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Let’s get fiscal about cliff jargon THE END OF the world never comes at a convenient time. It never comes, for instance, when you’re sitting in front of a blank computer screen trying to think of a column. But the end is nigh, accordMaureen ing to ancient Mayans and Dowd Washington mandarins. We have reached the quivering moment of truth that Jon Stewart calls “Cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust.” However the Mayan prediction and the “fiscal cliff” work out, I hope we are talking about the end of talking about the end. It’s tedious to always be suspended in midair, like Wile E. Coyote or Thelma and Louise. The attempts by some to continually whirl the whole American population into a state of apocalyptic excitement are exhausting. There’s a new American trend in hysteria. Everything now is in italics, punctuated by exclamation points!!! As entertaining as Carrie Mathison’s bouts of hysteria have been in “Homeland,” stirring up hysteria in real life, whether to draw clicks, eyeballs or votes, is not a good idea. Cliff dwellers in our society might think that facing the guillotine focuses the mind. But the cliff metaphor is so overused it makes me want to walk off one. Don’t even mention Cliff Clavin, Cliff Huxtable, Cliff Robertson, Jimmy Cliff or Heathcliff (either on the moors, in Cliffs Notes or in the funny papers.) If your Christmas presents
don’t come from Amazon in time, you’re going over the gift cliff. If your boyfriend bails, you’re going over the romance cliff. If he comes back, you could be going over the marriage cliff. Journalists now have to add an extra coup de grace (“Fiscal cliff crash”) or double metaphor (“Clock is ticking for fiscal cliff”) or raffish cartoons to juice things up. The new cover of The Economist features Uncle Sam, waving a Jack Daniel’s bottle, with the Statue of Liberty, wearing cool shades and smoking a doobie, plunging into the Grand Canyon in a red, white and blue Thunderbird with the license plate “Debt 1.” Other metaphors have been suggested: “fiscal obstacle course,” “debt bomb,” “austerity bomb.” But we’re stuck in the year of cliffian thinking. There are cliffians, who predict dire consequences if a deal is not reached, and anti-cliffians. But no matter if you’re into Keynes, Krugmania or Ayn Ryanism, looking at things as a cliff is not the most constructive way to live. Scaring people is generally not a good way to get people to understand things. Especially in emergencies, grave crises like a nuclear threat or a terrorist attack, you need calm people who don’t think the world is going to end. Lincoln wasn’t cliffy. As the new Steven Spielberg movie shows, Lincoln had a goal and pursued it methodically through various means, some shady. He wasn’t interested in hysteria. It had no political use for him. The BBC examined the etymology of the phrase of the moment. The lexicographer Ben Zimmer discovered that an 1893 editorial in the Chicago Tribune
warned: “The free silver shriekers are striving to tumble the United States over the same fiscal precipice.” Zimmer traced the first use of “fiscal cliff” to the property section of The New York Times in 1957, in an article about people overextending their finances to buy their first home. Ben Bernanke imprinted the term on the public consciousness last February, pointing ominously toward Jan. 1. But Derek Thompson, the business editor at The Atlantic, told the BBC that if you had to go topographical, a slope or a hill was more accurate. “You talk about a cliff, it’s extremely sudden and the second you step off the edge you plunge to your death,” he said, adding: “We’re not going to fall off anything.” Language is important, he said, because it can provoke a panicky deal rather than a smart deal. He suggested that a more apt metaphor might be dieting after bingeing, as in “fiscal fast.” “There will be a short, sharp recession in early to middle of next year, which is more like falling on your face after fasting too vigorously, and then the economy is going to grow,” he said. The really bad news is that, even if we survive this abyss, there are more coming, with the debt ceiling cliff and the spending bill cliff dead ahead. Once you start with the cliffs, you can fall into cliffinity — with endless cliff riffs on the horizon. Cliff talk is not cool talk.
________ Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times. Email her via http://tinyurl.com/dowdmail.
Electronic records of Obamacare HERE’S MORE EVIDENCE that government cures are inevitably worse than the diseases they seek to wipe out. Buried in the trillion-dollar stimulus law of 2009 was an electronic medical records “incentive” program. Like most of Michelle President Barack Malkin Obama’s health care rules, this top-down electronic recordsharing scheme is a big fat bust. Oversight is lax. Cronyism is rife. The jobkilling and privacy-undermining consequences have only just begun. The program was originally sold as a cost-saving measure. In theory, modernizing recordcollection is a good idea, and many private health-care providers have already made the change. But as with many government “incentive” programs, the electronic medical records bribe is a tax-subsidized, one-size-fits-all mandate. This one pressures healthcare professionals and hospitals across the country into radically federalizing their patient data and opening up medical information to untold abuse. Penalties kick in for any provider that hasn’t switched over by 2014. So, what’s it to you? Well, $4 billion has already gone out to 82,535 professionals and 1,474 hospitals, and a total of $6 billion will be doled out by 2016. But the feds’ reckless profligacy, neglect and favoritism have done more harm than good. Don’t take my word for it. A recent report released by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general acknowledged that the incentive system is “vulnerable to paying incentives to professionals
and hospitals that do not fully meet” the program’s qualityassurance requirements. The federal health bureaucracy “has not implemented strong prepayment safeguards, and its ability to safeguard incentive payments postpayment is also limited,” the inspector general concluded. Translation: No one is actually verifying whether the transition from paper to electronic is improving patient outcomes and health services. No one is actually guarding against GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). No one is checking whether recipients of the electronic medical records incentives are receiving money redundantly (e.g., raking in payments when they’ve already converted to electronic records). No one is actually protecting private data from fraud, abuse or exploitation. Little is being done to recoup ill-gotten payments. In any case, such “pay and chase” policing after the fact is a crummy way to run government in lean times — or in fat times, for that matter. As for the claim that the electronic records conversion will reduce paperwork, many doctors say the reality is just the opposite. In Greensboro, N.C., Dr. Richard Aronson told the local Fox TV station that the mandate doubled the amount of paperwork in his private practice. Some medical professionals are now warning that the dangerous phenomenon of “distracted doctoring” is on the rise as a result of data-driven imperatives that direct health-care providers’ attention away from their patients and onto their screens and hand-held devices. You know who is benefiting from the initiative? Put on your shocked faces: Obama donors and cronies. Billionaire Judith Faulkner, Obama’s medical information czar and a major Democratic con-
tributor, just happens to be the founder and CEO of Epic Systems — a medical software company that stores nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population’s health data. Another billion-dollar patientrecord database grant program has doled out money to the University of Chicago Medical Center (where first lady Michelle Obama and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett both served in highpaid positions). As I’ve previously reported, these administration grants circumvent any and all congressional deliberation as part of Team Obama’s election-year “We Can’t Wait” initiatives. Even as the White House touted the move toward gee-whiz 21st century electronic databases, health-care professionals in the know have debunked that claim, too. Companies like Faulkner’s, which lobbied loudest for the mandates and “incentives,” represent traditional hard drivedependent software firms that are already dated. As Athenahealth Chairman and CEO Jonathan Bush, who advocates cloud-computing alternatives, put it: The Obama electronic records mandate is “healthcare information technology’s version of cash-for-clunkers.” Then there’s the still-growing and untold number of doctors nationwide who are closing up shop or limiting their practices and converting to “concierge care” to escape this and myriad other Obamacare intrusions. My own primary care physician in Colorado Springs quit her regular practice and converted to “concierge care” because of the electronic medical records imposition. More paperwork. More waste. Less accountability. Less care. Government malpractice at work.
________ Michelle Malkin’s nationally syndicated column appears in the PDN every Friday. Email malkinblog@gmail.com.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2012
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