Can we fix it by taxing it?
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Alternatives To ObamaCare
It’s time to propose some.
Yes, I think it’s ripe now, thanks to the monumental cluster effery of the administration.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Republicans next strategy to kill this monstrosity:
Alexander, the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has a plan for replacing Obamacare. It includes providing governors with more flexibility in operating state Medicaid programs, strengthening workplace wellness programs, permitting small businesses to pool their resources and offer lower-cost insurance plans for employees, expanding opportunities for consumers to purchase insurance across state lines and providing greater access to health savings accounts.
Alexander said his plan offers “step-by-step reforms that would reduce the costs of healthcare.”
Alexander isn’t alone in advocating for a process known as “repeal and replace.” The House Republican Study Committee, a conservative group within the GOP caucus, also has offered an Obamacare alternative that it intends to continue pursuing.
“American families and businesses deserve and demand real solutions to the serious problems that exist in our healthcare system,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the committee chairman. “The RSC’s American Health Care Reform Act is a common-sense bill that will lower costs using conservative, free-market solutions which give American families more choices without the unworkable mandates and billions in taxes included in President Obama’s healthcare law.”
The 200-page bill offers $20,000 in tax deductions to families and a $7,500 deduction to individuals to purchase insurance from vendors in any state — thus, supporters say, allowing people to save money by selecting lower-cost providers.
The measure also offers altered proposals to some of the more popular aspects of Obamacare – creation of a $25 billion fund to lower costs for those afflicted with pre-existing conditions, permitting people to carry their insurance from job to job and permitting coverage for adult children up to age 26.
That last remains stupid, regardless of how popular it is.
The Uploading Problem
Three-Mile Island
Why ObamaCare is similar to it:
…the Affordable Care Act’s insurance market reforms have created a system prone to what Charles Perrow dubbed “Normal Accidents.” By “normal,” he didn’t mean “minor” — the lead exhibit was Three Mile Island. Rather, he meant something like “hard to avoid.” The system is both complex and tightly coupled: All the pieces are interdependent, so a failure in one part is apt to cascade throughout the market. This is not a system where you want to start pulling out one piece to see how well the rest can get along without it.
The administration clearly understood this — right up to the point where a major component failed. Now it’s apparently planning to keep the reactor running with as many pieces as possible in the hopes that none of it will unexpectedly blow up. This is not sound policy thinking, or even sound political thinking, and I think that all of us who care about keeping insurance available for ordinary Americans should try to talk them out of it — for their good, as well as our own.
Sound policy thinking is not their hallmark.
As an aside, Perrow’s book is excellent — I used it for doing case studies of various tightly-coupled complex disasters when I was doing contract work for S&MA at NASA HQ a few years ago.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The buck stops with Obama:
He’s not very competent, and like most people who aren’t very competent, he tends to hire people who are no more competent than he. As they say: First rate people hire first rate people. Second rate people hire third rate people.
Except he seems to be a third rater hiring fourth raters. And this was obvious to some of us in 2008, but not enough, then or four years later.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama and Sebelius: The dog ate my homework:
The collapse of the Obamacare project over the first three weeks offers no such pathways away from responsibility. Obama and his team demanded that Congress pass the Affordable Care Act so that they could impose their own ideas of central-planning reform on the health-care industry, which makes up a sixth of the American economy.
It passed with no Republican votes, and thanks to its tax provisions, provides most of its own revenue streams. The Department of Health and Human Services has had 42 months to prepare for the rollout of the web exchange, the critical tool that would allow people to purchase mandated insurance policies under government supervision.
In short, the ACA was the Obama administration’s own bid to prove that activist, large-scale government was superior in innovation and competency. Instead, it has become a signature example of the lack of accountability, incompetence, and rank dishonesty that activist, large-scale government creates and protects. And that was just on performance. Despite the 42 months lead time and the outlay of $400 million, the web portal failed immediately, and two successive weekends of repair couldn’t make it work.
That’s actually the best news. One couldn’t have demonstrated Hayek’s thesis of the knowledge problem more spectacularly than this belly flop of a swan dive.
[Update a while later]
OK, if you don’t like the TMI analogy, how about the Titanic?
The Obama administration had three years to build Healthcare.gov, a website that is not fundamentally revolutionary when compared to the likes of Progressive.com or Amazon.com. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare during a window when they controlled all power in Washington, and were more concerned about passing a health care law than with passing a good health care law. Most of them never bothered to read the law they passed. Many of them sold their votes for pork or empty promises. While the Titanic had little advance warning of the iceberg, the Obama administration was warned by stress tests months before the site’s launch that Healthcare.gov would crash. But they did not heed those warnings.
Similar unjustified arrogance and hubris was involved.
Seven “Solutions” To ObamaCare
…that won’t save it:
I don’t know how to fix the broken programming system. But I do know what sort of “fixes” could make the insurance market break further. If we’re going to delay, then we need to delay the whole thing — guaranteed issue, community rating and so forth. Otherwise, we’re just asking for, well, a quagmire.
They’re calling for a “surge,” without an exit strategy.
Irrational “Liberal” Hate
Dissecting the anti-Keystone nonsense:
So what is going on here? Rich liberals hire kids–recent college graduates, or maybe college or high school students–to produce idiotic “research reports” that can be dismantled by anyone familiar with arithmetic, let alone the oil and gas industry, of which these kids obviously know nothing at all. The claims these reports make are completely divorced from reality, but liberals don’t seem to care. The Huffington Post headlines: “Keystone XL Pipeline Could Yield $100 Billion For Koch Brothers.” PolicyMic: “Actually, You Probably WILL Guess Who Stands to Make $100 Billion Off the Keystone XL Pipeline.” TruthDig: “Koch Brothers Stand to Make $100 Billion From Keystone Pipeline.” And, of course, the Kos Kidz are all over it.
Imbecility.
Technology Is Killing ObamaCare
…but it may be able to save us from it:
Over time, I think we’ll see a lot more intelligence moving into medical devices covering a wide range of subjects. (And, in some cases, it may do the job better than a human doctor: When my wife had a heart attack at the age of 37, the EKG machine at the hospital flagged her reading as indicating a possible myocardial infarction, but the doctors dismissed that because she was a young, thin, athletic woman. The machine was right, and they were wrong.)
While we’re a long way from the “autodocs” featured in some science fiction stories, the proliferation of devices that can do extensive blood tests and diagnostic workups doesn’t seem that far away. Neither does the creation of freestanding gadgets that can diagnose things such as strep throat and other staples of doc-in-a-box or nurse-in-a-box practices now.
While such devices will be expensive at first, they’re likely to get steadily cheaper and more capable because, as electronic gadgets, they’ll benefit from Moore’s Law, the steady increase in computing power.
But only if we don’t tax them out of existence, or punish those developing them.
The ObamaCare Rose Garden Speech
There were more than eight, though.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why is the ObamaCare roll out failing? Because Obama and his lackeys hate government.
Isn’t it obvious?
The Article VI Problem
Copenhagen Suborbitals has discovered it.
At ISPCS last week, I was talking to another space lawyer about the need to deal with this, sooner than later (though Planetary Resources and other mining companies don’t seem to understand the problem). As I noted in the conclusion to my property-rights piece in The New Atlantis last year, The words “continuing supervision” open us up to all manner of mischief:
it is worth noting that, while the OST arguably does not prevent the recognition of property claims per se, it may prove to be a hindrance to any kind at all of large-scale space activity, not just settlement. In that regard, this is the most troublesome sentence in the entire treaty: “The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.”
Consider the implications of the words “continuing supervision,” if taken literally. It could be argued that satisfaction of this requirement would demand that any person operating off the planet would be required to have a government minder with him at all times. Prior approval — for example, a launch license — might not be sufficient, because supervision could be argued to imply not just observation, but physical control. This wording in the treaty could imply that even the remote monitoring of private activity in space, which itself would be a significant hindrance for space settlement, would be insufficient.
With new affordable spaceflight technologies on the horizon, extensive private activity in space will be a serious possibility in the near future. If we wish to see humanity flourish in space, we have to recognize that the Outer Space Treaty is a relic of a different era. Fresh interpretations may not suffice: we may soon have to renegotiate and amend the treaty — or even completely scrap it and start from scratch — if we want not just to protect space as a mere scientific preserve but to open it for settlement as a grand new frontier. [Emphasis added]
I think my next project may be called “The Article VI Project.”