Health Care Debate

At the time I'm writing this the nation is hotly debating President Obama's health care reform ideas. One of the most contentious ideas is whether or not we should have a public option (government-provided health care).

I think we should give serious consideration to this idea--but not yet. Yes, the need is absolutely dire, but we'd be getting the cart before the horse in a dangerous way.

If we started providing complete or partial health coverage under the current U.S. health system the government would quickly bankrupt itself. Before we discuss a public option we need to completely address the cost structure of health care, which means driving costs out of care at all levels and capping the profit motive of private insurers (similar to utility company regulations). If ever all of these costs are brought under some sense of rational control, then let's discuss forms of government-provided coverage.

I'm not advocating socialism. Health (especially health insurance) is not a free-market business. The laws of supply and demand are very skewed here. How much will you pay to save your life? All you have, of course. So the built-in incentive to insurance companies is to charge as much as they can and provide as little as they can. Good business if we're talking about radios, cars, or cups of coffee because the market will counter the raw profit motive and create a price point. As prices rise, at some price a normal person will decide not to buy the fancy coffee. When enough people agree at that price, a price point is created and the seller will not be able to charge more without losing business. Not so in medicine. I propose that what appears to be a market price point in health insurance is in fact a wealth indication of people who can afford the insurance directly or happen to work at a decent-sized company that offers benefits. In that equation people will pay all they can until they can pay no more--there is no elastic point where an average person opts not to pay more for insurance. As prices rise they will pay more until they simply can't, then fall out of the system. The large insurance companies are playing a very twisted games of macro economics with no balancing power resting on the consumer side of the table to make a true market price. To put it more crisply, they are setting a wealth-indexed price point, not a market driven price point.

Where do these wealth-indexed profits go today? To the shareholders and executives of the insurance companies. More specifically they leave the health care system and provide no benefit to the insured or the medical community.

I believe there is some analogy to the electricity industry, e.g. how much would you pay for power? Maybe not everything you have, but certainly as much as you could. So to keep electricity from becoming a wealth-indexed commodity and see entire poorer regions of cities go dark governments set the price point (or they used to prior to deregulation). Why can't we do this for health insurance? It should be regulated to be a barely-profitable venture--just enough so some will want to be in the business. As a nice side effect this should also create a very stable investment vehicle for the risk-adverse.

Get all that put together--then let's talk about the government's involvement in health provisioning.

Looking for God

I've been reading a lot of online posts contributed by atheists on sites like reddit.com and others. So many seem to be better described as anti-theists (hate God, or the idea of God) vs. a-theists (don't care if God is there or not). There was one post by someone who very clearly seemed to have been bitterly disappointed that God did not respond to a major need in his or her life and therefore concluded God's non-existence. I wondered if that was a common experience of other atheists.

This is a common problem for believers, isn't it? Hasn't everyone been disappointed in God's non-appearance at some critical juncture of their life? I thought about this a bit and concluded that there should be a way to try to see God's existence by inference.

We can devise an exercise where the participant records prayer requests of various kinds: large, small, specific, more general. Then record any important events impacting the outcome of the request. The criteria is key here: Success is not indicated simply by things working out according to the prayer request coming to pass as asked. If we suppose there is a God eternally greater than us then we must concede that His plans will many times far exceed our ability to understand. However this is not a cop-out. We should be able to differentiate a natural-order outcome of events from outcomes that appear to be directed--whether or not in the direction of the request.

For example, we accept the world is set in motion and laws of cause and effect apply. If you wonder whether you should join a mission trip to Mexico and you are able to buy a plane ticket--is that God's will? Not an indicating event either way. Companies sell tickets and people buy them. No divinity required. If, when you go to buy the ticket you discover you hit on a 1-day super-saver sale, or conversely the last possible seat just sold out yesterday, these would seem to be stronger indications of divine interaction with events in your life.

So to track your prayer request outcomes you need to examine the circumstances carefully. Don't read anything into natural order outcomes--things that would happen anyway to anyone in the same circumstances. Likewise don't dismiss as coincidental events that intervene into the natural order to shape the outcome. Treat the whole experience lightly and look at the broad outcome in panorama, not looking for flaming lightning bolts from heaven in single experiences. Did the broad outcome seem to be directed (in your "favor" or not) or did it seem to be only the result of natural order? My guess if I were to conduct this experiment is that you would see a mix of results.

What would this suggest? Well, for one it should encourage faith of God's existence if you believe any of the outcomes were divinely guided in any way (even against what you prayed). It would also suggest that not every little thing we do is part of some cosmic master plan. It just may be that eternity (and your life) will proceed just fine whether you decide to attend university A or university B--your choice, says God.

Bottom line is that there is still faith involved. Some people will choose to see events as purely natural order, which includes improbable, unforeseen intervening events, and not see a place for God in that world view. Others may see a God working in their life, perhaps frustratingly not in the ways we want or expect.