† Socialized Medicine: Some Animals More Equal Than Others?: When French President Nicolas Sarkozy collapsed while jogging a couple of weeks back, he was whisked to a hospital and spent the night undergoing diagnostic tests of his heart and neurologic function. The Wall Street Journal reports that another French citizen, Laure Cuccarolo, who lives in a village in southern France went into early labor and ended up delivering her baby in a firetruck because the local fire brigade could not get her to the nearest hospital – 30 miles away – fast enough.

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.

French taxpayers fund a state health insurer, Assurance Maladie, proportionally to their income, and patients get treatment even if they can't pay for it. [Emphasis, The Stiletto.] …

Assurance Maladie has been in the red since 1989. This year the annual shortfall is expected to reach €9.4 billion ($13.5 billion), and €15 billion in 2010, or roughly 10% of its budget.

France's woes provide grist to critics of Mr. Obama and the Democrats' vision of a new public health plan to compete with private health insurers.

The Journal notes that the U.S. and French healthcare systems face the same pressures - rising drug costs, aging populations and growing unemployment.

† Chicago On The Potomac: Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass observes that “Republicans don't know much about the Chicago Way”:

If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss' little brother, you write the check. Otherwise, government inspectors may arrive, demanding to know why your thing-a-ma-bob isn't coupled with the whoosy-whatsits, in the manner of the prescribed flibber-mcjibbits, as outlined in the appendix of the municipal code. Then you've got real problems.

Kass is particularly chagrined about the naiveté of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who recently sent a letter to Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Hussein Obama's chief of staff “demanding to know who is behind a series of letters sent by several Obama Cabinet secretaries to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer that subtly threaten to withhold federal dollars from the state if Republican critics [of the economic stimulus program] like Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona don't shut up”:

What bothers Issa is all that Chicago-style muscle in the White House.

"They're taking over the Census, and Cabinet officers threaten to cut funds to states of critics of the president," Issa said. …

"Chicago is run a certain way, and that's a decision made by the people of Chicago," Issa said. "But the United States of America is run with minorities having rights and active dissent. And now people are being silenced. We're not a country run on patronage, where if you do the right thing, a family member ends up with a political job. That's not the way the American people expect the country to be run."

As Kass points out: “The national media - and the Republicans - weren't all that interested in Chicago politics when Obama was campaigning. The pundits were too busy smoking their Hopium. National Republicans made one little commercial about the Chicago machine, but Mayor Daley said there wasn't any machine, and that was that.”

† Sometimes, Nanny Knows Best: During the Joint Statistical Meetings convention in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, ace numbers crunchers cringed at a slideshow confirming that Americans are shockingly innumerate, reports The Washington Post:

It's a public service announcement for colon cancer awareness: "The Early Warning Signs of Cancer -- You feel great. You have a healthy appetite. You're over 50." Some 50,000 Americans will die from colon cancer, the PSA says.

But die when? Next year? In their lifetimes? Who are these Americans? Old men? Infants? And what does 50,000 mean, anyway? Sounds like a lot. No. It's less than one-twentieth of 1 percent of the U.S. population.

"If there was a hall of fame for misleading statistics," presenter Steven Woloshin says dryly, "survival statistics would have a lifetime membership."

That's why he's leading this workshop on statistical literacy. Because the general population does not get it. Worse, they don't even get what they don't get. They use "random" when they mean "uniform." They confuse "cause" with "correlation." They do not question study designs, like the recent survey claiming Republicans were happier with their sex lives than Democrats, but failing to take into account that more Republicans are men, who always think they're studs. They can't tell the difference between relative and absolute risk. They can't tell the difference between the mean and the median. "That eats at me constantly," says Jim Cochran, a statistics professor from Louisiana.

Forget statistics - despite his ivy-league education and law degree, President Barack Hussein Obama is flummoxed by … fractions! Here’s what he told the good people of Eklhart County, IN, in a speech about his economic stimulus policies the other day:

The plan was divided into three parts. One-third of the money has gone to tax relief for families and small businesses. One-third of the money is cutting people’s taxes. … Another third of the money in the Recovery Act has been for emergency relief that is helping folks who’ve borne the brunt of this recession. … So that’s the second half. First half, tax relief. Second half, support for individuals, small businesses, and states that had fallen on hard times. The last third of the Recovery Act - and that’s what we’re going to talk about here today - is for investments  that are not only putting people back to work in the short term, but laying a new foundation for growth and prosperity in the long run.

Quick: What’s four-thirds divided by two halves? Obama can’t tell you, but it’s 1.3.

† Never Mind Marxism. Will An Obama Administration Be Totalitarian?: Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is accusing the White House of compiling an "enemies list" comprised of ordinary citizens who oppose his version of healthcare “reform,” reports The Dallas Morning News

Cornyn, who leads the Republicans' Senate campaign effort, said Wednesday in a letter to Obama that he's concerned that citizen engagement on the issue could be "chilled." He also expressed alarm that the White House could end up collecting electronic information on its critics. …

Cornyn was responding to a post on the White House's blog Wednesday in which users are asked to help stop the spread of disinformation about legislation to overhaul health insurance. The post offers an e-mail address, flag@whitehouse.gov, for users to forward anything "on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy." …

In his letter, Cornyn asked that the effort cease immediately and that the administration inform Congress what it's doing to ensure that names and electronic information about citizens weighing in on health care are not collected.

By now it’s become de rigueur to point out “Imagine the level of outrage, had President Bush [fill in any number of creepy Obama actions and policies, such as dropping charges against a hate group that menaced voters and prevented them from going to the polls]?

† Madoff’s Victims: Gullible Or Greedy?: Three PA residents, who had invested with Bernard Madoff and claimed they had the support of more than 100 other victims, unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S. Southern District Bankruptcy Court to reject the request of Irving H. Picard and his legal team at Baker & Hostetler for more than $15 million in interim fees, because he has a "pathetic track record" and caused "needless devastation" to Madoff's customers by "ignoring" the mandate of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) to pay claims promptly based upon their 'statutory balances.'"  Judge Burton R. Lifland approved the fee request, reports New York Law Journal, on the grounds that the plaintiffs' case amounted to nothing more than “a disagreement in approach" concerning the evaluation of claims, and that they “had already raised these arguments in a separate adversary proceeding against the trustee, which he would rule on at a later date.”

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that the IRS has begun disbursing refund checks to Madoff investors to reimburse them for taxes they paid on money they had not actually made. Some of the checks are for nearly $500,000. Some victims who could get seven-figure checks from the government may not have filed amended 2008 tax returns as of yet.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, King Of The Heels): Roughly a month after former aide Andrew Young testified before a federal grand jury, former Sen. John Edwards' former girlfriend-cum-campaign videographer Rielle Hunter – with daughter Frances Quinn Hunter in her arms – did the same, reports The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC):

A federal grand jury is investigating whether Edwards misused campaign funds as hush money for Hunter.

Hunter, a recovered drug addict and videographer, was paid $100,000 by the Edwards campaign in 2006 to produce a series of videos offering an intimate look at Edwards during his campaign. As part of the investigation, the grand jury may ask questions that will help them determine whether Hunter was paid a fair market rate for her work. …

The investigation will require grand jurors to sift through millions of dollars in donations gathered over several years to help launch Edwards' presidential run. Much of it was collected in large chunks by non-profit groups kept at arm's length from Edwards. It is not clear how all of that money was spent.