This is nothing but a crock. Yesterday at Zero Hedge where I am a contributor, my co-blogger, “Tyler Durden” pointed out an article from Dow Jones yesterday that said:

German market regulator BaFin said Monday that so far, it doesn’t see any sign of massive speculation in credit default swaps against Greek government bonds, despite some recent press reports suggesting this.

A significant reason behind widening CDS spreads is the increasing demand for insurance against Greek risk, BaFin said in a statement, adding that it closely watches the government bond and credit derivatives markets for selected euro-zone countries.

In other words, the Greeks are fiscally incompetent and the markets are responding to this in a rational way. So George wants his fellow sovereigns to regulate these speculators so they can’t drive up the cost of the debt that Greece must sell to try to stave off default. In other words, the Greeks shouldn’t be punished for their fiscal stupidity.

Tyler Durden in an accompanying piece summed up Papandreou’s speech on this perfectly, and hilariously:

To paraphrase the 20-page speech: it is still just the speculators’ fault, who are now “threatening not only Greece, but the entire global economy” so burn them all post haste before they can read all the declassified [Goldman Sachs] prospectuses, and scour the footnotes thus uncovering the truly deplorable state of all European budgets, also please ignore this huge corruption problem we have, it’s under control, oh, and it is time our globalization “partners” realize that we are critical in the future of the free world, and bail us out, even though we have repeatedly said we need no steenkin’ bail out, or else global financial crisis v.2.0 – here we come. Now show me where Ben Bernanke’s office is.

Interestingly, last week’s bond sale by Greece went well for them. They sold €5 billion ($6.85 billion) of 10 year notes at 6.3%. There were €14.5 billion in bids, or three to one coverage which seems to me to be rather too good under the circumstances. My guess is that Greece’s fellow sovereigns were bidding heavily to make sure the sale went off well. From Bloomberg:

The final decision to sell Greece’s latest bond, announced in the early hours of trading in Athens and London, followed several days of behind-the-scenes European diplomacy and improved performance by Greek government-debt securities.

Will Germany and France continue to support Greece’s bond sales?

Overall, Greece must borrow €54 billion this year to cover maturing debt and interest payments. That demand will crowd a euro-bond market that is scheduled to raise nearly €1 trillion this year, according to Citigroup Inc. …

In the next three months alone, European countries are on track to raise €287 billion, which will test the appetite of bond investors. On top of that, European banks face about €560 billion in maturing debt this year, including a substantial chunk that will have to be refinanced, according to Morgan Stanley. …

Many investors are worried that Greece, despite its promises, will be unable to escape its long history of overspending.

“We think there is still a good deal of execution risk in terms of how the Greek government is able to implement these measures,” said Kristin Ceva, who directs the global fixed-income group at Payden & Rygel, a Los Angeles asset-management firm that bought Greek debt in February. “We can buy other [emerging-market] sovereigns with similar credit spreads to Greece where we think the story is a lot clearer and the fundamentals stronger.”

Apropos to the above “execution risk” comment, I heard this morning where the cops broke into the government printing office to prevent the publication of the new austerity laws passed by the legislature. Apparently, until the new laws are published in the official government newspaper, they don’t go into effect.

I republished the “Government Health Care Kills” article on ZeroHedge where I also publish (same stuff as here at The Daily Capitalist). It had about 3,000 reads and 120 comments. The comments were mostly negative, especially from Canadian and UK readers who defended their systems and denigrated the U.S. health care system. Many comments were in the nature of a screed. Here is a response I made to their comments that you may find interesting.

The proper way to analyze the delivery of health care is to understand how and why our system is flawed. I would argue that the free market delivers any product or service better and more efficiently than any government system. I think most of you would agree in general with that statement, but you don’t see it applying to health care.

The U.S. health care system is highly regulated. We have no real free market health care system. As a result the delivery of health care is highly distorted by the government and the result has been an expensive and often burdensome system. This has been going on since 1965 with the passage of Medicare. The rigged tax code, the prevention of competition, the lack of control by consumers of their health care dollars, meddlesome regulation, and the burden of Medicare costs being borne by non-Medicare privately insured consumers, have lead to our current mess.

Yet I don’t see similar problems in the delivery of other goods and services, say food for example, because the government does not regulate and control it. Yet food is more necessary to sustaining life than health care.

With all of these flaws, almost all (but not all) innovations, new tools and drugs come from the U.S. That is only because of the profit system that can bring big rewards to innovators and entrepreneurs.

I have studied the health care systems of other countries that have some form of government universal health care and they are all losing money, resort to rationing (cutbacks in services), and have a shrinking population base with which to support an aging population. From Cato:

However, a closer look shows that nearly all health care systems worldwide are wrestling with problems of rising costs and lack of access to care. There is no single international model for national health care, of course. Countries vary dramatically in the degree of central control, regulation, and cost sharing they impose, and in the role of private insurance.

Still, overall trends from national health care systems around the world suggest the following:

• Health insurance does not mean universal access to health care. In practice, many countries promise universal coverage but ration care or have long waiting lists for treatment.
• Rising health care costs are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Although other countries spend considerably less than the United States on health care, both as a percentage of GDP and per capita, costs are rising almost everywhere, leading to budget deficits, tax increases, and benefit reductions.
• In countries weighted heavily toward government control, people are most likely to face waiting lists, rationing, restrictions on physician choice, and other obstacles to care.
• Countries with more effective national health care systems are successful to the degree that they incorporate market mechanisms such as competition, cost sharing, market prices, and consumer choice, and eschew centralized government control.

Although no country with a national health care system is contemplating abandoning universal coverage, the broad and growing trend is to move away from centralized government control and to introduce more market-oriented features.

If we were to start over, I think many of you would choose a system that covered the most people, with the best care, at the lowest cost. Like food, only the free market can do that. But that’s not the system in which we live.

There are a number of market based solutions which Congress could do other than mandatory, top-down, government sponsored or controlled health care systems. I urge you to go to Cato.org or the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) for further information on this.

My concern is that if the U.S. system goes the way of Canada or the UK, then innovations in medical care will decline and there will be nowhere to go for advanced health care. If Danny Williams and Sylvio Berlusconi come here now, where will they go in the future?

Further the cost burden will be very high, placing an unfair burden on our children and grandchildren, and will be a permanent drag on the economy.

I understand that many of you have anecdotes about medical care, good and bad, here and in Canada and the UK. But the reality is that the Canadian and UK systems are going broke and are rationing health care. It is not feasible to raise taxes forever and still maintain a vigorous capitalistic economy.

I predict, as does Cato, that they will seek more market based solutions to bring costs under control. Really, you Canadians don’t have to settle for long lines and poor quality.

Centennial Bank, Ogden, UT
Waterfield Bank, Germantown, MD
Bank of Illinois, Normal, IL
Sun America Bank, Boca Raton, FL

This brings us up to 25 for the year.

These government fundamentalists march to the canon and cry of the efficiency of government-run systems and mock for-profit systems for being inefficient and wasteful. Yet there is no area of economic activity that the government operates efficiently precisely because of the lack of discipline present in for-profit ventures. The USPS just announced they lost $238 million in 2009. Fedex and UPS were profitable.

The shibboleth of the inefficiency of capitalism has so often been proven wrong by economists on all sides of the spectrum that one can only conclude that these free market deniers are worse than ignorant: they choose power over efficiency. And that is what Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom.” After all, it was the Marxists and Socialists who proved by their failures that the free market works.

It is useless to appeal to reason to these fundamentalists. Their quest for power is an end in itself and they won’t relent.

What to do?

My suggestion is that we should use scare tactics and create an environment of fear and doubt about government health care plans. This is fair since Liberals and Progressives have been spreading falsehoods about the free market system for a hundred years. We have an advantage: we don’t have to lie. The truth is scary enough.

Here are two frightening and disgusting articles that demonstrate what I am talking about. Don’t tell me it couldn’t happen here.

You might find this first article disturbing.

1,200 Needless Deaths

By Fay Schlesinger, Andy Dolan and Tim Shipman

Last updated at 1:45 PM on 25th February 2010

• Up to 1,200 patients died unnecessarily because of appalling care
• Labour’s obsession with targets and box ticking blamed for scandal
• Patients were ‘routinely neglected’ at hospital
• Report calls for FOURTH investigation into scandal

Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.

Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.

But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction.

Indeed, some have either retired on lucrative pensions or have swiftly found new jobs.

Former chief executive Martin Yeates, who has since left with a £1million pension pot, six months’ salary and a reported £400,000 payoff, did not even give evidence to the inquiry which detailed the scale of the scandal yesterday.

He was said to be medically unfit to do so, though he sent some information to chairman Robert Francis through his solicitor.

The devastating-report into the Stafford Hospital-shambles’ laid waste to Labour’s decade-long obsession with box-ticking and league tables.

The independent inquiry headed by Robert Francis QC found the safety of sick and dying patients was ‘routinely neglected’. Others were subjected to ‘ inhumane treatment’, ‘bullying’, ‘abuse’ and ‘rudeness’.

The shocking estimated death toll, three times the previous figure of 400, has prompted calls for a full public inquiry.

Bosses at the Trust – officially an ’elite’ NHS institution – were condemned for their fixation with cutting waiting times to hit Labour targets and leaving neglected patients to die.

But after a probe that was controversially held in secret, not a single individual has been publicly blamed.

The inquiry found that:

• Patients were left unwashed in their own filth for up to a month as nurses ignored their requests to use the toilet or change their sheets;

• Four members of one family. including a new-born baby girl. died within 18 months after of blunders at the hospital;

•  Medics discharged patients hastily out of fear they risked being sacked for delaying;

•  Wards were left filthy with blood, discarded needles and used dressings while bullying managers made whistleblowers too frightened to come forward.

Last night the General Medical Council announced it was investigating several doctors. The Nursing and Midwifery Council is investigating at least one nurse and is considering other cases.

Ministers suggested the report highlighted a dreadful ‘local’ scandal, but its overall conclusions are a blistering condemnation of Labour’s approach to the NHS.

It found that hospital were so preoccupied with saving money and pursuit of elite foundation trust status that they ‘lost sight of its fundamental responsibility to provide safe care’.

Health Secretary Andy Burnham accepted 18 recommendations from Mr Francis and immediately announced plans for a new inquiry, to be held in public, into how Department of Health and NHS regulators failed to spot the disaster.

But Julie Bailey, head of the campaign group Cure the NHS, condemned his response as ‘outrageous’ and backed Tory and Liberal Democrat demands for a full public inquiry into what went wrong.

Tory leader David Cameron said: ‘We need openness, clarity and transparency to stop this happening again.’ Gordon Brown described the scandal as a ‘completely unacceptable management failure’ and revealed that the cases of 300 patients are now under investigation.

He told MPs the Government was belatedly working on plans to ’strike off’ hospital managers responsible for failures. The hospital could also lose its cherished foundation status.

Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said ‘These awful events show how badly Labour has let down NHS patients. It should never again be possible for managers to put a tick in a box marked “target met” while patients are pushed off to a ward and left to die.’

The Francis probe was launched following a Healthcare Commission report on Stafford Hospital in March last year. It found that deaths at the hospital were 27 to 45 per cent higher than normal, meaning some 400 to 1,200 people died unnecessarily between 2005 and 2008.

Two weeks before the report’s publication, the Trust’s chief executive Martin Yeates was suspended. He eventually resigned in May after being offered £400,000 and a £1million pension pot.

The Francis report said staff numbers were allowed to fall ‘dangerously low’, causing nurses to neglect the most basic care. It said: ‘Requests for assistance to use a bedpan or to get to and from the toilet were not responded to.

‘Some families were left to take soiled sheets home to wash or to change beds when this should have been undertaken by the hospital and its staff.’ Food and drink were left out of reach, forcing patients to drink water from flower vases.

While many staff did their best, Mr Francis said, others showed a disturbing lack of compassion to patients.

He added: ‘I heard so many stories of shocking care. These patients were not simply numbers. They were husbands, wives, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, grandparents. They were people who entered Stafford Hospital and rightly expected to be well cared for and treated.’

Family who lost four loved ones

Kelsey Lintern was at the centre of one of the worst tragedies in the hospital’s appalling catalogue of failure.

She lost four members of her family within 18 months, her grandmother, uncle, sister and six-day-old baby.

Mrs Lintern, 36, almost became the fifth victim when a nurse tried to give her pethidine while she was in labour, despite her medical notes and a wristband clearly stating she was allergic to the drug.

The horrific story began in January 2007 when her baby daughter Nyah had to be delivered by her own grandmother because a distracted midwife was not looking.

The baby was not breathing but she was resuscitated, then discharged by a junior paediatrician just two days later, despite the family’s fears she was seriously ill.

She was not feeding properly and still appeared blue. She died four days later. A post-mortem examination revealed four holes in her heart. Mrs Lintern accepts that Nyah may have died in any case, but said the hospital should at least have ‘realised there was a problem’.

It was when she was in labour with Nyah that a nurse arrived with a syringe of potentially-fatal pethidine, oblivious to the fact Mrs Lintern was allergic to it.

In April 2007, Mrs Lintern’s sister, Laurie Gethin, 37, died of lung, bone and lymph cancer, which had taken 18 months to be diagnosed, even though she was displaying tell-tale symptoms.

Her body, with her eyes still open, was left on her blood-splattered bed in full view of other patients. Tests revealed that Mrs Gethin had ‘markers’ in her blood which can indicated cancer.

But it was only when she was sent for a scan at another hospital that tumours were discovered. Mrs Lintern’s uncle, Tom Warriner, 48, died in January 2008 after his intestine was accidentally pierced in an operation for bowel cancer.

A coroner ruled the death was accidental. That summer, her grandmother Lilian Wood Latta, 80, died hungry and dehydrated after suffering a stroke. She was left in her own excrement during her final days and the family said the dehydration was caused by staff failing to give her adequate fluids.

Mrs Wood Latta had been referred to the hospital by her GP after suffering a series of mini-strokes at home. She was moved between wards three times, and it was left to relatives to change her incontinence pads.

Her dying wish had been to see Mrs Lintern’s new baby Khalen, so, after checking with staff, Mrs Lintern took her daughter in. But as the frail pensioner held her great-grandchild, a nurse appeared and said: ‘What on earth is a baby doing here? You do know we’ve got MRSA and C-Diff on this ward?’

Mrs Lintern, who lives in Cannock, Staffordshire, with husband David and their two daughters, said: ‘It is called the caring profession. But where is the care?’

James Reay died in agony after a junior doctor at Stafford Hospital failed to check his medical history and gave him the wrong drug.

The 67-year-old former miner was admitted to A&E in May 2006 with a swollen leg. Medics administered the anticoagulant Heparin – but failed to take into account Mr Reay’s history of stomach ulcers, which are known to react badly to the drug.

Two days later he was rushed to another hospital where he died from internal bleeding after three weeks of intense pain. Yesterday his widow Olwen won a five-figure pay-off in an out-of-court settlement after Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust admitted liability.

Mrs Reay, 69, said: ‘I have won my case but to me it is blood money and I cannot enjoy it. I would rather have my husband.’

With a background in the hotel and catering industry, Martin Yeates was brought in to help Mid Staffordshire achieve the holy grail of foundation trust status as a supposed beacon of quality in the NHS.

A profile on the Trust’s website, since removed, boasted that he had developed ‘a more businesslike approach for the organisation’ after his appointment in September 2005.

The Trust finally achieved foundation status two years later. Mr Yeates’s career in the NHS began when he switched from the hotel trade to manage the catering department at Walsgrave Hospital in Coventry in 1977.

It has now ended with a £1million pension pot, six months salary and a possible £400,000 pay-off for the father of two – despite the Trust’s catastrophic failings.

Mr Yeates, who lives with second wife Lynn in a converted barn in a hamlet outside Stafford, was not at home last night and a neighbour said he had not been seen since Christmas.

It is believed he has spent at least some time in Egypt since being suspended on full pay of £169,000 in March last year – two weeks before an investigation revealed the deaths of at least 400 more patients than would have been expected, and an ‘appalling’ catalogue of failings in care.

Yesterday’s inquiry report said Mr Yeates resigned with effect from June 14, and was paid six months full salary in lieu of notice.

In his report, Mr Francis said Mr Yeates had failed to resolve ‘governance and staffing issues’ at the Trust and that he and colleagues had ‘focused on systems’ instead.

Of the other Trust bosses, former chairman Toni Brisby resigned in March last year after the NHS watchdog Monitor said it intended to remove her. She told the Francis report she received no termination payment of any kind. Jan Harry, the trust’s director of nursing from 1998 to 2006, oversaw disastrous changes to the organisation of wards.

But she told the inquiry she could not recall a decision to axe 52 nursing posts and was ‘not aware’ of plans to drastically alter the ratio of trained to untrained staff. She also said it was not her job to monitor ward standards – a claim later described as ‘absurd’ by Dr Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing.

Helen Morrey, former director of operations at the trust, admitted that risk assessments about the impact of job cuts were inadequate and accepted responsibility for a failure to thoroughly investigate complaints by patients. She was put on paid leave last July, before leaving the trust in November.

You don’t have a choice other than the National Health System unless you are rich. In a free market system, you could sue and drive the bad hospitals out of existence. Or you could go somewhere else. Thus the free market corrects its mistakes. Very difficult in the UK. I do think that our legal system is too liberal with awards in medical malpractice cases, but the idiots in the Republican Party see “malpractice reform” as a cost cutting measure. You can hate the lawyers, but remove them, and there is nothing between us and Leviathan.

This next article will repulse you because of the hypocrisy of it.

Canadian Legislator Goes to Miami for Heart Surgery

By Tara Brautigam (CP)  February 22, 2010

An unapologetic Danny Williams says he was aware his trip to the United States for heart surgery earlier this month would spark outcry, but he concluded his personal health trumped any public fallout over the controversial decision.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Williams said he went to Miami to have a “minimally invasive” surgery for an ailment first detected nearly a year ago, based on the advice of his doctors.

“This was my heart, my choice and my health,” Williams said late Monday from his condominium in Sarasota, Fla.

“I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics.”

The 60-year-old Williams said doctors detected a heart murmur last spring and told him that one of his heart valves wasn’t closing properly, creating a leakage.

He said he was told at the time that the problem was “moderate” and that he should come back for a checkup in six months.

Eight months later, in December, his doctors told him the problem had become severe and urged him to get his valve repaired immediately or risk heart failure, he said.

His doctors in Canada presented him with two options – a full or partial sternotomy, both of which would’ve required breaking bones, he said.

He said he spoke with and provided his medical information to a leading cardiac surgeon in New Jersey who is also from Newfoundland and Labrador. He advised him to seek treatment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.

That’s where he was treated by Dr. Joseph Lamelas, a cardiac surgeon who has performed more than 8,000 open-heart surgeries.

Williams said Lamelas made an incision under his arm that didn’t require any bone breakage.

“I wanted to get in, get out fast, get back to work in a short period of time,” the premier said.

Williams said he didn’t announce his departure south of the border because he didn’t want to create “a media gong show,” but added that criticism would’ve followed him had he chose to have surgery in Canada.

“I would’ve been criticized if I had stayed in Canada and had been perceived as jumping a line or a wait list. … I accept that. That’s public life,” he said.

“(But) this is not a unique phenomenon to me. This is something that happens with lots of families throughout this country, so I make no apologies for that.”

Williams said his decision to go to the U.S. did not reflect any lack of faith in his own province’s health care system.

“I have the utmost confidence in our own health care system in Newfoundland and Labrador, but we are just over half a million people,” he said.

“We do whatever we can to provide the best possible health care that we can in Newfoundland and Labrador. The Canadian health care system has a great reputation, but this is a very specialized piece of surgery that had to be done and I went to somebody who’s doing this three or four times a day, five, six days a week.”

He quipped that he had “a heart of a 40-year-old, so that gives me 20 years new life,” and said he intends to run in the next provincial election in 2011.

“I’m probably going to be around for a long time, hopefully, if God willing,” he said.

“God forbid for the Canadian public I won’t be around longer than ever.”

Williams also said he paid for the treatment, but added he would seek any refunds he would be eligible for in Canada.

“If I’m entitled to any reimbursement from any Canadian health care system or any provincial health care system, then obviously I will apply for that as anybody else would,” he said.

“But I wrote out the cheque myself and paid for it myself and to this point, I haven’t even looked into the possibility of any reimbursement. I don’t know what I’m entitled to, if anything, and if it’s nothing, then so be it.”

He is expected back at work in early March.

At least he admits that the Canadian system isn’t very good. His lack of faith in his own system speaks volumes. Where will he go when we destroy the best health care system in the world?