Ok I've been meaning to write this for a long time, so here it is finally.
Religion and me
As you may have noticed I'm an atheist, religion is however one of my many passions and I've started to realise that in my passion I often say things that sound fine to me but which others can easily misinterpret, or which I dont mean at all but say when carried away. And the last thing I want is for people to be offended by me or put off from what I have to say. Richard Dawkins et al, whilst excellent scientists, academics, debaters etc (read Dawkin's science books by the way they're brilliant) are doomed to fail when they talk to many religious people, simply because their audience dismisses what they have to say pre-emptively. So I'd like to make a public apology.
All my friends, religious or otherwise, if I have upset you by ridiculing your belief or by offending a broad group to which you belong or inappropriately talked about people of your group having the character of some fringe lunatic, I am very very sorry, and promise that I meant no disrespect to you as a person by it. I have Christian, Buddhist, Deist, Pagan, Atheist (it would be good if I could spell that damned word), Agnostic and Pastafarian friends, with many others in-between and I do not think any less of any friend for being religious.
If I respect my friends who are religious why do I post many things attacking people's beliefs? Because respect for you all as individuals does not imply respect for your beliefs. I have a family friend who I like a lot, she's a lovely woman, very kind and generous. She is a young earth creationist who believes that the universe is 6000 years old, Hubble red shifts and careful analysis of many aspects of the universe tells us that the true age is 13.7 billion years. She is out by a factor of over 2 million, this is equivalent to believing the distance from Alaska to Maine is a little over 2m and that the whole of North America would fit in a generously sized living room. This belief is insane, much as I respect her and think she is a lovely person this belief is just wrong and frankly, she is intelligent enough to know how wrong.
My problem with religion is that whilst as a system for bringing communities together, comforting those who are grieving and helping people make tough decisions it is unparalleled, it does produce real dangers. Knowing the age of the universe is unlikely to save your life, but in many things being out by a factor of over 2 million is enough to kill you many many times over. Religion provides many bright people with the desire to believe things that aren't credible and this kills. Not just kills Jehovah's Witnesses who need blood transfusions, or women in many countries who die because they cant get a safe abortion, or gays and apostates who in the 21st century are killed by stoning but many others in far less serious cases who just cant act appropriately because they think they should, to be a good person, believe something that reason tells them is false. These things make me angry, because there is no bigger perversion of the good that religions should be doing. I'm upset because I hear rational normal people telling me that god made mountains with dinosaur skeletons already in them, or that they have met and done spiritual battle with witches or that the laying on of hands can cure their illness.
So to all my friends, I am so sorry if I upset you, because you are the very people who need to be able to hear about the things I post without being put off or feel you're being shouted at. I really want people who are religious to hear some of the crazy and frankly evil things being done in the name of their religion. Because if the important debates of our time like gay marriage, assisted suicide, ID in science classes etc are set up to be god vs. liberals then everyone looses. If nutty ideas aren't challenged within religious circles than they wont be challenged at all. My young earth creationist could listen to me present evidence all day, it wont change her mind. To stop someone with a nutty belief you need to get to the heart of where that belief originates, and that's what I cant do. I know a lot about religion, I went to Sunday school as a kid and have read most of the bible, but it's been so long since I believed in god I cant connect to it any more.
I know it's damned presumptuous of me to think this. But I know a few of you are the kind of people who really want to see change in the world for the better, and you are the only people who can do it. People of faith that can reach out to others in a way that I cant, I can give you all the science in the world, talk to you about constructing your own moral system, do a comparative analysis of religions of the world. But someone from the same church, or just someone who believes in a god at all, has a far different impact when they say that Matthew cant be a historical account because Matthew 27:52-53 is about zombies. It's very different for me to say that the pope is evil for his stance on condoms, as it is for a catholic to say that the Christian principle of compassion outweighs papal dogma.
So I'll end by saying I'm sorry if I call religions nuts, I dont mean it, I mean that religions give licence for people to hold nutty beliefs, and that reasonable people of faith are probably the key to challenging that licence.
Please do reply to this whatever you think, I want to know what you'd all like me to do, my dear friends.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
REPOST What's wrong with science
Science is my passion. In order the things I passionately care about are: sex, maths, science, freedom, fairness, alternative medicine, religion, tea, radio 4 and astrology. I love science, I dont just mean that I'm interested in a few things about space or evolution or whatever, I mean that I really really love it and get a huge amount of pleasure from it in the most profound way I have ever experienced.
Why am I saying this? I'm saying it because I think other people who feel similarly should say the same thing too. And I think that because there's a danger, not that science will stop happening, but that it will become separate from the real world. Too often I read things in the paper that start with “scientists have announced” or “a world expert in such and such today said that”, I was watching an interview with a scientist, possibly Marcus Chown, and the interviewer described scientists as the new priesthood. This scared me a lot. If this is the way things are going it needs to stop now. Scientists should not be allowed to claim infallibility just for being scientists just as a priest should not be able to claim infallibility for being a priest (whatever the pope says no human is without error).
Why is this a problem? If things go on like this people wont be able to do basic science themselves, everyone will start to assume that Science with an upper-case S is this big holy thing done by people in white robes in special cathedrals of knowledge. And that means that people wont use science in their day to day life, and I believe that this is vital for staying alive in the world. We live in a technological society, things rest on knife edges, if people cant use critical thinking disasters happen. If you give your child a homoeopathic remedy instead of real medicine the child's death is not due to you rationally considering the medical literature and experiments to compare results. It's because you've rejected the cult of science and gone for something that feels better. People who reject science in this way and buy into whatever nonsense seems good to them (watch out for the phrase 'western science') are feeding off this feeling of being rejected or alienated by science. So we need to make sure there is no cult of science for people to be turned off by.
What do I think should happen? I think that everyone, whatever they do and however well educated, can be and should be a scientist. This doesn't mean doing complicated research, it means thinking about the evidence for important beliefs and testing things in some limited way. It means not accepting what experts say because they are experts, but because they have done a good experiment to show they are right. It means not risking your health on the advice of people living centuries ago, but trying to be healthy in the way that the evidence shows is best. In the case of MMR for instance, it is in my opinion immoral for someone to make a decision about whether their child should get this jab without using science, few people have the time to analyse the research done for sure, but everyone has time to go to their doctor and ask him what the research says. And if he doesn't know, get a new doctor, medics who dont follow research on important topics like this should not be trusted.
What stops everyone being a scientist in this way? Society makes it so damned hard! Newspapers never publish examples of experiments, so much is done on what one or other group of scientists say, their word is taken as evidence. Why? Because science is hard, nobody wants to try and do it because it makes your head hurt. This is a double failure, of society and of education. Science classes that I have been to are massively unfit for purpose, pupils are made to spend years memorising facts without the faintest idea where they come from. We all learn at school that science means labelling a diagram of an eye, with little understanding of why the various fluids are there, we learn that chemistry is about manipulating horrid chemical equations without really understanding why the reactions happen, we are told that f=GmM/d^2 but are never told how this was found out. This makes science seem like it is a dry complicated academic mess, and so the media tells us that it's far too hard for us and so tells us something it thinks we can understand, irrespective of whether this is true or not.
My final point is that there is no need for science to be like this. Science as a method is easy, you look at some event, generalise what you see, predict from this something you haven't seen yet and then see if that happens. If so the generalisation survives this round, but if not we find a new one. There is no reason for this to be hard to do. In every day situations: if you think that crystals make your plants grow well, try it out, put two identical plants next to each other, one with a crystal and one with out, simple things like this mean either that you can confidently harness the power of the crystals knowing they work, or that you can stop wasting money on useless ornaments. But even in the profound things there is still a lot of science people dont get exposed to. A lot of deep science can, with a bit of thought, be said in such a way that you keep all the ideas, but make it seem much easier. I'd be prepared to bet that there would be far fewer “debates” on evolution if everyone were told that “there is a species of bacteria that eats, and can only eat, a by-product of nylon, as nylon was invented in the 40s, bacteria like this could not have lived before then, so they must have gradually come into existence since as the descendants of a very similar bacterium that ate something else” and yet if this is presented anywhere it is either written in such a dumbed down way “scientists say bacteria can eat plastic” or in the full horrors of a stream of incomprehensible Latin words so that nobody really understands why it is important. Science is easy, there's no reason why you should do something important without testing your ideas, and there's no reason why you should believe experts without testing their reliability.
Just a quick question: is anyone at all interested in this essay? I just wrote it because I've been irritated recently and wanted this idea off my chest, if nobody wants it feel free to say so and I'll write them but not publish in future.
Why am I saying this? I'm saying it because I think other people who feel similarly should say the same thing too. And I think that because there's a danger, not that science will stop happening, but that it will become separate from the real world. Too often I read things in the paper that start with “scientists have announced” or “a world expert in such and such today said that”, I was watching an interview with a scientist, possibly Marcus Chown, and the interviewer described scientists as the new priesthood. This scared me a lot. If this is the way things are going it needs to stop now. Scientists should not be allowed to claim infallibility just for being scientists just as a priest should not be able to claim infallibility for being a priest (whatever the pope says no human is without error).
Why is this a problem? If things go on like this people wont be able to do basic science themselves, everyone will start to assume that Science with an upper-case S is this big holy thing done by people in white robes in special cathedrals of knowledge. And that means that people wont use science in their day to day life, and I believe that this is vital for staying alive in the world. We live in a technological society, things rest on knife edges, if people cant use critical thinking disasters happen. If you give your child a homoeopathic remedy instead of real medicine the child's death is not due to you rationally considering the medical literature and experiments to compare results. It's because you've rejected the cult of science and gone for something that feels better. People who reject science in this way and buy into whatever nonsense seems good to them (watch out for the phrase 'western science') are feeding off this feeling of being rejected or alienated by science. So we need to make sure there is no cult of science for people to be turned off by.
What do I think should happen? I think that everyone, whatever they do and however well educated, can be and should be a scientist. This doesn't mean doing complicated research, it means thinking about the evidence for important beliefs and testing things in some limited way. It means not accepting what experts say because they are experts, but because they have done a good experiment to show they are right. It means not risking your health on the advice of people living centuries ago, but trying to be healthy in the way that the evidence shows is best. In the case of MMR for instance, it is in my opinion immoral for someone to make a decision about whether their child should get this jab without using science, few people have the time to analyse the research done for sure, but everyone has time to go to their doctor and ask him what the research says. And if he doesn't know, get a new doctor, medics who dont follow research on important topics like this should not be trusted.
What stops everyone being a scientist in this way? Society makes it so damned hard! Newspapers never publish examples of experiments, so much is done on what one or other group of scientists say, their word is taken as evidence. Why? Because science is hard, nobody wants to try and do it because it makes your head hurt. This is a double failure, of society and of education. Science classes that I have been to are massively unfit for purpose, pupils are made to spend years memorising facts without the faintest idea where they come from. We all learn at school that science means labelling a diagram of an eye, with little understanding of why the various fluids are there, we learn that chemistry is about manipulating horrid chemical equations without really understanding why the reactions happen, we are told that f=GmM/d^2 but are never told how this was found out. This makes science seem like it is a dry complicated academic mess, and so the media tells us that it's far too hard for us and so tells us something it thinks we can understand, irrespective of whether this is true or not.
My final point is that there is no need for science to be like this. Science as a method is easy, you look at some event, generalise what you see, predict from this something you haven't seen yet and then see if that happens. If so the generalisation survives this round, but if not we find a new one. There is no reason for this to be hard to do. In every day situations: if you think that crystals make your plants grow well, try it out, put two identical plants next to each other, one with a crystal and one with out, simple things like this mean either that you can confidently harness the power of the crystals knowing they work, or that you can stop wasting money on useless ornaments. But even in the profound things there is still a lot of science people dont get exposed to. A lot of deep science can, with a bit of thought, be said in such a way that you keep all the ideas, but make it seem much easier. I'd be prepared to bet that there would be far fewer “debates” on evolution if everyone were told that “there is a species of bacteria that eats, and can only eat, a by-product of nylon, as nylon was invented in the 40s, bacteria like this could not have lived before then, so they must have gradually come into existence since as the descendants of a very similar bacterium that ate something else” and yet if this is presented anywhere it is either written in such a dumbed down way “scientists say bacteria can eat plastic” or in the full horrors of a stream of incomprehensible Latin words so that nobody really understands why it is important. Science is easy, there's no reason why you should do something important without testing your ideas, and there's no reason why you should believe experts without testing their reliability.
Just a quick question: is anyone at all interested in this essay? I just wrote it because I've been irritated recently and wanted this idea off my chest, if nobody wants it feel free to say so and I'll write them but not publish in future.
REPOST Derren Brown's "Deep Maths" is easy
If you didn't watch the lottery prediction or the event program you're crazy, go watch it online right now. But if you did you may have been interested by the "deep maths" of coin tossing that Derren claimed would take an hour to explain... not so, it's fairly simple really. So I'm going to try and explain it quickly and without anything more than common sense.
The game:
You take a coin and flip it a lot of times in a row, and you note every time that two different sequences of 3 results comes up.
The assumption:
Your initial reaction (and mine) was that all of the 2x2x2=8 results are equally likely to come up. Because if we flip a coin 3 times only this is true. You try and flip a coin 3 times and record weather your sequence came up or not and then start again. If you do this enough times (you'll need a few hours and nothing better to do) and you can easily show that all 8 results are just as likely. We are lead to believe this is true for the game above.
But:
This isn't what happens, in a long string of results HTHHHTHTHTTHTHTHTHTTTHTHTHTHTTHHTH etc it is possible for results to overlap. For instance HTHTH contains HTH twice, and HHHHH contains HHH 3 times. How can you use this overlapping to your advantage? You start by thinking about what happens if you nearly "win" but fall down at the end. What can you do if you predict HHH and it comes up HHT? You've got a result you dont want, and you have to start again from scratch. but what you can do is get a head start. If the last coin in your sequence is different from the first one something interesting happens. You pick THH, the first coin is a tail, you're happy, the second is a head, you're very happy, the third one is a tail ... you haven't won this time, but you're not upset, because you've already got the first coin of the sequence in place. To put it simply: with THH every time you predict a coin wrong you are already a third of the way through the next attempt, but if you pick HHH then every time you go wrong you have to start again at the beginning.
I predict THH: T win! 1/3 done, H win! 2/3 done, T ignore what happened before, start again with the first one right , 1/3 done
I predict HHH: H win! 1/3 done, H win! 2/3 done, T ignore what happened before, start again with the first one wrong, 0/3 done
Conclusion.
Pick a sequence where failing to get the end right means you are automatically in with a second chance. This means you can win far more often than you would think. The reason is just common sense, no deep maths, no psychology, no team thinking, no magic, just common sense.
As for how he predicted the lottery, there are dozens of equally plausible solutions, but however he did it I'll stab myself in the foot if a group of 24 people in a trance had the slightest involvement.
The game:
You take a coin and flip it a lot of times in a row, and you note every time that two different sequences of 3 results comes up.
The assumption:
Your initial reaction (and mine) was that all of the 2x2x2=8 results are equally likely to come up. Because if we flip a coin 3 times only this is true. You try and flip a coin 3 times and record weather your sequence came up or not and then start again. If you do this enough times (you'll need a few hours and nothing better to do) and you can easily show that all 8 results are just as likely. We are lead to believe this is true for the game above.
But:
This isn't what happens, in a long string of results HTHHHTHTHTTHTHTHTHTTTHTHTH
I predict THH: T win! 1/3 done, H win! 2/3 done, T ignore what happened before, start again with the first one right , 1/3 done
I predict HHH: H win! 1/3 done, H win! 2/3 done, T ignore what happened before, start again with the first one wrong, 0/3 done
Conclusion.
Pick a sequence where failing to get the end right means you are automatically in with a second chance. This means you can win far more often than you would think. The reason is just common sense, no deep maths, no psychology, no team thinking, no magic, just common sense.
As for how he predicted the lottery, there are dozens of equally plausible solutions, but however he did it I'll stab myself in the foot if a group of 24 people in a trance had the slightest involvement.
REPOST House bill 676 (AKA evil Nazi comunist healthcare bill)
Disclaimer: I lean anarcho-capitalist and I'm British, everything I say is biased. Read the bill and make your own mind up.
Americans spend more on health care per capita than just about anywhere. This is largely due to the poor not wanting to pay for preventative medicine and so paying out massive lump sums for emergency operations etc (one of the highest causes of bankruptcy in the US is medical debt). So it makes sense for preventive medicine to be paid for by central funding, thus putting more people into the labour market and increasing general goodness and utility. However massive government health care programs (eg the british NHS) are often inefficient and expensive for their own reasons (not not as much per capita as America). The NHS is the 5th largest employer in the world after the Red army, Walmart, US defence department and Indian national railways.
Ok enough preamble, the bill. The only version I can find is the bill as presented to the house, this is the short (30 page) bare bones version before lobbies and others can expand that hell out of it with thousands of sub clauses. The entire thing is at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-676 or http://johnconyers.com/hr676text
* Chiropractic services. (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A64) bluntly chiropractic 'treatment' is psudoscientific nonsense, no well conducted study has shown any benefit for the kinds of conditions it claimed to deal with, on top of that is is dangerous in a very real and well documented way. http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/360/ http://www.ukskeptics.com/article.php?dir=articles&article=chiropractic.php
* freedom of choice (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A81) this is a good if not vital idea, but this one sentence is not nearly enough to deal with it, we'll have to see how things turn out after editing and expanding.
* No balance billing (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A121) this is the sort of thing we have problems with in the UK, the sharp discontinuity between private and public, accepting any govt. money at all renders your services non-billable.
* Favouring community-based care (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A140) is another one that needs to be watched post edit, in theory this leads to much better outcomes for the patient, but not universally, I can imagine many situations where this will either be interpreted too strictly or opposed by NIMBYs.
* Official prescription drug buyer (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A144) if you have to legislate to say that people should be encouraged not to give their patients drugs that are dangerous you're doing it wrong.
* Promotion of generics (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A145) fantastic, this is an absolutely necessary part of the legislation (watch it get watered down or pulled in committee. While we're at it lets use free software on all govt computers.
* right to petition (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A146) two things: you don't need to tell us we have the right to petition, that's given in the the first, what you mean is that people have to listen, that's a different matter. secondly the word region here scares me, I get images of the UK's postcode lottery where different services are available depending on where you live.
* funding (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A153) not being very familiar with the American system is putting what taxes will be raised a normal part of bills? If so it's a very clever idea so people can know what everything costs and where the money comes from. Though this is just nonsense, you can't cut paperwork by saying you're going to, bureaucracy breeds, secondly you're raising a large chunk of this by taxing only the top 5%... is it really fair/sensible etc to have such a dichotomy, with only the rich paying for only the poor.
* replacing medicare offices by new regional offices (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A170) Is this really a good use of resources? If medicare is running things now why can't they carry on, keep all the same offices just expand them as required, I dont see the benefit of what looks like a massive re-branding exercise.
* Huge list of duties for regional director (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A178) Is it sensible to centralise things in this way? I see no logical reason why the same person who decides when and where hospitals are built should also decide on an area's health budget, surely the first needs to be done at a really local level and the second at a huge area?
* electronic records (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A188) I know I'm jaded by the NHS, but huge computer systems dont work. it wont cut down on paper either, everyone will still print things out. We need records of what drugs are give an what tests take for sure, but do we also need all the rubbish that are always in government databases? There is also the problem that people who fear computers wont tell doctors things because they worry about it being on the system.
Conclusion: This bill will pass, but it'll look nothing like this by the end, America could never accept such radical change. The bill has far too wide a mandate as it stands, you'd need to tear down half the health industry to implement it. There are some very good points but the focus is quite wrong. What this bill should be about is providing the basic services that the uninsured dont get, not trying to put vast swathes of heath care into the government's hands in one fell swoop.
Both sides are misrepresenting this, the impression I get from republican officials is of a far more limited bill than this one. The impression I get republicans ... well the impression i get from republicans is that republicans are stupid, but the bill is presented as actually evil. This is not destroying anyone's rights, nor will it cost half the national budget, nor will there be mass killings or the amount of government involvement described.
What it is is badly balanced and inefficient (half the bill is spent creating new middle management posts) but with enough wholesale re-writing this bill could very easily become serviceable.
Americans spend more on health care per capita than just about anywhere. This is largely due to the poor not wanting to pay for preventative medicine and so paying out massive lump sums for emergency operations etc (one of the highest causes of bankruptcy in the US is medical debt). So it makes sense for preventive medicine to be paid for by central funding, thus putting more people into the labour market and increasing general goodness and utility. However massive government health care programs (eg the british NHS) are often inefficient and expensive for their own reasons (not not as much per capita as America). The NHS is the 5th largest employer in the world after the Red army, Walmart, US defence department and Indian national railways.
Ok enough preamble, the bill. The only version I can find is the bill as presented to the house, this is the short (30 page) bare bones version before lobbies and others can expand that hell out of it with thousands of sub clauses. The entire thing is at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-676 or http://johnconyers.com/hr676text
* Chiropractic services. (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A64) bluntly chiropractic 'treatment' is psudoscientific nonsense, no well conducted study has shown any benefit for the kinds of conditions it claimed to deal with, on top of that is is dangerous in a very real and well documented way. http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/360/ http://www.ukskeptics.com/article.php?dir=articles&article=chiropractic.php
* freedom of choice (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A81) this is a good if not vital idea, but this one sentence is not nearly enough to deal with it, we'll have to see how things turn out after editing and expanding.
* No balance billing (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A121) this is the sort of thing we have problems with in the UK, the sharp discontinuity between private and public, accepting any govt. money at all renders your services non-billable.
* Favouring community-based care (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A140) is another one that needs to be watched post edit, in theory this leads to much better outcomes for the patient, but not universally, I can imagine many situations where this will either be interpreted too strictly or opposed by NIMBYs.
* Official prescription drug buyer (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A144) if you have to legislate to say that people should be encouraged not to give their patients drugs that are dangerous you're doing it wrong.
* Promotion of generics (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A145) fantastic, this is an absolutely necessary part of the legislation (watch it get watered down or pulled in committee. While we're at it lets use free software on all govt computers.
* right to petition (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A146) two things: you don't need to tell us we have the right to petition, that's given in the the first, what you mean is that people have to listen, that's a different matter. secondly the word region here scares me, I get images of the UK's postcode lottery where different services are available depending on where you live.
* funding (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A153) not being very familiar with the American system is putting what taxes will be raised a normal part of bills? If so it's a very clever idea so people can know what everything costs and where the money comes from. Though this is just nonsense, you can't cut paperwork by saying you're going to, bureaucracy breeds, secondly you're raising a large chunk of this by taxing only the top 5%... is it really fair/sensible etc to have such a dichotomy, with only the rich paying for only the poor.
* replacing medicare offices by new regional offices (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A170) Is this really a good use of resources? If medicare is running things now why can't they carry on, keep all the same offices just expand them as required, I dont see the benefit of what looks like a massive re-branding exercise.
* Huge list of duties for regional director (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A178) Is it sensible to centralise things in this way? I see no logical reason why the same person who decides when and where hospitals are built should also decide on an area's health budget, surely the first needs to be done at a really local level and the second at a huge area?
* electronic records (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-676&version=ih&nid=t0%3Aih%3A188) I know I'm jaded by the NHS, but huge computer systems dont work. it wont cut down on paper either, everyone will still print things out. We need records of what drugs are give an what tests take for sure, but do we also need all the rubbish that are always in government databases? There is also the problem that people who fear computers wont tell doctors things because they worry about it being on the system.
Conclusion: This bill will pass, but it'll look nothing like this by the end, America could never accept such radical change. The bill has far too wide a mandate as it stands, you'd need to tear down half the health industry to implement it. There are some very good points but the focus is quite wrong. What this bill should be about is providing the basic services that the uninsured dont get, not trying to put vast swathes of heath care into the government's hands in one fell swoop.
Both sides are misrepresenting this, the impression I get from republican officials is of a far more limited bill than this one. The impression I get republicans ... well the impression i get from republicans is that republicans are stupid, but the bill is presented as actually evil. This is not destroying anyone's rights, nor will it cost half the national budget, nor will there be mass killings or the amount of government involvement described.
What it is is badly balanced and inefficient (half the bill is spent creating new middle management posts) but with enough wholesale re-writing this bill could very easily become serviceable.
Hello
So basically, I rant a lot on facebook and write many mini-essays and stuff. So I thought I might as well branch out and make a proper blog. I wont promise to make this regular or coherent. Just whenever I want a rant I'll stick it on here. I welcome all the feedback I can get so please dont be shy. If you dont understand what I've said please tell me because it means i've screwed up. Hoping we all have fun with this. Yours, Rebellionkid.
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