Crickets Chirping

Courtesy of buzzfeed:

[Wow, slideshare's embed code is MASSIVE]

I write, then think

I did some reading thanks to some tips from friends and colleagues. In hindsight, my previous post on Health Care and Free Markets is just one more contribution to the noise.

What are blogs for, if not to bloviate? :) Moving on.

Not about Socialized Health Care

I now believe that my assumption that this is going to be a Free Market vs. Socialism debate was false, and regrettable. Nate Silver’s post Not all Socialist Countries are Alike clarified for me the difference between Single Payer and Socialist Health Care. They are not even close to the same thing.

It’s very unlikely that universal socialized medicine would even be proposed let alone enacted in the US. Congress is too scared by Angry Old White People Who Scream* to even suggest it. And structurally, it would be a major upheaval to implement government-run hospitals on the scale necessary to take care of every one. Various Veterans Administration scandals over the past few years don’t help promote the idea either.

Linking Insurance to Employment

The problem of bundling of health insurance with employment was created by a loophole in (federal ?) wage caps during WWII. Conservative and liberal friends of mine both agree about this origin. It started out as a job perk so companies saddled with wage caps could compete for talent, but persisted after the wage caps were lifted. I don’t know why that is, but I’m sure it’s complicated, juicy material for policy geeks. I’ll try to read up on that.

Lighting Candles Instead of Cursing the Darkness

Aaron asked about the existence of a “Credit Union” model for health insurance. Ivan points out some interesting free-market/collective solutions in the form of Captives – a form of insurance gaining popularity with small business and wealthy individuals that works a lot like a credit union. This sounds promising. You pool your financial resources with other individuals into a fund for paying out claims. The money is invested while it’s not being payed out, so you could actually make dividends if claims don’t put a huge dent in it.

My initial impression is to like the idea, but the fact that many Captives are created in the Bahamas and Belize makes me worry that it’s not entirely legit. Shades of Enron. More reading to do on Captives for sure.

Meta

About the spirited healthcare debate itself: Curiously for all the noise, there is currently no bill in congress to debate. The administration has basically recognized that health care is a huge problem and would like to do something about it, but no concrete proposal exist yet. Only speeches.

*All the Death Panelers are either protesting out of complete and utter ignorance of the issue, or (my gut feeling) using the issue as a cover for something much sadder/more sinister: they object to having a black president. Angry old white people want “their” America back, and conservative leadership has latched onto health care as the conduit for their rage. It’s an unfortunate situation if that’s the case, but I can’t think of a simpler explanation for their actions.

[this is another post seeded from a discussion on facebook. a pattern?]

I posted a link to You Do Not Have Health Insurance on facebook and got an interesting response from a friend who’s spent a long time studying the subject. He seems to have a very different viewpoint than I do, which makes me question mine. What to do, when smart people disagree with you?

So here’s my position, at the moment:

The current regulatory system may be utterly flawed in its wording and execution, leading to us spending more yet being sicker, to there being no real choice in healthcare, and to there being millions of completely unprotected US citizens. I see that as more of an argument for fixing the regulations than throwing them away completely, though.

My problem is with the idea that the free market will fix this mess if we just stop trying to check its power.

The free market is amoral. It excels at maximizing shareholder value, but that is its singular goal. It has a poor track record of taking care of people. In fact, its wealth-accumulating mission leads it to exploit and control people unless they are checked by government, collective bargaining or other non-corporate power.

Furthermore, it is only accountable to you to the extent that you have lots of money. I’m one of the majority who don’t.

Without healthy people, we have no economy, and no market, free or otherwise. To make healthcare subordinate to the free market to me seems precisely backwards, and in the long run disastrous. Markets have bubbles and crashes and wild rides up and down. Forgive me if I don’t want that greedy, stumbling drunkard telling my doctor what to do. Or rather, having even more of a say in what my doctor does.

What we have right now is a muddled mess, right? Not totally socialized and not totally privatized. So it’s a bad example to use for arguing either side of the privatize/socialize debate. More of a worst-of-both worlds example. The thing is, there are plenty of examples of successful socialized health care systems in other countries. Where are the examples of successful privatized healthcare systems?

So right now, I lean heavily in favor of socialized healthcare.

</sophist-marxism>

Maybes:

Maybe the act of regulation (not just the particular regulations currently in place) caused all of these problems. Something about the relationship between government and the market creates an inevitable, malignant feedback loop. I’m doubtful of this because of cases where regulation has improved things (e.g. forcing automakers to install seatbelts), making me think nothing’s inevitable about that relationship.

Maybe free markets are the natural order of things and we’ve been ignoring or fighting it to our detriment. Like insisting that the world is flat.

Maybe Obama actually is out to control every aspect of our lives.

Maybe there are examples of successful completely privatized healthcare systems in other countries.

Ben Reed posted this story to my Facebook wall (would link to it, but ya know, that walled-garden thing is in the way).

I’ve always felt SciFi writers help guide the development of technology by ‘designing’ without logistical constraint. (See No. 4 at link below.)

Here’s the link he was talking about. It’s about stuff from the movie Blade Runner that has become real in the time since it was made. In particular, this one is about a new camera rig from Adobe that allows you to take infinitely scalable photos.*

And here’s my response, which grew too big for me to be willing to leave it in my little patch of the walled garden.**

To your point about “design”: I tend to like sci fi stories that focus more on the experience of the characters using technology to resolve larger conflicts, and less on the boring implementation details that would solve the logistical constraints to create said tools. (Unless of course those constraints are an important part of the story (such as the 1983 movie Brainstorm (classic 80s sci fi, highly recommended)), but who cares about the Tyrell Corporation’s supply chain issues?)

I believe good product designers also share the sci fi writer’s healthy disregard for the arbitrary, shifting constraints of the present. It has to be balanced for sure (compromise is a fact of life), but the focus of the story/product should be on the character/user experience.

* There have been ways to do this (almost) since the early 90s, without special optics. While images compressed using a fractal iterated function system can be “zoomed” infinitely during decompression, they exhibit strange artifacts in practice.

** Sadly, my facebook page probably gets more traffic than my blog.

A couple of years ago I ran across this disturbing ebay item:

Then more recently I saw this image used as an avatar, and when I saw it again as an album cover I had to check out the band:

Black Moth Super Rainbow – they’re actually pretty good. In the age of AutoTune it’s nice to hear a band that’s like, “fuck it. we’re going 100% vocoder” and not even front. I’ve been listening to Tobacco, one of the band’s side projects, for a couple of days now. Really digging it.

And then I saw this today:

It’s a poster for a horror movie about some Advertising guys who get lost in the woods.

Why are these images so disturbing? I get dizzy, almost on the verge of a headache, looking at them.

I’ve read that the brain has special visual circuitry set aside just for faces, so maybe these trigger something on that level, like the Thatcher Effect.

(Original photo by D.C.Atty)

Is anybody else creeped out by this ad campaign? It’s like the Quaker Oats has some kind of ulterior motive.

Follow our new breakfast overlords on twitter: @quakertalk

Shot with my minoHD – I had to get one after seeing Charlie‘s.

Alex was the cameraman, and I think this was the only time I got to hang out with him on this trip.

My friend Kevin Koym was attacked by four men Friday night at 5th and Brazos in downtown Austin.

He is okay, but this event is really shocking to me because it was so violent, and so random. Kevin is one of the nicest people I know. He’s a pillar of several communities. I can’t imagine what reason these men would have to do this to Kevin in particular. Also upsetting is that this intersection is not in some sketchy part of downtown. I worked right by it for years, walked past it innumerable times at all hours of the day and night without anything like this happening.

Perhaps most unsettling to me is that according to KVUE, the crime rate in downtown Austin is three times what it was last year. WTF is going on there? In my mind, Austin is this happy, safe, friendly oasis. Are those days over? Should I pick up some pepper spray on the way out of the airport for SXSW?

True to Kevin’s style, he uses air time to spread awareness of the bigger picture instead of his own personal suffering:

Koym told KVUE, “The only reason I’m speaking out about this is, I want to see the town get safe. I love Austin. I’ve lived in Boston, Chicago, Guadalajara, Mexico, The Bay Area, Phoenix, New Mexico, Dallas and Santiago Chile, and I love Austin and I choose to be here and I want to see this town get safe.”

Kevin puts his money and his time where his mouth is -especially about improving Austin. Before this unfortunate incident, I would have expected his TV appearance to be about his work helping Austin entrepreneurs get off the ground with TechRanch or Bootstrap, or any of the other organizations he’s involved with.

I hope his attackers are caught and punished to the full extent of the law, but like Kevin says I’d also really like Austin to be safe again.