When one puts off packing until the morning of a trip, one tends to over pack.
I can't decide what to wear to the casual-ish wedding party on Saturday, so I've packed two skirts, three tops, and three shoes, which can be combined in seven different ways. I'll have to try on each outfit in the hotel room, and then make Steve tell me which outfit makes my butt look fat and which is the most appropriate for the event. He loves that game.
I never tire of torturing my husband.
I leave you with an open thread on health care politics. Talk among yourselves and tell me what I should read when I get back on Sunday.
Apt. 11d 
I can’t decide what to wear to the casual-ish wedding party on Saturday, so I’ve packed two skirts, three tops, and three shoes, which can be combined in seven different ways.
Couldn’t they actually be combined in 18 different ways? In theory, anyway.
I leave you with an open thread on health care politics. Talk among yourselves and tell me what I should read when I get back on Sunday.
Well, all my posts on the topic, obviously.
Hope you have a fun weekend. Weddings (and wedding parties) are great.
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Dday on Stewart’s thrashing of McCaughey here. I have the bill open in front of me now, and I’m looking at the section BM was talking about. She’s concerned about the PQRI, which was a Bush admin creation, fwiw. You can find info about the PQRI here.
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“Couldn’t they actually be combined in 18 different ways?”
That’s why all my shirts are blue and all my pants are brown. Everything matches, so I just have to decide how many stains on my shirt are too many for whatever function I’m attending.
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MH,
You with your fancy blue shirts! If you were a mathematician, you could get by with a couple dozen white shirts (acquired over a decade) instead.
(Every married woman I have spoken to on the subject has war stories of disposing of undesirable shirts in her husband’s wardrobe, at least a few of them dating back to junior high.)
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I don’t think I’m like that. My wife may have a different opinion, but her clothes occupy 3/4 of the closet space in the house, so I don’t listen.
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Three shoes! One of the greatest cartoons of all time was the Chas Addams where they are in bed, and she says to the mister, ‘That’s two. I’ll NEVER be able to sleep til he drops the third’…
Changes my mental image of you entirely, Laura.
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but, besides the three shoes remark, you asked what you should read. Here is a Stirewalt column from the Washington Examiner – he is NO FRIEND of Obama, clearly, but he is suggesting things are pretty dire. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obama-fighting-for-his-presidency_-not-reform-8114039-53354747.html Is it that bad? I vacillate. It does look like this has been poorly handled, but is the guy really the second coming of Jimmy Carter?
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I am the exception. My husband has had to dispose of undesirable shirts from my closet. “This was out of date the last time you wore it, and that was five years ago.”
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” I vacillate. It does look like this has been poorly handled, but is the guy really the second coming of Jimmy Carter?”
If so, it just proves that our country is really just full of people who want the government to keep their hands of their medicare, and as Elizabeth said in her blog, that people are going to get the government they deserve.
More substantively, I think that health care funding in this country is walking towards disaster, with its reliance on employment. The scheme makes the US uncompetitive, and skews the costs of employment. It plays the same role as pensions (used to, and do so less as we’ve privatized them), of making the cost of employing people in the US higher, and disconnected from the cost of the product being sold. Our backstops for providing medical care for the poor (i.e. emergency rooms) are slowly driving urban hospitals into despair and disrepair. Our unwillingness/inability to negotiate the cost of drugs means that we are subsidizing as a country drug-development for the rest of the world.
For a free-market ideologue, the solution is to make everyone pay for our health care/health insurance (perhaps by removing the current government subsidy in the form of tax breaks). But, I found the 1963 article by Kenneth Arrow (“Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care.”) reprinted by WHO in 2004 pretty convincing.
apps.who.int/entity/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf
The solution doesn’t have to be government sponsored health insurance (as in other industrialized countries). It could be privatized health insurance (as our pension system has become, though of course we have the theoretical backstop of social security).
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“The scheme makes the US uncompetitive…”
New plan: Run-up the foreign debt, use $ to build-up the navy and hoard resources, declare autarky.
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bj,
There’s been a lot of talk about getting the market working in health care over the years, and some of the following ideas have been floating around.
1. Even the playing field the other way around by allowing the individually insured to pay for their insurance with pre-tax dollars, just as the employer-insured already do.
2. Make it easier to carry-over HSA dollars from year-to-year. I keep hearing that you can theoretically do it, but whatever our account is has to be spent by the end of the year. I know what our basic medical expenses are, but I have no idea when we’re going to have a major catastrophic event so I can’t plan for it.
3. Everybody who isn’t poor ought to have at least $10k in cash available for emergencies.
4. Basic catastrophic insurance should be more widely available. (Sorry, states’ rights.)
5. As the saying goes, if you have your health, what do you need? I think we have a very distorted idea of medical spending. Somehow, it’s regarded as a huge injustice that one might have medical bills. I think health is important, and average and upper-income Americans need to get used to the idea that they ought to pay for it. If saving your life or your family’s life isn’t worth paying money, what is?
6. Medical institutions needs to be more transparent about what stuff costs. There should be price lists available. A patient should know in advance how much they are going to be spending when they go in for a planned procedure. (Of course, that doesn’t help in case of a genuine, time-sensitive emergency, but for a lot of the old-age stuff, there’s plenty of time to shop around.) The feds could publish lists of procedures and regional price medians, plus stats on doctors (years practicing, number of malpractice suits, news articles featuring them, number of times they’ve performed a particular procedure, etc). Some of that stuff is probably out there already, but not necessarily in a single place or in patient-friendly format. Planning a surgery should be at least as transparent a transaction as shopping for a car. And patients shouldn’t be shy about asking for a deal for cash. You can get a discount even today, if you ask in advance. At a lower level, it’s time for a Pap-Smears-R-Us or Jiffy Pap franchise, and the in-store clinics are a step in the right direction. I’m not going to pay a lot for a mammogram!
7. The feds also ought to maintain easy-to-understand online reference with regard to which procedures, therapies, and medications are most effective. They could also publish information for the public on cost-effectiveness.
8. Patients need to be willing to tell doctors: “That’s just too expensive and unlikely and I’m not going to do it,” to encourage doctors to go beyond mindless test-ordering. My dad (a cash patient) recently got a bump on the head. When he mentioned it to a doctor, the doctor immediately recommended an MRI, like some sort of Pavlovian response. My dad naturally didn’t follow up on the MRI suggestion. In the best of all possible worlds, maybe he should have had the MRI, but in the absence of other symptoms, it smells of lawsuit-avoidance medicine.
9. Most of the stuff I mentioned applies just to middle and upper-income people. The truly poor and the chronically ill are a different kettle of fish. I suppose we could fund catastrophic insurance and top off their accounts as needed.
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10. As in other areas (home loans, student loans, etc.), other-people’s-money has had a negative effect on medical costs. Without other people’s money (in the form of loans), the price of the average home in the US would never have soared to a quarter of a million dollars. Without other people’s money (in the form of student loans), we would never have gotten to the point where it is possible for undergraduates to wind up with six-digit debt before they’re old enough to legally buy a beer. In US medicine, likewise, it’s regarded as a sign of great injustice if you have to pay your own medical bills, and (highly discounted) third-party payments dominant the market (if market is the correct term for a system where there is so little information available and the purchasers aren’t price sensitive). Creating price sensitivity is the way out of soaring medical costs. No government cost-control system stands a chance faced with 300 million people who want to live, are used to more lavish care, and who can vote.
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