In  a public statement, the American Medical Association argued that a public option would be attractive enough to drive out private insurers, causing a "...surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers." While they are wrong in principle about the second point, higher costs, they are likely right about the first. My guess is most primary-care physicians would encourage their patients to shift, in order to reduce the paper and phone calling those offices need in order to collect from the private companies.

But the large number of specialists that are partners with labs and clinics, who see lots of extra income from tests and procedures that are not prescribed in similar situations elsewhere in the country, will in fact earn less. In this I am not wholly sympathetic to their plight. Since most civilized countries have satisfactory staffing levels at hospitals and in offices for visits, there is not an apparent need for this business model. And it is precisely this approach that drives costs beyond the needed into the wasteful range, as exemplified by studies that showed huge cost differences between an expensive town in Texas , McAllen, and the low-cost but revered Mayo Clinic. Atul Gawande details the differences in the New Yorker magazine. Read more »

The United States has produced the Marshall Plan, but also Hiroshima. It defeated fascism but also had to defeat racism at home, an ongoing project. It has produced both Duke Ellington and Aaron Copland, and if we didn't create the Beatles we sure as heck created ragtime, jazz, and rock and roll.

And we lofted the first Great Observatory into space, Hubble.

This has been our gift to the world's populations, pictures and science for all. Researchers have proprietary privileges for one year, and after that all data is public domain, not needing subscription to journals and so on. Anyone can download the amazing images, print them, and sell them as posters, with only a notice of credit for the image being asked. This may be the most generous gift we have offered to the world, since there are exactly zero strings on it.

The male bower bird of Australia collects objects to arrange as a stage, on which to display its pleasing stature and song. It weaves grasses into walls to frame the stage, places bright and dark pebbles around it, and makes sure it is oriented east-west, so that noonday sun will illuminate the place of honor. This takes roughly 70% of its day, and a goodly portion of that time consists of defending the bower against destructive attack from competitors, or launching attacks on others' bowers.

Is the bird wasting its time? The bird that opts out of the competition also opts out of the gene pool. We would root for trying harder, reaching higher, just as we applaud small colleges seeking to make the Final Four, or American Idol, or any of thousands of forms of human competition. We spend money on storytelling, whether books or movies. We buy pictures to mount on our walls, even though we can't eat them, or survive attack by sheltering behind them.

The question of necessity is raised by the economic overshoot we have experienced. We were buying for the fun of it, we think, instead of the necessity of it. But economists and writers point to Japan as having been too concerned with saving, back in the 90s, and the government tried hard to inspire spending. Is there a level of frivolous economic activity that is necessary?

Homo lingua, we talk all the time now. Twitter and texting (sexting!) rule the hubbub. The ultimate tool, language has been used to check genetic data indicating that behaviorally modern humans migrated out of Africa, across the Red Sea, roughly 50,000 years ago. Our first language was click, like Khoisian, or the !Kung and San. The San, in particular, show the widest genetic diversity, and this is considered the best indicator of founding population. Similarly, the widest genetics for apples is found in Kazakhstan, so it is the home of the apple tree.

Eden was probably crowded and contentious, with groups fighting over waterholes, or women. (Amazon Yanomamo laughed at researchers that asked if they fought over food.) But the exodus led across the Arabian Peninsula, into India, and was likely also contentious, given the previous expansion of Homo Erectus and Habilis. This could be where we get legends of trolls and ogres, which could also be Neanderthal, which met the second group of migrants that turned west across Turkey, into Europe. ("Before the Dawn" by Nicholas Wade, is a good source on this.)

It's fascinating to think about the reasons language started. Theories have included grooming becoming gossip and hunters making plans. I doubt the latter, since the plan would be usually the same, and while hunting, no one is talking. I think we can take some clues from what we do now.

I've been reading about the unholy combination of McCarthyism and MacArthurism that was the toxic atmosphere during the Korean War. Douglas MacArthur's father got his chance to try being Caesar in the Philippines, waterboarding and all, before President McKinley couldn't take him anymore. Harry Truman got a chance to repeat, or rather, rhyme, history, when he had to fire the son of the earlier MacArthur. It is not Shakespearean, but more a Greek tragedy, that this nativist, racist, jingoist strain of characters won't go away. Familiar name from Doug MacArthur's Tokyo sycophants---Alexander Haig. Add Buchanan, Cheney, Rumsfeld. Garnish with the new MacArthur, McCain, who wanted to be Eisenhower. Looked like the same effective mix. (In retrospect, it is a really scary thought to consider the alternative to Eisenhower in 1952, MacArthur. We were lucky.)

The rabid right was not all that happy with Eisenhower, so Kennedy had to out-hawk the hawks, and it trapped him into adventures that we were decades recovering from. I find myself hoping Obama is Eisenhower, with Johnson's domestic emphasis.

None of the dire consequences the rabid right warned of  happened, i.e. no dominoes, no global communism, and China buys our Treasury bonds. More recently we had the exquisite embarrassment of our president promising us he would protect us from Saddam's nonexistent arsenal. At least some people notice how wrong this crowd has been, and how often.

Actually, the second part is what I don't know, and would like someone to explain. There seems to be a class of rhetorical trick that is the usual technique. Here's one example: "When guns are criminalized, only criminals will have guns." It makes an absurdity out of a sensible issue, mainly by exaggerating and then reversing a point. "So we should let France have a veto over our national security?" "Liberals want to offer psychotherapy for terrorists." "Why do you hate America?"

One of our reflex-slogan specialists here recently asked why a contributing guest had switched from using "global warming" to "climate change". The obvious intent was to make the guest look unsteady, unreliable, unserious, since he can't keep his terms straight. Unfortunately, the guest always used the latter term, as does the International Panel on Climate Change. But it reminded me of an exchange I had with a letter-writer in the Chicago Tribune, in the 90s.

In principle, that is, with Tesla's new offering, the Model S. Priced at roughly half of the Roadster's six figures, the sedan can be charged in 45 minutes for 160 miles, or go 300 miles with the larger battery option. We're having trouble, some of us, remembering that batteries are not only those things in our cellphones; they also served to sink Nazi and Japanese shipping, powering our hybrid diesel-electric WW II submarines. And they can run trains just as easily.

But I would say we should still use liquid or gaseous fuels for most long-distance transport. These can be derived from several non-fossil sources: Ethanol of course, which should not be from edible corn but from trash cellulose; solar-derived hydrogen peroxide is a compact form of chemical energy, also used in WW II for submarines (Germany); hydrogen can be stored in metallic "sponge" for leak-free safety; and solar-derived hydrogen can be feedstock for methane made with CO2 captured from the atmosphere. Some algae yields 80% burnable oil by weight, and there is all that fast-food frying oil out there, for diesels.

My 20-something son, film student, writer, waiter, asked me about AIG. So I launched into an explanation of financial leveraging in general, and credit default swaps in particular. He said he knew that stuff, but wondered what was up with those bonuses. That's trouble, as in Vietnam. The kids might have been low-key about Iraq, since only their gung-ho friends went. But when they see their personal future looking bleak, carrying large college loans, still waiting tables, they kinda notice the discrepancy between their lives and certain others'.