http://www.moorewatch.com/…

It’s the latest socialized medicine success!

Tens of thousands of English patients could be registering with Welsh GPs and making day-trips to the country to obtain free prescriptions, it was claimed yesterday.

Statistics show that three million people are registered with Welsh GPs, about 100,000 more than the official population. Wales is the only part of Britain not to have prescription charges.

England has the highest at £7.10, followed by Northern Ireland at £6.85 and Scotland at £5.

The Conservative Party in Wales claimed that the figures pointed to patients from England travelling to Wales and called on the Welsh Assembly executive to stop “prescription tourism”.

The copay in Englad is roughly the same as the prescription copay that I have with my eeeeeevil kapitalist for-profit US health insurance.  The only difference is that I have access to a wider range of newer, higher-quality drugs than the English.  And I don’t have to travel to Wales to avoid paying for it.

Oh, lest anyone get the wrong idea, I live in Beijing.  I pay, every month, out of my own pocket, for US healthcare, so that I can get prescriptions which are not available here in China’s socialist paradise.  Funny how that works, isn’t it?  When I want something I (gasp!) pay for it.

What else should you expect? Remove prices and you remove the signals required to accurately gauge value and resource allocation. People will take advantage of it every time. Had this been a free market the prices would equalize very quickly if there had been a discrepancy at all in the first place.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/…

The Conservatives will propose banning plasma screens and other energy-guzzling electrical goods in a report to be unveiled next week.The proposals target white goods like fridges and freezers, as well as TVs, personal computers and DVD players that use too much energy or operate on stand-by.

The ideas come from a Conservative group set up by David Cameron to develop policies to protect the environment and although the measures to make household electrical appliances more energy efficient are not binding on Mr Cameron, they are thought likely to be warmly received by the Tory leader.

The group will also suggest scrapping Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of the nation’s success in favour of a model that measures people’s happiness drawn up up by Friends of the Earth.

Under the proposals, a cap could be set on the energy use of each electrical appliance, and those exceeding limits could be banned from sale in the UK.

That’s the conservative party?! Is the British definition of conservative the opposite of the US English one? I had read previously about plans in parts of Europe to ban or heavily regulate standby modes and any power bricks which continued to use energy when not transforming current. This is nuts. Let the market decide electrical usage. If the cost of generation/transmission/storage goes up then people won’t keep their PS3, Xbox360 or Wii in standby mode. You pay for what you consume. What’s next? Requiring people to turn off lights before they leave a room? Legislate that sensors must be used in all rooms to guaranty lights are only on while someone is in it? Why don’t they save some power and turn off all those cameras? I’d bet unnecessarily left on lights consume more than TVs in standby.

Even more odd is this Friends of the Earth happiness measurement of national success. I’m really speechless.

 http://news.yahoo.com/…

Many foreigners can travel to Venezuela without a visa. But now there’s a new requirement once they get there. President Hugo Chavez announced on Sunday that foreigners who publicly criticize his government will be deported. He ordered officials to monitor statements made by international figures visiting the country. The comments came after the President of Mexico’s ruling conservative party criticized Chavez for seeking to do away with term limits at a recent pro-democracy conference in Caracas. “No foreigner, whoever it is, can come here to attack us,” Chavez said. “How long are we going to allow a person, from any country in the world, to come to our own house to say there’s a dictatorship here, that the President is a tyrant, and no one does anything about it?”

More evidence for the rise of Dictator Chavez. I had forgotten to post about the possible doing away with the term limits. If that’s not the most telling part of this all I’m not sure what else could convince people.