antipaucity

Dave Winer had an interesting take on the recent Twitter-NYPD flare-up.

Personally, the thought of any government organization demanding records without a warrant is abhorrent.

However, since the entire point of Twitter is to make your tweets public … then what is there to subpoena? They’re all out there – visible to the world… Unless the user has deleted them (and, from my understanding, they are “real” deletes (unlike facebook “deletes” which may or may not go anywhere)).

So, NYPD – why are you not just looking at the tweets that are available publicly? Why are you trying to demand data that may or may not exist, and without a warrant?

Lastly, to Mr Winer’s comment that “the government has no business investing taxpayer dollars in private companies”: there’s a couple big problems therein. First, since it was in reference to the Library of Congress, we should make sure that in addition to not “investing” in archiving tweets, they also not invest in archiving books, journals, newspapers, etc – after all, those are also coming from “private companies”. Second, if the government shouldn’t be investing taxpayer dollars in private companies, then where, exactly, do you propose the “government” get what it needs to operate? By fiat? By dictatorial claim? No – those aren’t good public relations moves. The government needs to obtain the services and goods it needs to continue its functions from private industry (or we need to abandon this whole ‘capitalism’ thing and go for a pure central economy wherein all produced goods and services are provided by the government).

Tax Day in the US is “late” this year because the 15th of April was a Sunday.

I was able to prepare and file my taxes early-ish (January) thanks to a proactive employer who got our W2s out quickly.

Every month I look at my pay stub, and am appalled at how much the various governmental agencies claim is “theirs” of MY worked-for pay:

• 11.3% – Federal
• 4.7%  - State
• 3.8% – Social Security
• 2.3% – Lexington-Fayette
• 1.3% – Medicare
• .5% – Fayette County
• 23.9% total taxes claimed

And it’s only that “low” because I participate in (completely legal) programs to reduce my taxable income (401(k), FSA, etc which reduce my taxable income by about 12%).

We have not yet added-in the state and local sales taxes that are claimed, nor the federal, state, and local fuel taxes (over and above sales taxes in most states). Currently I am not a home owner, but when that eventually changes, I’ll be paying property taxes – a fee to the city/county for the privilege of living there!

Of my take-home pay, if I spend $2000 per month on “stuff” (groceries, eating out, gas, shopping, whatever), about 7% of that is going to the tax coffers of the county and state (and maybe city, depending on where you live). 7% of $2000 is $131 (or if you want to add 7% on top of the $2000, it’s an additional $140).

I am a proponent of pay-as-you-go – in all areas of life: if I want to make use of something that belongs to someone else, or that is maintained by the “people” (eg roads), I do not at all mind paying for that opportunity.

However, I despise double-dipping and multiple-paying on the same service/product. A prime example is the concept of a toll road: if the road is owned/operated by the “government” (which is really the people, but with a delegated responsibility to maintain the facilities), it makes sense to me that it should cost something to have to take care of that road. However, if the government wants to charge a toll for a road, then it must eliminate the fuel tax that every driver pays: by charging a toll and a fuel tax, drivers have double-paid for the privilege of using the road.

Double-dipping affects all consumers in every other purchase they make as well because corporations are charged taxes on their income, and since businesses are in business to make money, they have to cover that cost from somewhere, which means it comes from their customers.

Several years ago I wrote a paper on implementing a flat tax in the United States. In the intervening years, I have become convinced that the premise on which I wrote that paper is not the best (ie, taxing income), but that it was a solid start in the Right Direction™.

What needs to be done instead is far simpler, and would in the process also eliminate the need for most of the IRS, and give substantially more power directly to the people over the direction their government takes.

Abandon the concept of an income tax entirely.

Eliminate taxation on gifts (including estates). Eliminate the “special” Medicare and Social Security taxes.

Implement a flat sales (or “consumption”) tax on all non-food purchases in the country.

One of the beauties of the sales tax is that everyone pays it – whether you are “rich” or “poor”, it is equally, and fairly applied to all – and it’s shown every day on transactions around the country: you buy a $20000 car, you pay $1400 in sales tax. You buy a $40000 car, you pay $2800 in sales tax. That’s a simple, easy-to-understand model, and one that everyone can follow straightforwardly.

According to Wikipedia, in 2007 total tax receipts (income, employment, corporate, excise, gift, estate) to the Federal government was just under $2.7 trillion. That’s trillion – with a “t”. According to this site, total personal income in the US in 2010 was $12.3 trillion (in 2007 it was $11.9 trillion)^*.

IF every American who earned an income paid a flat tax on that income (with no deductions, no special categories, no “loopholes”, etc) of 23%, that would *completely* cover the tax receipts of the Federal government. That would be a simple solution – if it wasn’t for what one of my favorite entertainers said:

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. –Will Rogers

Let’s end that lying now.

In 2011, the US spent $10.9 trillion. Subtract out non-durable goods for the moment (a quick way to distinguish food out of the mix, though I’m sure people didn’t spend $2.5 trillion on food^{^}). That brings us down to $8.4 trillion.If every person who bought something new in the US paid a sales tax of 37%, that would more than cover the tax receipts of the Federal government. With the far more probable $0.5 trillion spent on food at home, that gives $10.4 trillion spent. A sales tax rate of %26 would cover the Federal tax receipts.

Businesses already collect sales tax. Collecting a different rate is simple.

If the “average” citizen saw that on top of his $10 meal at Applebee’s he needed to pay $2.60 in taxes, it might help him budget better. It’s certainly more transparent – and easier to track.

Yes, it would put all kinds of tax attorneys, accountants, and the like out of work – but it would also mean that folks wouldn’t have to spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars per year to worry about their taxes: pay when you buy. It’s really that simple.

Eliminate the overt, unnecessary complexity of our tax code, and make it the simplest to understand and comply-with in the world.

Oh, and make the US an enviable target for corporations wanting to headquarter/operate here: no taxes on business income would be a clarion call to start/operate here.

^{*_{See bea.gov/newsreleases/national/pi/2012/pdf/pi0212.pdf for more recent numbers}
^_{according to creditloan.com/infographics/how-the-average-consumer-spends-their-paycheck, the average 2.5 person household spends $3750 per year on food at home (untaxable in my plan); there are 325 million people in the US; that’s 130 million households and $487.5 billion (just under $0.5 trillion)}}

Following-up a recent post on copyrights, I want to share some further thoughts I have on the topic, and about patents, too.

First of all, the concept of a copyright is meant to protect the author from others unduly benefiting from their work. One obvious conclusion to make from that statement is that after the author ceases to live, they can no longer claim to receive any benefit from their work. I know I certainly wouldn’t care about royalties after I die.

Second, only individuals or their proxies should be allowed to claim copyright over a work. By proxy, I would include work created for a company in the context of something sold and/or shared publicly.

My proposed fix for copyright law would be to cap copyrights at 25 years, or the life of the author – whichever is shorter. If something is written for a corporation, the copyright could be retained either by the author(s) or the company, but it will expire no more than 25 years after it has been written (this would cover the case of one of the authors being tragically lost due to illness or accident). Knowledge grows when information is spread. The more people have access to information, the more applications of it can be made. And, overall, knowledge is a Good Thing™!

With regards to patents, I think there are many broken aspects of the current system: not the least of which is that non-physical “things” can be patented (algorithms, software, etc). While not an inherently bad thing to be able to protect a proprietary process or method for accomplishing work, the fact of the matter with regards to modern society (speed/quality of communication, the ability to analyze data, etc) is that whether you patent your process for accepting multiple inputs at once to a program or not, someone will be able to [nearly] instantly copy what you did.

My first fix to the patent system would be to cap patent life at 10 years from the date of issuance, and 15 years from the date of filing (honestly, if it take more than 5 years to get it issued, your competitors have already caught and exceeded you). I would also preclude the ability to extend the life of a patent through any means – innovate more if you want, but you cannot extend the life of a patent past its expiration.

My second fix will be to ban the ability to patent software. It would not be just to apply a new law to old thinking, so extant software patents would not be affected beyond the ability to extend their life.

My third fix would be to ban security orders being placed on a patent (as the NSA has been known to do with regards to encryption algorithms). No one – private individual, corporation, or government agency – should be allowed to “preview” patent applications and attempt to get the blocked or hidden.

My final fix to patents would come with streamlining the application and approve-or-deny process. The USPTO is overwhelmed with applications. Some of this comes from companies trying to file exceptionally-broad applications just to see what they can get away with (“I know! We’ll patent the process of processing patents!” – or some other silliness). Some of this comes from inadequately-informed patent officers – there is no possible way every patent officer can possibly know about all the fields that patents are asked-for and -about! There needs to be an improvement in the general population of the patent office, whereby more skilled/knowledgeable/talented people are put in place to review patents (not saying they don’t have talented people now, but that needs to be increased).

Lastly – and this would related to copyrights, trademarks, and patents – a public database of all current patents and trademarks should be made available. That database should also show all expired patents and trademarks. And, for those authors who have chosen to register their copyright with the USPTO, a database of authors, their work(s), and the copyright date (and, by calculation, its expiry) should be visible.

This is going to ramble a bit, and I’m not 100% sure my opinions are even remotely reasonable, but I had a great conversation on the Gold Standard recently, and thought sharing that would be fun. The quoted sections are relevant parts of the conversation from my friend^*, and the unquoted segments are my responses.

I’ve seen pundits, or as I call them, “blowhards”, on both sides of the aisle claim that even suggesting we return to the gold standard is madness. Maybe it’s just because I’m not an economist, but I don’t understand that - we had like 3-4 thousand years of experience with the gold standard; we have less than a century with floating currencies. Why is it so crazy to say “we keep getting into trouble this way, maybe we should fall back until we’ve got this figured out better”?

The only issue I can see with returning to the gold standard (or the silver or any other), is that since gold is by nature a finite resource (whereas many others, while finite, are growable (eg crops, industry, etc)), there would be no reason to have an “exchange” between different counrties, and that it would make an effective universal currency – to some extent, undervaluing the currency systems of every country that chose to use the standard, and globalize (even more) our economies.

Plus, it makes issuing loans (and receiving them) substantially more difficult – and loans are NOT always a Bad Thing™.

For example, if, say, Canada and the US use the gold standard and decide that $1000 US is one ounce of gold, and $500 Canadian is one ounce of gold, the exchange “rate” is fixed – and it’s fixed to something that is increasable, but only at a fairly fixed rate (how fast you can acquire/generate gold). Whereas if you have floating currencies with no “real” backing, exchange rates can change based on the relative health of each country.

By setting a fixed exchange (which is what the gold standard would do … like what China has been doing for years to the US, but only on paper), is that it can cyclically under- and over-value individual countries currencies and economies, ultimately bringing more down at once when a few fail (or, of course the reverse – bring more up when some few major ones succeed).

During the early part of the last century, we were still mostly working with gold, and we had both the Great Depression, and some of the greatest economic growth ever seen.

The Great Depression, imho (though, admittedly, a biased, and fairly-underinformed opinion), was about 90% perception, and 10% reality – a fairly commonplace occurrence in economics, but one that was exacerbated by the [initially] fixed relations between the various national currencies

Also, imho, basing currency on a fixed standard (like gold) was truly only viable in an era of poor communication (I’d personally argue that shortly after the telegram became more than a technological marvel, this became more and more true until it was universal) - with poor communication, perceptions take a LONG time to be transferred – which correspondingly means that “news” was A) old, and B) taken with larger grains of salt than we *tend* to take it with now, since comunication is [effectively] instantaneous. {I have no research or citations to this point – yet: it is currently only my opinion.}

In my opinion, by floating currencies against each other and the relative strengths of each country involved, crashes are slowed (not eliminated, of course). Of course, again, the reverse is also true – booms are flattened-out. So, I’d view the floating-currency approach as one that will *tend* to flatten local (and global) booms and busts into substantially smaller ripples, rather than major mountains and troughs.

Not being an economist, I’m not sure I understand why that should be. What’s the evidence for that? How can we be certain that’s a good thing? Maybe the cycle of mountains and valleys is important, socially?

[not being an economist either,] I’d *think* that it would be better to keep the mountains and valleys more stable / less high|deep, so that slowdowns aren’t felt by a disproportionately small community/niche of the economy, and so that speed-ups can have a “good neighbor” effect to bringing some of the udnerperforming sectors ‘along for the ride’.

As to question 2 – I don’t *know* that it’s “a good thing” … but I also can’t say it’s a ‘bad thing’, either.

I’d be happy to hear arguments that either oppose mine, or are different

I think my strongest one would be that we used the gold standard for like 4000 years, and it seemed to work very well for us nearly globally during that time. As far as any possible good neighbor effect from flattening things out, it may be that social upheaval is an important component of progress: almost all major advances thus far in history have had some component of socio-economic shift; flattening those upheavals could very well have consequences that we can’t foresee (I realize this is a weak, speculative argument, but it’s worth considering).

There’s also part of me that feels like floating currencies are so much handwaving and voodoo. You talked about how they allow countries to create exchanges that are tied to their relative health, instead of some fixed point - but isn’t how much currency they’ve arbitrarily decided to create often used as one of the measures of health? If so, that’s somewhat circular logic: if floating currencies let us control how much inflation we’ve got, and inflation is one of the health metrics, then what prevents nations from trying to hide economic problems, just the way that nearly every EU member has done over the last 15 years?

Isn’t it exactly the fact that their currencies were floating relative to one another before hand that allowed them to hide so much of their debt before entering the euro zone? Or have i misunderstood that?

Prior to the “euro zone” cluster****, country finances were a LOT less open/transparent, too … kinda like a private vs public company (not that public companies are as transparent as would be helpful, but the comparison stands).

I feel like if they’d been the gold standard, the euro zone negotiations would have been more along the lines of:

“ok, so how much gold have you got?”
“oh, quite a bit!”
“ok, well, we’re going to need to count all of it, so that we can figure out how many euros to give you.”
“oh, well, we have quite a bit of gold!”
“yeah, still need to count it.”
“oh. um. crap. …fine”

It’s a lot harder to hide how much actual wealth you have, when your wealth can be reduced to a physical object, instead of just assertions on paper.

However, if you’re going to count the gold nuggets (or whatever), it’s also trivially-simple to elect to *NOT* show your whole hand … which would seem to me to be the same economic sleight-of-hand as can be done when asked “how many barrels of oil do you have?” and you reply “we’re recovering 5million bbl/day”

That’s not an answer – it’s interesting information … but not an answer.

In this particular case, there’s no benefit I can immediately think of to hiding your wealth – the whole point was to get your finances into a good enough shape to be able to qualify for the euro zone. The shenanigans were more about hiding debt than hiding wealth.

I think that hiding wealth *could* be beneficial to make yourself *appear* weaker than you are, so that when you “need|want” to be “strong”, you can be. It could also be from a detail-vs-gestalt approach.

So now I ask all of you – is this plausible/reasonable/right? Or am I smoking some serious space crack?

^{*_{He gave me permission to quote him as appropriate if desired}}

ars technica has a great article on some short-term, easy-to-implement fixes to the current copyright fiasco in the United States.

I have a bevy of thoughts on this myself, but not quite enough time today to write them down.

Pick your slant report – Huffington Post or Fox News: it has been reported that President Obama’s administration will be issuing waivers to 10 states with regard to compliancy with No Child Left Behind (which, in my opinion, is one of the biggest debacles in public education ever).

If the point is to “leave no child behind”, why are waivers being granted over a decade later?

And why are there 28 more states who are planning to “seek flexibility” with regards to NCLB?

Seems like that’s MAJOR proof that it was distinctly NOT the best thing we could have done as a country to address education.

From NBC New York, “NJ Man Sues Over Toll Hikes, Claims Bias“.

A New Jersey man has filed a federal lawsuit in New York over the Port Authority’s toll increase.

Yoel Weisshaus of New Milford claims the increase is an abuse of power and discriminates against him because he is poor.

Cash tolls on the George Washington Bridge, Holland Tunnel, Lincoln Tunnel, Goethals Bridge, Bayonne Bridge and Outerbridge Crossing went up from $8 to $12 on Sunday.

Weisshaus claims the tolls are targeted to restrict minimum-wage earners and will be used to complete the World Trade Center project instead of improving bridges and tunnels.

Sounds like a USA Today story from 3 years ago.

Max Brooks is likely the world’s foremost authority on zombies – how to survive them, what to do if there is an uprising, etc.

In “World War Z – An Oral History of the Zombie War”, he tackles the issue of reporting on what happened by interviews with those who survived. From first-hand accounts from a variety of sources – early spotters, military members, religious leaders – from around the world, Mr Brooks presents a thrilling, chilling, engaging narrative of “The Crisis”: both as it happened, and what we need to do to continue to avert any further repercussions.

I have yet to find another report as balanced and in-depth as Mr Brooks with regards to this horrific chapter in human (and zombie) history.

• Quality of writing: 5/5
• Entertainment value: 5/5
• Historicity: 5/5
• Viscerality: 5/5
• Overall: 5/5

Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas claims to be “the secret history of the Mossad”.

From the myriad reviews on Amazon, I didn’t know whether to be expecting a massive work of historical fiction, or a insightful tour de force. After having nearly finished it, I don’t know if I have an opinion of whether it’s “inciteful” or “insightful”. Of course, this is supposed to be detailing backroom dealings, secretive organizations, and national intelligence operations: so there is likely a fair amount of ego building and some fanciful manufacturisms along the way.

It is written in a conversational, informative tone and is eminently readable. The “structure” reminds me of how some of the best professors I had in college spoke – the stories didn’t seem to happen in any particular order or for a reason, but by the end you can see how they all interlink to give the picture.

Several of the items in the book I can informally verify to be true having spoken to other first-hand sources on some of the topics. Whether the entire book is “true” or not, it is certainly worth reading for at least the perspective of Mr Thomas, and the sources he has interviewed.

As with any other claimed exposé, much of what is said needs to be taken with grains boulders of salt, but it is very well written overall. It starts with an account of folks surrounding Lady Diana’s death – Mossad agents, MI5, MI6, Dodi Fayed, etc etc. What this has to do with the rest of the book… I don’t know, but it was still an interesting take. Some would say this is to support conspiracy theorists and their beliefs that intelligence agencies are all-powerful, and that they will actively withhold information that could benefit their allies just because of personality clashes. Personally, while I think some of that happens, it can’t really be as wide-spread as some would claim, or some countries would have been removed from the gene pool.

My biggest complaint is that for a professional journalist, Mr Thomas CANNOT use the phrase “try to” properly – almost invariably he says “try and” instead! GAAAHHH!!

Should you read the book? I think it’s worthwhile, even if it turns out to be 90% fiction. If you approach it as a book in the strain of the Jack Ryan universe created by Tom Clancy, and it turns out to be true – cool. And if not, you at the very least had an entertaining time.

• Quality of writing: 4/5
• Quality of content: unknown, but I’d guess at least 3/5
• Entertainment value: 4/5
• Historicity: unknown, but between 2/5 and 4/5
• Overall: 3/5

The problem with health care in America is NOT that too many people don’t have it.

And it’s NOT that it’s too expensive (though it is expensive).

The problem with health care in America is that there is no reason for people to pay for what they can get for “free”. And if something goes wrong, you’re just a phone call away from heaps of cash (after the 35-50% that goes to the lawyers, of course).

I see people using the Emergency Room as their Primary Care Facility. Not because they think it’s better than a doctor’s office, but because if they can’t pay for it, the hospital can’t come after them.

The bill that passed the House last night, supporting President Obama’s “Hope and Change” agenda is going to cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.  The only way of paying for that, since the government never CUTS spending (except for President Clinton who cut our defense budget in the 90s), is for taxes to be increased.

As it stands now, someone earning $40k in the US (depending on the state) pays about 9% to Social Security and Medicare. Another 0-10% to their state. And 10-20% to the IRS. That’s a total of 20-40% of their income being taken from them. Add on top of that the sales taxes that [almost] every jurisdiction in the country charges (4-10% from where I’ve been, except OR and DE). Also add-in fuel “surcharges”, phone taxes, etc – and the typical American is paying about 50% of their income to various taxes.

Yes, I do understand that government services are paid-for with taxes. And I understand there are a host of taxes available. Some people even manage to pay [almost] no taxes. Due to earning too little, there are a host of Americans who benefit from government services who never pay into them (other than sales taxes).

Should citizens benefit from their government’s provided services? Of course. Should citizens contribute (something) to benefit? I believe that is also a resounding “YES“.

Should citizens be forced to pay for things they are not using? That’s where this health care “reform” bill has me against it. It’s where most of the state and federal budget items have me upset.

Property taxes supposedly pay for education in most areas. Except, of course, for where there are “educational” lotteries. If lotteries pay for education, why are property taxes still as high as they are? And if property taxes pay for them, then the lotteries are just get-rich-quick-schemes taking advantage of people who can’t do math. (Personally, I think if you can derive $1 of entertainment from a scratch-off ticket, then it’s ok; it’s when someone looks to the lottery as a “way out” of their current economic situation that I have a problem – they’ll keep coming back and back and back, because “you can’t win if you don’t play”.)

Fuel taxes supposedly pay for road maintenance and expansion.

Income taxes (personal and corporate [and capital gains and taxes on interest earned etc]) pay for pretty much everything else.

The current federal budget is about $3 trillion. I have no idea how much money that is. No one does. If you split it evenly over the population, it’s about $10000 per person (man, woman, boy, and girl) in America. According to the BEA, Americans earned about $5 trillion in personal income last year (excluding the $1 trillion governments paid in salaries). Additional to that was another about $1 trillion earned by proprietors of businesses. After all is said and done, that comes out to a per capita earnings of about $35000.

Estimates I have seen so far put the cost to the federal government (and therefore US – taxpayers: it’s where the “government” gets its money from) in the range of about $1000-5000 billion ($1-5 trillion) over the next decade. That’s an additional $100 billion per year – just over the next 10 years. That’s an increase to our national budget of about 3-15% per year. As a percentage, the bottom of the range is not big (but the top is huge). As a “real” number, the whole range is huge.

Various reports put the number of “uninsured” in America at 30-45 million people, or about 10-15% of the population. Why is it important that these folks become insured? What percentage of those “uninsured” actually NEED coverage? Why do they not have it? Is it truly because they cannot afford it (they earn too little, etc)? Is it because they DO NOT NEED coverage? I went without health insurance for 4 years. I’ve had it since January 2007, and haven’t needed it yet. It would be far far cheaper for me to not have health insurance and just pay my doctor once a year when I go for a checkup than it is to pay for insurance. (Yes, if I *did* need it, it would be nice to have.)

What costs are actually associated with health care? How much of that $200 you pay your doctor per visit is really associated with “care”, and how much goes to overhead costs, such as staff and their OWN insurance in the event the patient decides to sue them? The medical practice I used to use employs two doctors and three nurses. Let’s say for sake of argument that the nurses are paid $20 per hour for 40 hours per week. That’s $160 per day and $800 per week per nurse. So, if 4 patients come in on Monday, their office fees have paid one nurse for the week. Four patients in a day seems low based on every visit I’ve ever made to a doctor’s office: it seems to be typically about 2-3 per hour (or more), which is about 20 per day. Twenty patients times $200 are $4000 a day (gross) that the practice is charging.

Some amount of that goes towards utilities. Other goes to security. Some is used for supplies. Some chunk is paid directly to the government in the form of taxes. And some noticeable amount is paid to a liability coverage company to protect the staff in the event a patient sues them for malpractice (real or imagined).

I read that twenty years ago, a neuro-surgeon in Australia only had to carry $100000 in liability coverage because lawsuits are capped in Australia (except for gross malfeasance, which carries criminal penalties as well as civil ones). At the same time, US-based general surgeons had to carry $1 million in coverage, and neuro-surgeons $5 million. That’s 10-50 TIMES the coverage – at a MINUMUM! And that did not guarantee that if the surgeon was sued, he would be able to cover the costs of the lawsuit with his liability insurance.

That means that two, otherwise identical, surgeons, practicing the same type of work, had to have a ~50x difference in their insurances due to litigation law.

America is a very litigious (lawsuit-happy) country.

Only in America could you have someone sue their microwave manufacturer for not telling them not to use it to dry-off their hamster.

Only in America could someone sue McDonald’s for spilling hot coffee in their lap and burning themselves.

Only in America would a family sue Ford for the death of a wife and mother when she was backing her car on the interstate (patently illegal), and was rear-ended.

Only in America can a home-invader/thief/mugger sue the very family he was attacking because he got injured while trying to escape.

Only in America would a physician be required to carry millions of dollars in liability insurance, order “unneeded” tests, get extra opinions, etc: just in case the patient (or their family) decided that something wasn’t perfect in their care and therefore the doctor should have to pay.

What America needs is not “health care” reform. What America needs is “attitude” reform: we need to not be a country of victimhood, a nation of folks who think it’s someone else’s job to pay for their needs, a citizenry who all participate in the betterment of their nation, a society that is not afraid of mistakes – the society and citizenry that described America during its founding all the way through the early/mid-20th century.

I’m sure most of the folks who use ERs for their PCF aren’t trying to game the system. I’m sure many of them truly can’t afford the cost of going to see a doctor preventatively. I’m positive the percentage of those gaming the system is small.

The problem is that even a small percentage of a big population is a big number. If only 1 percent of 1 percent of the population were in the “gaming” category, that would be about 30000 individuals. Spread across the fifty states, it’d be merely a few hundred per region. If that was the percentage, health coverage would not need be so expensive.

Instead, and whether they intend to “game” or not (and I’m positive the great majority do not), the number of uninsured is 10-15% of the population. The number of insured, then, is 85-90%.

How many of those who have health coverage abuse that coverage? How many never go to a doctor, never use the insurance they pay for, and only have it just-in-case? How many go to the doctor every time they have a sniffle?

Forcing all Americans to have health coverage will cost taxpayers hundreds or thousands of billions of dollars.

Capping and limiting lawsuits would cost little more than passing yet another law.

Health care providers need to not be afraid that an honest misdiagnosis will land them in the poor house. Patients need to realize that there is no perfect diagnosis – sometimes even the best teams and techniques won’t determine the cause of their malady. Maybe it’s imagined. Maybe it’s real. Maybe it’s never been seen before. Maybe it’s just that the doctor you use doesn’t know what he’s looking at when he reads the X-ray. Maybe he’s new. Maybe he’s tired. Perhaps it was just your loved one’s time to go.

Forcing yet another trillion-dollar measure down the throats of hard-working Americans won’t cure the ills of the system.

How often does merely throwing money at a problem solve it?

How often does throwing people and ideas and a healthy attitude at a problem solve, mitigate, or refocus it?

Once good ideas, attitude, and people are working on a problem, money can be directed well. We won the first space race because we put all the best people we could find to work trying to solve the problem – and gave them fiduciary resources to make their visions happen.

Everything we as a nation have ever won has been because those with the vision, courage, and ideas to make somethign happen have gotten out there and done it.

We can reform health care once we remove [most] fear from the system.

Fear cripples any environment: doctors fear being wrong, so they order more tests; they fear patients suing them, so they are hyper-cautious in evaluations and diagnoses. Insurance companies fear lawsuits, so they charge customers lots of money for even the most basic of services. Patients fear the costs of insurance and that their doctor may not be perfect, so they use the ER for their doctor – or they sue for a misdiagnosis or “wrongful” death.

Doctors are human. They can make mistakes. Health care professionals don’t make many mistakes – ever. It’s one of the few professions where everyone is expected to be flawless. And it’s one of the few professions where the vast majority (I’d venture to say >99%) are flawless. From drawing blood and giving shots to replacing livers and hearts: medical professionals daily turn out not only their best work, but exceed the expectations of any reasonable person.