Several months ago I posted an article titled, Relative Negative Effects of Energy Sources. In that article I postulated that the negative effects of various energy sources are about the same on the whole and in the long-term. I said this about the generation of electricity using solar panels:

The impact on the environment appears to be about zero, until you account for the manufacture and transportation of the panels. Think about the magnitude of an operation to keep all the homes and businesses in the world supplied with enough solar panels to supply their total power needs. And what about the batteries and their disposal issues?

I’ve reconsidered the first sentence above. There could be significant negative effects aside from the manufacture and transportation of the panels.

The glowarmists (yes, I believe it is an “ism”) insist that the amount of “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere must be significantly reduced if we are to avert a disaster in the next few decades. They base their claim on the fact that gases in the atmosphere trap heat from the sun’s rays that are reflected from the earth’s surface, much like greenhouses trap heat from the sun’s rays.

(Most people agree that the greenhouse effect exists, but many disagree that human activity is a significant contributor or that it deserves the level of attention that the glowarmists want.)

My question is: If any increase in trapped heat from the sun is undesirable, and for some a pending crisis, why do we want to trap more of the sun’s heat in solar panels? Eliminating the coal-fired and oil-fired power plants might indeed reduce the greenhouse effect, but replacing those plants with enough solar panels to generate the same amount of energy will likely trap the same amount of heat. The point of solar panels is to not reflect the sun’s rays, but to absorb them and convert the sunlight into electricity. Unfortunately, the process of converting light into electricity wastes most of the energy as heat and that heat can raise the global average temperature.

How much? Who knows? I’m just saying that we should gather more data and gain more knowledge before we depress the world economy and slow the progress of developing nations as the glowarmists apparently want. Their agenda is rife with the potential for unintended consequences. Or are they unintended?

If the government takes over medical-care in this country there is little doubt that we will eventually have to start looking for alternative sources. The national health services in Britain and Canada are proof of that. I suggested in a previous post that Cuba should seize the opportunity to start exporting medical-care to citizens of the US, since Michael Moore has assured us that Cuba has an excellent medical-care system.

That was mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I do believe this presents an opportunity for one of the impoverished Caribbean islands. A company or consortium of companies should put together a proposal to establish a huge medical complex on one of the islands. This med-plex would specialize in providing the medical services that would be hard to get through Obamacare. It could also include luxury resort hotels for their wealthy patients and family members and less expensive quarters for the not so wealthy.

The consortium could include insurance companies that offer policies to cover the kinds of medical-care provided at the med-plex. These policies could vary from covering all medical-care the insured might need to covering only those procedures and treatments denied by Obamacare. They could also cover the travel expenses. Since the insurance companies operate off-shore they won’t be subject to all the restrictions imposed by the US government. Neither will they be subject to any of the protections, but a free market should give us all the protections we need.

Speaking of a free market, there is no reason this has to be restricted to one consortium and one island. If one med-plex operation becomes successful there will be others. Three-hundred million people is a big market.

I suspect that such a consortium would have little trouble finding an island nation willing to host a med-plex. The boost to the island’s economy would be huge. It’s also possible that Indian reservations in the US could host such med-plexes — like they’re able to host gambling casinos in states that don’t allow casinos.

I don’t think the consortium would have any problem recruiting all the good doctors it will need.

President Obama contributed an article yesterday to the New York Times titled, Why We Need Health Care Reform. He failed to explain why. He just repeated the assertions that he has made several times recently in his appearances on television. He opened with this:

OUR nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.

Well, of course we haven’t heard directly from millions upon millions of people, either for or against Obamacare. How could that happen over a period of a few weeks? The polls give us a sampling of those voices but we won’t hear from all of them until the elections next year. The polls indicate that he should be glad he’s not hearing from the masses.

The claim that health insurance often works better for the insurer than the insured is a good example of the many statements that pour from the president’s mouth that mean nothing. Saying that it often works better for the insurer doesn’t negate the possibility that it also often works better for the insured. In fact, that is what insurance is all about. With many of its policies the insurer collects more money from the insured than it pays out to the insured. On the other hand, many of its policies result in greater payouts to the insured than payments collected from the insured. Of course, if the insurer wants to make a profit and stay in business it has to do a little more of the former than the latter.

The president then gives a couple of anecdotes from people who were denied health insurance. Such anecdotes are attention grabbers but taken alone they mean almost nothing. What we need to know is, does this represent the norm or are they just extremely isolated cases? There are lots of such cases as he describes in the British and Canadian health-care systems that he cites as models for Obamacare. There are such cases in Medicare and Medicaid. There will be such cases in Obamacare if it becomes law. No system is going to work perfectly. So give us real data, not more anecdotes.

The president offers “four main ways the reform we’re proposing will provide more stability and security to every American:”

First, if you don’t have health insurance, you will have a choice of high-quality, affordable coverage for yourself and your family — coverage that will stay with you whether you move, change your job or lose your job.

Blatant assertion! No details! Just trust me to work miracles? High-quality, affordable coverage even if you don’t have a job? We truly live in a marvelous time. What the man really means, of course, is that others will pay when you can’t or won’t. What he means is that you will not only be protected from medical costs but you will also be protected from having to pay your policy premiums. What is that, insurance-insurance?

I can’t wait until we have national food-insurance, clothing-insurance, energy-insurance, communications-insurance, entertainment-insurance, housing-insurance, and then insurance on all that insurance. I mean, these are all basic human-rights, right?

Second, reform will finally bring skyrocketing health care costs under control, which will mean real savings for families, businesses and our government. We’ll cut hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies that do nothing to improve care and everything to improve their profits.

He admits here that two government run health-insurance programs are fraught with waste and inefficiency — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. He says nothing about how he will eliminate that waste and inefficiency or why Obamacare won’t have the same problems. He apparently wants us to believe there is something special about Obamacare that will avoid those problems. If so why doesn’t he share it with us? Appointing panels, boards and czars to direct and audit Obamacare won’t necessarily do it; Medicare and Medicaid have panels, boards and czars. Please tell us exactly how Obamacare is going to be different.

He thinks that it is the job of insurance companies to improve health-care? Little ol’ me thought that was the job of health-care providers. Again, insurance companies are only in the business of helping people spread out their risk. Sure, they would prefer that you not get sick, not wreck your car and not have your house burn down. They might even make some suggestions on how you can avoid these misfortunes, but they aren’t in the business of substantially preventing them. After all, if none of these things ever happen to you why would you need insurance?

Third, by making Medicare more efficient, we’ll be able to ensure that more tax dollars go directly to caring for seniors instead of enriching insurance companies. This will not only help provide today’s seniors with the benefits they’ve been promised; it will also ensure the long-term health of Medicare for tomorrow’s seniors. And our reforms will also reduce the amount our seniors pay for their prescription drugs.

He is going to make Medicare more efficient than an insurance company? Again, Mr President, how exactly are you going to do that? Medicare is an insurance fund. It is managed by a government bureaucracy and contracts with private firms to process claims. Where is the waste and inefficiency? Is it in the government management, in the private claims processing or in both? I can certainly believe that Medicare is fraught with waste; most, if not all, direct government services are fraught with waste (by direct I mean services provided directly to individual citizens; indirect services would include defense and foreign policy). What I don’t believe is that Obamacare can substantially eliminate that; in fact, I believe it might make it worse. This point is just more assertions with no details or substantiation.

Lastly, reform will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable. A 2007 national survey actually shows that insurance companies discriminated against more than 12 million Americans in the previous three years because they had a pre-existing illness or condition. The companies either refused to cover the person, refused to cover a specific illness or condition or charged a higher premium.

No, Mr President, please don’t tell me that! An insurance company refused to insure a house after it had already burned down? And the ones that did wanted to charge a higher premium? What is this world coming to? Sarcasm aside, if the president wants people with pre-existing health problems to be insured someone will have to be charged a higher premium. That will probably be everyone who is able to pay anything, and then we’ve got welfare, not insurance.

Most important, we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like mammograms and colonoscopies. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and prostate cancer on the front end. It makes sense, it saves lives and it can also save money.

I’m all for preventive medicine because it saves lives. But several people or organizations have seriously researched this and have found that it doesn’t save money overall. The problem is that everyone has to be periodically tested because there is no way to know who will contract a disease. To illustrate, if 100 people have to be tested over a period of many years to find one person with a disease, the cost of the tests can far exceed the cost of treating the one person who contracted the disease.

If Obama’s article were a high-school essay I would give it an F. I know he’s not that dumb, so I’m left to conclude that he is being devious. He thinks we’re the dummies and that he can sell us some snake-oil. But he’s certainly no Billy Mayes. What I don’t understand is why he put his article in the New York Times. His cohorts could have told him that the country’s dummies don’t read it.

President Obama claims that his Obamacare will reduce the overall cost of medical care. There are lots of detractors, including me, who say that this is impossible without limiting the types and amount of medical care available. But, could he have in mind achieving government cost savings in another way? If Obamacare eventually leads to reductions in the medical care options available to the elderly, their life expectancy will be shortened. This will lead to reduced payouts in Social Security benefits.

I know that he claims that no such policy is included in Obamacare. Perhaps it isn’t in the current bill, but what about next year? It can always be added later. Actually, it doesn’t have to be spelled out in the bill itself. It can simply be implemented as a preferred practice by the policy making board that the bill does authorize.

There are also a lot of federal civil service retirees out there drawing their pensions directly from the Treasury. Although federal workers contribute a percentage of their salaries to  a “retirement fund,” no such fund exists. The government just spends the contribution on something else and assumes the responsibility to pay retirees from the Treasury.

So, if federal retirees start dying at a younger age, further government cost savings will accrue. There aren’t nearly as many federal retirees as Social Security recipients, but federal retirees generally draw more than Social Security recipients.

If four retirees draw an annual pension of $50,000 dollars each from federal civil service and/or Social Security, the government saves a million dollars if they die five years younger. And that doesn’t even count any savings on their medical care.

Is this fear-mongering? I don’t think so.

It amazes me that there are still people who think that the government can improve their lives over the long-term by creating additional costly bureaucracies. Do you really think medical care is going to be better with the government more involved in supplying or controlling it? Then consider this: Would you prefer a public defender or a private attorney to defend you in a criminal case?

You could argue that a public defender is better than no attorney at all, and you would probably be right. You could also argue, correctly in most cases, that public medical care is better than no medical care at all. But, if you try to use this argument to defend the need for Obamacare you are way off-base. Public medical care is already available. Obamacare is being pushed because the currently available public medical care is not as good as the currently available private medical care. That is, the Obamacare proponents are admitting that public medical care is not as good as the private medical care available to those who can afford it, and they want to remake the medical care system so that this disparity is removed.

So, the real question is: How will Obamacare remove the disparity? Will it bring the public medical care up to the level of the private medical care? Will it bring the private medical care down to the level of the public medical care? Or, will they meet somewhere in the middle? This leaves out the worst-case outcome — that Obamacare turns out to be worse than the currently available public medical care, which I think is a very real possibility.

Obama is not saying that our private system is not providing good medical care; he is saying that some people can’t afford it. He is saying that the public system is not providing good medical care to those who can’t afford the private care. That is, he is saying the private system is working and the public system is not working. So, he wants to replace the private system with a new public system. Go figure.

I want to emphasize that Obamacare is more concerned with leveling the availability of medical care than with improving the quality of medical care. There are three ways to level something: (1) grind off all the high points down to the lowest low points and discard the excess material, (2) bring in extra material and fill in the low points up to the highest point, or (3)  chop off the high points until you have enough material to fill in the low points so that the whole surface is even and smooth. In most cases the latter is the most efficient and inexpensive. Since Obama insists that he will lower the overall cost of medical care, don’t look for him to use the second method. And God help us if he uses the first method.

People arguing for a national health insurance plan often state that the United States is the only developed nation without one. They say this as if it is sufficient argument for one. They apparently believe that we should have one just because our peers have one. Never mind the fact that medical care in other developed nations is inferior to ours. Never mind that the vast majority of emigrants choose to move to the United States over the other developed nations; for them, national health insurance doesn’t seem to be a strong criterion.

Those in favor of national health insurance seem to believe that universally available health care is preferred over good health care. But the flaw in this argument is that universally available health care is already available. Private health insurance is available to anyone who can afford it. For those who can’t afford it there is Medicaid, SCHIP and charitable institutions. You might be denied knee replacement surgery under Medicaid but that will also be denied under a national health insurance plan.

There is also the false assumption that a national health care plan will ensure that everyone is covered. If the plan is universally available but voluntary not everyone will opt to pay for it. If participation in the plan is mandatory how will the cost be collected from those unable to pay? The cost won’t be collected from those unable to pay so we’re back to the system we have now: health insurance plans that are available to those able to pay and public assistance for those that aren’t.

The concept of “minorities” in a political sense has always bemused me. Following are my somewhat random thoughts on the subject:

How can a political party that depends on a majority for its power be a true friend of a minority? They can’t. They can only be a true friend to a collection of minorities with common interests. And that collection has to be large enough to constitute a majority. But if this collection of minorities has sufficiently common interests and numbers to place a particular party and president in power are they truly a minority? The mathematician in me says no.

Since slavery, the most racist act committed by this country was the inclusion of all citizens of African descent in a single group. That group is the “black minority.” It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are or how educated or uneducated you are; if your ancestors were African you are in that group. It doesn’t matter if you are among the most poor, uneducated and disadvantaged in the land; if your skin is white you are not in that group. It is a blatant classification of a large segment of our population on their ethnicity alone.  Jeff Foxworthy’s classification of rednecks makes more sense; he specifies hundreds of criteria, each of which can qualify you for membership in the group.

African-Americans are not alone; Hispanics, for example, have their own group. But why should Hispanics be classified separately from blacks? Aren’t their needs similar to those of blacks? I would think that the needs among blacks or among Hispanics taken separately are at least as different as the needs of both taken together. The answer is that combining the minorities might be politically threatening; if they’re all combined they may no longer constitute a minority. But an astute, populist political party can claim that it is their duty now to represent the interests of the new majority.

It seems to me that all this thrashing about over the supposed under-represented minorities is much ado about nothing. What happened to representing all the people all the time? And treating everyone equally?

(Perhaps I shouldn’t raise the question posed in the title of this post; Obama may want to create a new White House Czar for that purpose.)

Here’s an idea: Let’s stop keeping money in banks in order to remove the incentive for people to rob banks. When asked decades ago why he robbed banks Willie Sutton said, “because that’s where the money is.” So why not just stop keeping money in the banks? Because it’s a stupid idea. We don’t need banks if we can’t put our money there for safe keeping. We need to deter bank robbers by capturing them and dealing with them severely, not by giving in to them.

But that’s exactly what President Obama wants to do in closing Gitmo, give in to elements that want to harm us. He says that it has become a symbol that helps Al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. He provides no evidence to support that claim but so what if it is true? Should we cease to defend our country when doing so encourages our attackers? Should we not punish our attackers when doing so infuriates their supporters? No, the only effective way to deal with them is to punish them hard and often.

Placating the enemy is never an effective strategy; it is only seen as a sign of weakness. Irritating them as often as possible is better; when angry they will make mistakes.

It’s interesting that Obama apparently believes that the radical elements around the world are stupid enough to not notice that he is just moving the detainees from Gitmo to other prisons in the US. That is, he plans to close Gitmo, not release the detainees. Or, he thinks that the radical elements are upset about the symbolism of Gitmo itself rather than the fact that their comrades are incarcerated.

Anyway, I’ve long questioned the idea that there is an endless supply of hothead fanatics ready and willing to give their lives for the cause of destroying the US. If Gitmo has been such an effective recruiting tool where are they and what have they done? To the US homeland, that is. I think it’s more likely that immediately after 9/11 they celebrated a lot and then started to ask themselves what they really accomplished. The US mourned the loss of the victims but hardly skipped a beat on the whole. And they recognized that things were now a lot tougher on them. They all had to leave Afghanistan and go find new digs (literally) in Pakistan.

Perhaps too they came to believe that the 9/11 attack just turned out to be a huge recruiting tool for the Americans.

President Obama is boasting about coming in under budget on one of his spending plans. He doesn’t bother to point out that all the money he spent is money the government doesn’t have. He is bragging about the few dollars that he won’t spend.  This is like me bragging to my wife that I only spent $99,000 more than I made this year instead of the $100,000 that I planned to spend. For me a thousand bucks is not pocket change but what’s more important is the $99,000 that I did spend. And what’s more important for the country are the trillions of dollars that Obama is spending beyond what the government will “earn”.

But Obama knows that probably half the people who heard his comment will think he is talking about achieving a balanced budget — that is, no deficit spending. His team probably budgeted more than they meant to spend so that he could make this boast.

Based on a discussion I heard on Morning Joe this morning Obama apparently used the word “privacy” instead of “piracy” in making some remarks on the rescue of the ship captain taken hostage by pirates. He reportedly said something like: We have to take steps to eradicate privacy. Most likely he was reading from a teleprompter and the teleprompter had it wrong. Will this be Obama’s “misunderestimate” moment? Don’t count on it.

President Obama is embarking on another of his fantasies. He thinks he can rid the world of nuclear weapons. I would like to think that he is launching some very clever scheme to convince everyone else to destroy all their nuclear weapons while we secretly keep our own. But I don’t give him that much credit. I think he actually believes that giving up our nuclear advantage is the right thing to do.

Utopia would be a wonderful thing to achieve, but there is no chance that it will ever be achieved. No matter how nice we try to be there will always be someone looking for a weakness, a crack in the armor, an opening.  I would estimate that 99 percent or more of the world population would like nothing better than to live in peace, but it’s that other one percent that we have to worry about.  Among them are the power hungry and the crusaders. We can not afford to let our guard down for a second.

But that seems to be exactly what Obama wants to do. He wants to start destroying our nuclear capability as soon as the other nations possessing or developing a nuclear capability agree to do the same. I would expect Iran and North Korea to be the first two in line to sign the agreement. And then go back home and continue their development programs while laughing their asses off.

It’s an impossible goal, and Obama should know that. Sure, we can destroy all our nuclear weapons, but there is no way to ensure that everyone else destroys theirs. And there is no way to ensure that new weapons aren’t built to replace those destroyed.

Can you imagine a crime-mob boss seriously embarking on a mission to get the other mobs in his territory to destroy all their weapons and promise not to acquire more? Can you imagine the mobs actually abiding by the plan even after agreeing to it? Of course not. That’s why they’re called criminals. They don’t follow rules unless the rules work to their advantage. It’s a hard, cold fact that many nations are little different from crime-mobs.

Too many nations and factions know too much about the production of nuclear weapons for any kind of control to be 100 percent effective. Unfortunately it only takes one breach of the controls for havoc to be wreaked.