I Moved My Blog

Sabrina got me into the Sugar community. I like their tools more than blogger's.

So, here's my new blog:

http://palace.onsugar.com/

I Know I'm Preaching to the Choir

But if you have any relatives or friends who are on the fence in this election and who have an interest in being able to see the doctor when they are sick, send them to this article on McCain's health plan agenda recently published in the journal 'Health Affairs.'

Here's the abstract:

Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) health plan would eliminate the current tax exclusion of employer payments for health coverage, replace the exclusion with a refundable tax credit for those who purchase coverage, and encourage Americans to move to a national market for nongroup insurance. Middle-range estimates suggest that initially this change will have little impact on the number of uninsured people, although within five years this number will likely grow as the value of the tax credit falls relative to rising health care costs. Moving toward a relatively unregulated nongroup market will tend to raise costs, reduce the generosity of benefits, and leave people with fewer consumer protections. [Health Affairs 27, no. 6 (2008): w472-w481 (published online 16 September 2008; 10.1377/ hlthaff.27.6.w472)]

I know Obama's plan isn't perfect either. It will require a lot of money that we don't really have at the moment. But he doesn't throw the whole current system to the dogs (i.e. market) based on the fallacy that supply-demand economics will reduce the cost of health care. This has been proven to be false by so many studies that looked at the effects of health plans with low premiums but high deductibles.

If your friends or family don't want to read the article, send them to this excellent interview with a professor of health policy from UNC. It's a balanced look at the pros and cons of both candidate's plans and shows you why in the long term, McCain's agenda to strip health insurance from the employer-based system and throw it into the market will most likely result in lots of misery for all of us.

Helpless

I don't want to feel helpless in the face of the Palin frenzy. But every time I delve into the invective being thrown from both sides over this controversial development in the presidential race I start to feel under-educated on all the issues I want to be able to discuss with intelligence. Hell, I even just read that the separation of church and state is a principle derived from the First Amendment, not an edict that in and of itself exists in the constitution.

And to me, arguing for this important American value seemed like the only thing I'd be able to fall back on when in a stand off against a group of people who seem to like Palin mostly for her values, not her actual track record on government reform or her experience with the deeply complex issues that face our economy and our relations with other nations. It doesn't appear to me that people in support of Palin are thinking through the probability of her winding up president of this country and whether or not her level of experience dealing with state-wide issues would at all be adequate for her to take over the role of the most powerful leader in the world. Of course, those experience arguments also fall flat because somehow the fact that Barack Obama studied constitutional law and has spent lots of time developing policy positions to address the wide array of problems facing the nation doesn't count for anything.

So if I can't even argue that we'd be skating on constitutional thin ice by electing a a Vice President who wants to turn her religiously-based value set into laws which limit the right to freedom and pursuit of happiness for large contingents of our population, what can I do?

I guess there just really are a lot of people in this country who believe we should be a theocracy, not a democracy. And they're not going to care if I start making comparisons between other theocratic societies and the place this nation could be headed.

Someone wake me up from this nightmare.