McHenry County Blog

The Chicago Tribune had an August 16th column by Steve Chapman. It was titled,

Here’s a link that may still work.

What’s remarkable is the content in the column. It factually refutes President’s Barack Obama’s assertion that health care in the U.S. takes a backseat quality wise to other countries.

First Chapman summarizes Obama’s position:

“He says though the United States spends more per person on medical care than any other nation, ‘the quality of our care is often lower, and we aren’t any healthier. In fact, citizens in some countries that spend substantially less than we do are actually living longer than we do.’

“Then he writes something which at first reading seems perplexing:

“That’s one of the favorite rationales for a government-led overhaul. But it gives about as realistic a picture of American medicine as an episode of ‘Scrubs.’”

It can be perplexing because so many people have bought into Obama’s connect-the-dots in the above position.

Here’s what was so factually remarkable in Chapman’s column:

“It’s true that the United States spends more on health care than anyone else, and it’s true that we rank below a lot of other advanced countries in life expectancy. The juxtaposition of the two facts, however, doesn’t prove we are wasting our money or doing the wrong things.

“It only proves that lots of things affect mortality besides medical treatment. Actor Heath Ledger didn’t die at age 28 because the American health-care system failed him.

“One big reason our life expectancy lags is that Americans have an unusual tendency to perish in homicides or accidents. We are 12 times more likely than the Japanese to be murdered and nearly twice as likely to be killed in auto wrecks.

“In their 2006 book, ‘The Business of Health,’ economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider set out to determine where the U.S. would rank in life span among developed nations if homicides and accidents are factored out. Their answer? First place.”

Chapman then points out what every American voter should read or be told:

“That discovery indicates our health-care system is doing a poor job of preventing shootouts and drunk driving but a good job of healing the sick. All those universal-care systems in Canada and Europe may sound like Health Heaven, but they fall short of our model when it comes to combating life-threatening diseases.

“Some of those foreign systems are great, as long as you don’t get sick. Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho of the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania examined survival rates for lung, breast, prostate, colon and rectum cancers in 18 countries and found that Americans fared best.

“The U.S. also excelled on other measures, such as surviving heart attacks for more than a year. Why? Because our doctors and patients don’t take no for an answer. The researchers attribute the results to ‘wider screening and more aggressive treatment.’ Another factor is that we get quicker access to new cancer drugs than anyone else.”

I asked my European-trained brother-in-law, the doctor, if he had ever heard this interpretation of life expectancy. He had not.

He did say that it had never made sense to him that European medicine was better than ours.

For a President who is lashing out about people who are misinforming the public, it is truly remarkable that the national news outlets haven’t picked up on these facts.

So if you missed Steve Chapman’s column in the Chicago Tribune, at least some more people will be better informed by McHenry County Blog. Pass it along.

A better informed electorate is one of the best protections for our freedoms.

Unless you consider socialism a form of “personal freedom.”

That’s the question that New York Times reporter Scott Shane had buried in his front page article Saturday on the connection of Weatherman terrorist bomber Bill Ayers and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

And the very day the issue finally surfaces in the New York Times, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin starts talking about Chicago’s home grown terrorist turned state payroller. (He’s a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Is Illinois a forgiving state or what?)

Here’s the complete quote from Chicago Tribune’s libertarian leaning columnist Steve Chapman, who defended Obama with regard to his minister, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.:

“I don’t think there is a statute of limitations on terrorist bombings,” Mr. Chapman said in an interview, speaking not of the law but of moral implications.

“If you’re in public life, you ought to say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this guy,’” Mr. Chapman said.

“If John McCain had a long association with a guy who’d bombed abortion clinics, I don’t think people would say, ‘That’s ancient history.’”

And what did Ayers write in his autobiography?

The [New York Times] reporter quoted him as saying [on September 11, 2001] “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough”, and, when asked if he would “do it all again” as saying “I don’t want to discount the possibility,”^[13], according to Wikipedia.

Click to enlarge any image.

That’s the question that New York Times reporter Scott Shane had buried in his front page article Saturday on the connection of Weatherman terrorist bomber Bill Ayers and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

And the very day the issue finally surfaces in the New York Times, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin starts talking about Chicago’s home grown terrorist turned state payroller. (He’s a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Is Illinois a forgiving state or what?)

Here’s the complete quote from Chicago Tribune’s libertarian leaning columnist Steve Chapman, who defended Obama with regard to his minister, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.:

“I don’t think there is a statute of limitations on terrorist bombings,” Mr. Chapman said in an interview, speaking not of the law but of moral implications.

“If you’re in public life, you ought to say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this guy,’” Mr. Chapman said.

“If John McCain had a long association with a guy who’d bombed abortion clinics, I don’t think people would say, ‘That’s ancient history.’”

And what did Ayers write in his autobiography?

The [New York Times] reporter quoted him as saying [on September 11, 2001] “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough”, and, when asked if he would “do it all again” as saying “I don’t want to discount the possibility,”^[13], according to Wikipedia.

Click to enlarge any image.

Articles two days in a row on a national issue. First gun control and now abortion.

That’s got to be a new record for McHenry County Blog.

Don’t worry, it won’t happen often.

It’s just when I compared the rantings by Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg with what the Tribune’s Steve Chapman had to say Sunday, the interpretations were so great that I thought them worth noting.

Steinberg spends less space in his piece.

Comparing what Congress did to try to keep Terri Schiavo from being slowly starved to death and killed by dehydration, Steinberg says the Supreme Court has “popped up between the legs of the women of America and waved away any doctors who might want to perform certain late term abortions” which he says are “rare,” but “grisly.”

“…right-to-Lifers..(ha)ve lost trying to convince America to ban abortion, so instead they are nibbling away at the edges, on issues that give most decent folk pause, such as this procedure.”

I would not that such an incremental approach in the 1800’s was the way abortion was banned.

Chapman notes the problem that the decision presents abortion advocates:

It’s that it treats the fetus as more than a disposable inconvenience—as a living entity entitled to a measure of respect and protection. One you take that step, there is no telling where it might lead.

And let me share Chapman’s part describing the procedure itself:

The court cited one nurse’s account of this procedure:

The doctor, she said, “delivered the baby’s body and arms—everything but the hear.”

At that point, she said,

”The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out…The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out.”

The striking fact about the debate here is not that some people are appalled and revolted by what is done in these instances, but that some people are not. They don’t flinch from the violence visited on well-developer fetuses in the name of reproductive freedom. Any abortion, in their eyes, is a justifiable abortion.

Chapman then takes on the “health of the mother” bugaboo.

He hasn’t room to point out that the provision is not in Roe v. Wade, but in Doe v. Bolton, a companion decision handed down the same day. The exceptions for health is so broad that it includes, as the second, long ignored case states, not only physical risks,

“but all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age—relevant to )her) well-being.”

As Chapman points out,

”The exception cancels the rule.”

To abortion rights groups like Personal PAC, the group whose candidate Rosemary Kurtz took me out of the Illinois House, as Chapman says without citing any specific group,

”any limit on ‘the right to choose’ is intolerable…”

…even if it is barbaric.

Articles two days in a row on a national issue. First gun control and now abortion.

That’s got to be a new record for McHenry County Blog.

Don’t worry, it won’t happen often.

It’s just when I compared the rantings by Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg with what the Tribune’s Steve Chapman had to say Sunday, the interpretations were so great that I thought them worth noting.

Steinberg spends less space in his piece.

Comparing what Congress did to try to keep Terri Schiavo from being slowly starved to death and killed by dehydration, Steinberg says the Supreme Court has “popped up between the legs of the women of America and waved away any doctors who might want to perform certain late term abortions” which he says are “rare,” but “grisly.”

“…right-to-Lifers..(ha)ve lost trying to convince America to ban abortion, so instead they are nibbling away at the edges, on issues that give most decent folk pause, such as this procedure.”

I would not that such an incremental approach in the 1800’s was the way abortion was banned.

Chapman notes the problem that the decision presents abortion advocates:

It’s that it treats the fetus as more than a disposable inconvenience—as a living entity entitled to a measure of respect and protection. One you take that step, there is no telling where it might lead.

And let me share Chapman’s part describing the procedure itself:

The court cited one nurse’s account of this procedure:

The doctor, she said, “delivered the baby’s body and arms—everything but the hear.”

At that point, she said,

”The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out…The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out.”

The striking fact about the debate here is not that some people are appalled and revolted by what is done in these instances, but that some people are not. They don’t flinch from the violence visited on well-developer fetuses in the name of reproductive freedom. Any abortion, in their eyes, is a justifiable abortion.

Chapman then takes on the “health of the mother” bugaboo.

He hasn’t room to point out that the provision is not in Roe v. Wade, but in Doe v. Bolton, a companion decision handed down the same day. The exceptions for health is so broad that it includes, as the second, long ignored case states, not only physical risks,

“but all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age—relevant to )her) well-being.”

As Chapman points out,

”The exception cancels the rule.”

To abortion rights groups like Personal PAC, the group whose candidate Rosemary Kurtz took me out of the Illinois House, as Chapman says without citing any specific group,

”any limit on ‘the right to choose’ is intolerable…”

…even if it is barbaric.