Friday, June 05, 2009
Friday night linkage and miscellaney
Yes, the blogging has been lame this week -- we have been otherwise detained. I have, however, accumulated some linkage for your early weekend reading pleasure, preferably accompanied by a nice old vine red Zinfandel.
In the category of the potentially useful, 10 online photo editors that you supposedly need to bookmark. I'm not sure why one would bookmark ten online versions of anything, much less a photo editor, but there you have it.
The global temperature anomaly, as calculated in the UAH and RSS data sets, were damned near zero.
So you wanna publish a book?
The left's smartest health care blogger, Ezra Klein, explains how the Obama administration wants to leverage Medicare to cut aggregate health care expense. It is surprisingly smart, and in another couple of glasses I might find myself agreeing with it.
The TaxProf writes a very moving post to his son on his high school graduation. It makes me a bit wistful that I did not do the same.
Sarah Palin makes a low-key visit to American feminism's greatest monument, on her way to raise money for research into autism.
California house prices in terms of gold. It is 1988 all over again.
The most offensive beer ad in the history of the universe? Or just the funniest?
Some tort lawyer claimed that his client was "deceived" into thinking that "Crunch Berries" were, well, fruit. Not surprisingly, the case was brought in California. Surprisingly, the judge dismissed it.
Hard-boiled paragraph of the week, from James Crumley's gritty novel, The Right Madness
I ordered another beer after the lunch had subsided and carried it into the gaming room, where I leaned in a corner and finally had a couple of cigarettes. The retired couples working the machines on a wasted afternoon looked at me as if I were either a crazy preacher or a cop because I hadn't bellied up to lady luck's bad little sister. Maybe they should have felt guilty. Maybe we all should. What sort of mistake had been made in their lives that led them to believe the only fun left was stuffing twenty-dollar bills into a empty hole controlled by a computer chip? Perhaps I only felt sorry for them because they had fallen prey to a vice I had managed to avoid. Sort of the way way I felt sorry for golfers.
Couldn't have put it better myself.
Islam really did not invent all that stuff that President Obama said it did. Obviously, neither the president nor his staff reads TigerHawk.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Jun 06, 11:51:00 AM:
TH - it is Saturday morning and I am perfectly sober and I agree that I like what Ezra Klein was describing. As much as I like the concept of MedPac moving faster than Congress is capable of acting, I still feel like we just shifted gears from glacial speed to tortise speed.
One broader question to MedPac is that if this works for Medicare policy, why wouldn't a similar organization work for Malpractice suits? If the Dems are serious about driving out cost of our healthcare system they need to address the over litigious nature of our entire healthcare system. The reason why universal healthcare on the whole works for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, et al. is that they have not piled on a massive tort system on top of an extremely highly regulated industry. If you get the lawyers out of healthcare as a whole, costs would come down dramatically and I believe quality of care would go up.
By , at
Sun Jun 07, 01:03:00 PM:
On healthcare, it's Sunday morning and I'm more than sober.
This may be too simplistic, but why is it that we don't have a crisis in dentistry but we do in healthcare? Is the answer to make our healthcare more like our dentistry?
JPMCT here educated me that he loses money on Medicare patients,. but balances it out with the rest -- I already knew this cross subsidy was going on -- what shocked me in JPMCT's case was the extent of the imbalance in payments... it was huge. As we have more Medicare patients in the mix, this will only get worse -- it's unsustainable.
If you put in a bigger beuracracy to oversee this, providers will only drive their practices to further game the system. In my one healthcare business venture, I learned that individual caregivers might care about patient outcomes but that the system only cared about billing -- outcomes be damned. That -- and the use of Other People's Money -- are the root of the problem, it seems to me.
Lastly, how is what Obama is proposing any different from what Massachusetts has been doing. Mass has seen further explosion in its costs, not the promised reductions.
Link, over
By Publish A Book, at
Fri Jul 02, 07:05:00 AM:
JPMCT here educated me that he loses money on Medicare patients,. but balances it out with the rest -- I already knew this cross subsidy was going on -- what shocked me in JPMCT's case was the extent of the imbalance in payments... it was huge. As we have more Medicare patients in the mix, this will only get worse -- it's unsustainable.
