perfidy

Wow... that just trips gaily off the tongue.

I see that Reuters is reporting that the Government has revised the rules governing what patients may be turned away by hospital emergency rooms, making it easier for hospitals to deny care.

The idea is that many poor people, who don't have insurance, are using the Emergency Room as a primary-care facility, and these rule changes are meant to fix that loophole.

Well, thanks. On the face of it, that's fine and dandy, but it totally fails to address the underlying problem-- that there are as many as forty million people in the USA who don't have insurance and therefore need to rely on emergency medicine.

The problems with this?

• Emergency room visits are damn expensive. This is part of the larger economic trap that poor people get into where they cannot afford high monthly payments on furniture, COBRA, or car insurance, for example, and then get bit in the ass when disaster strikes. I've been in this position, and it's really, really easy to get sucked into a debt spiral as catastrophe costs mount.
• It's really hard to get good baseline health care if you only go to the hospital when you're sick. That means that the 40 million uninsured Americans are not getting the yearly physicals, breast exams, prostate exams, mole checks, and so forth that lawmakers take for granted.
• Clearly, emergency rooms are not the place for primary care, but in the absence of any other reasonable, affordable choice, . . . ?

Basically, I think a baseline national health care program is a pretty great idea. I'm not looking for a full-blown endless-referral system, but just some broken-bone and checkup system that gives economically marginal citizens a chance to stay both economically and physically healthy.

Dean in '04!

[moreover] Politicians and policymakers always seem to forget that most Americans don't have much in the way of "fuck-you" money, as we used to call it in the entertainment biz. That is, savings socked away that can get you through a few months without a job, or cover a disaster. A lot of conservative social policy seems predicated on the existence of such "fuck-you" funds, and it just ain't there. Therefore, economists and politicians tend to wildly overestimate the ability of people to move out of depressed regions or search for a new job if their current one doesn't pay well enough. Just my two cents.

Instapundit links to this this Yahoo! News story via this blog:

Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, on Wednesday said it will cut list prices on compact discs by as much as 30 percent in an effort to boost sales that have been stymied by free online music-sharing services such as Kazaa.

Starting in October, Universal, the home to such artists as Mary J. Blige (news), U2 and Elton John (news), will trim its prices on most of its CDs to $12.98 from its current $16.98-$18.98 range of prices.

"Our research shows that the sweet spot is to sell our records below $12.98,' said Universal Music president Zach Horowitz. "We're confident that when we implement this we will get a dramatic and sustained increase."

However, Glennie then notes

"Research?" I'll bet some marketing consultant charged them a lot more than it costs to read Fritz's blog. . . .

Wrong, wrong, wrong. I've sat in hundreds of 'marketing' meetings and I know exactly what happened. All the chiefs and their main sidekick indians were sitting around a long-ass conference table like they have every week for years, kvetching about declining revenues. Then, during the open discussion, some incredibly senior sales rep from Minneapolis puts out his Marlboro, streches his legs, and pulls out a spreadsheet showing the bigwigs what he's been telling them for five years: Electric Fetus has been selling shitloads-- shitloads of the U2 back catalog at $9.99, whereas they couldn't give them away when the sticker said $16.99. One of the biggest bigwigs, who's at the end of his emotional rope, not to mention his contract, says, "Fuck it. Let's reduce 'em all. Best idea I ever had."

$13 is the magic number for new releases, and you can sell ANYTHING for $9.99, especially if it's a catalog reissue with hastily chosen and poorly mastered "bonus tracks". Once you see this in action, as I have, it becomes a matter of elementary psychology and pure god-given revelation. I cannot believe that it's taken the industry as a whole this long to figure this out. Unless I'm smarter than most people in the music industry. After all, I was smart enough to get out, right?

Loyal reader "Atomzooey" emails with this excerpt from an interview with Britney Spears (remember her?) by CNN hack Tucker Carlson:

CARLSON: A lot of entertainers have come out against the war in Iraq. Have you? 

SPEARS: Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens. 

CARLSON: Do you trust this president? 

SPEARS: Yes, I do. 

CARLSON: Excellent. Do you think he's going to win again? 

SPEARS: I don't know. I don't know that.

Thoughts that leap to mind like a thousand eager Freshman to a freshly tapped kegga Bud:

• Hear that sound? That's CNN, gasping for air like an unwanted dogfish on the deck of a Gloucester swordboat.
• This President can't lose, now that Britney Spears has delivered the all-important pre-teen vote!
• I'm impressed-- unlike Sean Penn, who appears smarter, Britney Spears know when she should shut up.
• I think that from this day forward, anyone who wishes to publicly discuss the President and his policies should first tongue-kiss Madonna. And enjoy it.

[update] Or Christina Aguilera. And enjoy it. Where do I sign up?

[moreover] Britney thinks we should "trust our President in every decision that he makes." Remember what I said yesterday about Rich Lowry? Well, I might have been wrong about him being craven. He might just be ignorant instead.

Hey, get a new T-Shirt.

This Fox story informs us that California will allow illegal aliens to get driver's licenses.

The legislation, by Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, would help undocumented immigrants get drivers' licenses by allowing them to submit a federal taxpayer identification number or some other state-approved form of identification to the Department of Motor Vehicles instead of a Social Security number. (emphasis mine.)

I think that California is quite purposefully ignoring something very important here, as their euphemistic description of illegal aliens indicates.

These are illegal aliens, for chrissake! We can have a meaningful and interesting debate over all the issues surrounding immigration except for this one. Access for foriegners: easy or hard? How long can they stay, and what can they do while they are here? How many immigrants a year, from what countries, and with what skills? How quickly can we assimilate them, and how should we do it? What requirements for naturalization? Reasonable people can differ on these issues, and I've heard good arguments for many sides of the argument.

But, illegal immigrants do not deserve the benefits we extend to our own citizens, and to those who have moved here legally and dealt with the insane bureaucracy of the INS. They are here illegally. If caught, they should be immediately deported. Any "undocumented immigrant" who shows up at a CA DMV should be instantly shown the door, and warned not to come back.

I am prepared to welcome any citizen of any nation regardless of race, creed, color, or hairdo - provided that they come here in accordance to the laws of this nation. Otherwise, get the hell out. It is ridiculous to extend to them taxpayer funded benefits when their very existence in this country spits on the laws we live by. And amnesty for illegals is a slap in the face to all the immigrants who did jump through all the hoops to get here legitimately.

They don't need an ID. They need a bus, ship, train or plane ticket home. 

In response to Johno's recent post, I have this to say: 

What kind of commie, pinko, terror-loving, raghead son of a....

Wait, what I meant to say was that he is exactly right.

David Brin has talked a lot about this, as well. Not so much about the Patriot Act in particular, but about what the most effective defense is. He believes, as I do, that an empowered and informed citizenry is the most effective defense. A distributed defense far more effective and responsive than anything the goverment could create by restricting our freedom. One might even say it would be... a general militia.

Two things - the events on flight 97 on the day, and the sniper madhunt in DC. The passengers on flight 97, in 90 minutes, used advanced communications technology and their own initiative to discover the intentions of the hijackers, formulate a plan, and foil the plot. Their example has made it unlikely that any American airliner will ever be hijacked again. Sadly, they lost their lives, but the principle still holds.

In the DC sniper situation, the police attempted to withhold critical information. The snipers were only caught when information accidently leaked, and a citizen put it all together and the suspects were arrested while sleeping in a rest area.

We are the first line of defense. In a terror war, we are on the front lines. Things like the Patriot Act are reprehensible not so much for infringements of our liberty, though they are guilty of that, but because they are ineffective. They get in the way of a proper defense. They try to sustain the myth of government omnicompetence.

We should not be reporting information to be collected in government deebees, there to be pondered by "experts," classified, and never to see the light of day unless the information gets in the hands of the DEA and some pot grower gets arrested.

The government should be releasing information to us. Websites tracking the activities of suspected terrorists should be published. The same monomaniacal geeks who engage in anal retentive fact checking of Michael Moore movies or Wolfowitz speeches could go nuts. Instead of a few government experts, you'd have thousands of people examining the data, weeding out the chaff, and forming consensus on the rest.

And if those fuckers ever come here, their faces would be all over the web.

These ideas would provoke horror in the minds of most bureaucrats. But stuff like that will be necessary, before too long. And in the long run, its the only way we can preserve our liberty and our security. 

The cover story of the recent issue of the Economist completely agrees with my scheme for reworking NASA - that it should focus on exploration and research, and that private industry should take over Earth to orbit transportation. Money quote:

"Indeed, if private enterprise can create astronauts with only millions of dollars, what might it achieve with a fraction of NASA's wasted billions? The Space Station is a mere 240 miles above the Earth. That is about four times further than any of today's private suborbital craft are trying to reach. But, if NASA were a customer, and not a competitor, in the business of building spacecraft, companies might have the incentive to extend their craft all the way into orbit.

...Meanwhile, the existence of the shuttle doubtless inhibits the development of a private space industry and the new private companies face regulatory restrictions that do not apply to the shuttle. Remove some of those barriers, scuttle the shuttle, and a private industry may bloom... And NASA could explore the real frontier."

You heard it here first. In related news, Slashdot has a roundup of links discussing the business case for reusable launch vehicles. There are a lot of interesting tidbits there, but I have been thinking that there may be some value in going back, at least for a little while, to usable rocket launchers.

While rockets are expensive, the shuttle is ridiculous. It is reusable in only the most restricted sense. If we really needed to get stuff into space, disposable launchers - maunfactured in quantity - could be substantially cheaper than operating the shuttle. The shuttle requires immense sums of money to launch, and more to be reconditioned for the next flight. Depending on disposables would eliminate at least one whole category of shuttle expenses.

The two current disposables in our inventory - the Atlas and the Delta, were both at one time man-rated. They could be again. And if we were making lots of them, they would cost less. We could put a two man glider like the Dyna-Soar (yes, aerospace engineers can have a sense of humor) we designed in the sixties on top of it. I'd be curious to know what their ground crew needs are. And we can always use the disposable shuttle pieces as a cargo lifter, as I have mentioned before.

With a little money and design work, the demise of the shuttle would not put us out of the space game, and could in fact increase our capabilities. Disposable launchers do not have the long turn around times of the shuttle - just order a new one and launch it. Cheap two man orbiters would not be the technological nightmare that the shuttle is, and not a single point of failure. The shuttle-based cargo lifter would have more cargo capacity than anything since the Saturn.

AND NONE OF IT REQUIRES A SINGLE DAMNED NEW PIECE OF TECHNOLOGY. All it takes is a little money, and a couple free weekends for the engineers at Boeing and Lockheed.

Again, the boys and girls at Reason have hit one out of the park. Julian Sanchez has a long piece which asks the right questions of those who defend the USA-PATRIOT Act against all criticism.

Read the entire article, but I extract this nugget of wisdom for you:

The broadest thing wrong with this standard, [namely, Rich Lowry's assertion that "The challenge to critics should be this: Name one civil liberty that has been violated under the Patriot Act"] though, is where it places the burden of proof. Civil libertarians want the answer to questions that as yet have barely been asked and never been answered: How will these new powers make us safer? Would they have prevented the September 11 attacks? Do they add anything to the existing powers the government failed to deploy effectively before then? Are they broader than necessary to aid in the fight against terror?

The PATRIOT apologists will have none of this. The default, as they see it, is to grant new powers unless there's proof that they'll lead overnight to tyranny. The presumption of liberty is replaced by a presumption of power. The sad reality, though, is that even a police state can't guarantee total safety: Whatever we do, the coming years will see more terror, more attacks. If we conclude, each time, that the culprit must be an excess of domestic freedom, a lack of government power, we are traveling a road with no end.

There's a fatalistic note to this conclusion that I don't love, but Sanchez' broad point hits the spot. The Federal Government exists at the convenience of the American People; indeed the Constitution focuses on delimiting exactly which areas the Feds are empowered to act in, leaving the rest to, who, again? Consequently, any Act that purports to increase the power of the Fed, especially along police-state lines, ought to be met with the strictest scrutiny.

Ultimately, Rich Lowry's approach amounts to patriotic cravenness, a blind apron-clinging trust that the Government would never(!) do anything that could harm us. Sanchez argues for a much clearer-headed, innately American way to approach the question of balancing liberty with security. Despite what you sometimes hear nowadays, a good patriot is a skeptic.

I apologize for depriving you all of the blinding light of my reason, the psychic kick to the head of my astounding insights, and the guilty titter that my unique brand of humor induces. However, the capitalist monkey on my back insists that I finish the renovation of my townhome so that I may rent it and so destroy the future and credit rating of some poor worker. This is all justified by the comfortable foam padding it will add to my bottom line.

So, all the paint fumes that I have inhaled over the long labor day weekend while my wife and prog sipped Mint Juleps on the porch have stunted my mental capacities. (Considering how low on the scale you started, have you considered whether mental capacities can go negative? -ed.)

While I make a last dash for the light at the end of the tunnel, praying that it is not an oncoming train and hoping that I can finish the damn house by next weekend, reread all of Johno's excellent posts while I laboriously handknit a couple posts in my limitless spare time.

Geek Lethal responds to my Ehrenreich thinkery:

"Personally, I found her thesis, that it sucks to be poor, not particularly revealing or challenging. What I found interesting was that so many people didn't know that already, and therefore had to buy her book to find that out."

Fucken-A.