As a practical matter, even with a single risk pool, you'd have to have some way of forcing insurers not to cherry-pick geographically -- to only provide coverage in states with better health, for example. Or to cherry-pick by only having offices in well-off suburbs. And so on.

Posted at August 9, 2007 8:46 AM in response to Universal Access To Affordable Health Care: Step Three - A Single Risk Pool

But the U.K. is hardly a Polynesian island.

Actually, Polynesia can be a pretty stressful place for the natives. I've got friends who have lived there for a while, and they report a lot of problems and rivalry and violence.

And a lack of good healthcare. On one remote island (population about 1000), my friend reported the two things the natives wanted most: high speed Internet access, and a regular doctor. In that order.

Posted at June 26, 2007 12:53 PM in response to "Sicko" and U.S. Healthcare: What's Cuba Got To Do With It?

"Just send him his Iraq appropriation with appropriate taxes attached."

This is exactly correct. Support the troops -- with a 5% surcharge on the upper tax brackets, say. Superglue it to the "emergency" appropriations bill. If it is veto-ed, Bush is a flip-flopper like Kerry -- supported the bill before he was against it.

Every request from the President that gets passed by Congress should have something in it his base will have trouble swallowing, but that is also at least semi-popular -- be it tax hikes, minimum wage increases, pollution regulation, rollback of some executive over-reaching, ...

Posted at December 28, 2006 12:37 PM in response to End of the Bush Era? Political Blinders on the Left

Well, the rich didn't suffer too much in Katrina did they? So everything's really OK.

Posted at August 30, 2006 8:02 AM in response to Katrina and the American “Model”

Considering the state of the British military, Chamberlain could only have tried to bluff Hitler at Munich about the Sudetenland issue.

Posted at August 30, 2006 8:01 AM in response to The Munich Analogy Redux

I had a friend visiting at the time the Abu Ghraib abuses started to make news. His response was, almost literally, "I don't care what happens to them after what they did to us." A perfect example of the conflation that underlies racist attitudes.

Posted at August 8, 2006 6:51 AM in response to Racists Among Us

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
This is an alternate history novel told by a woman living in the middle of a system of great evil.  She was born into in this system, and although she is a victim of it, cannot see the full dimensions of the darkness in which she and her society are structurally enmeshed.  Even those who struggle to ameliorate the evil are strongly contaminated by it, and they cannot see that about themselves.
This book made me think about the evil in the history that we DO live in, and how much that we take for granted will someday perhaps be seen as monstrous and cruel.  Not necessarily the things that people rail against now.

Posted at December 4, 2005 4:15 PM in response to Best Books of 2005?

Continuing the thread of "Soviet science not ALL stolen":
Although the early Soviet fission bomb work was based largely on stolen knowledge, I don't think anyone has plausibly put forward information that the much more complicated fusion work was stolen.  Sakharov is credited with coming up independently with the Ulam-Teller idea.  And the technology required to implement the fusion weapon, even if the knowledge is a given, is incredibly intricate.
Source: Dark Sun, by Richard Rhodes.

Posted at October 28, 2005 10:22 AM in response to Freedom and Scholarship

The US is now in the middle stages of its third great crisis, after the Civil War and the Depression.  In this case, the symptom is that the national government has been taken over by those whose entire conception of governing is maintaining their power and wealth.  Essentially, we are becoming a 'banana republic'.  One cause of this is the political laziness of much of the public, allowing their votes to be bought for a handful of carefully crafted emotionally resonant slogans.  Things will go on until they get really bad.  Iraq and Katrina are too small to bring down the ruthless entrenched power we have now.  Another smashup is coming; what form it takes I don't know, but it will be bad.  I predict 2010.

Posted at September 10, 2005 4:59 AM in response to Not too personal

From coldfury.com:
<span class="Apple-style-span">And for the entire time Bush was in the state, the congressman said, a ban on helicopter flights further stalled the delivery of food and supplies.</span&gt<span class="Apple-style-span">
</span&gt<span class="Apple-style-span">If this is true, George Bush should be impeached and removed from office.</span&gt

Posted at September 3, 2005 10:39 AM in response to The Golf Coast