17 August 09 am

Workout notes I got to the gym at about 7 and was done at about 8:48; in between I did 2200 yards of swimming (500 warm up, drill/swim, 10 x (25 fly, 25 free) on 1, 10 x (25 fist, 25 free) on 1, 200 cool down. Then 3 miles of running; a 10 minute mile to warm up then 9:30 mpm for the last 2 and then hit the shower.

Hence 5-7 am should give me plenty of time to get in to my 9 am class with coffee, time to review notes, etc.

Health care

Fact Check takes a look at the plans that President Obama is pushing; their main complaint is that he is using numbers that are unrealistically rosy (e. g., the plan will be more expensive than he is saying). Frankly, I believe fact check; to me the cost is worth it.

Still, as one libertarian blogger points out, much of the push-back against these plans have been false. He concludes:

Health care reform. I think I’ve seen about 5,000 tweets, Facebook and/or blog enties about how Obama is silencing debate. Most conservative complaints about Obamacare that I’ve heard (other than the ones saying complaints are being silenced, mind you) are flat… out wrong on facts and cross the line into paranoid fantasy. And if anyone is silencing debate, it’s these gullible fools showing up an town hall meetings shouting down their elected representatives. So forgive me for assuming that without anything real fpr opponents to complain about, the plan must not be too horribly flawed.

Mind you this blogger is “Mr. Free Market” all the way.

Paul Krugman: nice post here; I’ll reproduce his summary of how other countries get it done:

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care while spending only about 40 percent as much per person as we do. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.

The second route to universal coverage leaves the actual delivery of health care in private hands, but the government pays most of the bills. That’s how Canada and, in a more complex fashion, France do it. It’s also a system familiar to most Americans, since even those of us not yet on Medicare have parents and relatives who are.

Again, you hear a lot of horror stories about such systems, most of them false. French health care is excellent. Canadians with chronic conditions are more satisfied with their system than their U.S. counterparts. And Medicare is highly popular, as evidenced by the tendency of town-hall protesters to demand that the government keep its hands off the program.

Finally, the third route to universal coverage relies on private insurance companies, using a combination of regulation and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered. Switzerland offers the clearest example: everyone is required to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies.

In this country, the Massachusetts health reform more or less follows the Swiss model; costs are running higher than expected, but the reform has greatly reduced the number of uninsured. And the most common form of health insurance in America, employment-based coverage, actually has some “Swiss” aspects: to avoid making benefits taxable, employers have to follow rules that effectively rule out discrimination based on medical history and subsidize care for lower-wage workers.

Krugman goes on to point out that what is being proposed (House bill) is a program similar to the one that Switzerland uses.

Other pieces of interest

Health care costs: cause of many bankruptcies.

Nate Silver: doesn’t see a good chance of a bill with a public option passing; he looks at the actual “votes that are there.” I am not as pessimistic.

Mark Louis at Daily Kos: says that we (liberals) shouldn’t be “all or nothing” (see the Krugman article above).

Tim Wise: talks about the racial factor in all of this.

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