From the No Shit Department

The new federal health-care law has raised the stakes for hospitals and schools already scrambling to train more doctors.

Experts warn there won’t be enough doctors to treat the millions of people newly insured under the law. At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

That shortfall is predicted despite a push by teaching hospitals and medical schools to boost the number of U.S. doctors, which now totals about 954,000.

The greatest demand will be for primary-care physicians. These general practitioners, internists, family physicians and pediatricians will have a larger role under the new law, coordinating care for each patient.

The U.S. has 352,908 primary-care doctors now, and the college association estimates that 45,000 more will be needed by 2020. But the number of medical-school students entering family medicine fell more than a quarter between 2002 and 2007.

A shortage of primary-care and other physicians could mean more-limited access to health care and longer wait times for patients.

I don’t know where to start.

You can’t add tens of millions of people to our health care system without causing shortages. Any private system dealing with a huge increase in demand would struggle meeting that demand. As a result, prices MUST go up, and resources will become more scarce. The situation is even worse when the government controls the system because the government is the most inefficient organization on Earth.

If resources are scarce and prices start to skyrocket, the government will set price controls on what doctors and hospitals can charge. That will drive more doctors and hospitals out of business, increasing the shortage. In response to the emergency, the feds will start rationing. And thus: Death Panels.

“Health” “Care” “Reform” (to quote Mark Steyn) wasn’t about health or care. It was about establishing fascist, authoritarian control, fundamentally altering the relationship between citizens and their government, establishing more dependency and undermining individual liberty, and destroying any remnant of free-market economics in the health care system.

It should have been friggin obvious.

Rich taxpayers in Maryland are vanishing

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is the latest Democrat to demand a tax increase, this week proposing to raise the state’s top marginal individual income tax rate to 4% from 3%. He’d better hope this works out better than it has for Maryland.

We reported in May that after passing a millionaire surtax nearly one-third of Maryland’s millionaires had gone missing, thus contributing to a decline in state revenues. The politicians in Annapolis had said they’d collect $106 million by raising its income tax rate on millionaire households to 6.25% from 4.75%. In cities like Baltimore and Bethesda, which apply add-on income taxes, the top tax rate with the surcharge now reaches as high as 9.3%—fifth highest in the nation. Liberals said this was based on incomplete data and that rich Marylanders hadn’t fled the state.

Well, the state comptroller’s office now has the final tax return data for 2008, the first year that the higher tax rates applied. The number of millionaire tax returns fell sharply to 5,529 from 7,898 in 2007, a 30% tumble. The taxes paid by rich filers fell by 22%, and instead of their payments increasing by $106 million, they fell by some $257 million.

John Galt must have passed through. The smartest thing a state can do is to lure rich, successful people to the area with low tax rates. It builds the tax base and it increases entrepreneurship.

(On the other hand, statists will likely try to enact more laws preventing private parties from leaving an area, or forcing them to pay taxes on capital leaving their localities. Or equally as likely, the feds will begin setting blanket interstate tax policy, which would prevent the competition of ideas between states.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/07/AR2010040703116.html

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned Wednesday that Americans may have to accept higher taxes or changes in cherished entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security if the nation is to avoid staggering budget deficits that threaten to choke off economic growth.

"These choices are difficult, and it always seems easier to put them off — until the day they cannot be put off anymore," Bernanke said in a speech. "But unless we as a nation demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, in the longer run we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth."

His primary responsibility in life is to make sure that the United States continues to pay interest on its debt. He and his banking cabal will be cheerleaders for higher taxes as long as the interest payments keep rolling in.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6355N520100406

(Reuters) – The United States should consider raising taxes to help bring deficits under control and may need to consider a European-style value-added tax, White House adviser Paul Volcker said on Tuesday.

Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax "was not as toxic an idea" as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary.

Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. "If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes," he said.

Two weeks after passing a new entitlement into law, Obama’s economic advisor says we need to raise taxes to get entitlement costs under control.

The solution to big government is always more government.

I hope Guam is properly supplied with life vests and inflatable rafts in case it tips over and capsizes.

This Hank Johnson fellow got to vote for health care reform and I didn’t.