Replace Obamacare with Medicare for All

For those delusional day dreamers among you who like to luxuriate in utopian fantasies, here's a way to address the impending loss of Obamacare: Simply make Medicare available as an option to everyone.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield Tennessee Headquarters

The insurance companies had a major fit when this was proposed during the negotiating for Obamacare because they released:
1. People who have Medicare really like Medicare
2. They are much happier with Medicare than any of the commercial insurance they had before Medicare
3. Faced with competition from a superior product, these commercial insurance policies would be dead in the water within months.


So, in face of the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number, Congress passed the only law they had the votes for, which was to do good for all the insurance companies, their stock holders and employees, with no "government option."

Doctors fear universal Medicare because then they would be faced with a monopoly who could drive compensation for doctors down, and many younger doctors fear they'd be driven into bankruptcy by their student loans if they cannot recoup their investment with high fees.

Corporate Offices Gym, Cigna

I once calculated the total number of dollars spent on administration of insurance and payments to doctors in the United States.  I forget the exact number, but when I divided the dollars earned by health insurance company executives, and employees right down the line to the clerks who code the insurance bills in doctor's offices, the resulting number, divided by all the doctors who actually practice medicine in this country, it came out to $500,000 annually, if you paid every doctor exactly the same, pediatricians and neurosurgeons, rheumatologists and heart surgeons. 


There would likely be some grousing by surgeons, who make three to five times what internists and primary care physicians make, and who feel they deserve to make more, but likely 90% of practitioners in the country would be thrilled to get $500,000 a year for practicing medicine.

Cigna Campus

The problem would be what to do with all the unemployed health insurance people. There are, by my estimates, about 15 million of them, all told, whose jobs completely or partially are driven by commercial health insurance. They do not do anything productive, with respect to actual patient care. They are simply moving the money.  But what would you do with all those people?


Before electronic medical records replaced paper charts, the medical records departments at hospitals and doctors' offices employed lots of people, and took up whole floors and much space. Now all that is gone. And we don't miss those medical records people at all.


If we eliminated the health insurance people, they would not be missed by patients or doctors.  They really are superfluous.

Comey, Putin on the Ritz: it Don't Worry Me

So here's where NPR and Huff Post and Vox and Slate all lose me: They are all expostulating about the role Vladimir Putin may have played in getting emails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton online, as if that was the determinate thing in electing Donald Trump. The effect, all conjecture.

On the other hand, Huff Post et al  seem to have forgotten about Mr. James Comey, of the FBI, who released a statement 11 days before the election which was far more damaging.  Rather than accusing her of a specific crime, which could be addressed and refuted, he accused her of nothing. Much more effective, wouldn't you say?

So why are we so upset about Putin for trying to do what our own FBI director did  so much more effectively in broad daylight, i.e., feed the fake news about Ms. Clinton's crookedness?  
Strikes me as decrying the gossip,  but saying nothing about the hangman who, in full public view,  tripped the trap door beneath the condemned. 

P.S., As we all know by know, Ms. Clinton ran a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Now that's not conjecture. That's the truth. It was on the internet!
P.S.S.  Hey, guys. She lost. He won. It wasn't Putin. It wasn't even Comey. It was your fellow countrymen. They just didn't give a shit. Or, as Bunk Mooreland would say, "There you go, giving a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck." That's your problem, gentle reader. You care about something other people don't care about. Freedom riders get shot by local sheriffs; Black men get lynched, wind up as strange fruit, hanging from trees; Japanese Americans get hauled off to camps; unions get busted. Thus was it ever so--just read Howard Zinn. You'll feel better. Things aren't getting worse--they were always this bad.

Capitalism, Cashmere, Mongolian Goats and Grassland Denudation

When the cold war ended, a friend of mine, Daniel,  who was a principal partner in a firm based in Bethesda, Maryland, a firm called Development Alternatives International, headed off for Estonia. His firm acted as a consulting firm to help people in former Soviet nations figure out how to do business.

So, one of his early clients was a guy in Estonia who ran a huge dairy farm which produced literally tons of butter and tons of milk and meat every year and when Daniel arrived at the farm he asked to see the balance sheets. They had no idea what he was talking about. "You know, you've got expenses on one side and income on the other."  Again, blank looks.

"Well, look," Daniel said, "You have all these cows, right?  Now I don't know much about dairy farms, but I assume you need to feed these cows something. And feed costs money. So where do you record that cost?"

"Oh, no, it costs nothing."

"What do you mean?"

"It just arrives on Tuesdays and Saturdays, by train, from Moscow."

Well, of course, once the wall came down and Estonia was no longer a Soviet state, that train from Moscow was not going to keep arriving twice a week.

His next trip was to Mongolia.
Now, what on earth could you possibly advise people in Mongolia about?
It wasn't like the fall of the Soviet Empire affected the sheep herders in their yurts much.
"Mongolia's got cashmere," Daniel said simply.
It turns out Mongolia provides 60% of the world's cashmere, which grows on special goats, who can live on the grassy plains of Cashmere and thrive there, in fact and they have multiplied to such an extent they have virtually denuded the grasslands to the point everything else is starving out.

With global warming and with exploding herds of cash pelt cashmere goats, the winds are sweeping across once grassy plains and whipping up dust storms.

The herders told NPR reporters they realize the damage their goats are doing, but it's their only cash crop. China taxes everything coming out of Mongolia at the border, but for some reason does not tax cashmere, so that is to Mongolia what poppies are to Afghanistan.

The Mongolians can see the collapse of their environment staring them in the face, but they can't give up the cash.

Welcome to our world, Mongolia.

Robin Wright: The Miasma of Religious Fanaticism

Robin Wright of The New Yorker

Reading Robin Wright's description of various actors among the wide range of ISIS, Al Qaeda and other assorted radical Islamists gave me a new perspective on our new President: He's not as bad as these crazies.

In a recent article in the Islamic State magazine exhorted true followers to launch attacks against "kuffar" (non believers) in their home countries during festivities, singling out the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a glorious target and its author suggested using a U-Haul truck  "double-wheeled, giving victims less of a chance of escape being crushed by the vehicles tires."  Describing with delight, the prospect of running such a vehicle at high speed into a joyous crowd, one can only imagine the twinkle in the eye of this man who is thrilled at the idea of mowing down children. I now understand the response of the NYPD, blocking off side streets and arraying police at every corner in the city near and along the parade route.

Ms. Wright describes one after another of these religious zealots and given the full range of human behavior thus depicted, the Donald looks rather tame. 

Or rather, simply lame. 

Looking around the planet today, there are really nasty people out there next to whom Trump looks simply goofy.

Consider that whole crew who surrounded Adolph, or Stalin. Even Joseph McCarthy was more unappetizing, if you look at old videos of the man.

It is true, Mr. Trump is coming up with quite a menagerie--a head of the EPA who doesn't believe in global warming, but really, so what? It's not like we are really poised on a new technology which could prevent or reverse global warming if only we bought into it.

So you don't believe in evolution--who is harmed by that? Unless you can convince others you are right, and that's not going to happen any time soon.

Donald may have heard vaccinations cause autism and retardation--the woman in the parking lot told you. But there are enough doctors out there to remind us the Donald is just the President, not your physician.

I'm not saying Donald is harmless, but as a thorough going nitwit, we do not have to take him literally.  

Ping, Pong, The Witch Is Dead

Comet Ping Pong is a store which came after my time in Washington, D.C., but it's nearby a place I knew pretty well: Politics and Prose, a book store.  It's an upscale part of town, on Connecticut Avenue.
General Flynn Strangelove thought it was the prototypic den of iniquity. (The General may have something to tell us about fluoridated water, as well.)
A tweet from the General:

General Flynn 

✔@GenFlynn

U decide - NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc...MUST READ! http://truepundit.com/breaking-bombshell-nypd-blows-whistle-on-new-hillary-emails-money-laundering-sex-crimes-with-children-child-exploitation-pay-to-play-perjury/ …

10:18 PM - 2 Nov 2016

If you say that Comet Ping Pong is a place where they do abortions on the children they are trafficking for sex with HIV positive Democrats, and you put that on the Internet, on Facebook, does the First Amendment protect you?

If you walk into Logan Airport and start talking about the bomb you've got in your suitcase, or your fantasies about carrying a bomb in your carry on luggage, are you not taken down by the police? Do you shout? "Wait, I wanted to be taken seriously, but not literally!"

If you are the National Security Adviser and you suggest Hillary Clinton is running a child porn and child trafficking operation out of a Washington, D.C. pizza place called Comet Ping Pong, are you not something of a security threat, your own self?

General Flynn's idea of responsible child care, from his own career

I am getting a little confused here.
Perhaps it's understandable I am not the only one confused. Like this guy from North Carolina who reads about this child sex operation at Comet Ping Pong, coming from a reputable source, none other than the National Security Adviser elect and he, understandably, feels a call to arms. 
One might ask:  If you read this on line, might you not ask yourself, "I wonder why nobody has yet gone in and investigated this child porn/child trafficking den of iniquity?" I mean, it's on the internet and there are thousands of hits and likes on it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in a case about Freedom of Speech and the First Amendment, famously said, "Freedom of speech does not extend to crying 'Fire!' in a crowded theater when there is no fire."  There are limits on freedom of speech, even in America.  But, apparently, in the "post truth" era of Donald Trump and his Merry Men, there are no penalties for saying just about anything, because, after all, his supporters do not take him literally. 
Well, most of them don't. 
Except for the guy with the assault rifle in Comet Ping Pong, looking to rescue all those kids who Hillary Clinton has been trafficking. 
What I want to know is: Is their pizza any good?

"Only after watching the preceding video will it be possible to make sense of the Democrat pedophilia ring that has been broken in Washington, D.C.  When this [ORGANIZED] Satanic ritual child sexual abuse is finished being investigated, it will make the Franklin Scandal and Cover-up look like a garden party."
TMR report 

Maria Bartiromo, The Ultimate Trump Secretary

Okay, so here's the deal.
First Donald appoints all the people he has to appoint, to satisfy his various constituencies and to reward personal loyalty and to reward those who helped him win, and then, every 6 weeks or so, he fires an original apprentice cabinet officer and replaces him with someone really cool, someone who will fire the imagination of his followers, and maybe even his own loins.

First, it must be recognized there were people who helped him who never received much press attention for their role in his winning.  Chief among these, was Maria Bartiromo, who sat behind him during his pretty awful remarks at the Al Smith dinner, distracting at least 50% of the viewing audience so they did not hear a word he said.

Then she did the same for Hillary, who actually had some funny lines, which no white male even heard; again, credit to Ms. Bartiromo.

So you get all the players in place:
General Flynn: National Security Adviser: He suggests laying a pre emptive nuclear strike on North Korea, but Donald likes the Korean leader's leadership style.  So Flynn's out. Maria's in.

Maria Bartiromo, National Security Adviser

Congressman Price: HHS: He's cuts Obamacare and loses 22 million votes in the Rust Belt and the crowds there are growing testy. Maria's in. She can do both jobs--National Security Adviser's hardly a full time job.

Maria, Secy of HHS, National Security Adviser

Defense: Mad Dog Mattis recommends dropping an atomic bomb on Iran's nuclear reactor, but it turns out they have dozens and they are in bomb proof silos under mountains, so that doesn't go well--Maria's in. There isn't much going on at HHS with Obamacare dead, so she can handle Defense and HHS.

Maria B., Secy HHS, Defense, Nat Sec Adviser

HUD:  Carson is found wandering in the basement mumbling, "Scalpel, clamp, sponge." He's out, and really the main problem for health and human services is there are too many people losing their homes so we can combine HHS and HUD no problem. Maria's got that.

Maria, Secy Defense, HHS, HUD and Nat Sec Adviser

Education: Sarah Palin's been MIA. Turns out she doesn't like being a cabinet Secretary any more than she liked being governor of Alaska. Borrrring.  Get Maria in there. She's well educated.

Secy Defense, HHS, HUD, Education and Nat Sec Adviser

State: Well, here's the problem, if you give Maria State, she'd have to travel, and well, Donald doesn't want her away too often.

He's grown rather fond of her.

You should see my portfolio

Oracle Fixaton

Mark knows

It's my own fault, I know.
I just want someone smarter than I am, someone in the know, someone who has access to detailed information I don't have access to, someone who spends time analyzing data to tell me what's happening.
I seek out wise men. Oracles.

So every Friday night, I watch David Brooks and Mark Shields to tell what what to believe, to tell me how the story will play out.

Last Friday I heard Mark Shields say...But wait, let's remember what I heard him say so many times over the past four years, that the Republican party was fast becoming a minority party because it was fighting demographics. The country is turning from white to brown and the Republicans are resisting this trend and until they decide to embrace this change, they will lose Hispanics and they will not be able to capture the White House any time this century.

Now Mark is saying, Oh, the Democrats are a bicoastal party, condemned to be a boutique party of coastal elites, unable to win the heartland, unable to win the White House. 

Harry got the last laugh

He did have one fact I didn't know: There are now fewer Democrats in elective office since any time since 1900, governors, state representatives, Congress, Senate, White House, Supreme Court.
So, why do I still listen? Because I have this craving for authority, for people who know. 
Like Nate Silver.  Oh, he turns out to be reliable. 
After all, he did think Hillary's chances of losing were higher than anyone else--30%. And he did point out how wildly the polls were swinging, but still, he did not call it.

Nate was all over it

I want people to tell me the future, a future I can rely on:
I want Neville Chamberlain to tell me there will be peace in our time.

Peace in our time

I want Jim Cramer to tell me not to invest in mortgaged back securities.

Oh, he always knows.

I want Alan Greenspan to warn me about the impending crash in stocks related to  mortgage defaults.

Hang on his every word

I want guys who are supposed to know, to actually know.
What's wrong with that? 
It does remind me of a story my father once told me about a physician he met at one of his meetings at the Department of Health and Human Services. This physician had practiced oncology or something but now he was a federal employee, helping to write government policy statements just like my father. Why had he given up the practice of medicine? My father asked him.
He said he wanted to have a more far reaching effect.
"But these people you work with. These political scientists, these economists, they don't know anything. You knew something. Something real."
The physician just stared at him blankly.
That should have told us all something.