Tuesday, January 19, 2010

We are well and truly fucked

Republican Scott Brown has won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. Just when I thought there might be some hope for the future.

3 comments:

Dennis Gorelik said...

That's actually a good thing:
If Republicans take over Senate (and Congress), then economy would improve and Obama would have a good chance to get re-elected in 2012.
Hopefully it would resemble "Clinton with Republicans" era of mid and late nineties (when ability of government to hurt the economy was very limited).

Ron said...

When I wrote that I had health care reform particularly in mind. But you're right, considering what a hash Congress has already made of health care reform, just having them do nothing might not be such a bad thing.

Teddy Kennedy must be rolling over in his grave though.

Momus said...

Arrghh - The health care

Years ago Clintons screwed up their chance.
And now the democrats are on their way to screw up again. Instead of simplifications and a universal _basic_ insurance we will likely end up with more complications and the same or worse mess. The nincompoops in government have no appreciation for simplicity. Like with all other bills they pass, they don't understand that their convoluted bills end up with huge unintended costs and other bad side effects.

Part of the problem is that some of those well meaning keep pretending that insurance can cover everything, with no limits. So the opponents are often right about costs which can not be possibly met.

We should start by enforcing standardization and portability of existing insurance plans. Standardize several levels of basic plans, so the list of what is covered by these is the same across all insurance companies. Without this, we can't even compare plans from different insurers without devoting impossible amount of time reading all small print references and making random guesses on what kind of health problems we are likely to face.

And when it comes to the universal coverage, set a reasonable list of what is and is not covered by some basic level Medicare plan, and let anybody buy a policy if Congress can't agree that everybody should be covered by it as paid by taxes. Basic level of insurance will not cover many things, but at least it is a start. And those who can afford can buy supplemental insurance. We should never pretend that universal insurance will provide health care available to those who are rich. This simply can not happen.

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BTW, here is how I got to your page:
I was looking up web-page editors.
Google'd to some http://www.techsupportalert.com page about editors.
Went back to their home page.
Somehow browsed to their "100+ Places for Free Books Online" page
http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/
searched for quantum
Browsed several pdf files and run into your Quantum Mysteries Disentangled
then to your http://www.flownet.com/ron/xooglers.html
and then here...
Thanks for asking :-)