On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Dan Minette <danmine...@att.net> wrote:
> I have tended not to answer you John because I have not been able to solve > the problem of dialog with you. Whenever I use facts or correlations to > support an argument you point to the causal density of economics (not your > term but a neat term I found explaining why social sciences aren't science) > to state that there is no way to use data to point to conclusions....even if > the data is so simple as people getting negative interest from T-Bills shows > an extreme flight to safety. Your difficulty is caused by your belief that a few simple data points can accurately predict how a complex system will behave in the future. You refuse to accept that it cannot be so. If it were so, then there would be people who consistently predict things like the unemployment rate or the chances of Fannie Mae blowing up. But what we actually see are the experts rarely getting their predictions correct, such as this: http://michaelscomments.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/june-2010-unemployment-numbers-theyre-real-and-theyre-spectacular/ > But, in this case, we have an obvious solution. It may be an obvious thing to do, but it is not obviously a solution to the problem of how to pay for the best medical care for Americans. > While folks have heard horror stories about > medical care in the UK and Canada, etc. surveys of satisfaction with care > get greater percentages of people who are satisfied in those countries than > in the US....so they can't be all that worse. Satisfaction surveys (for all areas) are notorious for being unreliable. The results depend on how you ask the question. And it is never clear what you are actually measuring. One well-known phenomenon is that people tend to respond to these things relatively -- if they are better off than their neighbor, then they are happy. But that makes the results of happiness surveys difficult to interpret, since each person may be measuring relative to a different benchmark. I prefer to consider more objective measurements for judging health care quality. For example, 5-year-survival-rates for a given serious disease. > If we paid primary care physicians $100k/year, specialists $130k/year, and > about as much as every other developed country for all the other parts of > medical care, as well as required malfeasance for malpractice, we'd be able > to reverse the inflation in Medicare....and have costs in line with what is > affordable. Are you suggesting that we prohibit by law anyone from paying doctors more than your proposed amounts? If so, I would strongly oppose such a law. I find the idea of putting someone in jail because they paid a doctor too much to be reprehensible. If you mean that we should create a two-tiered health care system, one where the doctors agree to treat the national health-care plan people and to have a salary cap, and a premium tier for those doctors who do not want a salary cap and for those who can afford to pay their rates, well. I do not find that as repellant as the first option, but I do not think it will work. The people in the lower tier will be always clamoring for the higher quality, higher cost care of the higher tier, and so the costs will keep rising quickly, just as they are now. > As for Social Security, if we capped the highest SS payment to inflation > instead of the increase in the average income, I agree it is a good idea, but it is not a new idea. The fact that the Carter administration changed it despite objections about the unsustainability, and that it has not been fixed yet, makes me wonder what the chances are that it will be done now. > and got back on the > GDP/capita growth rate of 1960-2005 (number picked out of my head, not > cherry picked. Pick any other two dates between 1940 and 2007 which are at > least 30 years apart, and I'll be happy to use that.) I hope that GDP growth can return to that rate, but it seems we have a long way to go to get there from here. > The real problem, as I see it, is that the GDP > growth from 2000-2008 was mostly tied to the housing bubble and bank > profits. If you look at jobs growth from 1939-2010, and take a mean > percentage growth per year as the baseline, you will see the US starting to > fall off the baseline in 2001. The last 3 years have been very bad, but > real growth stopped when the internet bubble burst. Yup. _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
