An Ignored Impact Of US Health Care Reforms

An aspect of 'optimizing' political decisions is playing off internal interests against external interests - what is good for your voters/citizens against what is good for people outside of your precint as and when their interests are in conflict. Obviously, you have to satisfy your own voters, but at the same time, pissing off foreign allies and trade partners makes for very difficult situations. How much will, can and should you screw over everyone else for 'your people' !?!

Consider, for example, Obama's healthcare reforms. No doubt, for Americans it's a pretty good deal - at least for the average people on the street, if not necessarily for insurance companies and other corporate types. Of course, a hit to financial corporations has repurcussions that hit all areas of society down the road - so over time whether or not the decision is good for Americans is something that, well, time will decide. At least, in the short run, it's good for regular Americans.

But to follow through with the reform promises which will suddenly make healthcare available to tens of millions of Americans who hitherto were denied it either partially or completely, Obama will have to hire shiploads of new doctors. Given the timeframe, he will have to do so quickly. This means getting more homegrown doctors is not a practical option. He will have to import most of them. Now, most of these doctors are going to be taken from poor countries like the Phillipines, India, China, Bulgaria, etc...

This means that a lot of poor countries, which are already starved for good doctors, will be deprived of even more of them. And remember, the US is not going to take the run of the mill, average physicians, it's going to take the cream of the crop. Furthermore, as you go on adding doctors to a population each new doctor added helps fewer and fewer people. However, the number of people deprived of doctors increases exponentially with every doctors who leaves. This means that every doctor who comes to the US from, India or China, will be helping far fewer Americans than he or she will be hurting Indians or Chinese.

In summary, Obama's decision is likely help many Americans (at least in the short-medium term) while screwing over many more in the third world. As the US president, of course, his duty is to his people, so of course you can't really blame him for his decision. But it is an awkward decision to have to take. More than anything else, this highlights the 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' nature of politics.

It's probably a stretch connecting this medical piracy with invading people for oil. After all, the US isn't exactly invading the countries it's going to be taking doctors from. However, taking thousands of doctors from a country is obviously going to cause all manner of medical crises among the society left behind. The case could be made that this decision could really hurt a lot of poor people in the third world. In a world where India, China and other poor countries - despite their poverty - are becoming too powerful for the US to treat lightly, this may make things very hot for the President.

I should point out as a sort of disclaimer, that this very pessimistic post is based on an assumption that the US will need many more doctors, and that this is how the US will go about getting them. This may not necessarily be the case.

Engineers In Politics

It is in the nature of politics that there always has to be compromise. So I'm always rather surprised that more engineers and mathematicians are not involved - given how much of optimization is required. For instance, you are perpetually trying to maintain a very fine balance between taxation and providing public services and that requires considable opmization. Maybe there are loads of engineers working behind the scenes, I'm not sure.

The general drawback to having engineers as political optimizers, I suppose, is that they tend to be people who look at the problem completely dispassionately. This is fine if what you want is the best objective solution to the problem at hand, but that may not be what the voters want. When you consider voter demands - and you have to; that's kind of the point - you are bringing emotion into the problem, and engineers are not exactly experts at handling that. Perhaps engineers do get hired, but only after they get an MBA or something to get people skills and learn how to be pricks. It would be interesting to see how many politicians/beaureaucrats have backgrounds in engineering or mathematics or some other technical science.

Fun In The Sky

Speaking of glass floors, they should have an all glass section on airplanes. That would be amazing. Vomit everywhere.

Tall Tale

I went to the CN tower some time ago. I don't mean near it - I pass it on most days. No, I went up the tower. They have an observatory close to the top. The view is nice enough, though all told, you're still looking at Toronto, so there's only so much niceness to be got out of it. They really should move the tower to Vancouver - now that would give people a view. Anyway, the point is, the observatory has a glass floor. Most of the glass is carpeted over, but one small slice is left uncovered so that people can experience the joy of vertigo, I guess. On the day I was there, I was joined, among other visitors, by a very sweet young family - mum, dad, a boy of about 5, and his year old sister (asleep on dad's shoulder). The boy, with the typical abandon of young children was prancing on the glass floor, along with the other young kids, many of whom were practically jumping up and down in an effort to break the floor. Dad followed him with marked gingerness. But mum was absolutely terrified. She just refused to go anywhere near that arc of exposed glass. So, of course, the kid made it his mission of the day to get her onto it. He took her hand and tried to lead her to it. He jumped up and down to show the glass was sturdy. He even trotted out the claim the tower employee had made to everyone on the way up - that the floor could take the weight of eleven elephants, so there was nothing to worry about. But mum just wasn't convinced. The whole episode, and espicially the little bugger's insistence on getting mummy on the floor was hugely amusing.

This got me thinking about the nature of belief and knowledge. Most people seem to assume that belief exists only in the absence of adequate knowledge. If you know, you don't need to believe. And yet, here was another case where someone knew there was a floor, could see many other people actually walking on it, and yet couldn't bring herself to walk onto it because she just didn't believe. Sometimes you just have to have faith, I guess.

My musing had got to this point when it was interrupted by one of the sweetest incidents ever. Dad, who had started out gingerly (and had probably walked onto the glass floor purely under the influence of ego) had by now managed to get comfortable. He put the infant, who had woken up, down to crawl about with the other little ones. Then he walked over to his wife, picked her up and took her over to the glass floor. After a while, when she felt confident enough, she stood on the floor while holding onto him. And then, on a little slice of glass on the top of the world, they danced.

Taste

People always talk of how taste is all about the tongue and the palate and the olfactory bulb. And these are all valid claims. The thing is, no one seems to mention the throat. And yet, to me, when it comes to food, there is tremendous pleasure in the swallow. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. It's strange that no one seems to have written about this.

The Essence Of Test Cricket

T20 may well be the rage of the age, but it will struggle to provide this:

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --

Ten to make and the match to win --
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.

(From Newbolt's 'Vitai Lampada')

More On Democracy

On a related note - can a pure democracy exist, even in theory !?! Surely it is a contradiction in terms. Consider the following chain of reasoning:

1. In a pure democracy, everything is dictated by the will of the majority.

2. A person's rights, however, exist regardless of popular opinion.

3. Therefore, in a pure democracy, there are no rights, only privileges which people enjoy as long as the majority allows them to.

4. If there are no rights, there is no right to vote.

5. If the right to vote does not exist, then the government in power cannot be a democracy.

6. But the government in power IS a democracy.

7. This is a contradiction.

8. Therefore, a pure democracy cannot exist. QED.

Is this proper reasoning !?! If not, what gives !?!

On Democracy

I find it funny that a lot of my well-meaning, lefty friends from Vancouver constantly extol the virtues of democracy while simultaneously talking about the divine nature of human rights. As I see it, democracy is antithetical to the very concept of rights. A person's rights exist regardless of popular opinion - that's kind of the point of rights.

In a goverment where everything is dictated by the will of the majority, there can be no rights. People can only have privileges which they enjoy as long as the majority allows them to. The rights which we enjoy, therefore, exist not because of democracy, but in spite of it. And, importantly, they protect us from the excesses of democracy.

I note this because there is a tendency (in Canada, the US and all the other Western countries which are currently trying so hard to bring the 'peace of democracy' to the world's many troubled regions) to assume that democracy is the supreme good - that once that is achieved, everything else will fall neatly into place. On the contrary, democracy, if established before the establishment of a strong tradition of the observance and protection of human rights will only lead to tribal warfare and mob rule. I wonder if the policy makers have considered this and accounted for it in their democratic crusade. I hope so, because the alternative is altogether too depressing.