Outbreak Continues

As the father of a 12-week-old, I have to say this is getting pretty disturbing:

We learned late Tuesday afternoon there are three new probable cases of measles in southeast Wisconsin. That's in addition to the four cases already confirmed.

There's also now a case of rubella in Waukesha County. Rubella is also known as "German measles,” and it's something we haven't seen here since the 1990s.

The measles outbreak now covers Milwaukee, Waukesha, Racine and Walworth counties.

In Racine, a local doctor tested a 5th grade boy for measles and it came back positive. Officially, this is considered a probable case. Racine officials rushed a sample to the state health lab where they're working on confirming the measles.

I'm soon moving to Waukesha and we were going to enroll Lucia in the daycare in which these outbreaks started. Let's just say this is hitting a little too close to home.

One wonders, could it have anything to do with this? I'm not aware of a significant, direct illegal immigration problem in Southeastern Wisconsin but it seems very likely that unvaccinated individuals are responsible as the measles/rubella vaccine is incredibly effective unless some untreated jackoff brings it back:

Of the 66 cases of measles reported in the U.S. in 2005, slightly over half were attributable to one unvaccinated individual who acquired measles during a visit to Romania. This individual returned to a community with many unvaccinated children. The resulting outbreak infected 34 people, mostly children and virtually all unvaccinated; 9% were hospitalized, and the cost of containing the outbreak was estimated at $167,685. A major epidemic was averted due to high rates of vaccination in the surrounding communities.

As you all know, I'm not one for the government mandating behavior in citizens but the topic of vaccination is a strong exception. If you have a religious or other strong objection to vaccinations, then you should not be allowed to live among us. We have done the responsible thing and protected our children from needless, terrible diseases that should be a thing of past. If you want your kids to be retarded because of measles, that's fine. Just keep them the fuck away from my daughter.

That's a Great Reason!

An incredulous Henry Gomez:

Smoking gun evidence about how the mainstream media and particularly CNN, which we have always referred to as the castro news network, is trying to sanitize castro's legacy, EVEN NOW!

As if health care and education were a good enough excuse to violate human rights. We have to be fair now don't we?

Of course CNN believes health care and education are good enough excuses to violate human rights. They and their Democratic overlords believe just that. If you doubt me just imagine the laws and regulations we'll be dealing with after we have universal health care imposed on us allowing the government to tell you what to eat, drink, where to walk and where to live in order to keep costs down.

Not a human rights violation? Well, wait until people start to rebel against the system. Then you'll get them. Bunches of them.

Jeff Goldstein Wakes From Coma

Then writes the definitive piece on the SCHIP situation:

Well, perhaps not nationally. But here, in the comments, it’s come up quite a bit, despite the inability of certain visiting SCHIP-expansion shills to either locate these arguments or respond to them substantively. Which, I realize, is asking a lot from those whose only rebuttal thus far has been is to accuse critics who find fault with the Democrats’ using a 12-year-old mouthpiece already covered under SCHIP to push for the program’s dramatic expansion (in what its critics believe is a dishonest emotional appeal designed to create a bridge toward national healthcare by incorporating the middle class) of being “hateful” smear merchants, “stalkers,” and “child abusers.”

That is exactly right. The left is being willfully dishonest about this debate. They know that they were disingenuous when using the Frost family as an emotional bludgeon. Graeme was already covered! They did it to avoid having to defend expanding a system wherein a sizable chunk of the money is already being wasted on adults and people that can afford insurance.

The sad thing is, if they were willing to actually agree to a bill that spent money on health care for poor children and only poor children they would get it passed in a minute. Too bad they have to demagogue the issue.

Jeff also echoes my preferred solution to rising health care costs (bias alert: I work in the non-health insurance industry):

Instead, I’d prefer we started treating insurance as insurance — to cover the catastrophic — and use the huge drop in premiums such a restructuring would effect to allow people to budget for their own out of pocket health care needs.

This approach begins to reteach the need for personal accountability, which progressives despise, given that, in the long term, such instigation is a remedy for the encroachment of the nanny state they so clearly desire.

How we’d deal with the irresponsible in the meantime — so that, say, children don’t go without routine checkups or flu shots, etc., so that Mommy and Daddy can add the GPS system and the sunroof to the Volvo — would then become a legitimate question of policy, and one that I’d be more than happy to hash out.

Before I started working in the insurance industry, I admit I had a very fuzzy understanding of the process. The problem is that our current health insurance system is only nominally insurance at all. The fact that known, reliable monthly expenditures are included in what insurance covers, by definition, makes it not insurance. Insurance is a risk balancing industry that attempts to rate unknown risks and aid a person in levelling out the cost of unexpected catastrophic expense. It is not intended to be used like a discount card at the local pharmacy, which is how most people use it.

Ask an average insurance consumer if they think they should be paying at least as much for their insurance as they use and they'll say, "why would I want it then?" The expectation of covered medication is far more like socialism than insurance. It would be like expecting your auto insurance to pay for oil changes and gasoline.

Another Win For Socialized Medicine

I wish I could say I'm surprised by this:

In recent years, Britain's superbug infection rates of bacteria like Clostridium difficile and MRSA have skyrocketed. In the 1990s, only five percent of in-hospital blood infections were from MRSA, the deadly bacteria resistant to nearly every available antibiotic. In past years, that figure has jumped to more than 40 percent.

Critics blame the rise on overstretched hospitals that do not have enough money or capacity to catch superbug infections early.

Apparently you can sue the NHS and it is starting to have a rather staggering effect:

MEDICAL MALPRACTICE PREMIUMS in the United Kingdom are on the rise.
In recent years there has been a 15%–20% annual rise in the cost of claims, and
litigation costs for the National Health Service are soaring.

That document notes the same trend in Canada.

Update: It just gets better and better. (h/t: Hot Air)