In the early 1990s, my father-in-law was battling cancer. My father-in-law had been in business for himself, and had suffered from heart disease for many years. This combination of circumstances had the unfortunate result that he could not get health insurance–at any cost. Also, due to his health problems, he had lost most of his businesses and was not in very good financial shape. However, due to the generosity of the citizens of Bexar County, Texas, via a county health program, my father-in-law received treatment for his cancer, even though he could not pay for it all himself. The care he received wasn’t top-notch, but he wasn’t left to die, either.
At the same time my father was suffering from cancer, near the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first term as president, his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton took on the task of health care reform. I vividly remember the huge battle over the issue and over the First Lady tackling such an important issue.
One tactic that the Clintons’ opponents employed was to scream ‘They want socialized health care! Look at what a disaster it is in Canada and England!” The claim was, of course, false–the Clintons were not trying to institute true socialized health care (where the government owns all health care facilities)–but it struck a nerve with a lot of people and ultimately contributed to the failure of Ms. Rodham Clinton’s efforts.
At that time, I enjoyed pointing out to opponents that we already, in fact, had (and still have) socialized medicine on various levels in the US. In addition to the oodles of local programs, such as the county program serving my father-in-law, we also have several very large federal socialized health care programs, among them: Veteran’s Administration, Medicare, Medicaid. In fact, the VA runs a ‘real’ socialized health care system, in that it owns its own hospitals and clinics, employs the doctors, etc. Medicare and Medicaid, on the other hand, are government-run systems for paying for mostly private health care.
My comments stopped more than a few opponents in their tracks.
In a new New York Times column, Paul Krugman gives us an update on this issue. First, he compares what we spend on health care:

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.
Amazing, isn’t it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

Then Krugman summarizes what we receive in each country, respectively, for that expenditure:

What do we get for all that money? Not much.
Most Americans probably do not know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America’s high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.
A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services – we have lots of MRIs – but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors’ visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There is also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the United States than in other advanced countries.
The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad – but they do not actually receive more care. The title of their article? “It’s the Prices, Stupid.”

When you compare the U.S. to these countries with ‘socialized’ health care, we don’t stand up so well, do we?

While attending his county Democratic Party meeting, Rafe Colburn made an astute observation:

North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall was the other elected official who gave a speech, and hers was almost entirely a defense of federalism and the importance of state’s rights. For my entire life, I thought that state’s rights was a Republican issue, but now I see that it’s a power issue. The party in power in Washington wants to exercise that power, and the opposition at the state level wants to prevent it. So now we’re in a situation where Republicans want to expand the power of federal government, and Democrats at the state level want the federal government to butt out. I think this is the reason for the clash between Republicans in Congress and the federal judiciary. The conservatives in federal courts haven’t gotten the memo that the Republican party no longer cares about federalism, and the Republican Congress will not accept checks or balances.

A lot of people are making doom and gloom predictions about what will happen in the next few years of decreasing availability of oil. On the other side are the optimists like John Scalzi:

As bad as it may get, I don’t think it will get as bad as many people might fear — or at the very least, won’t be bad for long. To begin, America and Americans are happy to put off until tomorrow what ought to be done today, and this emphatically includes dealing with energy issues. However, when Americans are finally at a point where something has to be done, it gets done. . . And so with something like an oil peak; if America is looking down the barrel of ruin, it will suck it up and do what is necessary to persevere. It’s done so before within the last 100 years with WWI, the Depression and WWII. We are admittedly out of practice (a happy side effect of having dealt with the issue so well before), but we can and will do it again.

I agree with Scalzi that the Great Depression and the two World Wars are good examples of Americans dealing with difficult situations, but if Scalzi is also suggesting that the effect of diminishing availability of oil will be ‘no worse’ than those times, I have to take issue with him.
The Great Depression had a severe impact on the lives of many Americans–including rampant hunger, homelessness, etc. I certainly would not want to live through a comparable economic downturn. Likewise, most Americans had to make great personal sacrifices in order to mobilize for the second world war: food and fuel rationing, being strongly urged to put their savings in government bonds, etc.
If the coming economic situation rivals the Depression or World War II, then I would consider it pretty severe.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether we have hit peak oil production (this BoingBoing entry links to a lot of good articles). But I’ve come to the conclusion that many people are missing the point. Peak oil production is only half the equation. Demand for oil is the other half. Things start to get rough if oil production peaks, but it also gets bad when demand increases significantly compared to production. Taking demand into the equation, things are looking grim for the US, as several large countries–primarily China and India–have developed to the point that their demand for oil has increased significantly, competing with the US for a finite production.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve tried to make sense of the devaluing dollar, the fact that China a a few other nations buy so much of the bonds to cover our federal deficit and what it all means. I’m happy to report that my understanding was pretty much correct. This New Yorker article by James Surowiecki explains the situation pretty succinctly.
In short, Americans have been maintaining our standard of living on borrowed money, and the Chinese are our largest lender. Of course, it’s been in their best interest to maintain our consumerist lifestyle, since the US is a big export customer for Chinese goods. But if the Chinese ever decide it’s not in their best interest to continue buying (so much of) our debt, our fate is in their hands. It’s all a vicious cycle, and it cannot continue forever. This concern keeps me awake nights.

For days, I have pondered whether to post something about the raging issue of what to do about Terri Schiavo, and if so, what to say. I think it’s pretty much all been said elsewhere. Politics aside, this comment on Alas (a blog) states my feelings more elegantly than I could:

Hello, I’m a nurse anesthetists and work in Birmingham, Alabama. I live in the Bible belt, born and raised a Christian and I consider myself VERY conservative on politcal issues.
What Cerbrocrat has said, and what Jeremy has just said above me in a more technical sense, is right on point. This woman’s brain is SEVERLY damaged; the cerebral cortex is almost completely gone.
There is not a medication, therapy or experimental science that will ever change her condition. Like an arm or leg that has been amputated, the body can live without parts of the brain, but it will never regenerate. The only problem with my analogy is that although a person can actually function without an arm or leg, that’s not the case without a brain. There’s no such thing as a cortex prosthesis. She will be this way for the rest of her life.
I make my political and religious stance for a reason, that this is not a political issue; even if it has been made into one. This whole argument is about one single point, whether she would have wanted to live like this. Her husband (and some others) has said that she would not; her family says that she would. If all of you honestly were true to yourself, I would be willing to wager that at least 90% of you would say you wouldn’t want to live this way. Every person I have talked to, even the ones who have objected to letting Mrs. Schiavo die, have said they personally wouldn’t want to live like that. I know of dozens of family, friends, and co-workers who have just recently or are about to put this very thing into writing. Attorneys may end up the big winner when this is all said and done, but I digress.
The point here is that so many people would never want this for themselves, but somehow they want it for Terri and assume Terri would want to live like this. To me this is crueler than letting her die. I believe it is for the family’s own selfish reasons not to let her go, not the husband. If the husband wanted to be selfish, he would have been better suited to take the money and run 14 years ago, divorced her, walked away and just let here parents think he was an a$$. The money is all gone now, only about 50 grand remains, so what is his motivation at this point? To be the most hated person in America? It just doesn’t make sense unless he truly believes there is no hope for her and he knows she wouldn’t want to live this way.
I was asked today by a gentleman, “If it were your daughter, would you let her go.” I said yes and he responded with, “well, then you don’t love her.” I said, “Sir, it is because I do love her that I would want her to go home and be with the Lord, not suffer here on earth.”
As a parent it is only human nature to want your children to outlive you; I know I want mine to outlive me. But people have to put aside their own selfish wants to realize what is best for their child, and what that child would truly want in a situation like this.
So put aside all the conspiracy theories, the selfish motivations, the moral and emotional arguments and ask yourself, would you want to live like this?…and then ask yourself, do you honestly think Terri would?

The article that I mentioned in my previous post also contains the best description I’ve seen so far of G. W. Bush’s ‘ownership society’ concept:

On the campaign trail this year, President Bush has made the case that people are better off relying on themselves, rather than on business or government, in case of trouble. Under the banner of the “Ownership Society,” the president has proposed a series of new, tax-break-heavy accounts to let families pay for their own retirements, healthcare and job training. He also has called for partially replacing the biggest of the government’s protective programs — Social Security — with privately held stock and bond accounts.
Such arrangements might help people build up their personal assets. But the approach also would expose them to even more economic risk than they’ve already taken on.

A recent Harris poll shows what American respondents believe about the following issues:

• 61% believe that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a serious threat to U.S. security
• 64% believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links with Al Qaeda
• 47% believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001.
• 44% believe that Several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis

This article in The Nation offers a nice, succint summary of the religious beliefs of the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States. Suffice it to say that anyone who claims the U.S. was founded on Christian principles does not know or is ignoring historical fact.

This is something you have to actually hear to appreciate (I heard it on NPR yesterday): at a news conference at the European Union yesterday, President Bush was asked about the US’s intentions in regard to Iran. Mr. Bush responded: “This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table.”
There was a very short pause, and then the press corps started laughing.