Daily Archives: November 25, 2009

Health care.  While the qual­ity and the tech­nol­ogy of the health care busi­ness in the U.S. is out­stand­ing the way we get it and how we pay for it are not so hot.

In 2001 (2009 — 2001 = 8 years ago) Mil­ton Fried­man addressed the issue, iso­lated the rea­sons for the prob­lems we have with it, and sug­gested ways to fix them.  His solu­tions are sav­agely resisted by sev­eral very pow­er­ful inter­ests.  So they haven’t been tried, or even dis­cussed very much. Fried­man said,

to doc­u­ment the two (related?) respects in which the United States is excep­tional: we spend a higher per­cent­age of national income on med­ical care (and more per capita) than any other OECD coun­try, and our gov­ern­ment finances a smaller frac­tion of that spend­ing than all coun­tries except Korea.

Friedman’s sug­ges­tions would very likely fix the major prob­lems with our health care sys­tem.  But they wouldn’t pro­vide a wind­fall of money for any­body, which is prob­a­bly why they aren’t among the reme­dies in the two pieces of leg­is­la­tion which came out of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and the Sen­ate.  Unions, trial lawyers, and other inter­ested par­ties didn’t spend hun­dreds of millions of dol­lars elect­ing Democ­rats just so the coun­try could have a good health care sys­tem.  They don’t care how it comes out so long as they get theirs.

Friedman’s diag­no­sis is not long and its sim­plic­ity, given the length of the two health care bills, will astound.  Give it a look.  HERE.

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Neo-Neocon likens the global warm­ing con­flict to a reli­gious war.

It’s been clear for quite some time that the AGW con­tro­versy has mor­phed from a sci­en­tific to a reli­gious war—although in this case, it’s the AGW sci­en­tists who are the “reli­gious” fanat­ics. That sort of sit­u­a­tion can­not help but spell trouble.

There’s some­thing in that. The demands of the pro-AGW folks sound a lot like calls for reli­gious ortho­doxy and call­ing skep­tics “deniers” is sup­posededly to com­pare them to peo­ple who dis­pute the exis­tance of the Holo­caust but the sub­text goes back a lit­tle bit fur­ther than that. “Denier” is one of the descrip­tions of Satan.

Then there’s redemp­tion. In a post Chris­t­ian world many no longer seek it but, rather, seek to offer it by recre­at­ing or at least pre­serv­ing Eden.

And there’s The Great and Pow­er­ful God Mammon.

From a small coterie of sci­en­tists the cli­mate game has exploded into a multi-billion dol­lar busi­ness. Uni­ver­sity chairs, fel­low­ships, research grants. Every news­pa­per has a cli­mate reporter. They may be lay­ing off every­body else but there is still one of those.

There are con­fer­ences in Tahiti, Rio, Steam­boat Springs. Stowe, Ver­mont. Gstaad. Pick a spot where the beau­ti­ful peo­ple gather and there will be a cli­mate con­fer­ence there.

So — let’s recap (and please understand,or recall, as the case may be, that this isn’t a recita­tion of failed bread recipes, but crises that were just as real at their time as the fact that a few gigatons-worth of ther­monu­clear war­heads were pointed at us):

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1968

The planet is going to starve. Paul Erlich

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1972

Club of Rome

We’ll run out of oil in the 80’s.

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1975

Ice age — Newsweek

The Dark Ages are going to return

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1998

Y2K.    Air­planes falling from the sky.   Thou­sands of very expen­sive emer­gency gen­er­a­tors appeared for sale on Ebay, Craig’s List, and in the local clas­si­fieds the week after New Year’s day, 2000.

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2004

The Day After Tomor­row — Art Bell and Whit­ley Streiber, where the earth froze due to global warm­ing (you read that right). Art Bell had a late-night talk show cater­ing to Extraterrestrial-Alien Kid­napees and Big­foot Researchers, while Whit­ley Streiber was a writer of hor­ror nov­els. This movie was taken as gospel by a lot of people.

The film made $110,000,000 in DVD sales, bring­ing its total film gross to $652,771,772.

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2006

Al Gore looked at that and got the idea for An Incon­ve­nient Truth. That earned $49 mil­lion and he got around $1.5 mil­lion for his Nobel.

It was even made manda­tory that it be shown in British schools until a court reviewed it and found it full of inaccuracies.

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There was a com­mer­cial for Life cereal in which these two kids are think­ing about try­ing it and then they decide to try it out on their lit­tle brother, Mikey. Because Mikey doesn’t like anything.

I don’t think we should be peo­ple who won’t try any­thing. But should we be the peo­ple who will swal­low everything?

Kind of reminds me of The Music Man

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