After the Senate rushed a fracking bill through committee, oil lobbyist Bill Weatherspoon made a statement arguing that North Carolinians favor hydraulic fracturing for the following reason:

They don’t wanna be handcuffed to an ayatollah, who has a name they can’t pronounce, in a country that they don’t know where it is, with a religion and a culture and a language they don’t understand.

Really? We can’t locate Canada or Mexico, two of our largest sources of foreign oil? I admit that Canadian culture is a bit quirky, but we can learn to understand it. With some effort we might also one day understand a religion called Catholicism, which is widely practiced in Venezuela.

And Saudi Arabia is pronounced SOU-dee-uh-RAY-bee-uh. It’s that big plot of land hugging the Red Sea.

Now that we’ve cleared that up let’s slow down the drive to inject chemicals into the ground and cause earthquakes near Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant.

The Heartland Institute, a far right “think” tank that has faced some controversy lately over its comparison of scientists and environmentalists to murderous terrorists, now has some health policy suggestions for us.

The idea is to treat our human health insurance system like the system for pet insurance (included is the heartwarming story of a dog named Goober). It’s a great analysis because health care for people is almost exactly like health care for our beloved turtles and hamsters. Seriously, care is getting more sophisticated for animals, but the two are not remotely comparable from a policy perspective.

Here’s a nice thought:

Markets, as they should, put a dollar value on everything. The pet health insurance market does this well by literally treating pets as property. And this isn’t bad for animals or their -owners. When it comes to certain aspects of human health—even serious but not life-threatening events like contracting shingles or breaking a leg—such personalized cost-benefit thinking that treats individuals’ bodies like pieces of personal property might serve Americans and the medical system far better

The deeper problem here is that conservatives need a new idea for how to reform health care so that they can offer an alternative to “Obamacare”. The trouble is that Obamacare is the Republican idea for health reform. Most of its proposals arose from the offices of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr. Obamacare was first implemented by Mitt Romney with support from conservative policy propagandists like Heritage Foundation. But Obama implemented this Republican plan. That means Heritage and its Republican friends must oppose it.

Thus the rub. If you are forced to oppose your own ideas once they are implemented, how do you dream up a new plan that is more conservative than your original proposal? Apparently, you turn to pet insurance.

If the Affordable Care Act is overturned there aren’t many options left. If you are a market fundamentalist then you are left with treating grandma like Goober.

If you haven’t read the articles in the News & Observer and Charlotte Observer series on hospital profits and charity care you should check them out here. The reporters found some astounding stories.

I had several thoughts while reading these investigations. I’ll start by giving hospitals credit where credit is due. Hospitals, like all of us, are trapped in a terribly broken health care system. They have to deal with a huge number of moving parts including insurance company negotiations, quality reporting, changes in public programs, competition with other hospitals, etc. A hospital, for example, might feel forced to buy the latest and greatest equipment, even if it does not improve care, to attract the wealthiest and best insured patients. This can offset some of the free care given to uninsured patients.

Hospitals recognize that the system is senseless. That is why hospital associations both nationally and in the state endorsed health reform. I respect that. Many insurance companies claim that they want reform and then oppose any actual law that is drafted. Some even send post cards and make illegal robocalls to defeat health reform proposals.

Now on to the blame. No matter how desperate the situation for hospitals, it is appalling that a huge system like Carolinas HealthCare would sue thousands of patients. It is especially galling that they would pursue someone like Joyce Jones, a woman who paid property and sales taxes for years to support Carolinas. The hospital then billed her for $34,000, put a lien on her house, and refused to accept her offer of $10,000 and a payment plan.

This is a multi-billion dollar health system ruining a patient’s life over less than $20,000. They should be ashamed.

Hospitals do much good in our state. And, as the stories reveal, their billing practices are causing great pain. They should get credit for recognizing that we need change and endorsing the Affordable Care Act. But they should immediately stop suing poor people and impounding their homes.

Enemies of health reform make sport of attacking “Romneycare” in Massachusetts because they know Mitt Romney’s signature achievement in public life served as a model for the Affordable Care Act.

But, as with much of the rhetoric surrounding “Obamacare”, the truth is much different than the tea party narrative of exploding costs and rationed care. To promote the truth about Romneycare, the business affiliated Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation released a report with the scintillating title “Massachusetts Health Reform Spending, 2006-2011: An Update on the ‘Budget Buster’ Myth”. If you can’t wait to tear the cover off of this hot read then you can find the link here.

For the shorter version here’s a snippet from the executive summary:

Six years after Massachusetts enacted its groundbreaking health reform law, Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006, more than 98 percent of the state’s residents have health insurance, access to needed care has improved, and the percentage of employers offering coverage to their workers has climbed despite the national recession.

The gains of health reform have been achieved without placing an unexpected or unmanageable burden on the state’s budget. Annual spending for programs affected by Chapter 58 grew from $1.041 billion in fiscal 2006 to $1.947 billion in fiscal 2011, an increase of approximately $906 million (Table 1). The state’s share of this spending increase is $453 million, or 50 percent of the total. While critics periodically claim that health reform has been a “budget buster,” additional state spending attributable to the health reform law accounted for only 1.4 percent of the Commonwealth’s $32 billion budget in fiscal 2011.

Health reform is working in Massachusetts. That is why legislators used Romneycare as a model for the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare is already working for many people. If it’s given a chance then nearly everyone will benefit after 2014.