Paul M. Jones

2) “Coverage” is not the same as actual medical care.

Supporters of the Massachusetts plan frequently claim that it is a success because 98% of the state’s residents are now “covered.” But this is misleading, because it conflates theoretical “coverage” with actual medical care. In fact, access to medical care has worsened for many Massachusetts residents.

Because the state-mandated health insurance is so expensive, the government must subsidize the costs for lower-income residents. In response, the state government has cut payments to doctors and hospitals. With such poor reimbursements, physicians have become increasingly reluctant to see new patients.

The Massachusetts Medical Society reports that 40% of family practice doctors and 56% of internal medicine physicians no longer accept new patients [4] -- “the highest percentages of primary care practices closed to new patients … ever recorded.”

Some patients in western Massachusetts must wait more than a year for a routine physical exam [5]. Some desperate patients have even resorted to “group appointments, [6]” where the doctor sees several patients at once (without the privacy necessary to allow the physician to remove the patient’s clothing and perform a proper physical exam).

Similarly, the average waiting time in Boston to see a specialist has increased to seven weeks [7]. In contrast, waiting times in comparable cities in other states have been decreasing and now average three weeks.

Massachusetts patients may have theoretical “coverage,” but that’s not the same as actual medical care.

via Pajamas Media » ObamaCare: A National Version of RomneyCare » Print.

People ask, “Why is there poverty in the world?” It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger, and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.

The interesting question isn’t “Why is there poverty?” It’s “Why is there wealth?” Or: “Why is there prosperity here but not there?”

At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.

via The Spoiled Children of Capitalism by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online.

This is old (from April this year) but deserves reminding-about. Anyone know of any updates on the event?

Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported.

That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its centralization. The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities. In addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a "paper system" for the day.

...

This should lead managers of critical services to reconsider their dependence on software-as-a-service rather than local servers. Having your email live at Google means you don't have to manage it, but you can count on it being unavailable if your facility loses its internet connection. The same is true for any web service. And that's not acceptable if you work at a hospital or other emergency services provider, and really shouldn't be accepted at any company that expects to provide services during an infrastructure failure. Email from others in your office should continue to operate.

What to do? Local infrastructure is the key. The services that you depend on, all critical web applications and email, should be based at your site. They need to be able to operate without access to databases elsewhere, and to resynchronize with the rest of your operation when the network comes back up. This takes professional IT engineering to implement, and will cost more to manage, but won't leave you sitting on your hands in an emergency.

...

The most surprising news from Morgan Hill is that they survived reasonably unscathed. That they did so is a result of emergency planning in place for California's four seasons: fire, floods, earthquakes, and riots. Most communities don't practice disaster plans as intensively.

Will there be another Morgan Hill? Definitely. And the next time it might happen to a denser community that won't be so astonishingly able to sustain the trouble using its two-way radios and hams. The next time, it might be connected with some other event, be it crime or terrorism. Company and government officers take notice: the only way you'll fare well is if you start planning now.

via Bruce Perens - A Cyber-Attack on an American City.

TRANSPORTATION SECURITY. « Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine.. "Oh, but government-run health care will be different."

The King James version of the Bible runs more than 600 pages and is crammed with celestial regulations. Newton's Principia Mathematica distilled many of the rules of physics in a mere 974 pages.

Neither have anything on Nancy Pelosi's new fiendishly entertaining health-care opus, which tops 1,900 pages.

So curl up by a fire with a fifth of whiskey and just dive in.

via Harsanyi: Masterfleece Theater - The Denver Post.

A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.

Snubbing the Dalai Lama.

Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.

Freezing out a TV network.

Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too.

President Barack Obama has done all of those things -- and more.

via What if Bush had done that? - Yahoo! News.

Agile ain’t agile no more when adopted as the official enterprise software development process. The problem with agile is “agile != flexible”.

Agile was born in the world of contractors who have to show something for the money at every status meeting. For a while clients let themselves fooled with use cases written on many hundreds of pages but this doesn’t work no more. They smartened up and demanded to see something working, for a change. Agile came in handy because it allows to show a prototype early on. As long as you keep adding features to it and you are able to demo them there is a good chance your contract will be extended.

While in theory the Agile methodologies tell you to be flexible, the cruel reality is that most people that apply them don’t think a lot before taking the manual and enforcing every bullet point with a thick stick.

via Software development dogmata - good practices gone bad | Little Tutorials.

We thus stand at a crossroads for American capitalism. One path would channel popular rage into political support for some genuinely pro- market reforms, even if they do not serve the interests of large financial firms. By appealing to the best of the populist tradition, we can intro- duce limits to the power of the financial industry--or any business, for that matter -- and restore those fundamental principles that give an ethical dimension to capitalism: freedom, meritocracy, a direct link between reward and effort, and a sense of responsibility that ensures that those who reap the gains also bear the losses. This would mean abandoning the notion that any firm is too big to fail, and putting rules in place that keep large financial firms from manipulating government connections to the detriment of markets. It would mean adopting a pro-market, rather than pro-business, approach to the economy.

The alternative path is to soothe the popular rage with measures like limits on executive bonuses while shoring up the position of the largest financial players, making them dependent on government and making the larger economy dependent on them. Such measures play to the crowd in the moment, but threaten the financial system and the public standing of American capitalism in the long run. They also reinforce the very practices that caused the crisis. This is the path to big-business capitalism: a path that blurs the distinction between pro-market and pro-business policies, and so imperils the unique faith the American people have long displayed in the legitimacy of democratic capitalism. Unfortunately, it looks for now like the Obama administration has chosen this latter path.

via Dynamist Blog: Don't Let U.S. Capitalism Go the Italian Route. (All emphasis mine.)

GENEROUS PAY for new Freddie Mac CFO. “The government-controlled mortgage finance company is giving CFO Ross Kari compensation worth as much as $5.5 million. That includes an almost $2 million cash signing bonus and a generous salary that could top $2.3 million.” It’s okay to pay him a lot. He works for the government.

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » GENEROUS PAY for new Freddie Mac CFO. “The government-controlled mortgage finance company is giving….

So if the biggest impact has already happened and the effect is going to level off, can we have the other $593 billion back, please?

via GIVE THE MONEY BACK!.