Football season starts tonight with the first college football games of the year. Ah, this is what I look forward to every year--and now it's finally here! Real games that count, possible upsets, hard hits, last second scores--the whole shebang! The possibilities are endless. Too bad I've got a party of 30 coming in tonight at 7:00, but I'll watch highlights when I get home. The game I really want to see is on Saturday, though, and I've got one thing to say about that:

GIG 'EM, AGS!

Ok, so I thought I would start posting rebuttals in my blog for the recurring themes that I am seeing on Answers. Today will be the "US ranks 37th in Health Care" post that seems to pop up constantly. Of course, when you ask where this ranking comes from, and what the criteria is for the ranking, no lib ever wants to give out that information--or they simply give you a violation for asking. Well, I went and looked at the WHO rankings (which is where this figure comes from, and which are from 2001) and I noticed a few things--like the overall quality of health care is not part of the rankings. Quality is qualified with "fairness," a very subjective term. The rest of it was hard to understand, and I couldn't really formulate an argument to rebut this completely--until John Stossel just wrote an article on this very subject. It can be found here:

http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/JohnStossel/2007/08/22/why_the_us_ranks_lo...

To summarize, these rankings start from a false premise (go figure), that is, life expectancy. In the article, John discusses how the WHO doesn't adjust for non-health care related deaths, such as transportation accidents & homicide. John then says this: "When you adjust for these "fatal injury" rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation." Thanks, WHO.

Next John tackles the "fairness" issue. In the first place, without factoring in the fairness of the distribution of health care, the US has the highest quality health care of any nation. Have you ever heard of anyone leaving the US to get better health care? Secondly, a big component of this so-called fairness is the supposed 45 million uninsured. We all know that this is an inflated number based on illegals, teenagers, and those who don't need or want insurance or are transistioning between insurance. Also, as John points out, a large portion of those left out are because the US health care system doesn't have enough free market incentives in it. Here's what John says on this issue: "let's acknowledge that the U.S. medical system has serious problems. But the problems stem from departures from free-market principles. The system is riddled with tax manipulation, costly insurance mandates and bureaucratic interference. Most important, six out of seven health-care dollars are spent by third parties, which means that most consumers exercise no cost-consciousness. As Milton Friedman always pointed out, no one spends other people's money as carefully as he spends his own." So, if the system had more conservative principles built in, it wouldn't be so expensive. Amazing. <sarcasm> So, the next time you see "37th in health care" on Answers, give 'em some of this, and link to John's article. Enjoy!

Here's a great game to play called "Show of Hands." Enjoy!

http://www.gop.com/net/ShowOfHands/debate.aspx