One Hundred Twenty Nine: Health Care

Last night I listened to some of the oral argument at SCOTUS while drifting off to sleep. From the questions posed by several of the justices it seems as though the chances of reversing any or all of the current law are slim. Especially given the two woman (Sotomayor and Kagan) picked by BO to serve on the Court, the chances of overturning ANY law passed by a Democrat congress are almost nonexistent. So, to me the focus should not be on undoing what BO has done, but rather on how to fix it. If we are to have national health care, which is not philosophically a bad thing, what is the best and most efficient way to implement and administer it? If all the members of congress got sick and went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, I guarantee that there would be quick agreement on a plan to simply hire the people at Mayo to run the national system and be done with it.

As far as the economics are concerned: I currently pay about $13K per employee in health insurance (this covers the employee and their families). I assume my rates are about the same for most small businesses; large corporation pay far less because of economies of scale. But we use VERY simply economic assumptions, say the government taxed every individual taxpayer an average of $3K per year for health insurance. With approximately 100 million taxpayers, that would be about $300 billion per year generated to pay our collective health care costs. If that is not enough, tax a little more. The point is, there would seem to be enough wealth generated by our current economic activity to accomplish the objective.

One Hundred Twenty Eight: Apple

So, here I sit at the Apple Store in Deer Park, Illinois. The store probably has 75 people milling around. Approximately 30 of them are blue-shirted A drones. One A drone in particular, a 50-ish woman trying desperately to look something less, hovers over me like humming bird. My friend is buying, or has purchased an iMac and is being led through the set up process by an overweight A drone who seems to be one of the less obnoxious employees. Actually, they are all quite impressive in terms of superficial product knowledge. Interpersonal skills are generally non-existent though. I guess Apple, and the tech biz in general, has long since decided that basic personal social skills are not important. And I suppose when you are interacting with someone electronically, the other person really doesn't care what I sound, look or smell like. It's a different world out there from the one I grew up in, which is of course the lament of every generation. But I wonder if this shift from real to virtual contact between humans really is a game changer.