Lockerbie Ugliness

We know how the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber is playing here - understandably, not well at all - but how's it look from the other side of the Atlantic?

This BBC article hints that the whole thing could be about oil. There's a shocker.

This piece in The Scotsman refers to a "Deal in the Desert" meeting in 2007 between Gaddafi and Tony Blair, but doesn't elaborate.

Most importantly though, there seems to be quite a divide between the U.K. and U.S. victims' families as to whether Megrahi is actually guilty. The trial was apparently controversial for a number of reasons.

Still, the whole thing looks really bad. Megrahi dropped his appeal when, due to a legal issue, it stood in the way of his "compassionate release". Scotland's justic system screwed up; they should have heard his appeal properly or kept him in prison. His release carries the stench of a minister who was swayed by prevailing U.K. opinion that the convicted got a raw deal. That should have been for the courts to decide during the appeals process. Sure, there would have been outrage from victims' families if he had won his appeal, but unlike the apparent capriciousness of his release, it would have carried some legitimacy.

Another Perspective on Health Care

This article from The Atlantic is certainly thought-provoking. Now, I can't vouch for the veracity of the author's statistics or other claims, but at face value it's a compelling article. A few items that I zeroed in on while reading it:

• This excerpt below reminded me of Bjorn Lomborg's take on global warming, that's it's really not so bad, when compared with all the other bad stuff that we could be spending money trying to mitigate:
  

  As a nation, we now spend almost 18 percent of our GDP on health care. In 1966, Medicare and Medicaid made up 1 percent of total government spending; now that figure is 20 percent, and quickly rising. Already, the federal government spends eight times as much on health care as it does on education, 12 times what it spends on food aid to children and families, 30 times what it spends on law enforcement, 78 times what it spends on land management and conservation, 87 times the spending on water supply, and 830 times the spending on energy conservation. Education, public safety, environment, infrastructure—all other public priorities are being slowly devoured by the health-care beast.
  
  By what mechanism does society determine that an extra, say, $100 billion for health care will make us healthier than even $10 billion for cleaner air or water, or $25 billion for better nutrition, or $5 billion for parks, or $10 billion for recreation, or $50 billion in additional vacation time—or all of those alternatives combined?

• Why does health insurance work so differently from every other form of insurance?:

  Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is. We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance. Most pregnancies are planned, and deliveries are predictable many months in advance, yet they’re financed the same way we finance fixing a car after a wreck—through an insurance claim.
  

  Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share. An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no?

  Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee—more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else—by ourselves.

• We hear a lot about how other nations' citizens have it better-off because of universal coverage. That might be true, but evidently they're struggling with rising costs too (of course, their care costs, on average, are still much cheaper than ours):
  

  Whatever their histories, nearly all developed countries are now struggling with rapidly rising health-care costs, including those with single-payer systems. From 2000 to 2005, per capita health-care spending in Canada grew by 33 percent, in France by 37 percent, in the U.K. by 47 percent—all comparable to the 40 percent growth experienced by the U.S. in that period. Cost control by way of bureaucratic price controls has its limits.

So what does it all add up to? Should we ("we" being the government, in theory, anyway) not even bother to attempt any incremental fixes, since they probably won't work? Will this round of supposed reform set the stage for a future, more positive round, or leave the public too frustrated or indifferent to try again?

The author's proposed solutions (on page 6 of the article) are attractive and certainly seem to make sense, but I suspect that we're already stuck too far down in the system; if people are up in arms about relatively modest changes, how would we ever succeed in so fundamentally changing the way that health care is paid for?

Health Care Town Hall Hysteria Goes Local

Ben Cardin held a "town hall" meeting on health care in Towson last night, with predictable results. Yes, the polarization of this country continues, with lobbyists and interest groups pulling strings (on both sides) and opponents of reform - any reform - hoping that volume alone will win the day.

O.K., so maybe you think the government plan is socialized medicine. Could even be true, depending on which form the final plan takes, but is that the best you've got, roll out the specter of scary socialism and hope that it sends everyone running for the hills? Now go one step further, and tell us why that's so terrible. Can't do it? Words escape you? Too hoarse from shouting down your senator/congressman recently? How about you make an actual argument or shut up. There's enough real data out there to argue for or against health reform, but if you're too lazy to do so, by all means continue shouting. Eventually though, you'll lose your voice, so it's win-win either way; a meaningful discussion, or blissful silence.