Paul M. Jones

Apollo was not a methodical space program; it was an anomalous race in the Cold War in which anything could be wasted but time. It turned out to be unsustainable and unaffordable, which is why it boggles the mind that over three decades later—during which time there were huge technology advances—Apollo was chosen as a [...]

It's crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It's even crazier to do it by August.
Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, “to reinvent the nation's health care system.”
Let that sink in. [...]

I think it is fair to conclude from this that the Massachusetts health reform plan, which in some ways is the model for the plans currently under discussion in Congress, was a failure. Thanks to Mark Ambinder for the pointer.
Maybe the commission's proposal is a step in the right direction. Even if it is, I [...]

According to the chap who runs the Massachussetts exchange, the state and medical providers still face a hefty expense for treating those who don't have insurance, with over half the cost of medical care for the uninsured still persisting. And the new system is very expensive, particularly in a time of fiscal trouble.
It's thus [...]

I take Lipitor. The drug may extend my life. But this doesn't lower my health-care costs. Years of pill-taking increases costs. If the pill works, I may live long enough to get an even more expensive disease. And maybe I, like millions of others, take Lipitor unnecessarily because we would never have had heart attacks. [...]

The writer suggested I begin: “it was once the most powerful company in the world…”
GM was indeed the most “profitable,” or “biggest”—that I get. But powerful? Why do people think about business that way? GM has/had no armies with which it can invade other companies. It had no power [...]

It's also time, Obama tells his viewers, to lose weight, and stop smoking, and pull up your socks. Later on he tells people that they are foolish to prefer brand name drugs to generic drugs, and to want multiple medical tests. “If you only need one test, why do you want five tests?” Stop clinging [...]

In my opinion, the signs are now pointing more strongly toward deflation. Or in other words, to the next leg downward in the collapse of the housing bubble. The heroic efforts of government policymakers to deny reality and act as if they can forestall a necessary readjustment appear to be fizzling out. And the behavior [...]

Veterinary spending is rising just about in line with human medical spending. Kudoes to AEI for publishing a graph that seriously undercuts one of the major conservative arguments about health care: that the main problem is consumers who don't bear their own costs. Veterinary spending is subject to few of the perversities [...]

The New Culture of “Pay Up, Mister–or Else!”
For Obama to pull this off, an entire sort of new vocabulary, rhetoric, and attitude is necessary. And the model is California: the carpenter and the bricklayer are laid off, and the state snoozes; while the assistant solid waste inspector of Green Acres is on television every night [...]