Growing achievement gap in favor of home educated kids versus public educated kids; it's not income, education level of parents, or amount spent.

A study of standardized test scores of home educated and public school educated students reveals a growing achievement gap in favor of home educated kids. According to a recently released study, "Progress Report 2009", the percentile gap increased between home and public educated students from 30 percentage points in 1997 to 37 percentage points in 2009.

"Progress Report 2009: Homeschool academic achievement and demographics" is a study commissioned by The Home School League Defense Association (HSLDA) on the the academic performance of home educated kids. It compared the nationally recognized standardized test results of 11,739 home educated students to public school educated students nationally.

It found a growing gap between the academic performance of home versus public educated students. It found home educated kids continued to do very well regardless of socio-economic background, education level of parents, whether the parent was a certified teacher, whether the state imposed heavy or light regulations on home education or style of home education.

Why do home educated students perform so well? From demographic info in the study, I think there are a couple of factors.

First, family structure and parental involvement. Nearly 98% of the families studied were married. And second, most of the time one parent stayed at home. Just under 20% of home educating mothers worked outside the home and most them, nearly 85%, worked part-time.

The key is parental engagement and time with their kids. That's just not possible in a single parent household or where both parents are working outside the home.

This reaffirms the incredible importance of intact families on our children, our next generation of leaders.

What can government do? Obviously, it can't mandate that parents stay together or educate their children at home. But it can encourage strong families by reforming no fault divorce laws and empowering parents with more educational choices -- like educating their kids at home if they choose to do so. An added benefit of more students educated at home is saving taxpayers a lot of money. The median home educating parent spent between $400 to $600 per student a year.

Obama's health care proposal is only more of status quo and will only make matters worse.

Washington Post economics' columnist Robert Samuelson did a story on Obama's health care plan now in Congress, "Obama's Health Care Will Make it Worse."

Samuelson says Obama isn't doing what he said he would -- change the status.

Obama took a pass. He simply claims that his plan will do things it won't. What he's offering is an enlarged version of the status quo that, as he says, is already unsustainable.

Samuelson adds:

...open-ended reimbursement by government and private insurance has ballooned health spending despite repeated pledges to "contain" costs. For example, health payments for individuals rose from less than 1 percent of federal spending in 1965 to 23 percent in 2008.

Obama would perpetuate this system. No president has spoken more forcefully about the need to control costs. Failure, he's argued, would expand federal budget deficits, raise out-of-pocket health costs and squeeze take-home pay (more compensation would go to insurance). All true. But Obama's program would do little to reduce costs and would increase spending by expanding subsidized insurance. The House legislation would cut the uninsured by 37 million by 2018, estimates the Congressional Budget Office. The uninsured get care now; with insurance they'd get more.

"You'd be adding a third medical entitlement on top of Medicare and Medicaid," says James Capretta, a top official at the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004.

What would a debate over controlling health care costs really look like?

For starters, we wouldn't be arguing about how to "pay for" the $1 trillion or so of costs over a decade of Obama's "reform." Congress wouldn't create new benefits until it had disciplined the old. We'd be debating how to trim the $10 trillion, as estimated by CBO, that Medicare and Medicaid will spend over the next decade, without impairing Americans' health. We'd use Medicare as a vehicle of change. Accounting for more than one-fifth of all health spending, its costs per beneficiary, now about $12,000, rose at a dizzying average annual rate of 8.5 percent a year from 1970 to 2007. (True, that's lower than private insurers' rate at 9.7 percent. But the gap may partly reflect cost-shifting to private payers. When Medicare restrains reimbursement rates, hospitals and doctors raise charges to private insurers.)

Medicare is so big that shifts in its practices spread to the rest of the delivery system. But changing Medicare, and through it one-sixth of the U.S. economy, requires more than a few demonstration projects of "comparative outcomes" research or economic incentives. What's needed is a fundamental restructuring. Fee-for-service medicine -- Medicare's dominant form of payment -- is outmoded. The more doctors and hospitals do, the more they get paid. This promotes fragmentation and the overuse of services.

We should move toward coordinated care networks that take responsibility for their members' medical needs in return for fixed annual payments (called "capitation"). One approach is through vouchers; Medicare recipients would receive a fixed amount and shop for networks with the lowest cost and highest quality. Alternatively, government could shift its reimbursement of hospitals and doctors to "capitation" payments. Limited dollars would, in theory, force improvements in efficiency and effective care.

We're not having this debate. To engage it would require genuine presidential leadership, because, admittedly, these proposals would be hugely controversial. Medicare recipients -- present and future -- would feel threatened. Existing doctor-patient relationships might be disrupted. Spending limits would inspire fears of short-changed care. Hospitals, doctors and device manufacturers would object.

I think the answer, and Samuelson only mentions it in passing and indirectly, is restoring market forces to the health care system, e.g. vouchers for one. Government will have to stop offering everybody something for nothing. More government control and regulation will only make matters worse, e.g. rationing, less access to medical care for those with serious conditions, reduced quality of care, etc.

ObamaCare's Perfect Day

For centuries, doctors took an oath to protect life and to uphold the covenant relationship with their patients. Even now, with the Hippocratic Oath discarded due to its problematic prohibition of abortion and euthanasia ("do no harm"), doctors still recognize at some level that they have a covenant with their patients, not just a code of conduct.

See: The Hippocratic Oath Today (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath.html)

And: Taking the Hippocratic Oath Seriously (http://al007italia.blogspot.com/2009/06/taking-hippocratic-oath-seriously.html)

So with the prospect of government-run health care, my question is this: Where's the oath that the government health care bureaucrats will take? Whose interests will they swear to protect?

With whom will the bureaucrats who run the system and make health care decisions have a covenant - with millions of patients they never see or interact with, or with the government from which they get a paycheck twice a month?

Obamacare advocates like to point to the Mayo Clinic as a model for quality care with controlled costs. Does anybody really think bureaucrats will follow Mayo Clinic's model of care: "The Needs of the Patient Come First" (http://www.mayoclinic.org/needs-of-patient/)?

For a chilling, prescient view of where Obamacare is headed, read "This Perfect Day" (1966), by Ira Levin. Levin's magic number was 62. I wonder where the actuaries set it now?

France wants health care system more like US while we're trying to do what they've done which doesn't work.

Here's an example of why not to embrace more government health care. What's happening where it exists. Here's a story, "France Fights Universal Care's High Cost" on the problems with French health care which widely touted as the model for where US health should go.

France claims it long ago achieved much of what today's U.S. health-care overhaul is seeking: It covers everyone, and provides what supporters say is high-quality care. But soaring costs are pushing the system into crisis. The result: As Congress fights over whether America should be more like France, the French government is trying to borrow U.S. tactics.

In recent months, France imposed American-style "co-pays" on patients to try to throttle back prescription-drug costs and forced state hospitals to crack down on expenses. "A hospital doesn't need to be money-losing to provide good-quality treatment," President Nicolas Sarkozy thundered in a recent speech to doctors.

And service cuts -- such as the closure of a maternity ward near Ms. Cuccarolo's home -- are prompting complaints from patients, doctors and nurses that care is being rationed. That concern echos worries among some Americans that the U.S. changes could lead to rationing.

The French system's fragile solvency shows how tough it is to provide universal coverage while controlling costs, the professed twin goals of President Barack Obama's proposed overhaul.

In an effort to control costs, bureaucrats are rationing care by deciding who will and won't get services rather than allowing people to make those decides through market forces. Again, government isn't the answer but rather the primary problem in our health care problems.

If Obamacare doesn't pass what will?

Here's an interesting column on health care, "Obamacare developing into Insurance Changes," by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. He thinks an overal of the entire health care system is not going to pass.

By year’s end, President Barack Obama will emerge with something he can call health care reform. The Democrats in Congress will pass it because they must. Otherwise, they’ll have slain their own savior in his first year in office.

But that bill will look nothing like the massive reform Obama originally intended. The beginning of the retreat was signaled by Obama’s reference — made five times — to “health-insurance reform” in his July 22 news conference.

Reforming the health care system is dead. Cause of death? Blunt trauma administered by the green eyeshades at the Congressional Budget Office.

What did the CBO reveal?

Three blows:

(1) On June 16, the CBO determined that the Senate Finance Committee bill would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, delivering a sticker shock that was near fatal.

(2) Five weeks later, the CBO gave its verdict on the Independent Medicare Advisory Council, Dr. Obama’s latest miracle cure, conjured up at the last minute to save Obamacare from fiscal ruin, and consisting of a committee of medical experts highly empowered to make Medicare cuts.

The CBO said that council would do nothing, trimming costs by perhaps 0.2 percent. A 0.2 percent cut is not a solution; it’s a punch line.

(3) The final blow came when the CBO euthanized the Obama “out years” myth. The administration’s argument had been: Sure, Obamacare will initially increase costs and deficits. But it pays for itself in the long run because it bends the curve downward in coming decades.

But instead Congress and Obama will target insurance companies in such a way that it will only make the problem worse. What will it look like?

To win back the vast constituency that has insurance, is happy with it, and is mightily resisting the fatal lures of Obamacare, the president will in the end simply impose heavy regulations on the insurance companies that will make what you already have secure, portable and imperishable: no policy cancellations, no pre-existing condition requirements, perhaps even a cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

Nirvana. But wouldn’t this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

The net result will be kicking the problem down the road which will only increase problems rather than solve them.