Paul M. Jones

A public option, Shelby added, would “destroy the marketplace for health care.”
But the notion that most American consumers enjoy anything like a competitive marketplace for health care is flatly false. And a study issued last month by a pro-reform group makes that strikingly clear.
The report, released by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), uses data [...]

There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy…Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanism of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.

via Marginal Revolution: Aid Realism for the Idealist.

Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he'd get it and you wouldn't, it's rationing.
It may seem absurd to worry about whether wealthy or well-insured people get every last test and exotic or [...]

In championing health care reform, the President stresses the unsustainability of our current system, while insisting that nothing will change (you can keep your insurance, keep your doctor, etc.).
The pattern that I see is one of following the path of least political resistance, even if it means failing to make any significant contribution to solving [...]

I love it when people who have never managed anything more than a government grant are convinced they can manage one sixth of the economy.

via Fixing the Health Care System, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

The unspoken truth about Mr Obama's … effort to reach universal coverage is that you may not be able to keep your existing health plan—at least, not at the same price. That is because paying for expanding coverage must involve capping or eliminating the tax exclusion currently favouring employer-based health cover. That single distortion of [...]

The weekly [initial unemployment] claims number can't seem to fall below 600,000. …
This is bad news for many reasons, not least of which is what is suggests about the structural problems in the economy that are likely to persist for years. But the real danger is the threat joblessness poses to an economy that, at [...]

I’m in no mood to keep my mouth shut any longer when I see NASA heading down the wrong path. And that’s exactly what I see today. The ­agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020—a glorified rehash of what we [...]

This is not strictly PHP, but it is about scalability, and every PHP programmer *ought* to be thinking about this stuff.
Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTI (where I work as a web architect) has this slide deck posted about Scalable Internet Architecture:
Scalable Internet Architecture
View more presentations from postwait.

via http://www.slideshare.net/postwait/scalable-internet-architecture
(Aside: I joke that at OmniTI, my reporting chain [...]

After months of having 100+ channels with nothing to watch most of the time*, I realized my main use of TV was to have something in the background as I settled down for bed. At the same time, it was a big time-sink, because I would turn it on, flip through 100+ channels to [...]