Excellent Obama ad

Superdelegates should let the voters decide

MoveOn did a full page ad published in USA Today today on the superdelegates issue. You can see my name just to the left of “Add your name at www.moveon.org.”

Health care debate

The moral debate about health care has been raging on ever since the 60’s and the “Great Society” it’s probably why we haven’t really moved forward all that much since. This is not so much a moral debate as it is one of economics.

Why has health care spending doubled from 1990 - 2000 and then doubled again between 2000 - 2007? If we keep doubling every 7-10 years nobody not even the rich will be able to afford it. Secondly, why do we American’s spend 2x the normal amount of our GDP(and rising) compared to the rest of the civilized world on health care. According to the UN we are not even close to the top of the list for quality of care. Universal Health care won’t help anybody if we can’t afford to pay for it.

We probably need to do something a little more drastic at this point. Like federal regulation capping the amount doctors, hospitals, insurance and drug companies can charge people. We should also have a constitutional amendment stating that Medicare and Medicaid must be fully funded. The Federal Government should probably take control of Medicaid from states if necessary to make sure people who can’t afford it get coverage. We could also provide tax incentives to hospitals, doctors and drug companies for working on self-regulation of cost such as digitizing records etc..

BTW, Obama’s health care plan is a good start but I am a little down on this whole debate because it really doesn’t address the underlying issues of the overwhelming cost of health care. I doubt that anybody’s proposed ways to reduce cost are going to work without some federal incentives or regulation.

I had to drop my employers health care. Because, it was $1,100k a month for my family + $3,500k deductible + 20% of all other cost. (It’s a difficult issues for my employer. There is not a lot they can do about it.) Because, my daughter has health issues we spent almost $20k in one year and it wasn’t even a major health catastrophe. I had to drop that plan because it sent me to the poor house. I now have private “Major Medical” which I pay $500.00 a month for. It covers major health issues but requires me to pay out of pocket for everything esle. It does give me a plan discount for office visits(I pay what an insurance company would pay for an office visit). We still spend a small fortune but not nearly as much as we were. Reducing cost is the MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES. Cost have increased way beyond the cost of living since 2000 that’s just not going to work long term.

Sources,

1.) Spending and GDP numbers quoted from California HealthCare Foundation (HealthCare Cost 101).

NBC has Obama Leading

Politics & Barack Obama

I have tried to refrain from posting about political topics on this blog. However, today marks a change in that policy. I will have more to say about why I voted and support Barack Obama for President soon.

Think gOS

Interesting

http://www.thinkgos.com/index.html The Google OS that’s not created by Google.

Here is the iso image.

External Drive for Time Machine

I have been wanting to get a external Fire Wire drive for my G5 iMac for a while now. Upgrading to OS X 10.5 gave me a great reason with Time Machine. I found a reasonable priced Seagate Free Agent Pro 320gb drive from Tiger Direct for only $109.00 it’s going to be used as my backup for my internal 250gb drive.

While I was at it. I decided to increase my RAM to 2gb another great deal for $104.00 from Tiger Direct.

Weird I just installed 10.5

This is weird. I just installed 10.5 and my keyboard back light started working. I never sent it back when I purchased it late last year.

Yeah!  

Scripting News Working In Opera

Dave has a challenge that his tree code is not working in Opera. I was able to fix it up and meet all of his requirements. Here is the code.

1. Flush

2. Works in Opera (see pic below)

3. Able to nest

4. Fast(only a few lines of code)

The Ny Times open archive and Amazon Mechanical Turk

I am sure everyone has heard the news that the Ny Times has opened up their archive. However, while following a link to Custer’s Last Stand only part of the article is reproduced. To view the full article you have to read the scanned PDF version (yuck). I bet they would increase their traffic ten fold if they were able to translate all there scanned articles. Sounds like a great job for Amazon Mechanical Turk.