Health Insurance Comments

This was inspired by recent protests organized by MoveOn.org, in which people marched in front of Wellpoint and demanded that they change certain things about how they do business.

Health insurance is a financial industry - their role is to handle large sums of money and to turn a profit doing it. To do so leads to an ever-increasing demand for efficiency. Unfortunately this is by necessity impersonal - decisions about who to carry are made for financial reasons.

Can we force this industry to take a different approach? To do so will mean a reduction in its profitability, which will result in fewer investors. Since such a directive would be contrary to the business's stated goals I can imagine that the industry would become much weaker.

Currently insurance companies are under pressure at all times to be more efficient and effective from a financial point of view. In some case this leads to better service for customers, but in others it leads to people being denied coverage. I am not sure what the answer is, but I suspect that trying to force the industry to go against its basic role and become more humane would not yield the desired result. Instead we need a stronger system to handle those whose health is such that they won't fit into the insurance companies' mold. If such scheme were built (the "public" option) then I am sure that insurance companies would adapt and survive. But to demand that they change their stated business plan is not going to get anywhere that we want to be.

One Manifesto

"If I saw a man named Jesus feed a multitude of people with 2 loaves of bread and five fishes; if I saw a man named Jesus bring Lazurus back from the dead; if the Bible were indestructible; if I saw Jesus killed and then come back to life; if I saw Jesus ascend into heaven; ... if ANY miracles were to happen as a matter of fact, then I would see that there were evidence for God and would believe. The people who supposedly saw these miracles were given a chance that makes faith unfair for the rest of the people living over countless millennia." - from http://www.rationalatheist.com/Articles/christianity_dont.html

Well that is the whole point isn't it - do you trust the people who wrote it down or not? Do you believe it possible they were telling the truth? I do. I have faith in people.

How ironic that the humanist viewpoint asserts that the bible authors were not telling the truth - so this apparently reveals that to be humanist you don't have faith in people.

Do you (the above author) think you deserve to have every wish granted for you in your life? Suppose just suppose your wish conflicts with mine? Any chance that could happen? God never said He is there to grant everybody a life of bliss. He created evolution after all, and look what a cruel system that can be.

So many atheists say that people would love each other more if we all forgot about the God idea. But is that true? I think not. I think we have inherited the idea of love from religion, in the West's case from Christ himself. I think given one or two generations of people in a totally atheistic society and the whole thing would collapse under people's innate selfishness. (Say, didn't that happen already in the Soviet Union and China? And even in those countries a lot of people kept their faith, they just couldn't admit publicly very much).

God's rules (both of them) are what helps keep us together. Atheists should not claim love, because love came to us from God.

Great Poetry

I love great poetry, and sometimes it comes from the oddest of places. For instance:

"Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning.
They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.

Come back to work — and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.

With admiration, Scooter Libby."

Amazing.