The health care bill makes it compulsory for all Americans to buy private insurance in the free market which in and of itself is an incredible irony. What’s so free about a market where you are forced to buy something? There are many who don’t think the solution that passed is Constitutional because while the government has the right to tax, it does not have the right to force citizens to buy a particular product. As Robert Siegel pointed out on NPR recently, It’s even more ironic that a public plan *would* have been perfectly Constitutional, because like social security and medicare it would have been funded through taxation. The flip side which I haven’t heard discussed is that long ago we made it mandatory for hospitals to provide emergency care to people that have no insurance. So we already have a situation where a private firm is legally required to provide a service for free. That certainly seems just as bad as requiring everyone who could potentially require that service to pay some nominal fee upfront. In fact, the health care bill may even correct that injustice. Except of course, that it doesn’t, because the new bill does not cover folks in this country illegally whom the Emergency Room staff are still obligated to help.

I personally favored a solely public plan solution (also called “single payer”) which would have removed private insurance carriers entirely. A single payer system would have removed the middle man and covered everyone in the country – saving perhaps billions of dollars, simplifying an otherwise onerous accounting process for doctors and hospitals and allowed for national standards to be set for provided care. The big losers in this would have been the insurance companies. Insurance companies are essentially bookies that are betting you aren’t going to get sick while you’re betting you are. Their actuaries are usually right (luckily for them) which means much of the money they take in is profit and does nothing to either improve care or provide it. They have no incentive to improve care (which is expensive), but lots of incentive to deny it or cancel it.

I’ve been poking around a bit on Prison Planet lately, thats a website run by Alex Jones, a radio talk show host who has been described as a “paleoconservative” whatever thats supposed to mean. Paleo means old, so I assume it’s being used to create a distance from the “neocons” (meaning New Conservatives) who were neither new nor really conservative in the first place. The first story I ran into over there was titled Louisiana Cops Plan for “End of the World” Scenario which goes on to describe how the program includes access to a .50 caliber vehicle mounted machine gun to help put down looters and rioting in the event of a crisis. I got a little further into the article and it is suggested that cities across America are beginning their own war training in preparation for the coming apocalypse in 2012. No, not the fabled Mayan end of the world, this refers to a prediction by a “futurist” named Gerald Celente.
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Hans Rosling, a physician and professor of global health from Sweden recently gave a talk at the US State Dept. entitled Let My Dataset change your midset illustrated by the free software he and his son developed called Gapminder. He explains how the data (which he thanks the US for compiling and releasing so generously) shows a convergence around the world (ala Tom Friedman’s Flat Earth) and warns us that some problems are more complex than a simple static chart or graph will reveal. Only by looking at (good) data with an analysis tool like this can you begin to see what is really happening. For instance, he shows that the HIV crisis in Africa isn’t really an “African” problem, as there are many very poor countries in Africa that have done a good job of reducing the problem, where other richer African countries have done a terrible job. Solutions to global health problems need to be tailored to the individual case.
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The New York Times has a story about how energy secretary Steven Chu says the US can easily save as much as 20% of our national energy costs for air conditioning. The solution isn’t rocket science – just make sure that buildings in the south have white roofs. Since dark roofs absorb more sunlight than white roofs, they can heat up a building much more efficiently – leading to higher energy costs for cooling that building. In the colder climes this may not always make sense because you end up having to pay more to heat the building in the winter, but in states like Texas this is a no-brainer. According to the story, houses with reflective tin roofs used to be common in Florida before air conditioning (and before the oil companies discovered they could make even more money in asphalt – which is used in roads of course, but also roof tiles). These asphalt shingles absorb as much as 90% of the sun’s heat energy, while a white roof absorbs as little as 10%! [Nate begins to see a conspiracy] What I think I need at my latitude is roof shingles that are black at low incident angles (when the sun is low in the sky) and white (or at least more reflective) at high incident angles (when the sun rides high in the sky in the summer). Oh, and those shingles should all have integrated solar panels which lock together into a giant roof-net.