Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, November 2, 2009

No- It's Not Reform

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I have made it clear that I think the current health care debate and the bills it has spawned are a bad joke in poor taste.  (see here and here).  While the insurance industry may be a problem it is not the only problem or even the largest contributor to the outrageous health care expenses in the United States.  Not to surprisingly the CEO of Kaiser Permanente agrees but he has some really convincing evidence that he shared with Ezra Klein. 

There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else
the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the
hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices
Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

Go check out the charts. It becomes obvious that nothing in any of the current health care reform bills will do anything to reform the real problem and in fact may make things worse.  The insurance companies are not the real problem. 

As I said before no bill is better than a bad bill and bad bills is all we have seen.



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  1. geoffNovember 2, 2009 at 2:57 PM

    When I've looked at the details of the proposed legislation - House & Senate - I'd wonder why anyone was even moderately optimistic about the problem. The public option will somehow induce competition to control cost escalation, even if it is extremely robust I don't think so. The Bill Obama signs I suspect will be the classic silk purse out of a sows ear mess but the spinning on the historic moment and the significance should be entertaining momentarily.

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