Removing barriers to better health care

Good news- There is an easy way to improve US health care and reduce costs.

In the United States, for every person providing a direct medical service there is a host of clerks parsing the bill. We don't pay for that army of clerks in Canada. Those people are applying their bookkeeping skills in other, more productive businesses. Our medical expenses are, in fact, medical expenses.

Single payer health insurance distributes individual medical risk across the entire population without the added overhead of pointless administrative and legal quarrelling over exactly who will pay for which part- because in the end we all pay anyway.

Besides radically reducing the cost of health care and improving the quality available to everyone, there are other, perhaps more important, advantages to these improvements.

Do Americans imagine that it costs them nothing to allow other Americans to grow up physically handicapped or poorly educated? That they can maintain a healthy, competitive, capitalist economy this way? Apparently they do.

Boots on the Ground

On today's GPS, Fareed Zakaria hosted a discussion about the future of American involvement in Afghanistan. His guests for this were Rachel Reid, Max Boot and Nir Rosen. All were knowledgable and articulate, though I had much greater sympathy with the points of view expressed by Ms Reid and Mr Rosen than I did with that of Mr Boot.
 
Unfortunately, it is Mr. Boot who is advisor to the US military. On the topic of  negotiating with the Taliban he declared that

"...what General Petraeus realizes is you have to fight them to set the preconditions for negotiating. And this is a point that was driven home to me by a NATO officer in Kabul who said you have to knock them on their backside before you offer them a helping hand up, because if you reach out to them right now, they're going to slap you away. "

This is what I call the Fascist fallacy; In this example it is the American military version: "First, you acknowledge me as your Master, then subordination to my will shall make you free". 

This is a riff on the common testosterone story that plays out in office politics everywhere, the one we all endure when some wannabe justifies his obsessive pursuit of dominance by agruing "First I obtain supreme power, then I will make good things happen". It just doesn't count as a 'good thing' unless he forces it on you.

So who has the better grip on the concept of democracy, the US Army stomping through somebody else's kitchen, or the people who live there ready to die resisting foreign force ?

A dressing-down for the nation

On Tuesday President Obama is, we are told, planning to dress the nation on a rock.

It had better be a big rock or there won't be enough room for them all.... Some of those Americans are large!
     

View to the North

I'm lazy. I would rather look at mountains from afar than sweat and climb and gain perspective. Besides, I'm waiting for all those people to get out of the way...

The Creative Process

I've been trying to understand how to invoke the Muse and what banishes her. I've come to the conclusion that ownership is key to the creative process.

The fact that sitting here, now, I can choose whether and when to publish is exhilarating.

The corollary, of course, is the ennervating effect of disempowerment-