Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Dave Barry writes an annual “Year in Review”. I thought 2008’s review was amazing, but 2009’s review managed to top it. It starts with this:

It was also a year of Change, especially in Washington, where the tired old hacks of yesteryear finally yielded the reins of power to a group of fresh, young, idealistic, new-idea outsiders such as Nancy Pelosi. As a result Washington, rejecting “business as usual,” finally stopped trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at it and instead started trying to solve every problem by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars at it.

And then:

In an alarming technological development, hackers shut down Twitter, leaving a desperate and suddenly vulnerable America with no way to find out what the Kardashian sisters are having for lunch. The Federal Emergency Management Agency urges the nation to “remain calm” and “use Facebook if you can.”

And finally my favorite:

Also, as the year draws to a close, the Centers for Disease Control releases an urgent bulletin warning of a new, fast-spreading epidemic consisting of severe, and in some cases life-threatening, arm infections caused by “people constantly sneezing into their elbow pits.”

It’s well worth the time to read the whole thing. :-)

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the “no denial for pre-existing conditions” clause in the current healthcare bill is sufficient to pave a 12-lane superhighway.

Prohibiting insurers from denying coverage based on a pre-existing medical condition is a very noble-sounding idea. But it’s as naive and myopic as the idea of eliminating poverty by giving everyone a million dollars and a pony.

To understand why, we need to think about how insurance actually works. Let’s look at auto insurance. For example, Crissy and I pay around $100 per month to have $500,000 of coverage per incident. It’s very unlikely that either one of us will ever cause that much damage in an accident, but if we did, it would financially catastrophic. So, we voluntarily buy insurance even though we don’t really expect to ever collect.

The insurance company collects $100 premiums from lots of people and pools the money so that a large sum of money is available if the low-probability event happens to one of us.

The system works since people pay small sums to protect against a low probability event.

If you wrecked your car yesterday and bought insurance today, would the insurance replace your car? Of course not. You would be asking them, “How about I give you $100 and you give me $25,000 to replace my car?”

Basically, you’re asking them to charge you the small premium of low probability event, even though the event already happened. You’re just asking for free money.

The same holds true for healthcare. If we pass a law that says you can’t be denied for pre-existing conditions, then people will just wait until they are sick and then buy insurance. The latest proposal from Congress has a penalty if you don’t hold insurance, but the penalty is a measly $750/year. So healthy individuals would still wait to buy insurance until they need it.

In this world, every policy holder will be filing claims. Which means every customer will be saying, “How about I give you $100 and you give me $25,000 to replace my car?” and the company will be required by law to say yes. The law essentially dictates that private companies have to give you free money to pay for your medical expenses.

In this system, all the companies will either go out of business or raise their rates drastically. And the whole private sector of insurance providers would collapse.

And though the government will claim this is a “market failure”, it should be clear that the cause is government meddling.

Once the private sector is gone, all we’ll have left is a government “single payer” system. And despite the touted theoretical benefits of a “single payer” system, does anyone actually believe that the same bureaucrats that brought us the the TSA, FEMA, the DMV, and the IRS can run a nationalized healthcare system that is cost-effective and also provides high quality care?

The sad thing is that politicians are using the “pre-existing condition” issue to distract people from the real problems: government bans of insurance competition, out of control malpractice lawsuits, and government subsidies that forced us to have a “3rd party payer system”.

Remember, a single-payer nationalized system has rationing by definition. Anytime something is provided for free, it is rationed. Every existing single payer system in the world and every single US government program is rationed. This includes Social Security, Medicare, Cash for Clunkers, $40 vouchers for digital to analog converter boxes, welfare, subsidized CFLs, tax credits for hybrids, and so on.

There’s no way anyone can claim that healthcare would be any different.

Finally, while I shouldn’t have to say it, I’m all for fixing healthcare. I’m just against the ideas coming from Washington. Those plans won’t make things better; they will make things much, much worse. If you’re interested in learned why and how to really fix healthcare, check out my earlier posts on this topic:

• The root causes of our healthcare problems
• How to fix healthcare
• Some closing thoughts on healthcare – I guess these didn’t turn out to be “closing” thoughts :-)
• Healthcare reform and Corporatism

This article on healthcare “reform” from a couple weeks ago is fascinating in a rage-inducing sort of way:

WASHINGTON — A measure to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and some other countries fell short in the Senate Tuesday night, but lawmakers were working on other ways to squeeze concessions from the pharmaceutical industry.

So our Senators had to ask the drug companies if Americans could have permission to buy medicine from non-American companies.

A free people should be able to voluntarily buy goods from whomever they want. The ban on importing drugs is nothing more than corporate welfare thanks to the industry’s liberal bribing of our Congressmen.

The drug companies claim that safety is an issue. But an amendment to allow importation of medicine if it has FDA approval was voted down in the Senate as well, which means the concern about “safety” isn’t valid.

I know we’re told that our economic and political system is Capitalism, but it’s very untrue. Sadly, we really have a system of Corporatism, where companies essentially run the government and write the laws. Heck, even Michael “I hate Capitalism” Moore agrees.

In this case, American pharmaceutical companies bought Congress and got a law passed that makes it illegal to buy products from their competitors. And it can be even more blatant: sometimes companies just get big piles of taxpayer money. A study that shouldn’t surprise anyone found that banks that spent more on lobbying were more likely to get bailouts.

An obvious, simple fix for healthcare is to let Americans voluntarily buy medicine from whoever they and their doctor feel is best. This alone with save Americans over $8,000,000,000 a year! But it’s not on the table; Congress doesn’t work for the people, Congress works for wealthy and powerful corporate interests.

But, don’t lay all the blame on the companies. The majority of the blame should be on our leaders in Washington. If they weren’t for sale in the first place, then they couldn’t be bought.

Merry Christmas everyone! As my Christmas gift to all of you, here are two very entertaining and highly annoying Christmas videos:

(Source)

(Source)

And Happy New Year! :-)

And one more recession indicator to add to the bunch: at Red Lobster, if it’s a customer’s birthday they bring him a biscuit with a candle in it instead of a piece of cake with a candle.

They do, however, sing the actual “Happy Birthday” song instead of some weird made-up song or chant. I’m not sure if they pay royalties or not though.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0on29a9kvlA)

Sadly, I had a manager who kept calling me “Raj”, which, of course, was the name of the other Indian guy on the team. One day, he asked, “Do you have a nickname?”. I believe my answer was, “You mean a short version of ‘Vijay’? Is two syllables too many for you to remember?”

I left that team as soon as I could.

Once again, the most insightful commentary and analysis of our world comes from our comedians.

You have to watch it; it’ll make you laugh really hard… and then it may make you cry since it’s all so true.

It seems like a no-brainer; of course our lawmakers read the proposed law before they vote on it. Right?

Sadly, they don’t. And given the pathetic state of political discourse in our country, this is a somehow a partisan issue.

A few Congressmen (from both parties) tried to add an amendment to the Health Care bill which requires the final version of the bill be available for 72 hours before the vote. And the amendment failed in committee along party lines!

Health care is extremely important to everyone’s quality of life and is the single largest piece of the U.S. economy. Congressmen voting on a 1,000+ page which overhauls over 10% of the economy without reading it? What on earth could go wrong?

Here are some of the many laws that were passed without anyone reading them:

• Patriot Act (Oct 2001) – voted on and passed even though many paragraphs and pages of the bill still said “to be written”
• $789,000,000,000 Stimulus Bill (Feb 2009) – 1,100 pages long and only available 13 hours before the debate and vote
• House Energy Bill (June 2009) – 1,200 pages long and only available 15 hours before the vote

Remember those large cash bonuses AIG executives got after being bailed out by us taxpayers? Last minute changes to the stimulus bill by Senator Dodd allowed those bonuses to be paid. And other provisions to tax bonuses of bailed out companies disappeared at the last second too. No one knew, since no one actually read the bill.

And that Energy Bill? Turns out that Democrats added 300 pages of amendments at 3 am the night before the vote.

But it’s not just the Democrats forcing bills through without letting anyone know exactly what’s in them. The Republicans forced through the Patriot Act and the Medicare Prescription Drug bill without anyone knowing exactly what’s in them as well.

The solution to this is really simple: voters need to vote out any Congressman that voted for a bill that he or she did not read.

I’ve called my Congressmen before and asked why they vote for bills they couldn’t have possibly read and I’ve heard a number of excuses.

One excuse is that it is very hard to understand the bills since they contain pages of text like “Amend paragraph 4 of subsection (a)(iv) of Subpart C…” Now, while it’s true that the language of the bills is hard to understand, this excuse is stupid. Is it too much to expect our lawmakers to be able to understand laws? Or that they would actually take the time to figure it all out?

These guys are paid over $160,000 a year (not counting all the perks and under the table money) and they aren’t able to do their job? Tell you what, elect me to office and I’ll vote for bills without reading them for half of what you’re paying your current guy.

Another excuse is “we have a crisis and had to act now”. This one is also untrue. For example, it was claimed that the 2009 Stimulus Bill was needed to avert a crisis. But only 20% of the spending in the bill was for 2009. So if it was urgent, the bill should have only addressed the “immediate needs” so that people could read it first.

The last excuse I usually get is “that’s just how things work”. This, again, is just a lame excuse. Everyone goes to Washington and says that they are going to bring “change, transparency, etc” with them. And they all turn out to be liars. If they all voted “no” on bills when they weren’t given enough time to read them, then we wouldn’t have this problem.

A friend mentioned to me that you can’t make the final bill available before a vote, since people keep adding amendments and riders to the bill. It seems like there’s a easy fix here: just declare the bill “final” and don’t allow changes for 72 hours while people are reading it.

I’m curious, does anyone think it’s acceptable for a Congressman to vote for a bill he didn’t read?

I think all Congressmen should have a rule: “If I didn’t read the bill, I vote no.”

In the meantime, we should all have a rule, “If you voted for a bill that you didn’t read, I’m voting for the other guy.”

My team had another nice feature launch today: Data Liberation, “Mark as viewed”, and New! :-)

In addition to all the core feature work, I spent a ton of time making the screenshots. Take a close look (click to see a larger image):

And this one:

I’m so glad my PR team has a good sense of humor. :-)