Green Blogging

I just discovered that as of September 1 my sister has become the leading environmental blogger of in Morris County, New Jersey. Kudos to her for her efforts to make the world a better place. I know she cares a great deal about activism and reform. You'll find her thoughts over the Daily Record website Living the Green Life.

Communication

Social networks are popular because they provide improved communication opportunities over e-mail, phones, text-messaging, and various static publishing methods. Short one-liners have an advantage over verbose rambling paragraphs. However, some ideas can't be represented adequately with such brevity. Is there a compromise conducive to communicating such complex ideas across the "new" media?

Health Care for the Public

Apparently big stuff is going on in Washington.

Republicans are trying to derail health care reform because they are smart, wily individuals with deep pockets. They say a "public option" will drive the private insurance companies that they run out of business while simultaneously admonishing all currently existing government health plans as being cursed by waste, corpulence, and inefficiencies. Meanwhile, they argue that "public health care" would yield such poor quality that you'd have to wait 6 weeks to see a doctor and I've seen ads that claimed "as many as 200,000 people would have died last year if they had been on a public plan instead of the private plan where they were able to get XYZ treatment for their condition."

It's a circular argument. They can't say, "The government is trying to 'takeover' health care," while at the same time claiming the government is completely inept. The American public would not allow the government to take control of anything if they don't demonstrate that they can effectively manage it. The only way for the government to have any success handling national health care would be to be more efficient than private health care providers... which is unlikely considering that many insurance firms are run by people who have 40 years experience and the government only has experience with programs like Medicare and Medicaid which are notable for being run so inefficiently. That is to say... arguing that they (insurance companies) are AFRAID of a government takeover is an admission that the KNOW their companies are LESS EFFICIENT THAT MEDICARE AND MEDICAID. This isn't news, but hearing it come from the horse's mouth is a bit of a relief.

But the president made several statements last week that negate the claims that the public health insurance plan would even begin to take customers away from private insurers.

He compared health insurance to government mandated automobile insurance so that "everybody would be forced to participate with few exceptions". These exceptions were noted to go to small businesses and individuals that didn't have the clout to get favorable deals from big insurance companies. Meanwhile, large companies who can offer their employees would still be required to offer the same level of coverage as they do today. The president also indicated that profitability would be taken into consideration for small businesses to apply for the waiver to prevent a self-employed individual reporting $250k in earnings to the IRS from taking advantage of the so-called "affordable health care plans".

Thus, the people who are being supported by the "public option" safety net are those who (a) work at small companies and genuinely can't afford health insurance through an employer benefit system, or (b) are not insurance-worthy by private health insurance standards because of risk assessment from known conditions. The president claims that government estimates peg this market segment at about 5% of the population.

Thus, a more accurate claim by Republicans would be that the government is trying to take control of the 5% of the health insurance industry that private insurance companies don't deal with anyway. But of course, they'd rather choose to focus the conversation with fear tactics.