The alternative to Obamacare

In light of all of the exemptions (waivers) being doled out by the democrat administration to their friends in the business world and their friends in the labor unions (companies, non-profits, and unions would have to otherwise drop their health insurance plans without the waivers due to the high cost of the required changes forced upon them by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or "Obamacare"), there is much talk of repealing the law and starting over with healthcare reform. The more reliable republican alternative was offered during the McCain campaign but was not well defended by the candidate and therefore ignored by most of the voting population. What is the alternative for improving (reforming) our healthcare system:

• End the tax preference/benefit for employer-provided health insurance gradually over the course of several years. This will encourage the growth of the market for individually purchased insurance (I actually have such a plan) that gives individuals or families more control over their plan and its costs, and make it possible for them to take it from job to job.



• The tax break should be converted into a flat credit so the most expensive insurance plans (used for high wage employees) lose the incentive to overspend. Employees should be able to use the credit toward their company plans OR allowed to use them for self-purchased plans.



• Allow individuals and families to buy insurance across state lines. The competition among insurers would reduce premiums, and the regulations of individual states would arguably have less impact on one's costs.



• With individual plans purchased on the open market, people would be able to select renewable policies instead of relying on an employer's plan that terminates when they quit or get laid off and causes great difficulty to those with chronic illness in getting a new policy (the pre-existing condition problem). Although younger people can lock in renewable policies right now on open market plans, people with pre-existing conditions right now would still be unserved, so republicans support creating a government "high-risk pool" subsidized program for the uninsurable today that would be weened away after several generations.



• The federal government should cap (establish maximum not to exceed funding level) Medicaid and let the states run the program to provide aid to only the most needy in each state.



• Medicare must be converted to a voucher program with the budget for each person established using reasonable formulas or criteria. The alternative is provided in Obamacare: tax increases and healthcare rationing.

The healthcare system pre-obamacare was not a free market system, it was over-regulated and therefore an excessively government manipulated system. It was not a market failure, but a failure to have free markets that has caused many of the problems.

Earth Hour

This is a great article by James Lileks of National Review, i had to post it:

"This year's 'Earth Hour' came and went without much hoorah. A few cities turned off their lights downtown for 60 minutes to show how glorious the world could be if we were all kickin' it Pyongyang-style, and people swooned. The objections are obvious: it's symbolic. It accomplished nothing. It flatters those who believe they are better people because they fret about carbon, compost their fair-trade coffee grounds, and lecture people who use superglue when they could use Himalayan yak spittle (seriously, you can find it at any co-op). If Freud were around these days, he's reduce their psyche to the Id and the Super-eco.

Here's the problem with Earth Hour: how do you know when it's over without consulting some carbon-powered instrument? I know, I'll check the sundial, like the wise old carbon-neutral Greeks! Someone light a candle so i can see what time it is. But candles give off the CO2, the Devil's Breath. One candle, it is estimated, gives off 0.00000001 PBs of carbon, with 1 PB being the amount it takes to melt a glacier and strand a photogenic polar bear on a floe. So no wicks, no tapers. Better to curse a candle than to light the darkness.

Perhaps one could use a wind-up timer to know when Earth Hour's done. That would have a symbolic message possibly lost on the celebrants: civilization, like and egg-timer, winds down unless maintained and resupplied with energy. The problem with our current energy situation, though, is that we won't hear the ding! when time is up. Things will just grind down until the economy is on blocks in the front yard because gas is six bucks a gallon, inflation is galloping like a stagecoach horse, and the entitlement state has become so enormous the only thing Congress can do is meet twice a year to turn it over so it doesn't get bedsores. We're supposed to be panicked about unsustainable fuels and switch to putt-putt plastic cars that run on hemp, but we could sustain ourselves for osme time with the oil we have and nuclear plants we could have. Might give us some breathing room, so skylines need not be darkened to divert the last precious watts to a hospital's ICU.

In the high holy holidays of the ecology movement, Earth Hour is the precursor to Earth Day, the annual reminder that despite 4 decades of laws and regulations, the planet is still precariously imperiled. Grade-school students will spend the day writing letters to Congress so the Koch brothers don't interject plutonium into the earth's core as part of their "mwah hah hah, die everyone die" initiative. But just as Earth Hour has lost steam, Earth Day has challenges. The latest Gallup poll indicates that Americans are caring less about global warming than before. The care most about 'contamination of soil and water by toxic waste,' which will surely spur the moribund EPA to fight all those laws that permit American Cadmium and Lead to pour their industrial waste into ponds by the elementary school. Most people also worry 'a great deal' about 'air pollution', 28% don't give it much thought at all, but they're sitting in boardrooms lighting cigars with $100 bills to kick off National Belching Smokestack Week. A majority of people, 57%, are worried about 'urban sprawl and loss of open spaces.' That is also the percentage of people who have never flown across the Midwest and looked out the window.

Bottom of the list: global warming. 51% "worry" about it "a great deal or a fair amount." The poll didn't dig into specifics, alas, one would love to know how the people who worry a great deal go about their day. [...]

The beauty of Earth Hour: it's predictable, it's voluntary, it happens at night, and it doesn't interrupt anyone's dentist appointment. Countries that have their own unscheduled "earth hours" several times a day must look at the West like a starving person regards a trencherman who announces he will abjure oysters once a year between 3 and 4 PM. We can give it up because we don't have to. Yet. If the grid goes down for good, and the human infestation on aching Gaia is reduced to hominids huddled in huts, children may ask toothless gramps to tell them what it was like when the great dark towers shone at night, when the night was banished by the proud gleam of our hasty and tireless servant, electricity. But if gramps was a green, he might well scoff: "twas a vain boast that man could outmatch the stars, and what did we get out of it? Besides a century of unparalleled prosperity? A 0.5 degree rise in global temperatures. Or so some say. The instruments that compute such things had to be plugged in to work. Anyhow, stop your fussin' and go to bed, sun's down, day's done."