The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Issues2004
: Fred Wilson has posted two more good replies to my Issues2004 posts on health insurance and homeland security. If you’ve posted replies on your blogs, please leave links in the comments; the point of this is to discuss the issues so let’s discuss. (And now I feel guilty I haven’t posted the next one, having wasted time on Dan Rather and all that. Shame on me.)
I’ve posted my responses to your Issues2004 posts so far at Iraq, Health care, and Homeland security.
For some reason or other Technorati isn’t picking up most of my posts (they don’t show up when you search for Issues2004). Mysterious are the ways of Technorati.
I’ve also been promoting the living daylights out of this discussion with Top 1000 bloggers to try to get some traction for this discussion. Please spread the word, folks. These are the discussions we should be having.
One point that none of the commenters on health care have made. Health care is a labor intensive service industry, and is therefore less amenable to improvment via productivity gains.
There was a period a few years ago where health care costs stabilized for a while. As someone with family working in the industry, I can tell you what I saw happen: 1) the computer revolution kicked in and billing moved to on-line automated systems; 2) most providers moved to a three tier system of charges: Medicare/Medicaid lowest, contracted health insurance middle, everyone else highest; 3) lots of jobs were eliminated or moved to lower-skilled staff (i.e. nurse jobs moved to techs, tech jobs moved to high school grads with a week or two of training); and 4) providers moved from personalized friendly care to assembly line medicine (a primary care doctor can’t afford to see a patient for more than a few minutes at a time any more). This picked most of the low-hanging fruit in cost reduction and productivity gains.
So, health care is in the siutation of being an industry that, from what I can see, is gaining in productivity slower than the economy as a whole. On one of the economics-oriented blogs I saw a post that said that it is a truism in economics that if you have a good or service that is in this situation, it will become more expensive (in relative terms) than other goods. I remember when color TVs cost more than an appendectomy. It still takes a doctor the same amount of time to do one, but I’ll bet the labor in making a color TV is less than 10% of what it was in the 60s.
Without some way to increase productivity, health care will get more and more expensive.
My post on homeland security is here.
My post on homeland security – fwiw.
To have homeland security, we need to get control of our borders. I don’t have a specific reply, but my Immigration category is chock-full of news stories highlighting Bush’s incredible failures regarding illegal immigration and border security. How anyone could regard him as the homeland security president is beyond me.
Also:
Bush wants to give social security to illegal aliens. Price tag: hundreds of billions.
Bush, the banking industry, Nanci Pelosi, Barney Frank, the CPUSA, and the Mexican government all support banks being allowed to accept Mexican IDs. The FBI and the DOJ call those Mexican IDs a security threat. (See also 222 House Members Put Interests of Banking Lobby Ahead of Homeland Security)
In an interview, our so-called border czar basically admitted he wasn’t doing his job. See “Hutchinson
