Posted by
Ed Lilly on Saturday, August 15, 2009 8:43:53 AM
There was a discussion in The Corner at National Review Online recently on the life expectancy issue. I believe the take there was that life expectancy is a bit of a red herring in that, once basics like clean water and vaccinations are taken care of, life expectancy is largely the same around the world.
But the real difference in later life is quality of life - where Americans apparently do much better because of advances in health care and things like joint replacements and other things that make our lives much more enjoyable than our counterparts who are much less likely to receive new knees, hips, etc due to the cost / rationing in other systems.
On a quasi-related note, in listening to the Hugh Hewitt program on the way home last night, they played several clips of the President at a town hall meeting in Montana. In response to one of the questions, there was reference to the issue of "how are we going to pay for the proposed program." The President's response started with the assumption that 2/3 of the cost of insuring approximately 46 million people (the estimated uninsured at the moment) would be "paid for" by savings that will be realized in eliminating waste, fraud, etc.
I've been doing a lot of work recently on issues relating to expert witnesses, and one of the things that gets thrown out in judicial opinions in this area is the phrase "ipse dixit." Essentially, the court's say that an expert opinion that something happens or is caused by something else JUST BECAUSE THE EXPERT SAYS SO is not admissible. "Ipse dixit" is a Latin phrase meaning "he himself said it" (or so a quick online search indicates), and court's generally use the phrase by explaining that something is not accepted on faith alone based on just the say-so of an asserted "expert."
But in hearing the President's ramblings about cost savings in health care, I thought, "Someone should update Black's Law Dictionary to put this discussion in there as a prototypical example of 'ipse dixit.'"
Why in the world should anyone believe, based solely on the President's unsupported assertion, that $600 million in savings will just magically occur? And if the government really can make savings just happen, why not prove it by producing real savings in current government programs FIRST, and maybe even creating benchmarks (I recall that was a term that liberals loved not too long ago) for government savings that must be met and proven / verified before any type of additional health care program created by the government can be authorized?