HEALTHY ONLINE

Healthcare.gov was “experiencing technical difficulties” again yesterday, but the system is up now. Thirty days after it went live, the Federal insurance marketplace, the flagship of Obamacare, is still hopelessly broken, much to the delight of those who predicted that Obamacare will be the end of our way of life, and to the equal chagrin of those equating Obamacare to LBJ’s Medicare, or even FDR’s New Deal. In one of a long string of interminable Congressional hearings, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is taking full responsibility for the broken website. A broken website, is what our entire government is now busy dissecting. How was it designed, how was it tested, how was it paid for, and above all whose fault is it, because we need to hang somebody, preferably the President, and the entire Obamacare legislation with him. All this moaning and groaning won’t work. Obamacare will be adopted, and we have data to support this assertion. So Obamacare has some seriously faulty ...

On his campaign trails, Harry Truman used to call on citizens to go out and vote for themselves, in their own selfish interests. It may sound shallow and divisive, but Harry Truman believed that the individual interests of the people should trump the special interests of the powerful few, and that’s how Democracy should work. Those were simpler times, but the logic still applies today, although it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people to figure out where their selfish interests lie, not because interests have changed, but because the art of spinning messages and the sheer amounts of cash thrown at it have grown beyond what Harry Truman could have imagined. Take for example the controversy around the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, which was spun into one little question: do we want the government to give more poor people health insurance, while forcing everybody else to pay for it? If yes, vote Democrat. If no, vote Republican. But Obamacare...

Health IT is booming, or so they say. The hotly debated and highly politicized health care reform, a.k.a. Obamacare, has been shining bright lights on a segment of our economy that is quickly approaching $3 Trillion per year, and is in dire need of improvement, or so they say. Depending on who you ask, some say that health care resources must be redistributed in a more equitable manner, while others contend that health care must be made more parsimonious, or both. But regardless of nuances and variations, all seem to agree that health care must cost less in aggregate. Somewhere around the turn of the 19th century, give or take a few decades, we figured out how to make things cost less in aggregate, and we have been applying the same principles to an ever increasing array of things that went from being luxuries reserved for Kings and magnates, to being household items taken for granted by every pauper. And we’re not done yet, not by a longshot, but our cost reducing tools have changed f...