eisely

It is funny how many of us talk about the Canadian system will little specific knowledge of it. I could also be dead wrong, but I believe that it is a criminal violation for doctors to be in private practice in Canada. I have not made that point previously because I am not at all sure of it. That leaves open the question of who owns and operates the hospitals. If there are any Canadian neighbors participating in this forum who can provide specific knwleges, please share.

I certainly would not rely on trail markers. These have been known to be tampered with.

Yes it is likely that the Canadians who come to the US for care they cannot get in Canada will have to get in the back of the line behind all others, including the illegal aliens who likely will be eligible for Obamacare. Oh, the humanity!(This message has been edited by eisely)

Maybe your local scout shop should offer the obsolete badges on eBay to collectors. The inventory certainly isn't turning over very fast in the store is it.

As I understand it, what BSA is most concerned about is violent crimes and crimes involving children. I don't have a clue about how BSA would consider something like this. If Michael Vick can serve his time and get another chance at an NFL career, why should we keep a guy like this out of scouting if the facts as described are true? Having said that, I would not put some adult who had been convicted of embezzlement or other finanical crimes in charge of the troop treasury.

Sounds like service to me. I would have a conversation with the scoutmaster first if at all possible.

PeteM Nobody is trying to add to this requirement. There is legitimate uncertainty and some disagreement about how other service type activities undertaken under the auspices of other organizations should be treated. Certainly scouts should not be punished with extra service hours under a particular interpretation or unduly burdened. Double counting is clearly a widely acceptable practice. However, I don't think anybody is suggesting that scout units should automatically give full credit for any service hours claimed without at least some understanding of the nature of the service. Scout units probably would be well advised to think about this in the context of their local situations and come up with policies that are fair and even handed, and easily understood.

There is ample reason to slow down the process. When our representatives cannot explain the proposals and/or refuse to read the legislation altogether, it is time to slow down. When the non partisan Congressional Budget Office projects in excess of a trillion of additional deficits resulting from the legislation, it is time to slow down. I am betting that some kind of legislation will be signed by the end of 2009. Afer all, the democrats have solid majorities in both houses and the presidency. So there will be a piece of legislation, the question is what will be in it.

Speaking of life expectancies, the government just released some new data with some explanations. By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe, Ap Medical Writer Wed Aug 19, 5:57 pm ET ATLANTA U.S. life expectancy has risen to a new high, now standing at nearly 78 years, the government reported Wednesday. The increase is due mainly to falling death rates in almost all the leading causes of death. The average life expectancy for babies born in 2007 is nearly three months greater than for children born in 2006. The new U.S. data is a preliminary report based on about 90 percent of the death certificates collected in 2007. It comes from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Life expectancy is the period a child born in 2007 is expected to live, assuming mortality trends stay constant. U.S. life expectancy has grown nearly one and a half years in the past decade, and is now at an all-time-high. Last year, the CDC said U.S. life expectancy had inched above 78 years. But the CDC recently changed how it calculates life expectancy, which caused a small shrink in estimates to below 78. The United States continues to lag behind about 30 other countries in estimated life span. Japan has the longest life expectancy 83 years for children born in 2007, according to the World Health Organization. The CDC report found that the number of deaths and the overall death rate dropped from 2006 to about 760 deaths per 100,000 people from about 776. The death rate has been falling for eight straight years, and is half of what it was 60 years ago. Heart disease and cancer together are the cause of nearly half of U.S. fatalities. The death rate from heart disease dropped nearly 5 percent in 2007, and the cancer death rate fell nearly 2 percent, according to the report. The HIV death rate dropped 10 percent, the biggest one-year decline in 10 years. "It was kind of a surprise to see it go down so much" and it's unclear if it will be a one-year fluke or not, said Bob Anderson, chief of the agency's mortality statistics branch. The diabetes death rate fell about 4 percent, allowing Alzheimer's disease to surpass diabetes to become the sixth leading cause of death. Alzheimer's has been climbing the death chart in recent years, though that may be partly because declines in other causes are enabling more people to live long enough to die from Alzheimer's, Anderson said. The nation's infant mortality rate rose slightly in 2007, to 6.77 infant deaths per 1,000 births, but the rise was not statistically significant. It has been at about the same level for several years. That's not a shock, some experts said. Medical care improvements can improve infant survival, but they also mean that some troubled pregnancies now make it to infancy before death, said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Atlanta's Emory University. Another recent CDC report containing early data for 2008 counted 2.45 million deaths last year. That's an increase of more than 29,000 deaths from the 2.42 million deaths in 2007. CDC data sometimes changes as more records come in and researchers eliminate duplicate reports. But it's likely an increase will hold up because of the growing number of elderly, experts said.

There is a difference between exemption from income taxes and exemption from sales taxes. I suppose it is possible that in some states a non profit such as a BSA council can be exempt from sales tax, but then the problems of timing and documentation of the claim arise. If the basis for refusuing reimbursement of the sales tax is some sort of tax emption for the council, then the council needs to sort this out ahead of time before volunteers are asked to purchase anything, and provide those volunteers with the necessary documentation to claim any such exemption at the time of purchase.

Another form of a governmental death panel comes from World War I. As I understand it "triage" is a French word. The French military medical services would occasionally be overwhelmed with mass casualties beyond their capability to help. So as quickly as possible the wounded were sorted into three categories; (1)Those who would survive without immediate care who would wait, (2) Those for whom immediate care was both feasible and necessary to give the greatest chance of survival, and (3) Those who were so far gone that little if anything could be done. The principle is the same. Trying to make decisions about who will get the care and who will not get the care based on available resources. Certainly insurance companies are involved today in these decisions in their denial of coverage for some tests and procedures, but at least their decisions are rooted in a private contractual relationship, not government coercion. This is where we are headed with universal coverage which is the real goal of the Obama administration. If it were not so serious, the current controversies would be extremely entertaining. Rarely have so many politicians been caught in so many contradictions in so little time.

I treat anything coming out of the United Nations with a great deal of skepticism. That said, there is at least a partial explanation for the difference. Life expectancy at birth is exactly that. It is my understanding that the statistics are biased in part because we in the US take extreme measures to help preemies who might not be born alive in other countries. To enter the statistical data base one must be born alive and counted as having been born. If we are more aggressive in early delivery of babies who might not otherwise be borne alive, and more of those babies dies after they have been counted as a live birth, it is going to pull your statistics down. Think Octomom. It is likely that neither she nor many of her babies would have survived a natural child birth. I saw somewhere recently that our seniors do have markedly longer life spans than seniors in other countries praised as having superior government run systems. If anybody has better more complete data, it would be interesting to see real numbers.

I am aware that many high schools now require some level of community service as a graduation requirement. Such service is essentially coercive, not fully voluntary. I am not opposed to what the schools are doing. Frankly I have not given it a great deal of thought and my youngest is now 23 so I am way beyond worrying about this as a practical matter. Nevertheless, making such service a graduation requirement seems to me to be qualitatively different. If the only consideration received is the ability to participate in a ceremony, albeit a fairly important one, then that is much less coercive. I am not aware of any BSA guidance on this. It still is up to the unit as to what service they will recognize.

I did not address this in my earlier post, but for anything to be considered to be a community service, I would think that no payment of cash or any other consideration, such as class room credit, should be received by the boy rendering the service.

Now that I have your attention, the op ed below written by a Texas attorney appeared in the Washington Times. End of life decisions are wrenching difficult decisions. Many on this forum have been through this. The question is not whether such decisions will be made as they are made on a daily basis. When the federal government takes over control of the health care industry, the government will be forced almost immediately to deal with this. With so much of health care dollars being spent during the last two years of life, government intrusion is inevitable if the government is paying the bill. So think hard about who you would like to see making these decisions and how such decisions should be made. I for one want the government as far away from this as possible. __________________ Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who says President Obama's heath care reform would result in "death panels," needs to look no further than Texas to see a slippery slope like the one she envisions. In Texas, a legislative provision that many thought was an innocuous proposal to help people has been twisted to snatch end-of-life decisions out of the hands of families. The provision to which Mrs. Palin refers, Section 1233 of America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, would allow Medicare to pay doctors to counsel or steer end-of-life decisions for a patient every five years or more often "if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual" or an admission to a nursing home or long-term care facility. Both the White House and some members of Congress dispute Mrs. Palin's contention about how this language would play out, but based on what has happened in Texas, Americans should heed her warning. One of the drawbacks of trying to overhaul an industry as large and sweeping as health care on the short schedule demanded by the president is that there is not time to study how the legislation would work in the context of existing state law. The truth is, for many states, Mrs. Palin's assessment likely is dead-on, except the "death panels" would be hospital-run, not government-run. Consider Texas. The Texas Advance Directives Act of 1999 became law with support from a broad ideological spectrum, but one of its unintended consequences has been astounding. When a patient or family wants health care to continue but the attending physician does not, the Texas law allows a hospital committee to have the final say under the amorphous concept of "medical futility." Texas law only requires the hospital to provide the patient and family with 48 hours' notice before a hospital "ethics" committee meets and makes a decision on terminating life support. There are few due-process safeguards in the law to protect patients during this committee proceeding. Once the hospital ethics committee decides that further care is medically futile, the family is given just 10 days to find a facility that will accept the patient, or the hospital and doctors can end curative care with impunity. Virginia law is similar but gives the family 14 days. Furthermore, if the statute is followed, the hospital and others involved are cloaked with complete criminal, civil and licensing immunity. In other words, even if the hospital's decision to pull life support was incorrect, it is immune from lawsuit or prosecution. All this sounds quite like a "death panel" to me. Under Texas law, the hospitals are not just allowed to try to persuade a family to "pull the plug" but are allowed to take the action themselves and end all curative care if the family disagrees. When patients and their families are battling a serious illness, they are in a vulnerable frame of mind. Some physicians and hospitals will try to step in during this emotional time and impose their will even when it goes against the patient's and family's decision and belief system. I have seen numerous Texas cases in which health care providers have tried to split families in an attempt to find someone to support the hospital's desire to end care. In the end, though, under Texas law, the hospital can go against the family's wishes if the family will not agree to end the life of their loved one. The Texas experience should not be ignored in the face of proposed legislation that would nationalize a policy that further goes against individual rights. The proposal is to pay doctors to counsel patients on end-of-life decisions. In practice, those consultations likely would take place frequently, considering that it is left to the doctor to determine what a "significant change in the health condition" is. Further, imagine how worn out senior citizens might feel by the repetitive discussion each time they move between a nursing home, long-term care facility or hospital. The end-of-life provisions of the Obama health care plan would upset the balance of power in health care decision-making in favor of doctors and hospitals and against individuals and families. The federal legislation provides an economic incentive for doctors and hospital administrators to use Medicare funds to start hastening certain patient deaths a bit sooner under existing state laws. In Texas, that balance already is tipped in favor of the health care providers, and the proposed federal legislation would only make matters worse by placing more Medicare dollars on that side of the scale. Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, is rightly concerned that the end-of-life provisions in the proposed federal law could be "misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly." Federal lawmakers interested in protecting individual and patient rights need to study carefully the end-of-life provisions with the understanding that the law will be implemented in health care settings governed under 50 different sets of state law. Admittedly, the warning of "death panels" is a shocking claim. But when I inform people of the effect of the Texas law and how it has trampled on individual rights, they are understandably shocked. If the Texas Advance Directives Act has shown us anything, it is that governments should leave end-of-life decisions to patients and their families. Robert W. Painter, an attorney at Painter Law Firm PLLC, handles medical malpractice and other litigation matters and has testified on the Advance Directives Act in the Texas Legislature.

The following op ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 14. Whole Foods is a company that has tried hard to take its employees' views into consideration, offer what they really need, and contain costs at the same time. Further this CEO has the courage to speak up. For this some on the far left have declared a boycott of Whole Foods. __________________________ The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Margaret Thatcher With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us. While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite directiontoward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:  Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees' Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness. Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan's costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.  Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.  Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.  Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.  Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.  Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor's visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?  Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.  Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health careto equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter? Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments. Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor's Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million. At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearlythey want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an "intrinsic right to health care"? The answer is clearno such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.or in any other country. Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health. Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spendingheart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesityare mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices. Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age. Health-care reform is very important. Whatever reforms are enacted it is essential that they be financially responsible, and that we have the freedom to choose doctors and the health-care services that best suit our own unique set of lifestyle choices. We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health. We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society. Mr. Mackey is co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc.

I have been to the Havasu Falls campground twice and it is definitely worth the trip. One can hike further down the canyon as a day trip from the campground to the Colorado River. As far as the village goes, it is far from wealthy, but scarcely the slum that Gern suggests. Parts of South Central Los Angeles are far far dirtier and scarier. It is not too demanding a trek. Your younger scouts can do this. I think the only reason that the Havasupai reservation does not get more traffic is its remoteness. The trail head is not difficult to get to as the roads are all paved. It is just a long way from everything else. The rim to rim within the National Park alluded to is far more demanding and also available on a lottery basis.

If it gets more people off of their duffs and out of the house it is a good thing. Babies crawl before they walk and walk before they run.

Yet another editorial from the Wall Street Journal. I hadn't thought about the accounting gimmickry involved, but the federal government is engaging in exactly the same kind of accounting games that resulted in criminal charges against executives at Enron and Arthur Anderson, resulting in among other things, the destruction of Arther Anderson. This is not accidental. It is willful misconduct that may not be technically illegal, but is certainly reprehensible. Barney Frank has muct to answer for. WSJ editorial below. ____________________________________ When Larry Summers and his White House economic team next take up the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, one idea up for debate will be shifting the mortgage giants' bad assets into a government-owned "bad bank." Fannie and Freddie would be left with clean balance sheets and a new lease on life. But shifting around bad assets is the least of the Obama Administration's problems with these two failed "government-sponsored enterprises." The bigger issue is that all of Fan and Fred's liabilities, whether kept inside the companies or hidden in a dark corner of the Treasury, are now Uncle Sam's responsibility. Moving their bad assets into a new Baddie Mae would only preserve the fiction that there is a difference between the government's obligations and those of Fan and Fred. Not even Barney Frank could believe that any more. The best long-run solution would be to put the two into run-off mode, paying their debts as they come due and collecting whatever they can from the portfolios they currently hold. Relieving them of their mistakes so they can gamble again on the taxpayer dime would merely re-create the moral hazard that landed them in federal conservatorship. We know how that movie ends. Mr. Summers has long said that mixing private profit with public risk is bad policy, and we trust he doesn't want to repeat the mistake. A starting point for permanent reform would be to treat Fan and Fred, in the budget and on the federal balance sheet, as the government-owned creatures that they are. For the moment, despite 80% government ownership, their $85 billion bailout cost (with more losses to come) and their $5.4 trillion in taxpayer liabilities remain off-balance-sheet in the mold of Enron's special purpose vehicles or Citigroup's SIVs. The politicians who created and pampered Fan and Fred like it that way. They know that offering federal "guarantees" looks much cheaper, in the official accounting, than actual outlays. But whether it's Fan and Fred, or the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation or the Federal Housing Administration, these deferred promises seem to come due sooner or later. Perhaps the politicians would be less profligate in issuing such guarantees if they had to admit the cost up front. Putting Fannie and Freddie on the national books would in an instant increase the national debt held by the public by 75%to $12.7 trillion, from $7.3 trillion today. The nearby chart shows that this takes debt as a share of GDP to nearly 90%, or nearly double the peak it reached in the 1980s when the political class was hyperventilating even as the Reagan deficits were falling as a share of GDP. Congress would have to add that $5.4 trillion to the increase in the federal debt limit that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is now requesting. But that would be truth-in-budgeting. Wall Street has sold Fannie paper to the world as if it were as taxpayer guaranteed as Treasury bills, and now we know it is. Even as the companies careened toward failure a year ago, the Bush Administration was desperate to show it would cover all Fan and Fred debt. The Obama Treasury has been no different and has ginned up the two companies to expand their debts amid the housing meltdown by guaranteeing more residential mortgages. The Federal Reserve has bought $543 billion of Fannie and Freddie mortgage-backed securities and has plans to buy up to $1.25 trillion worth by year end. Foreign debt holders get the message. The only people who still might be fooled are the American taxpayers, who are ultimately responsible when the bills come due. The larger issue is the integrity of the national balance sheet. As government spending soars, the political temptation to use off-balance-sheet vehicles of various sorts will only increase. Barney Frank is even pushing a bill to make the feds guarantee U.S. municipal debt. The danger is that the federal government will itself become the next Enron, with its biggest liabilities hidden from view, officially denied or tucked away in special purpose vehicles like Fannie Mae. Until the next crisis hits. It's bad enough that the political class has played this dishonest game with the long-term liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, which are also kept off the balance sheet. But at least those IOUs are held by another branch of the government and can be legislated away by some future Congress. Debt held by the public can't be repudiated without the U.S. descending into Argentina-ville. It's time to come clean about the debts our government is racking up, and Fannie and Freddie are a good place to start.

If the family is agreed and the young lady wants to do so, by all means she should wear her uniform.

I have participating as a trainer now for eight years. It is the single most rewarding thing that I think I have ever done or expect to do. I probably count as one of the "old guys" and I agree with some of the observations here. It is too easy to lapse into war stories. War stories that are brief and on point to a particular question may help make a point, but it is too easy to get distracted. People should generally stick to the syllabus, but I have found that there are technical errors in some of the materials that BSA has produced. In such situations I try to teach what I think is correct, and why I think it is correct. There are no shortcuts on safety issues and there should not be. If some trainee chooses to go back to his or her unit and intentionally ignore some stated policy there is nothing anybody can do to prevent that. But is the trainer's obligation to make clear what the rules are and leave no doubt in anybody's mind what the rules are.

I don't have a reference for this, but I believe that BSA has always defined community services as service rendered to groups or individuals outside of BSA. Thus, participating in an OA ordeal timed to help prepare the council camp for the summer camp season would not be considered to be community service. I would think the activity contemplated would be considered to be legitimate community service.

Having an 18 year old female ASM is certainly not against the rules. Regarding OA eligibility, as I understand the requirements she simply could not be put on the ballot with other youth members. She could later be nominated by the troop committe as an adult candidate where the rank requirement does not apply. I personally have never had to deal with the question of someone between 18 and 21, of either gender, regarding OA eligibility. Regardless of gender, I would consult with the OA lodge advisor.

It is not necessary to totally screw up the system to fix a few relatively simple problems. The first problem is that people look at health insurance as a benefit of employment, not as true insurance. The second problem is the waste generated by the tort lawyers lobby in the form of defensive medicine. The third problem is the distortions resulting from current tax treatment of health care benefit programs offered by employers. This creates a disconnect between the payors of health care costs and consumers of health care. A few simple suggestions: Radically reform the liability law requiring arbitration and drastically reducing damages for pain and suffering. Eliminate the distortion of current tax law which allows tax deductibility to employers for all health benefit program costs while treating this as a non taxed fringe benefit to employees. Replace the tax deductibility distortion with tax free medical savings accounts for everyone. For those who are employed, this could be largely funded by employers paying employees the amounts that employers currently pay for health benefit programs. Allow employers to offer group coverage for true catastrophic events with a fairly high deductible. Get the insurance companies out of the busines of administering benefits for every routine office visit, routine prescriptions,routine tests, and even minor surgical procedures. Put patients in charge of their health care decisions by empowering them with medical savings accounts to fund these routine things. Establish patient cooperatives to preserve competitive balance between patients and suppliers of medical services. These cooperatives would have the ability to negotiate pricing for a huge range of things, reducing the ability of suppliers to take advantage of their bargaining power against individuals. The price negotiations currently carried on routinely by insurance companies is one benefit that they provide to insured persons for which the companies get no credit. Possibly increase resources available to the truly indigent, thus addressing the problems of the relatively small number of people who have little access to health care and no insurance. (The claim of 40+ million un insured is a canard.) Modest sensible proposals. The only difficulty is that these keep the government largely out the picture, thus eliminating the thrust for more power exercised by politicians and their agents intended to create greater dependency on government by everybody.

OGE, I think you are correct that a lot of the anger is driven by the haste with which the government has thrown a great deal of money around. There is no reason for haste in dealing with health care. The haste is urged by Obama himself. Remember he wanted legislation on his desk for signature before the August recess. The only reason given for haste comes from a quote from Obama's chief of staff to the effect, "a crisis is too good a thing to waste." The democratic majorities in the congress and our president want to jam through their changes without a full airing because they themselves believe that most people really do not want what they are proposing. I believe it was Lincoln who said, "You can fool some people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time." We are now at that point.