Grandma's Gonna Die

My Living Will: If I am lucky to have lived long, and if, in my final fearful minutes I (or anyone around me) call for someone else to spend wildly to hold my body together for another few months, then please... PLEASE LET THERE BE A RATIONAL, RATIONING BUREAUCRAT TO STEP IN AND SAY NO!

An effective health care system will invest in the young and spread risk amongst the old, nothing more. Rationed health care acknowledges the special needs of people at different times of life. If our children land in a health care net, we want them to leap back out with vigor. Early in life the net is there for the protect and propel the person into the future. Later in life the net is there to defend society from things like corruption or from our irrational fear of death.

The health care debate has devolved beyond monied lobbies and hyperbole: it is campaign of fear mongers. Damn-it, Grandma's gonna die. Rationed healthcare isn't sinister, it is patriotic.

We aren't going to get this right until boomers step up and do the right thing: shift health care priority to their kids and grandkids.

Note: Glad to see this article in NYT today: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/health/policy/25zeke.html

On Congress, Obama and the Lobby.

Leading a modern American Congress to populism, or for that matter any basic and fair reform, would be like molding a prison yard of child molesters into good grade school schoolteachers. We have been reduced to a nation on the dole.

Here is a case where NYT columnist Frank Rich has accurately sensed the underlying current: everyone in power is addicted, and everyone without power is an unwilling enabler.

The question is quickly becoming: if not Obama and his new executive powers and solid foundations, then how massive must the forces be to undo it all?