Global Warming: Economic Slump caused decline in Greenhouse Gases

Good Source for differing points of view...

http://www.globalwarming.org/

The heat has really hit the fan on the Global Warming debate. But, Barbara Boxer isn't mincing theory, numerical equations or falsified data to fit the desired conclusion.

During the economic slump, behavioral changes of people out of work, resulted in a drop in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Period.

Boxer made the point that "the poor economy has been great for the climate."

Former Treasury Department Economist Says Repubs Big Spenders

Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Actionand Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Bruce Bartlett's new book is: The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.

Excerpt:

Amazingly, leading Republicans still defend the drug benefit. Just the other day, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., celebrated its passage, and at a recent American Enterprise Institute forum, former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., berated me for criticizing it. In each case, their main argument was that it ended up costing a little less than originally projected. Somehow, I doubt that Frist or Thomas would feel the same way if their wives thought it was OK to buy a closet full of expensive new shoes just because they were on sale.
I don't mean to suggest that Democrats are any better when it comes to the deficit, although they have a better case for saying so based on the contrasting fiscal records of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The national debt belongs to both parties. But at least the Democrats don't go on Fox News day after day proclaiming how fiscally conservative they are, and organize tea parties to rant about deficits, without ever putting forward any plan for reducing them. Nor do they pretend that they have no responsibility whatsoever for projected deficits, at least half of which can be traced directly to Republican policies, according to Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.
It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term. As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt. Space prohibits listing all their names, but the final Senate vote can be found here and the House vote here.

Read the entire article at:



http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/19/republican-budget-hypocrisy-health-care-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html

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GOP Repeats False Claims

The FactCheck Wire - The “Government-Run” Mantra

November 6, 2009


The claim that the House bill would amount to "government-run health care" suffered a blow last week, when the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the so-called "public plan" in the revised bill wouldn’t offer much in the way of competition to private insurers. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from repeating the claim.

For several months, we’ve been debunking assertions that Democratic health care bills call for a Canadian or British-type system in which everyone is insured, or insured and cared for, through the government. None of the bills being debated in Congress call for such a single-payer system. Conservative groups have also claimed that a federal health insurance plan would be the death knell for private insurance, offering a much cheaper alternative and eventually leading to "a government-run system." As we’ve written, how competitive the "public plan" would be depends greatly on how it’s structured. And the latest iteration in the revised House bill isn’t expected to have much of an impact on private insurers, according to the nonpartisan CBO and an independent analysis of this scenario.
But Republicans are still recycling "government-run" claims and old analyses that don’t pertain to the bill. House Minority Leader John Boehner was saying back in June that the House bill "is a complete government takeover of our health care system," and again last week, Boehner told Fox News that the revised House bill is "nothing short of a complete government takeover of our health care system." Boehner partly blamed the federal insurance plan for the takeover, saying, "you’re going to drive every private health insurance company out of business."
The congressional Republicans’ Web site further claimed that the House bill would create "a new government-run health plan" that "would cause as many as 114 million Americans to lose their existing coverage," according to the Lewin Group. But that’s not what the Lewin Group said at all. The GOP cherry picks this number from a months-old Lewin Group study that’s based on an early version of the House bill (and the assumption that the "public plan" would be open to everyone). Lewin’s estimates of how many would leave private plans in favor of a federal option, structured as it is in the latest House bill (as well as the version that came out of the Energy and Commerce committee), are 90 percent lower than that. The Lewin Group is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group but says it operates with "editorial independence."
The early House bill called for a federal insurance plan that would pay health care providers at Medicare rates, which are 20 percent to 30 percent less than what private plans pay on average, according to the Lewin Group. If this type of federal plan, which would be substantially cheaper than private insurance, were open to everyone within three years, it could lure as many as 114 million away from private insurance, Lewin estimated. The revised bill calls for a federal plan that pays negotiated rates, putting its premiums in line with those of private plans.
The Lewin Group has not released an analysis of the latest House bill, but it did model what would happen under a similar situation, with a federal plan paying negotiated rates. Lewin found that such a plan would result in 10.4 million to 12.5 million people moving off of private plans, in favor of the "public option." Why the big drop? Because those with private insurance wouldn’t save much money, if any, by switching to the federal plan.
CBO analyzed the revised House bill, and it came up with even lower numbers. CBO estimated that 6 million Americans total would join the so-called "public plan" by 2019 — and that premiums would be "somewhat higher" than the average private plan premiums offered through an insurance exchange. CBO said the plan would be most attractive to the less healthy members of the population, forcing premiums higher, despite the fact that the federal plan would save some money on administrative costs.
CBO: [A] public plan paying negotiated rates would attract a broad network of providers but would typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges. The rates the public plan pays to providers would, on average, probably be comparable to the rates paid by private insurers participating in the exchanges. The public plan would have lower administrative costs than those private plans but would probably engage in less management of utilization by its enrollees and attract a less healthy pool of enrollees. (The effects of that “adverse selection” on the public plan’s premiums would be only partially offset by the “risk adjustment” procedures that would apply to all plans operating in the exchanges.)
In any case, whether 6 million people take up the "public plan" (CBO) or 12 million (the Lewin Group’s high-end estimate), neither number comes close to backing up the GOP claim that this bill would "drive every private health insurance company out of business" and result in "government-run" health care.
Posted by Lori Robertson on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 2:34 pm Filed under The FactCheck Wire · Tagged with health care, health insurance, John Boehner


http://www.factcheck.org/2009/11/the-government-run-mantra/

Fact Check.org Health Care/House Vote Tomorrow

Boehner Misrepresents FactCheck.org’s Findings
November 2, 2009


Last week House Republican Leader John Boehner’s office issued a "Leader Alert" titled "10 Facts Every American Should Know About Speaker Pelosi’s 1,990-Page Gov’t Takeover of Health Care."
It’s a partisan document containing misleading characterizations of the bill. But the bullet point that bothers us most is #2, which reads:
MASSIVE CUTS TO MEDICARE BENEFITS FOR SENIORS. Despite grave warnings from CBO, FactCheck.org, and the independent Lewin Group that cuts to Medicare of the magnitude included in Speaker Pelosi’s bill would have a negative impact on seniors’ benefits and choices, Speaker Pelosi’s health care bill stays the course and cuts Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/11/boehner-misrepresents-factcheckorgs-findings/

Pitt in his biggest role

From the Atlantic...

A sturdy bike is a good way to get around the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The roads are still pretty rough, the distances between places tend to be too long to walk and too short to drive, and on a bike you can easily stop and chat with the residents who have returned. I moved to New Orleans about a year after Hurricane Katrina, and I’ve ridden my bike out here every month or two to see how the rebuilding has been faring. Also, I’ve heard that Brad Pitt likes to bike around when he’s in town. Folks tell me he’s a pretty regular guy. “Brad was here yesterday,” a woman sitting on the front steps of her new and very modern house told me one day last fall. “He was talking to everyone, just checking things out.”


Read More...







http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/curtis-architecture-new-orleans

H1N1 Vaccine Useless?

From the Atlantic...


Vaccination is central to the government’s plan for preventing deaths from swine flu. The CDC has recommended that some 159 million adults and children receive either a swine flu shot or a dose of MedImmune’s nasal vaccine this year. Shots are offered in doctors’ offices, hospitals, airports, pharmacies, schools, polling places, shopping malls, and big-box stores like Wal-Mart. In August, New York state required all health-care workers to get both seasonal and swine flu shots. To further protect the populace, the federal government has spent upwards of $3billion stockpiling millions of doses of antiviral drugs like Tamiflu—which are being used both to prevent swine flu and to treat those who fall ill.

Also see:
Q&A: “Facts About Swine Flu”The authors answer practical questions about H1N1 diagnosis and immunity.

But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying—particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized? The U.S. government—with the support of leaders in the public-health and medical communities—has put its faith in the power of vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality of swine flu. Other plans to contain the pandemic seem anemic by comparison. Yet some top flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed, and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu. And that unless we are willing to ask fundamental questions about the science behind flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, we could find ourselves, in a bad epidemic, as helpless as the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.



Read more here...

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1

Recession Good For Our Health?

This article comes from NewsChannel5.com

"University of Michigan researchers looked at death rates during the Great Depression, the worst economic slump in the 20th century. From the stock market crash of 1929 through the early 1930s, economic activity fell sharply, dropping 14 percent in 1932, while unemployment hit 22.9 percent that same year.

Black and white images from the era of bread lines and migrant farmers make it easy to assume the economic misery would have affected public health.

But when the researchers looked at mortality rates among men, women and children from 1920 to 1940, they found death rates declined during years of falling economic activity and rose when times were better.

The study is in the Sept. 28 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

During the two decades spanning the 1920s and 1930s, overall life expectancy increased by 8.8 years. But it wasn't a steady rise, instead shooting up and falling back in a pattern that correlated with the rise and fall of economic activity.

Between 1921 and 1926, the so-called "Roaring 20s" and a time of robust economic growth, life expectancy for non-white men fell by 8.1 years. Yet between 1929 and 1933, the years of steepest economic decline, their life expectancy grew a similar amount.

What do you make of it?


The article goes on to say:

"The basic finding of the paper is that mortality rates tend to evolve in parallel to the economy," said lead study author Jose Tapia Granados, an assistant research scientist at University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. "When the economy goes up, mortality tends to go up. When the economy goes down, mortality rates tend to go down, too."
Researchers did find one exception. During the 1920s and 1930s, two-thirds of all deaths were caused by cardiovascular and renal diseases, cancer, influenza and pneumonia, tuberculosis, motor vehicle accidents and suicide.
All became less deadly during difficult economic times, with the exception of suicides. But suicides accounted for fewer than 2 percent of all deaths, not enough to alter the overall trend, the study authors added.
The country's climb out of the Great Depression began in 1933. The economy grew by more than 10 percent annually from 1933 to 1936. Mortality again peaked in 1936, four years after the worst year of the Depression, even for children under age 4.

The reasons make sense:

More economic activity means people have money to drive cars, meaning more die in auto wrecks, the researchers theorize. In the 1920s and 1930s, cars became objects of mass consumption.
As motor vehicle use increases, so does pollution. Recent studies have linked particulate matter from cars and trucks and carbon monoxide with heart attacks and strokes.
During periods of growth, people have more money to spend on alcohol and cigarettes. And more economic activity means more factory orders, meaning people are working harder and longer and sleeping less.
Still, this is not to say that losing a job is good for your health. The study looks at the bigger picture -- fewer cars, fewer people working overtime, less pollution -- and how it may benefit public health as a whole.
A similar pattern may be at work during the current downturn, the authors suggested.

Read the entire article at:


http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/story.asp?S=11230024