I identified the reason after I read the three “Counterpoints” written concerning raising the minimum wage law in Minnesota in the Opinion Exchange section of Thursday 3/21/2012 Star Tribune newspaper.  After reading the three articles, I was more confused than ever because none of the articles explained with clarity what the law is now or what a “tip credit” is, how it is calculated, who the Minnesota minimum wage applies to, who the Federal minimum wage applies to, etc.  In other words, there was no base set of facts that a non-partial person had outlined so that all readers would start with the same foundation of knowledge.  We were expected to use our previous knowledge of the issue and then combine it with the salt & pepper or sprinkle approach towards facts and economic and moral concepts that each author used, not for the purpose of persuading with clarity, but to persuade with fear well disguised as altruism.

The comment by Alan Ackerberg, partner in Parasole Restaurant Holdings, Inc. “Please do not add this financial burden to an already overtaxed hospitality industry that provides tremendous economic benefit to the state and more than 250,000 jobs in almost 10,000 eating and drinking places in Minnesota.” is just another way of saying:

‘The only reason I or any other restaurant owner participate in the restaurant market place is because the restaurant market is, as it is right at this moment, at it’s ideal but it is also so precarious that any change from the current set of wages and taxes imposed by the government will send it into a tailspin resulting in lost jobs, tax revenue, destroyed businesses and families, basically hell on Earth.’

I’m not buying it.  The next time Ackerburg attempts to persuade other’s to adopt his position, he should try providing useful information instead of overuse of fear tactics, gloating (“Tipped servers and bartenders at my company’s 13 restaurants average $22.69 and $22.09 per hour, respectively.”) condescending attitude, (“They are doing pretty well earning $22-plus per hour), and stop introducing proposals that only serve to confuse the issue further.

A Star Tribune article, (“Wayzata restaurants await loosened liquor-sales rules” 3/20/13) states that current a Wayzata city ordinance requires food sales in restaurants with liquor licenses to consist of 65 percent of total sales and has been in place since 1988. The new ordinance will relax the requirement to 50 percent. The article doesn’t say how restaurants are punished that don’t always reach that threshold but the article does imply that thresholds above 50 percent keeps certain restaurant business models from moving or starting up in some communities.

“The change in the ordinance will let us stay in business,” one restaurant owner said. “Without a full bar, we feel that would be difficult for us.  We’re just trying to offer to our customers what they ask for.”

Exactly.

“Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker and the list goes on and on and on.  Many voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates even though they share our core beliefs because those voters feel unloved, unwanted, and unwelcome in our party.”

What Jeb Bush seems to be saying is that voters are so simplistic and selfish that they are willing to accept an invitation to dinner from someone who is a rich celebrity even if they are forced to watch the host beat his wife during the meal!  If voters’ “core values” include inclusion, embracing diversity, expansion of opportunity and justice, trusting the motives and decisions of anyone who is gay, female, an immigrant or scientist, or any worker who is a member of a union, Bush seems to believe that they can still be wooed to support GOP candidates if the candidates simply tell voters how much they needed, wanted and loved.

Bush’s statement reveals three problems with the GOP that will eventually lead to its demise:

• There is a cosmic disconnect between ‘the message they think they are sending’ and the one many voters are receiving from GOP candidates.
• GOP members are not aware of this cosmic disconnect.
• There is nothing anyone can say to them that will get them to acknowledge this cosmic disconnect because focus groups describe the GOP as “narrow-minded and out of touch, filled with stuffy old men”.

In other words, the GOP is filled with people who are incapable of being honest with themselves about what “core values” they really hold most dear.

Case in point:

In a Star Tribune article (“GOP regroups, looking for a way back to majority”, 1/6/13), State Senator and Minority Leader, David Hann, R-Eden Prairie, said that,

while they lost the election, “philosophically, we don’t think our ideas are wrong.” Republicans’ task, he said, is doing “a better job of communicating those ideas.”

That includes holding down taxes and spending, promoting free-market solutions in health care and other areas, making the state more business-friendly and retaining the traditional legal definition of marriage.

“The reality is, our state is fairly divided,” said Hann. “The arguments that we have and the point of view that we have is held by a very large percentage, and in some years, the majority.”

Neither are Republicans completely retreating from the issues that may have cost them their majority — voter ID and a ban on same-sex marriage. Voters rejected both amendments at the same time they handed control of the Legislature to Democrats.

Hann said while voters declined to put a gay marriage prohibition in the state Constitution, “I don’t know that you can say, well, based on that, we should change the meaning of marriage.”

On health care, Hann said he wants to ensure that the state’s health exchange, required under federal health reform, does not become a conduit for a single-payer health care proposal that some liberals have long championed. Hann said his goal will be to protect the health insurance industry “so that people who work in that industry are not going to lose their opportunity to make a living.”

Hann obtained a license to sell health insurance after the 2012 legislative session ended so he could eventually take advantage of those who he was responsible for initiating the idea of giving 7000 MNCare enrollees vouchers to purchase health insurance in the private insurance market.   See how this “core value” of his need to have an “opportunity to make a living” should make you want to share it and ignore all the other ignorant and contemptuous values that GOP lawmakers hold dear?

I was then struck a few months later when two DJ’s from the Australian radio show “The Hot30 Countdown” made a prank phone call to King Edward VII’s Hospital impersonating Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles in order to gain some information about the condition of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, who was being treated for acute morning sickness.  The nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, took the call and routed the DJ’s to the royal ward.  The radio show broadcast the prank call in December.

The nurse committed suicide a few days later.  In response, the DJ’s were taken off the air and all prank calls were suspended.

In a CNN December 12 article, the DJ’s, Mel Greig and Michael Christian, expressed deep remorse on an Australian talk show

“I don’t even want to think about going back on air, to be honest,” Greig said.

“I’m still trying to make sense of it all,” Christian said. “We’re shattered. We’re people, too.”

So what happened to Nancy Grace?  Nothin. She certainly never expressed remorse because her employer didn’t hold her accountable.  Oh, sure, there was a lawsuit filed by the family that was eventually settled by Grace’s employer, CNN, HLN network and the show. It might even have been for a million dollars. Who knows?  But that’s the problem.

Instead of being fired, she was protected by the insurance policy of her employer.

Instead of being fired, her unnecessary and irresponsible words were  picked up and carried by other media outlets.

Instead of being held accountable, she continues to be able to broadcast irresponsible statements.

Because this is America and no one in the media seems to want to accept responsibility to show some restraint in what they say.  Because why?  Because they are never held accountable for doing so.   Toni Medrano had been charged in a court of law.  She was going to be held accountable for her actions in a court of law.  That’s the way civilized societies are supposed to settle things.  It wasn’t good enough for Nancy Grace, though, and all the media outlets that picked and further spread her spiteful words.  No one in this country seems to recognize anymore when the line has been crossed separating a civil society ruled by laws and uncivilized society just waiting with bated breath for the next person to make a mistake so we can crucify them and drive them to insanity.

Assuming the coin is fair, after flipping it for 99 times and getting heads each time, what are the odds that the 100th flip will yield a tail?  The scholarly nerd answer: 50 percent since he knows from statistics class that each flip is independent of all the others, if the coin is fair.  The street smart guy answer: “I’d say no more than 1 percent of course.  You are either full of crap or a pure sucker to buy that ’50 pehcent’ business.  The coin gotta be loaded.  It can’t be a fair game.”

Taleb goes on in this same chapter (9) to explain that of all the risk of losses that a large Los Vegas casino thought it was protecting itself against–mainly cheaters and professional gamblers–the events that caused the greatest loss of money were events that were completely outside the domain of the casino floor.  They happened to be caused by among others: a tiger maimed its owner (Siegfried and Roy), an employee failed to send proper documents to the government and instead hid them under his desk, and a disgruntled employee threatened to blow up the place.

This got me to thinking.  Our national politics isn’t just polarized.  We don’t just have two political parties who disagree slightly about how to solve our nation’s problems and are able to come to some middle ground using the concept of compromise.  We have two completely different worlds people are living in.  One of those worlds is at war with the other world only the other world doesn’t even realize this.

A story on NPR’s Morning Edition on January 22, 2013, Die-Hard Republicans Rankled by Obama’s 2nd Term makes this all too clear.

One Texas Republican feels that the President Obama’s main goal is make America a socialist state.

A Republican precinct chair in Texas is still not sure Obama is constitutionally qualified to take the oath of office. “We never saw a birth certificate, we never met any of the professors that went to school with our president. . .”

The author of the book, “Ladies Can We Talk?”, Debbie Georgatos, seems to imply that Obama won over women by “pandering” to them “like their HHS mandate that free birth control had to be provided to women.  I thought it was like a lure to become dependent on government.  To me that was a complete U-turn from what what feminists used to always stand for.  Recipients of government assistance need to be looked at as victims who’ve been entrapped by policies that Democrats have created over the last 40 or 50 years and it has robbed them of the opportunity to be participants in this fabulous American Dream.”

Newly elected Florida Republican Congressman Trey Radel believes impeachment of the president because of his stand on gun control should be an option and he decries unfair partisan attacks by Capitol Hill Democrats: “Every time Republicans try to talk about something like immigration reform, Republican’s are called racists.  If we use a budget to say that we really truly need to tackle our problems when it comes to saving Medicare and Social Security,  Republicans have been labeled as nothing but people who hate your grandparents.”

This isn’t just about an inability on the part of people who call themselves Republicans to think outside the box.  It’s about creating the box, defining the box and determining all the rules that apply inside that box.  Inside that box: All Democrats are socialists; all Democratic presidents should be subject to impeachment at the slightest whim; All recipients of government assistance are (alternatively) takers, victims, lazy, weak, etc..

Speaking of presidential impeachment: Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks (R-Huntsville) introduced Protecting America’s Solvency Act H.R. 371 this last week (Jan 25, 2013), a bill proposing a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, but with a special twist–if the budget isn’t balanced within five years, the president can be impeached!  Mo Brooks is one of 67 Republicans in the House who voted against allowing FEMA to borrow $9.7 billion dollars to pay out policy claims for Hurricane Sandy victims.  The story by a hometown television station on January 7, 2013 reminds readers that his home district was hit by a devastating tornado on April 27th (2012) but since tornadoes don’t usually cause widespread flooding, inside the box of his mind, his disregard for the homeowners whose homes were flooded is justified because. . .  FEMA was charging homeowners too little for flood insurance, not enough to cover the payouts that have been required so that the flood insurance program is now $20 to $30 billion in the hole.  He uses that fact to justify taking an egregiously unjustified pot shot at the character of the victims of the hurricane:

“If you’re going to be a responsible American citizen, then you pay for your own homeowners insurance or business insurance.  You do not try to shift that cost of your lifestyle on the rest of America.”

(Let’s set aside the notion that “Your lifestyle” usually refers to being homosexual for now.)  So apparently, inside the box of Mo Brooks’ mind, being a homeowner in the path a hurricane is a “lifestyle” that puts them outside the box into the world that he does not inhabit and therefore does not need to concern himself with.

So what we have in modern day America is roughly half of the (voting) population (anyone who voted for Romney) that lives inside this box where they have established all the rules and determined all the beliefs that someone must believe who lives inside that box. What we have is not only people who can’t think outside the box–They can’t think outside the box they have created in their own minds!   Taleb’s point in his book is that people who can’t think outside the box get blind-sided by events they did not think could ever occur–because they could not think outside the box.  What we have in our cultural and political discourse is much worse: We have roughly half the country who cannot think outside the box of their own creation.

Inside this box, Obama wasn’t born (in America) and didn’t go to college, real natural disasters don’t ever involve flooding.

“Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms.”

After the original story aired, his response in a CBS Morning Show interview to blowback from listeners was this:

“Well, I think that was a bad choice of words on my part … that word has an association with of course dictatorships in the 20th century like Germany and Spain, and Italy. What I know is that we no longer have free enterprise capitalism in health care, it’s not a system any longer where people are able to innovate, it’s not based on voluntary exchange. The government is directing it. So we need a new word for it. I don’t know what they right word is,” Mackey says.

Yeah, that clarifies it.

The NPR story asked listeners to respond to the question:

How big a role does a business leader’s personal philosophy play in your decision to buy products from his or her company?

Wrong question.  The better question is:

What makes anyone believe they have the right to throw around words carelessly but don’t seem to have any sense of obligation to investigate to see if there is any justification whatsoever of their opinion?

Arrogance.

As we sat at a red light at Old Shakopee Road and France Ave, I noticed a couple waiting to cross the street.  We were one or two cars back from the front of the line so I could keep my gaze on the couple without being conspicuous about it.  The man was late middle aged, heavy set, of average height, dressed in a disheveled way.  He had the facial characteristics of someone with Down’s syndrome, and at first, it wasn’t apparent that the woman shared any form of developmental disability.  She too was heavy set and dressed in a way that signaled that thrift shops were her main source of attire.

The man stood slightly behind the woman so that at first, I thought she might be his mom, taking the lead to help guide her son safely across the busy street.  As I continued to watch the couple, though, the woman started to fumble with her purse that was hanging on her shoulder across her chest.  She struggled to pull it over her head and as she did so, the man reached out in an attempt to help.  She then half-turned to hand it to the man.  He accepted it without protest, even though he was already carrying a much larger satchel on his shoulder as well.  She turned back to face the street they were trying to cross, to make sure she didn’t miss the signal change.  As she stood slightly in front of him, the man reached up to straighten her collar, which had become upturned when she removed the purse from her shoulder.

He did this in such a gentle way that I began to wonder if they were a couple rather than mother and son.  They seemed to have an unspoken sense of affection for each other.  I sensed after watching her struggle with removing her purse that she too might be developmentally disabled.

The light turned green and we went on our way.  Over time, though, the scene has stayed with me, along with lots of questions: Were they in fact a couple?  If so, were they married?  Are there any laws in Minnesota that require a competency test or I.Q test when applying for marriage licenses? What about guardianship in these cases, when the independency and self-sufficiency of the adults is in question?  Do they have legally appointed guardians?  Do the guardians have the power to stop two developmentally disabled people from getting married if they want to get married?  What about sterilization?  Is sterilization a requirement?  Who gets to decide?

A few days after we witnessed the couple waiting to cross the street, I attended a Town Hall Meeting in Eden Prairie with the legislators from Senate District 42/48—David Hann, Jenifer Loon, and Kirk Stensrud.  The first question posed to state legislators concerned the Marriage Amendment that will appear on the ballot this November.  An Eden Prairie resident wanted to know how the Marriage Amendment would help his family, which includes his male partner, whom he referred to as his husband, and their two adopted children.  Later he wanted to know why in Minnesota, he could be legally bound to his children through adoption but not legally bound to his male partner. The audience began mumbling and some could be heard voicing sympathy for his point, but one man’s voice carried above the others: he insisted that since gay marriage could not create children through the traditional process, this certainly justified in his mind banning it, if not calling it an outright sin.

Below Edited 1/16/2013

What I simply cannot understand is why one person believes he has the right or obligation to make a judgment about the attraction two people who are complete strangers to him have for one another just because those two people just happen to be the same sex.  Attraction between two people is a mystery: a combination of the human spirit, of human evolution, and proximity.  It’s hard to be attracted to someone whom you have never met and yet we are not usually attracted with the same intensity to everyone we meet.  Therein lies the mystery, a mystery that will never be solved, that deserves no sleuthing to uncover the source by anyone.  Acceptance with a sense of awe that it happens at all is a more generous approach. Yet too many people, like the man at the Town Hall meeting, and State Senator David Hann (R-Eden Prairie), cannot find it within themselves to extend this generosity to two people who are attracted to each other but just happen to be the same sex.

A excerpt of interviews with David Hann in the Star Tribune, “GOP regroups, looking for way back to Majority” 1/7/13, reveals a disheartening level of arrogance and obtuseness on the part of Hann concerning the idea of gay marriage:

Hann said while voters declined to put a gay marriage prohibition in the state Constitution, “I don’t know that you can say, well, based on that, we should change the meaning of marriage.”

It’s disheartening because given the two tasks–trying to stop two people from being attracted to one another, or trying to change David Hann’s mind on who should be defining the “meaning of marriage”–a particular God, a particular religious tradition, a particular cultural tradition, the state or federal government, David Hann, or simply the two people who want to get married–I will have greater success in trying to stop two people from being attracted to one another.

But why on earth would someone want to do such a thing?  And what does it say about the character of the individuals who seem to think that their lives are being threatened by the attraction and desire to marry of same-sex couples?

It is easy for a man and woman to take marriage for granted, but the truth is that every time two flawed human beings (and we’re all flawed, even David Hann) fall in love with each other, stay committed to each other over years and decades, treat each other in a gentle way, stand by each other’s side, help one another cross the street, attend church together, convey their sense of commitment to each other and their children at Town Hall meetings, it is a miracle of mystery and needs to be celebrated, no matter the extent or nature of the flaws of the two human beings.

May we all find it in our hearts to celebrate the miracle and mystery of love.

Poor Paul Krugman may be a brilliant economist, but he doesn’t know quack about health insurance (“Inconvenient: Health care premiums rise,” Feb. 22, 2010).

He decries a Republican proposal to allow policy purchases across state lines (enlarging the loss pool) while touting mandated health insurance purchases for people who don’t need it (like a tax).

There are two very fundamental things Krugman does not understand.

First, in a nation where two-thirds of adults are overweight — and a third are obese — mandated affordable health insurance is an illusion. Equivalently, automobile insurance would be unaffordable if two-thirds of drivers had moving violations, including a third with DUIs.

The second is more fundamental. Insurance was designed to compensate for a loss. During high income, child-raising, mortgage-paying years, one insures health to meet responsibilities and obligations of life. Health insurers “underwrite” those years.

The responsibility for health does not lie with the government, insurers or even health providers. It lies with each individual. Health insurance won’t make you healthy any more than auto insurance will make you a good driver. You reap what you sow.

Donald M. Pitsch, Eden Prairie

Obviously, there are many things Mr. Pitsch doesn’t understand about the difference between real life and the world he inhabits.  One of them is the difference between car insurance and health insurance and what determines and drives the cost of each.  And there is a difference, a difference that “experts” like Steve Parente at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota also don’t want to admit to.  In an article in the Star Tribune, “More Minnesotans driven to choose high-deductible health plans”, June 3, 2012, that calls attention to the fact that nearly half a million Minnesotans now have high deductible health insurance plans, Parente is quoted:

“I don’t want to be the mean professor, but insurance means covering high-cost, low-probability events,” said Steve Parente, a health insurance expert at the University of Minnesota. “Prevention didn’t used to be in the equation. We call it insurance, but we expect first-dollar coverage.”

He says he doesn’t want to be mean but he is, and arrogant to boot.    It’s nice when you’re a professor and a large portion of your health insurance costs are paid for sight unseen by your employer.  It’s easy to parse words and get all sanctimonious about the definition of insurance as understood by the experts at the Carlson School of Management when you have health insurance that does indeed pay for preventative care.  Everyone in the real world understands that car insurance and health insurance are different.  The problem is–the ‘experts’ like  Dr. Parente (and Senator David Hann but more on that later) don’t want to admit to this.  They want to create public policy that assumes health insurance is just like car insurance because the ‘health’ and ‘car’ are merely interchangeable words to put in front of the word insurance, See?

NOT:

First of all, car insurance is not mandatory if you don’t own a car.  And everyone who purchases car insurance knows that if you file a claim to have the insurance company pay for your failed transmission, your agent will laugh at you.  Likewise, contrary to Mr. Pitsch’s claim, DUI’s and moving violations don’t increase the cost to the car insurance company.  If you get a DUI or multiple moving violations, doing so demonstrates that you are a higher risk to increase their costs, but not necessarily.  It’s an excuse to raise your rates, not a direct correlation to their costs.

In contrast, all of us who are alive will need some kind of health care in our lifetime. It’s obtuse, then, to imply otherwise.  Mr. Pitsch seems to believe that the amount of health care one needs is directly correlated with poor lifestyle choices and therefore, he feels no obligation or desire to contribute or belong to an insurance pool that will include anyone else in it, unless he can purchase it across state lines, but then again, most other states have higher rates of obesity than Minnesota so what gives there, Mr. Pitsch?

Second, car insurance liability/pay out by an insurance company for any one accident is fixed up front and limited to the preset amounts that are partially based on the value of the vehicle insured and partly on the risk that the driver will have an accident.  Automobile insurance is affordable because payouts by the insurance company are limited to the liability limits of the policy and the value of the vehicle, so it is possible for auto insurers to predict with some certainty, using actuarial tables, the limits of the policy, and the past driving history of the driver, to determine the maximum amount of and likelihood of payout.  When the rates become unaffordable, individuals must make decisions to reduce the costs: Remove comprehensive and collision coverage, get a less expensive car, or get rid of the car and use public transportation (but only buses since light rail is frowned on by Senator David Hann, apparently since he does not support any light rail expansion to his senate district).

When health insurance rates become unaffordable, individuals attempt to reduce the costs but remain insured.  High deductible health insurance plans are equivalent to car insurance.  The only problem is though is that people start to treat their health similarly to the way they treat their cars when they can’t afford routine maintenance.  They run their bodies and their health into the ground just like they run their vehicles into the ground, failing to get checkups, going to the doctor early when they start to notice changes.  The stress of being uninsured or underinsured most likely induces a reduced productivity level, fatigue, despair, etc.

The other major difference between cars/health/accidents/illness is that the incentive to avoid a car accident is built in.  Let’s just make the assumption for the sake of argument that 100 percent of people do not want to have a car accident.  We can say 100 percent of people do no want to get sick but we cannot say that 100 percent of people believe that not going to the doctor will help us not get sick or that not going to the doctor will help cure us.  In other words, we do not have a natural incentive to avoid doctor visits when we get sick (the actual item the insurance is paying for) nor do we have a preset limit of cost that has been agreed upon (by fate?) before the sickness occurs or the doctor visit takes place.

Herein lies the problem.  Health insurance doesn’t pay for the loss of health in a sickness like car insurance pays for a car (simplified) in an accident.  It pays the doctor a price that has been negotiated beforehand between the doctor and insurance company.  As patients, we have no control over the price or the diagnosis, unless we stay home.  High deductible plans, therefore, are insurance companies’ way of saying to individuals: Pay us some premiums so you can call yourself insured if it makes you feel better about yourself but do not in any way consider this our way of condoning an actual visit to the doctor so you can actually feel better.

And what could be done if that mental energy was directed toward identifying real problems and proposing real solutions that we could then debate among the populace to determine the best solution?  We don’t have that opportunity.  Instead we have one set of individuals who work extremely hard to create the illusion of that alternative reality.  There is no room for “compromise”, moving toward the middle in any discussion because one set of individuals is not living in the same reality as the other set because there is no middle. There are simply two different versions of reality-the Republican version and the real version.

This is not about each political party having different approaches as to how to solve a problem or difference of opinion as to what really constitutes a problem. This is about one political party working really hard to create a completely different reality and then within that different reality, defining all the “problems” on their own terms only.  Forget the rest of us who live in the real reality.  We aren’t invited to the Republicans’ party.  That doesn’t mean though that everyone single one of us isn’t affected by the effort to create this alternative reality.  We just can’t do anything to stop the creation of it except to stop believing it. As long as there are some among us who are willing to believe the lies with all their heart, lies that have no relation to truth, reality, pragmatism, respect for the American people, respect for government and the institutions the U.S. Constitution created, personal integrity, or an honest assessment of current reality, Republicans will keep repeating the lies.

It happened again today (7/9/12) at the Center for Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs Panel Discussion of the Supreme Court decision on the ACA.  When asked about the ‘replace’ portion of the Republicans’ ‘repeal and replace’ goal, Andrew McKechnie, formerly a health policy advisor to Senator Chuck Grassly (R-IA) and legislative assistant to Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), replied that there would be some “medical liability reform” in the Republicans’ version of ‘replace’.  You can ask anyone who was sitting around me (or you can just take my word for it) that as soon as the question was asked, I started hissing, “tort reform” over and over under my breath.  I knew that if he actually offered an idea, this would be the first thing out of his mouth.  He did not disappoint.

In David Brook’s June 28 2012 column in the New York Times, he also mentions the failure to address the medical malpractice issue:

“People in both camps seem to agree: We’ve had a big argument about health care over the past several years, yet we haven’t tackled the big issues. We haven’t tackled the end-of-life issues. We haven’t fixed the medical malpractice system. We are only beginning to correct the antiquated administrative systems.”

His readers disagreed.  One comment directed at the “We haven’t fixed the medical malpractice system” comment came from Aaron Walton in Geelong Australia and was especially scathing:

“

I’m an American-born and American-trained physician who for personal reasons (I married an Australian) lives and works in Australia. Anyone who includes a discussion of medical malpractice and tort reform in a discussion of the insanity that is the United States’ healthcare delivery system either has no idea what he is talking about or has an interest in seeing to it that meaningful healthcare reform never happens. Australia is very nearly as litigious as the United States when it comes to medical malpractice, and yet Oz manages to deliver free, high quality healthcare to all its residents and does so at roughly half the cost per capita as in the US.”

Another comment was fitting as well (from cbc in Mass.) and got to the heart of the ‘replacement’ debate.

“The Republican party doesn’t have replacement. They barely have a health care policy and you [David] need to stop pretending that these grievances come from a sincere and rational place.”

David Kerns from Napa, CA reacted to Brook’s statement, “But the truth is neither I nor anybody else really knows what works” this way:

“That is a statement of fact as long as one ignores the known universe.”

In another NYT article, a freshman Republican from New York trotted out the same old tired proposals:

“Representative Nan Hayworth, an ophthalmologist and a freshman Republican from New York, said she and others have a clear framework: bolstered health savings accounts, the option to purchase insurance across state lines, medical malpractice limits and a government-subsidized insurance pool for sick people who cannot buy insurance on their own. But those alternatives have not been broadly aired.”

I think Lennerd from Shanghai, China summed it up well in his comment to David Brooks’ article:

Ah hahaha. “But the truth is neither I nor anybody else really knows what works.” David, David, David. You make me laugh, then gag. Ask the folks (socialists, are they?) over there in Switzerland what works. Or Germany, or France. Or England or Canada or Australia. They all have better health care based on metrics and lower costs. Oh, but those are facts. Over here, we just go on propaganda, er, emotion.

”We haven’t fixed the medical malpractice system.” Um, but we do have a whole lot of studies by academics showing that medical malpractice is a tiny, almost insignificant portion of the total health care cost. But still, facts be damned, you’re going to trot that out one . more . time.

Sigh.

Sigh indeed.  The effort to build up an alternative version of the universe continues. . .

The truth is, the fastest way to discover that these same old tired proposals are unworkable and undesirable is for the Democrats to embrace them whole heartedly.  Then the Republicans would be forced to use some creativity to come up with some new ideas that they can then turn on with scorn as soon as the Democrats embrace them.

Ah, unless you believe that she was both drunk and texting, which surprisingly, a lot of people do.  It seems the opinion of many people is that Senser was drunk when she hit Phanthavong and panicked and fled the scene, even though the jury did not find there was enough evidence to find her guilty of careless driving.

When someone learned I had written an article about Amy Senser but had not read it, the woman unabashedly, almost cheerfully, shared her opinion that Senser was drunk and panicked.  After I started talking about the points I made in the article, her facial expression changed to one of resentful skepticism.  At least I was able to get her to admit that “There’s only one person who really knows what happened that night,”  but her statements indicated she did not know much about the case.  She knew what she wanted to know to justify her opinion.  She knew a witness had testified that Phanthavong’s body could have wrapped around the front of the car and was therefore possibly visible in the headlights. “So you don’t believe that he wrapped around the front of the car?” she asked me. “No, because if he had, there would have been some damage to some other part of the car besides just the front passenger side.”  I had looked at the pictures of the vehicle on line.

What I don’t understand is why so many people believe she was drunk and are more than willing to believe the witness who testified that it was a possibility without asking some simple questions instead.  How was it possible that Phanthavong’s body wrapped around the front but still landed on the passenger side of the vehicle or without going under the wheels.

It was also the opinion of the woman that the Sensers had delayed turning over the vehicle.  I corrected her and told her they had turned over the vehicle to police the next day.  ”Well she waited to come forward.”  That was on advice of her lawyer.

The problem is we all know what happened.  We all suffer from outcome bias.  What we all want to forget for some reason is that the decision that got Amy Senser in trouble was the decision to return to Saint Paul, to take the Riverside Drive exit that night, not a decision to do something illegal like texting, as the 18 year old in MA had done.  Her guilt is supposed to be somewhat dependent on her behavior before the accident and yet it is her actions after the accident that everyone wants to judge her by.