Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Socialized Healthcare

Linda and I just got back from Indoor Flying. I have this small foamy indoor flyer called an Ember. It flies well. Linda is a good sport and goes with me and reads her Kindle while I fly.

Ron suggested that we get together on Wednesday evening for a “Build Session.” I didn’t really commit because two Wednesdays a month I have meetings where I'm the secretary. Still, I like the idea and might suggest we look for an alternative night.

Today was mostly working on blocking and splitting wood. It was nice outside but the good weather isn’t going to last. All too soon the snows will come and I’ll be wishing I'd started earlier on my firewood mission.

I see the President’s having to back-peddle on the Affordable Healthcare Act. What happened here is a great example of defining a solution rather than a problem. If you don’t know the difference between defining a problem and formulating courses of action you should take a moment, pause and note the distinction.

In the problem solving process the problem is defined as finding (determining) the best way of doing something. Next the facts and assumptions are stated followed by formulating courses of action. When we skip the first two steps and immediately jump to the third we are defining a single solution rather than the problem. We wind up with a light switch outcome. “My way or the Highway.” This brings us back to the old definition of "Good" (Pre Greek) which was anything the Big Cahuna said it was.

The problem in this case was to determine the best way to take care of uninsured citizens. The Affordable Health Care Act was one possible solution, which in retrospect is clearly a far cry from being the optimal one. If the Administration had taken the time to go through the process they could have saved themselves a whole lot of grief. Instead they decided to go with the first thing that entered their socialist inclined thinking and we wound up with Obama Care.

Leadership is knowing “Best” and getting others to do it. It is an optimization process. Determining Best is the old problem solving process given to us by the Greeks. When we hip-shoot a course of action without first defining the problem, getting the facts and stating the assumptions we are setting ourselves up for a suboptimal solution which is what happened with the President's Flagship Legislation. Instead it has become the focus of derision and ridicule. There is a mechanism in the human psyche that elicits a hysterical reaction known as laughter when the delta between expectation and reality get too far apart. This approach has a fatal flaw. The younger workers are not going to want to pay for old people’s healthcare. DUH! Older aged workers are not going to want to pay for things like abortions, birth control and maternity leave. To avoid the penalty, all a taxpayer will have to do is make sure they do not pay enough income tax to qualify for a refund. The only way the government can currently fine someone who doesn’t play ball is to take it out of their income tax refund. Does that make you tremble in your boots or what?

Those rushing to sign up for Obama-Care are those with expensive preexisting medical problems. Eventually the web site problem will be fixed and there will be an opportunity to check out the Exchanges. For the first year or two the Government will be investing big time in subsidies as it becomes evident that there are more takers than contributors. The currency press will be cranked up another notch, more bonds will be sold to the Chinese and more of our dwindling gold supply will be dumped on the world market. When these subsidies balloon to the point they can no longer be ignored, they will have to be curtailed. When that happens, insurance costs are going to skyrocket as the gulf between the givers and the takers reaches critical mass. Suggesting that anything the Government gets involved with is going to save money for the working class is wishful thinking. Soon there will be more people without health insurance than there were before government intervention. Obama-Care is flawed beyond fixing and if the administration had two marbles they would scrap this failed legislative attempt, and go back, redefine the real problem, face the facts, and make some intelligent assumptions regarding how the tax payers can be expected to behave in the future… then they could begin examining some possible solutions that make some sense.