Routing around damage

By Michael Fraase

Saturday, 03 January 2009 02:16PM CST

Section: ESRD

Health insuranceFree marketeers are cute; they really are. Faced with an unquestionably failed economic policy, they solider on. It’s fascinating how they can robotically recite—with a straight face and fierce precision—that any government intervention whatever in any market leads to disaster. Like I said, fascinating.

There are, for better or worse, some sectors of an economy that are beyond market capabilities and can only be adequately and appropriately handled by government. Healthcare, for example. I knew this even before I got sick, but it was driven home for me like a shot between the eyes when I realized that without US government intervention in healthcare, I’d be dead.

When asked to provide evidence of a US government program that actually works, I point—without hesitation—to Medicare. That’s not to say it’s perfect—it’s not by a long shot—but it unquestionably works.

The US spends 16 percent of gross domestic product on healthcare. Most other industrialized nations spend roughly half that. Medicare is more efficient than market-driven alternatives; spending three percent or less of its budget on administrative overhead (.pdf; 72Kb), for example, compared to private insurers who spend a whopping 20% of their budgets.

The free marketeers were wrong about just about everything. Instead of arguing the point, it’s time to route around the damage they wrought and let markets work for the things they do well and find other options for those things best handled outside a market economy. Let’s start with an overhauled healthcare system free from the market and its attendant profit-driven motives.

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The problem with home vacations

By Michael Fraase

Tuesday, 30 December 2008 07:20PM CST

Section: Spirituality

Minnesota's north shore at Naniboujou Lodge
Minnesota’s north shore at Naniboujou Lodge.

Tim O’Reilly tweeted this earlier today:

“It’s amazing how much easier it is to be on vacation when away from home. A home vacation is too easy to turn into work catchup.”

No shit. As I’ve written previously, the idea of someone else paying me while I’m on vacation is mostly a foreign concept to me. And the notion that I’m accruing additional vacation time while on vacation just stops me in my tracks. Spending 25+ years self-employed will do that.

I took vacation time December 18-26 (with two paid holidays in the mix). The mistake was staying home: All I did was catch up with ARTS & FARCES work and everyone knew I was here so the emails didn’t stop.

The trick that I’ll have to remember is to do what I did last summer: get out of town, leave the laptop at home, and wander somewhere without mobile phone service.

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Revisiting Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 28 December 2008 01:18PM CST

Section: Media

The New JournalismIn 1972, Tom Wolfe defined what he called the New Journalism in two seminal articles in New York magazine, “The Birth of the New Journalism: Eyewitness Report” and “The New Journalism: A la Recherche des Whichy Thickets” (maddeningly unavailable on the web). Here’s how he described the idealized old journalism in the former:

“God knows I didn’t have anything new in mind, much less anything literary, when I took my first newspaper job. I had a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea ... Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the News peeing into the Chicago River at dawn ... Nights down at the saloon listening to “Back of the Stockyards” being sung by a baritone who was only a lonely blind bulldyke with lumps of milk glass for eyes ... Nights down at the detective bureau—it was always nighttime in my daydreams of the newspaper life. Reporters didn’t work during the day. I wanted the whole movie, nothing left out ...”

Wolfe goes on to describe the reality of the 1962 New York Herald Tribune as “wreckage and exhaustion everywhere… painted over in an industrial sludge…” populated with scoop reporters and his fellow feature writers.

From the 1930s through the early 1960s, the novel was the holy grail for the then unnamed creative class. The day’s novelists came seemingly from an obscure nowhere, Wolfe observed: “The author, you would be assured, was previously employed as a hod carrier (Steinbeck), a truck dispatcher (Cain), a bellboy (Wright), a Western Union boy (Saroyan), a dishwasher in a Greek restaurant in New York (Faulkner), a truck driver, logger, berry picker, spindle cleaner, crop duster, pilot ... There was no end to it ... Some novelists had whole strings of these credentials ... That way you knew you were getting the real goods ....” Journalists were allowed in the club (New York’s White Horse Tavern on Hudson and 11th) only as would-be novelists. “There was no such thing as a literary journalist working for popular magazines or newspapers.

More...

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