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Fix the economy by fixing “healthcare”

August 4th, 2011 No comments

Yesterday’s post from Charles Hugh Smith has what may be the most sensible “fix the economy” plan yet.  It’s simple (not simplistic) yet challenging.  Like the simple plan for physical fitness (“Eat better.  Exercise more.”) the difficulty isn’t in figuring it out; the difficulty is in actually doing it.  While Smith has 3 major points, I’m going to focus on #2 in this post:

 You Want to Create Jobs?  Here’s How

The only engine for jobs is small business, so quit pandering to global corporations and start pandering to the people who might actually hire someone in America. The back-of-the-envelope number bandied about is that small business creates about 60% of the new jobs in the U.S. I suspect that’s a number from a decade or two ago; in the real world of the present, it’s more like 90%. …

The U.S. economy is hobbled by two systemic burdens: sickcare and the insolvent “too big to fail” banking system. Both act as enormous taxes on the productive citizenry.

You want to create jobs? Then stop diddling around with cargo-cult Keynesian “stimulus” which just props up the least efficient and most parasitic elements of the economy: the banking sector, Wall Street, cartels and fiefdoms. Keynesian stimulus is simply another facet of the Wall Street/bank/corporatocracy Status Quo: we’ve already squandered trillions in “stimulus” government spending, and very little has trickled down to the businesses which might actually hire someone in the U.S. It is a failed policy precisely because it is entirely Status Quo.

If we really want to create jobs, we need deep structural reforms. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic–i.e. trimming the payroll tax 2%–is meaningless. Here’s the to-do list for those who are serious about creating jobs:

2. Reduce healthcare/sickcare costs by a third, from 17% of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) to 11%–then reduce it again to the level of Australian and Japan healthcare costs, around 8% of GDP. Sickcare is truly pernicious, as it acts as an 8% “useless tax” on the economy: if our developed-economy competitors can provide healthcare to all their citizens for literally half of what we spend per capita, then we are instantly uncompetitive just as a result of sickcare….

If you read the history of healthcare, it seems more an historical accident than some well-thought-out plan that employers were saddled with providing healthcare insurance for their employees. This was workable when healthcare was 1% or less of a workers compensation, but now that it’s 50%, and millions of people work part-time or are contract workers, it no longer works on a systemic level. There is nothing written in stone about this system, and in a “freelance nation” it no longer makes sense…

The common-sense solution to cut healthcare costs in half is a dual system: a VA-like system with universal access but strict cost controls and no profit, and cash: buy whatever care you want, from whomever you want. Don’t like the VA system? Fine, save your cash and buy whatever care you want, no restrictions. Don’t want to work for the VA system? Fine–get your license to practice medicine and set up shop, cash only.

This would not be a painless transition; after all, the cartel-Medicare/Medicaid complex has been on a hiring spree ever since the cartels realized there was literally no limit to how much they could bill the government. (Recall that 40% of our sickcare costs are paper-shuffling, embezzlement and fraud. That’s what’s incentivized, so that’s what blossoms.)

But the reality is that cutting sickcare in half would restore it from a “profit center” to actual healthcare in the hands of primary-care physicians.

The ultimate answer to improving healthcare is community-based healthcare. As long as isolated “consumers” have few incentives or local options for improving their own health with their peers and primary-care physicians and nurses, then improving health is fighting the headwinds of marketed illness via junk food and techno-entertainment inactivity.

If you don’t like these solutions, then come up with your own, but they have to cut U.S. healthcare spending per capita in half. Nothing less will create a competitive economy.

I essentially agree with this.  If ObamaCare had looked like this, with a modest but universal health care system for everyone, with “cash is king” freedom to seek alternative/additional treatment outside the system, all while removing the burden of health care costs from American employers, I would have supported it.

Instead, we got a monstrous inversion where the government, instead of supplying health care to citizens, supplies citizens to insurance companies.  This does nothing to address the cost or the power of the “sickcare” cartels.

This brought to my mind an article by John Michael Greer regarding the history of fraternal lodge organizations, which mentioned the “lodge trade” — how in the past, community-based lodge organizations would hire doctors to provide medical care for their members:

Lodges also provided health care to their members. The arrangement, once known as “lodge trade” among doctors, makes an interesting contrast with the corrupt monstrosity masquerading as health care reform currently lumbering its way through the US Congress. Each lodge simply went out and hired a doctor, usually on an annual contract. The doctor received a flat monthly salary from the lodge, and in return provided whatever general medical care the lodge members and their families needed. If it had a large enough membership, the lodge might also hire a couple of visiting nurses and a dentist on the same basis. Notice that this arrangement gave the patients a meaningful voice in health care quality, and imposed an effective limit on prices: a doctor who provided substandard care or charged more than the lodge wanted to pay would simply find himself out of a job when his annual contract came up for renewal…

Now it’s only fair to mention that as the lodges began their decline, they found the skids liberally greased by several outside factors. The American Medical Association, for example, spent much of the twentieth century in a sustained campaign to break the lodge trade system. Look through back issues of the Journal of the American Medical Association from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and you’ll find any number of editorials denouncing lodge trade, and for good reason: the lodge trade system placed the concerns of health care consumers ahead of the financial interests of the medical profession. In the 1920s, the average doctor made only a little more than the average plumber; the end of lodge trade, and of a variety of other arrangements that subjected health care to the economic discipline of the market, was central to the shifts that produced today’s six- and seven-figure incomes for doctors.

It’s easy to see how a revived “lodge trade” could dovetail with the proposed “VA-like” government / cash dual system proposed by Smith.

Pros: Would achieve the social benefit of basic health care for all Americans while reducing costs and improving American competitiveness.  At the same time, it would preserve the freedom of Americans to choose their own healthcare (subject to what they can afford to pay, of course – but that’s already true).

Cons: I’d hate this with a burning, visceral, existential passion if I were a doctor, a malpractice lawyer, or owned lots of stock in pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and insurance companies.

What am I missing on the pro/con lists?

 

Categories: The Stupid Economy Tags:

A Failure Of Leadership

July 19th, 2011 1 comment

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
— Sen. Barack H. Obama, March 2006

As the French saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Belt-Tightening

June 28th, 2011 No comments

Ilargi at The Automatic Earth writes about the Greek Debt situation:

Tanks in the street of Athens, and people throwing themselves out of windows. It’s come to this kind of threatening language, and in the next 48 hours or so it will only intensify, and financial markets will fluctuate because of it as if that’s their very and only purpose in life.

The words about the tanks and suicides come from one of Greece’s newly fangled fat twin political duo, Theodoros Pangalos, the deputy prime minister who appeared out of nowhere the past few days, as far as that is physically possible for someone his size.

Look, I’m not trying to make fun of fat people here, it’s just the irony that the fact that the “face” of Greece in the international financial media has overnight changed to these two huge guys that no-one outside of the country had ever heard about before. And that they’re the ones threatening the Greeks with hell and brimstone if they don’t agree to austerity measures that will make a substantial part of the population go hungry. “We all have to tighten our belts now”, that sort of thing. Well, those are quite some belts to tighten.

"it's as big as a whale, and it's about to set sail!"

Wow.  Looks like, for austerity measures, they could start with “think globally, act locally.”

While entertaining, why does this affect us (Americans, that is)?  Read on:

But yes, do ask yourself: what do you think would happen in New York, LA, Atlanta, Chicago, if those Greek austerity measures mentioned above would fall on the doorsteps of your community? Same question for those of you living in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Montréal.

Maybe this is a good time to speak up. At least now you still can. Once there are tanks in the streets, that may prove to be not so easy anymore. Look, Greece is not the worst of the lot, or the biggest issue. As Jon Stewart pointed out last week, Greek debt amounts to some $44,000 per capita. In America, it’s $45,000.

We’re all in this together, believe it or not. US banks have exposure to Greece through credit default swaps to an extent that nobody can define. We do know, though, that it’s substantial. And that if the Greek austerity vote fails on Wednesday, those US banks will come looking for more bailouts. From a government that can’t even agree on a debt ceiling, because the debt is so monstruously high already there is no way out anymore.

I doublechecked — the quoted number is low.  As of today, the per-capita share of the U. S. debt is $46,027.83 (direct from the Treasury divided by the Census).

It’s also fun to compare Greek vs. U.S. unemployment numbers, but for right now, I will leave that as an exercise for my readers…

Seedling Progress

May 24th, 2011 1 comment

So far, no disasters with the seedlings, so they are still doing well:

Tomatoes!

Tomatoes!

More Seedlings

More Seedlings

 

I also have some lettuce starts as part of the Slow Food Huron Valley seed trial:

Lettuce Test Plot

Lettuce Test Plot

The upper left is ‘Grand Rapids’:

Grand Rapids

Grand Rapids

In front of that is some ‘Black-Seeded Simpson’ I planted for comparison:

Black-Seeded Simpson

Black-Seeded Simpson

Front and center is ‘Sunset’:

Sunset

Sunset

And the front right variety is ‘Sanguine Amerliore’ (also known as ‘Strawberry Cabbage Lettuce’):

Sanguine Amerliore

Sanguine Amerliore

The two rows that aren’t doing so well are the ‘Cimmaron’ and ‘Australian Yellow Leaf’ that I planted for comparison (top center and top right).

I’ve also started a four-pack of the ‘Mini Yellow Bell’ pepper which is in with the rest of my pepper seedlings.  I have some ‘Hanson’ head lettuce growing which is the SFHV trial variety but which I selected on my own to try as a fall planting last year.

 

Categories: Garden, Slow Food Huron Valley Tags:

“So, what have you been reading?”

May 6th, 2011 4 comments

I was asked this by a friend tonight, and it made me think.  What have I been reading lately?  (I’m only going to count real, bound, ink-on-dead-trees books.  Blogs, Facebook, newsfeeds, and webcomics will not count for this purpose.)

Let’s see: fitness, gardening, more fitness, Carmelite spirituality, stage combat, economics, and bits of BritLit.

In case anyone wonders why this blog is named “Eclectic Amateur”, this should help explain.

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

GNOME development – lack of progress report

May 2nd, 2011 No comments

Well, it’s been a year since I said that I was going to get active on GNOME development again.

Perhaps that was over-optimistic.  Real Life™ did not go away and give me copious free time – and even snuck in a curveball or two.  Still, I haven’t been completely idle.

The original plan was to use the OMAP Zoom2 development platform to test GNOME using the ARM processor, with a further goal of exploring the OMAP video capability (ultimate motive: enable Cheese).  The Zoom II was made available by TI and provided by the GNOME Foundation.

The TI OMAP Zoom2 development system

The TI OMAP Zoom2 development system

This was going to be accomplished by using OpenEmbedded and Ångström to build GNOME for ARM.  As Ångström has Zoom2 support, this ought to have been simple.

In theory, at least.  In practice, I ran into the following obstacles:

  • I had not worked with git-based development before, and (at least at the time I started), and the latest-and-greatest pull were probably a bit more bleeding-edge than I should have started with.  No big deal there; standard teething troubles for trying to learn how to work with a new project.
  • Also at that time, one of the GNOME recipes had a build failure in it, and I was not yet familiar enough with OE and BitBake to fix it myself.
  • Working around that build failure, I discovered that my build system didn’t have sufficient disk space to hold a full OE build anyway.  (The OE documentation advises you to make sure you have “sufficient” system resources and bandwidth for a complete build, but is frustratingly non-specific about what qualifies as “sufficient”.)
  • This was about the time that my build system gave up the ghost anyway.
  • Poked at it a bit more with a borrowed build system that did have enough disk space.  That one died too.

Lessons learned:

  • Be more realistic about how much time I can squeeze in for GNOME projects, and remember to allow for life changing my schedule and commitments.
  • Do not underestimate the required beefiness of an OpenEmbedded build machine.
  • For OpenEmbedded development, stable branches might be your friend.

Plan B is now under consideration.

Categories: GNOME Tags:

Seed Starts

April 22nd, 2011 No comments

My little table of seedlings, almost two weeks ago:

My tomato and pepper seedlings, 4/10/2011

Pepper and tomato starts, 4/10/2011

This was almost two weeks ago, so they’re bigger now.  I’ve repotted the largest tomatoes already, and need to do some more.

As you can see, I am doing my traditional overplanting of tomatoes — we can really only eat so many, even if they are tasty heirlooms.  The plan is to try canning some salsa this fall.  The peppers should help with that, too.  Last year was the first time I’ve ever gotten any yield at all with peppers.  Hopefully, that wasn’t a fluke.

Categories: Garden Tags:

Oversight

January 13th, 2011 No comments

See what happens when you neglect the Environmental Impact Statement?

Categories: Silliness Tags:

Twilight of the Chicken Tenders

December 23rd, 2010 No comments

From John Michael Greer comes this reflection on the value of from-scratch cooking with basics:

I want to talk about something a good deal more basic: the awkward fact that the food you can produce in your backyard garden, or acquire in any other way likely in a deindustrializing world, does not magically appear in the forms that most Americans are used to consuming. A nation used to eating factory-breaded chicken tenders and JoJos to go is going to face some interesting traumas when food once again consists of live chickens, raw turnips, and fifty-pound sacks of dry navy beans.

It’s easy as well as entertaining to poke fun at America along these lines, but the difficulties involved are very real. A very large fraction of today’s Americans, provided with a plucked chicken, a market basket of fresh vegetables, and that fifty-pound sack of navy beans, would be completely at a loss if asked to convert them into something tasty and nourishing to eat…

You may be thinking that it’s all very well to praise home-cooked meals produced from raw materials, but cooking that way is a very time-consuming process, not to mention one that involves a vast amount of hard work. You’ve seen the gyrations that actors in chef hats go through in cooking programs on TV, you’ve glanced over the forbidding pages full of exotic ingredients and bizarre processes that make today’s gourmet cookbooks read like so many tomes of dire enchantment out of bad fantasy fiction, you’ve seen racks of women’s magazines that treat elaborate timewasting exercises disguised as cooking instructions as a goal every family ought to emulate, and you’ve unconsciously absorbed the legacy of most of a century of saturation advertising meant to convince you that cooking things for yourself from scratch is an exercise in the worst sort of protracted drudgery, and probably gives you radioactive halitosis and ring around the collar to boot, so you really ought to give it up and go buy whatever nice product the nice man from the nice company is trying to sell you.

If all this has convinced you that you don’t have time to cook, dear reader, you have been had.

Read the whole thing.

Dear Santa

December 15th, 2010 No comments

What I really want for Christmas is a shiny new Android tablet.  Is that too much to ask?

Categories: Crass Commercialism Tags: