Health Care, Freedom, and Equality

View 798 Tuesday, November 12, 2013

 

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

 

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Universal Health Care and Equality

It’s pretty clear that the objective of the Affordable Health Care Act is to bring about a situation of universal health care, with the goal being that it will be just free: no insurance premiums, low to zero co-payments for both drugs and medical services, pretty well free hospitals. We may adjust the system, particularly with co-payments to discourage frivolous use of medical resources, but that appears to be the goal: universal single payer health care.

As it happens, I had breakfast with Frank Herbert the morning he was informed that the intestinal discomfort he had been feeling lately was middle stage pancreatic cancer. Frank being Frank it was a lot less unpleasant than you might have imagined. We were both making speeches at a computer convention in Seattle, and Frank gave his with aplomb, and we had dinner at Ivar’s that night. During dinner he told me that he and his wife had made arrangements for him to go to the Mayo clinic the next day. He was determined to lick this thing.

Of course he didn’t, but not from lack of trying. The point is that he could do that.

At that time I couldn’t have. Indeed, when I was told I had brain cancer in late 2007, my choices were always limited to what Kaiser offered; going to the Mayo Clinic or Sloan-Kettering wasn’t a financially feasible option. I hasten to add that had I had the money I wouldn’t have been tempted: my experience with the Kaiser system was as pleasant as it could have been under the circumstances, and I had every reason to believe in the competence of my physicians – most of whom had actually read some of my books.

Pass now to days of universal health care: can the Mayo Clinic exist? For that matter, can “Cadillac Plans” such as I have had with Kaiser for more than twenty-five years continue to exist under single payer universal health care? Could the Kaiser system itself survive?

“Why should Frank Herbert have access to better health care than I can get?” Or Bill Gates, or – but you get the idea. If we ever get to single payer universal health care that will be a question that must be answered. Why should anyone have access to something better than everyone can afford?

So you are faced with allocation of services – death panels, in popular parlance – to elite institutions, or else the elite institutions must cease to exist. They may not vanish and go out of business; there is always the alternative of expanding them enormously so that they are no longer elite institutions although they keep the same name; but effectively they will be gone.

I invite comment. If we have universal health care, will it allow Bill Gates and Frank Herbert options that you and I won’t have? How? Will physicians be allowed to offer concierge practice to the rich? How will physicians be paid?

 

Solar activity heads for lowest low in four centuries

I like these quotes: "The Maunder Minimum coincided with the worst European winters of the little ice age" and "The precise extent to which solar cycles influence global temperatures is still debated." And while the Climatologists didn’t see this coming, they know the outcome: "we should not expect a new grand minimum to bring on a new little ice age".

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24512-solar-activity-heads-for-lowest-low-in-four-centuries.html

David Smallwood

Of course the media are filled with dire warnings that “Climate Change” (no longer Global Warming) is responsible for the severity of the recent typhoons in the Philippines. There is no evidence for this hypothesis, but that doesn’t bother the institutional bureaucrats of the UN who get to pose as scientists.   Why any scientist worthy of the name participates in the UN political farce they call science is not clear. 

 

I used to build models for a living. The notion of systems analysis was to find systems you could model using mathematics that let you solve the model; you then tested the model against the real world.  The various climate models do none of this. They don’t even attempt to model in known factors, and they can’t even predict the real world – that is they can’t take the initial conditions of 1950 and run to 2010 and get anything similar to what actually happened.  And as the years go on it becomes more and more clear that there is no more warming trend now than there was in the days when the great fear was a cooling trend toward an ice age.  The fact remains that we don’t know what generates long term climate trends, and we have absolutely no understanding of solar radiation phenomena.

 

We do know that Earth was much warmer in Viking times than it is now; and that it was much colder during the Little Ice Age after the cooling trend began about 1300; and that it has been warming since about 1800 with a good deal of the warming happening before 1850.  CO2 has been seized as a forcing factor largely because it’s hard to think of another; but then CO2 from volcanism isn’t predictable either, and it’s not clear just what its contribution to rising CO2 levels may be.

We ought to be working on ways to reduce CO2 levels if they get a great deal higher, but not at the price of bankrupting ourselves.  Since there is uncertainty whether climate is getting hotter or colder, Bayesian analysis would indicate that optimum strategy would be to spend more on reducing that uncertainty, not on betting on remedies that depend on guessing correctly.  We know that CO2 is rising; it’s wise to think up ways to deal with that; but not as climate control.  Incidentally, forests are pretty good at sequestering CO2.

‘Until recently, without the knowledge of Congress, the Air Force was moving fast on a secret plan to help fund the F-35 by abolishing the A-10 fleet.’

<http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/148289/usaf-maneuvers-to-retire-a_10.html/article/20130923/NEWS04/309230002/>

 

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Roland Dobbins

Droll

 

6 satellites ready for space

Each one is a 10 cm cube loaded into a dispenser. They will fly to ISS next month. You can post the picture.

Someone told me Von Braun thought kicking sats out the door of a space station was the best way to do it. You heard this? Want to ask your readers? Would love to get a source.

Rich

Commercial space in action.  I seem to recall hearing that von Braun had said that and it seems reasonable, but he never said it to me. Anyone remember it?

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.