Saturn and Her Moons

Hat tip to Trey Peden for linking me to these wonderful images The Boston Globe printed. 

Wow!  Just wow!

The Berlin Wall

Twenty years ago next month, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.  This Wall Street Journal article tells a story of the Berlin Wall I had never heard before. 

The world believes Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev or peaceful protests brought down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago next month. But for those who had front-row seats, the argument boils down to Ehrman vs. Brinkmann.

Riccardo Ehrman, a veteran Italian foreign correspondent, and Peter Brinkmann, a combative German tabloid reporter, both claim they asked the crucial questions at a news conference on Nov. 9, 1989, that led East German Politburo member Günter Schabowski to make one of the biggest fumbles in modern history.

Be sure to click on the “Slideshow” tab above the article.  It’s amazing!  Slide 3 of 16 shows how desperate people were to get out of East Germany (and America is inching closer and closer towards that type of misery.)  Slide 9 just amazes me.  I can’t imagine shooting another human being for no reason other than crossing an arbitrary line.  Slide 14 should be titled, “A First Look at Freedom.”

I find it so difficult to believe, although the reality of it is everywhere around me, that so many people, especially many Americans, don’t understand the value of individual rights, much less what they are.  How many more examples must history provide us with before we learn once and for all?

I know most Americans are busy with their careers, their children, their spouse, sports events or whatever else occupies their time.  We’ve become spoiled to being free enough to have too many things to occupy our time, but the times are changing.  If Americans don’t start doing what the government-run schools failed to do, educate themselves, history is doomed to repeat itself.

I don’t like change!

I saw this episode of Family Guy the other day and this line from Stewie had me rolling!  Every time I hear it, I laugh out loud.  :-)

How to Fix Health Care

Here's an interesting take on the health care debate.  Basically, this guy has figured out what many of us have been saying all along, that we need to restore free market health care!  (As an aside, there’s also a link in the article to the “Checklist” article I’ve mentioned before and continue to highly recommend.)   

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.

It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.

___

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

The problem with our current system is that the government or some heavily regulated insurance company is our health care provider’s client, not us.  Not only can we not pick and choose what health care services to buy, once we are at the provider for service, we are not their customer.  By allowing individual customers back into the equation, now you’ve got a business serving the needs of its customers, not big government.

Now I do disagree with Mr. Goldhill on how to fix the problem.  He wants to mandate HSAs.  I want to get rid of all mandates.  The government should not be involved in health care.  Period.  Here’s a great blog by my friend over at FIRM that talks about just that.

Most of his proposed changes are free market reforms or would be happen naturally in a free market. (I disagree with some of his ideas, such as requiring everyone to own a Health Savings Account. But I agree with repealing legal obstacles to purchasing HSAs and catastrophic-only insurance plans.)

And most importantly, he's willing to challenge the idea that "reform" is synonymous with government-run "universal coverage", especially given that he identifies himself as a Democrat. More politicians need to hear this message.

If someone identifying himself as a Democrat can realize this, perhaps there’s still hope after all.

Free Speech Threatened Again

Over at Noodlefood, Diana Hsieh just blogged about new regulations that may effect all of us bloggers.  Please read, it’s very important.

http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2009/10/regulating-speech-to-death.shtml

Americans Want It, Canadians Don’t

Despite what you probably think, I am really sick and tired of writing about government run health care and the threat it is posing to America.  I just can’t believe how much information is out there that shows it just doesn’t work, yet people still push for it.  The ignorance and/or sheer evil never ceases to amaze me.

So today, I saw this article in the WSJ.  From the article:

Hoping to capitalize on patients who might otherwise go to the U.S. for speedier care, a network of technically illegal private clinics and surgical centers has sprung up in British Columbia, echoing a trend in Quebec. In October, the courts will be asked to decide whether the budding system should be sanctioned. More than 70 private health providers in British Columbia now schedule simple surgeries and tests such as MRIs with waits as short as a week or two, compared with the months it takes for a public surgical suite to become available for nonessential operations.

'What we have in Canada is access to a government, state-mandated wait list,' said Brian Day, a former Canadian Medical Assn. director who runs a private surgical center in Vancouver. 'You cannot force a citizen in a free and democratic society to simply wait for healthcare, and outlaw their ability to extricate themselves from a wait list.'"

In other words, while Congress debates whether to set U.S. medicine on the Canadian path, Canadians are desperately seeking their own private option. At least Ms. Woodkey had the safety valve of Montana and private American medicine. Once Congress passes a form of Medicare for all, with its inevitable government price controls and limits on care, Americans might not be so lucky.

Let's hope that by then Canada has expanded its own private option, so Americans will one day be able to visit Alberta for faster, better care. Unless Congress bars that too.

(Emphasis mine.)  I don’t think that’s quite the “Hope” Obama had in mind, but yes, let’s hope for at least that much.  At the most, let’s hope, fight and win the battle for free market health care in America. 

Things That Make Me Go, “Hmm…”

I have noticed that those that I know that do not have health insurance, live in or own larger houses than they really need.  They own iPods, iPhones, at least one computer, usually at least two TVs, sometimes new or nicer furniture than I have, new or nicer cars than I have, they dine out and/or eat too much (to the point they are overweight), they sometimes smoke and/or drink, they have more clothes and shoes than I have, have children and so on.

Perhaps if many of those without health insurance were spending their money on the necessities of life and not living beyond their means, they wouldn’t be demanding that people like me pay for their health care (or a multitude of other government programs), then perhaps I could afford some of those items listed in the first paragraph, much less a child.