation, of the fundamental philosophical ideas that dominate a given nation's culture.

You cannot fight or change the consequences without fighting and changing the cause; nor can you attempt any practical implementation without knowing what you want to implement. In an intellectual battle, you do not need to convert everyone. History is made by minorities or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities.

Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality that counts (the quality and consistency of the
ideas one is advocating).

An intellectual movement does not start with organized action. Whom would one organize?
A philosophical battle is a battle for men's minds, not an attempt to enlist blind followers. Ideas can be propagated only by the men and women who understand them.

An organized movement has to be preceded by an educational campaign, which requires trained- self-trained - teachers (self-trained in the sense that a philosopher can offer you the material of knowledge, but
it is your own mind that has to absorb it).

Such training is the first requirement for being a doctor during an ideological epidemic and the precondition of any attempt to "change the world."... Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum <and the legal and economic chaos of our health care system>;  they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them?

Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? ... * A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war.*

If you want to influence a country's intellectual trend < or help bring rational reform to the American health care system>, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case case, to the best of your knowledge and ability.

This does not mean memorizing and reciting slogans and principles; knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles to concrete problems, to recognize the principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action....

When or if your convictions are in your conscious, orderly control, you will be able to communicate them to others. If you like condensations (provided you bear in mind their full meaning), I will say: when you ask "What can one do?" the answer is "SPEAK" (provided you know what you are saying).

A few suggestions: do not wait for a national audience. Speak on any scale open to you, large or small, to your friends, your associates, <your patients>, your professional organizations, or any legitimate
public forum.  You can never tell when your words will reach the right mind at the right time. You will see no immediate results, but it is of such  activities that public opinion is made.... it is never too late or too early to propagate the right ideas- except under a dictatorship.

If a dictatorship <or government run socialized medicine> ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. ...

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/DocsFighting4HealthCareReform/message/13

The myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished

The myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished

Excellent article which identifies the unstable political-economic fault lines  in the current  US system which will undergo seismic shifts in the November election one way or the other and determine the future course of American history:

"  ...What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust.

The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect.

The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union...."

What is actually being exposed with stark clarity is the economic throes of the US under the current Obama regime  of socialist class warfare  and the economic and political instability of a "mixed economy".

This was identified and described here in vivid detail by Ayn Rand- as as unstable intermediary form of government on its way to the  inevitable degradation into full socialism and dictatorshiip- as America is on its way to finding out:

"A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship.

A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one’s interests are safe, everyone’s interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it.

Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands.

While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.

A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e., by force.

 In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy’s only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure.

 If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone’s actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.

The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity..."

What is the solution?  As a country, the US must learn to embrace and uphold the proper Principles of a Free Society.