Palin Derangement Syndrome becomes Thatcher Derangement Syndrome

When you move to the other side of the pond.

Thatcher’s achievements are not “every woman’s” achievements, but she did shatter a glass ceiling and was one of the most powerful and influential world leaders of the late twentieth century.  With Reagan and Pope John Paul II, she helped to bring about the fall of communism and liberated millions of people from starvation and oppression.  Those of us who have always lived in the West, in the land of the free, cannot really understand that not getting government benefits is in no way analogous to being starved to death by your government.

It’s remarkable how women turn into jealous brats, and men, into insecure misogynists, when confronted with a brilliant and powerful woman.  Perhaps they hate her because she does not need them, and the only weapon they have – their hatred and disapproval – is the one they will wield.  Sarah from Alaska didn’t need the modern feminist movement (but pays homage to Title IX, Geraldine Ferraro, and Hillary Clinton), and they hated her, too.

Update: More Margaret Thatcher hate.  Some seriously sexist bile for the Baroness from Russell Brand, including the obligatory insult to her mothering capabilities:

You could never call Margaret ‘Mother’ by mistake; for a national matriarch, she was oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. “Thatcher as mother” seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema; how could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, it’s the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Dennis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gunrunning are jarring distractions from the main narrative: woman as warrior queen.

Prat alert!

Predictable, but unintended, consequences of government-run medicine

From Instapundit, in two parts:

As the piece goes on to explain, the [British] hospital’s actions  [ignoring even basic standards of care] sprung from its single-minded pursuit of cost control. It drastically reduced its operating budget in hopes of qualifying for foundation-trust status, a legal category that would grant it more freedom from central government control. It’s a textbook case of how structural incentives in government-dominated health care systems can lead to terrible outcomes.

and….

When Obama took to the stump for health care reform, one promise came through loud and clear: “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.” That promise is officially about to be broken, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Millions of employees will soon be dropped from health insurance coverage as new provisions of the law go into effect. . . . The CBO also projected that 5 million fewer people will gain health insurance coverage over the next decade than originally expected.

Well, health insurance got more expensive (via mandates), and government bureaucracies are bad at assessing quality of care but good at assessing cost.  Individual humans are good at assessing what they, subjectively, find to be good quality (e.g. lots of nurses, good hospital food, private rooms, fast procedures, the best doctors) and comparing it with cost; likewise, individuals are good at finding the right automobile insurance plan, home insurance plan, life insurance plan, and, if unfettered, health care plan.  Markets are good – really good, as if the very survival of the company depended on it – at responding to those assessments.

Does denying a pregnant woman an epidural count as a “war on women”?

And if so, can we finally admit that socialised medicine might not be the best thing for the distaff half of the population?

In order to save money, Britain’s National Health Service now recommends that women avoid pain relief and Caesareans during delivery.  (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)

We’re often told that the government should run health care because it’s not evil and isn’t out to profit on our sickness.  Nevertheless, governments have budgets, and they also have trillions of dollars of debt.  (Know any insurance companies that are $16 trillion in debt?)  A government is under larger, not smaller, budgetary pressures than your average insurance company.

What really makes me wonder is how much “advanced” medicine, when delivered by a government, seems to resemble something out of the Stone Age.