A Lack of Indignation

It seems to me that we are a culture that has lost the notion of righteous indignation. I see an administration that labels any critic unpatriotic, corporate leaders who come up with scam after scam to feather their nests, and government officials so corrupt that they must go into hiding.

The only place to find indignation is by listening to assorted comedians as they try to make a comic turn of this sad state. Why are the interviewers so polite? The first question I'd ask nearly any politician I encountered is, Do your really believe that? So many spew unfettered drivel that is nothing more than an ideological chant that it seems they believe if repeated enough might give birth to truth.

If this is the best we have to offer as a culture, then there is little hope for we are doomed to be mired in delusion. Do not stand for it. When you see a wrong, speak to the moral vacuousness of that wrong. Hold people accountable. Consider the effort to make the ten commandments visible in public places. Are those who advocate that willing to live by them? Remember, thow shalt not bear false witness. Live by that one alone and there would be no campaign commericals.

Social Security

As an individual who has a healthy respect for the free market, you might find my view that we should save social security and medicare a bit out of character. In the best of all possible worlds, we would all put aside a bit of our earnings into some retirement fund, and it would grow little by little to a level sufficient to support us into old age.

There are a couple of reasons I consider that economic fantasy. First, recent history tells us that large corporations with an array of financial advisors to envy at their beck and call can't seem to manage a defined benefit plan. The upshot is that we the taxpayers are going to dig them out of their incompetence, even though they received annual compensation as if they were performing in an outstanding manner. The bottom line is that they haven't demonstrated for private managers to produce a reliable defined benefit plan. While the theory supports the idea, the facts simply don't.

Problem two is that even if we take the forced savings that is now social security and put it in private accounts, I know few people who are good at managing money. They'll be too conservative or take too much risk, or do what I do, and just not pay sufficient attention. The upshot is that we will end up with a bunch of people who simple do not have the funds to retire and pay for their health care.

Problem three is that a whole army of charlatans will arise laying out plans to make us well off, but simply making fees on our ill-advised choices. The lawsuits in recent years against various financial services groups are testiment to the likelihood charlatans even in an environment that is relatively constrained.

I believe every American should have the knowledge that out there at age 65 or so is a small amount of cash and health coverage to make retirement possible. Yes, we can afford it. Yes, it is resdistributional. In other words, we do take from the wealthier and give to the less wealthy. What I don't know is when this suddenly became some sort of terrible thing. To be honest, I don't mind that a bit of my money goes to pay for some working person to retire. Nobody gets rich off of social security, and nobody gets poor because of it.

The first step to solving the problem is to make the trust fund truely a trust fund that can't be used to obfiscate the true level of the deficit. The second step is to force employers to make sure that the full share of taxes is paid in. Don't allow under the table, off the books use if illegal labor. It is the young, imigrant that is part of the funding for social security. The third step is to establish a wealth sir tax that goes into the trust fund. These are the guys that ripped off the private sector retirement system, so this should be their penalty.

Of course you can expect the wise conservative economic bretheren to provide all sorts of reasons why these are bad ideas. First and foremost, they will argue that the owners of capital have special gifts to grow the economy that will be lost through redistribution. Maybe, but at least social security recipients will spend their dollars here and not shelter them in some foreign tax haven. Plus, the amount of money is such a tiny amount as to be insignficant. The resistance is ideolgical, not empircal.

Health Care in America

Most of us have the good fortune of never having to do much interaction with the health care system. We encounter little more than the basic cold or flu.

Unfortunately, as we age, we all will find our contacts with health care more frequent and more complex. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, our system is not all it's cracked up to be. Many western countries have health outcomes that surpass ours, and pay out substantially less than we do.

The latest trend is to increasingly shift costs of health care to individuals. For the 20 year old, that's not so bad. But when you are 45 or older, you have been paying in for many years without having made many claims. Now you are being expected to pay. In other words, they took your money and you assumed you'd come out even in the future, but that's not how it's working. You are getting ripped off.

Politicians and economists will hand you all sorts of free market justifications for the change and if you hadn't been subsidizing others for 20 years, they might be right. But the fact is, they took your money, now they want to act as if they didn't. This is just flatly theft.

Let's begin by eliminating a myth or two. The heath care market is not a free market. It simply doesn't meet the economic criteria to be considered a free market, and it's unlikely it ever will. To be a free market, I've got to be able to find the best deal and to do that, I've got to be able to know what is the best product, have multiple competitors, and be able to shop around. Anyone know where that can be done with respect to health care?

The second myth is that we can pin the rise in the cost of health care on some single factor such as lawsuits, needless use by consumers, over use of tests, conflicts of interest, or even just the fact that the population is getting older and sicker. The reality is not that simple. Health care costs are going up because of all sort of factors forming the perfect storm of rising costs. The fact is that the real cause of rising health care costs is greed. There are greedy pharmaceutical companies, greedy doctors, greedy lawyers, selfish consumers, greedy employers, and greedy shareholders. A pure free market will combat greed because competition drives it out, but the market of health care can't. Recent surveys of new doctors indicate they are not motivated by caring, but by money. You can't blame them, but don't look to them to suddenly find a sense of compassion. Employers are doing everything possible to shift costs to employees at rates that offset the slight raises that the average worker gets.

The profligate spending of the recent administration coupled with tax cuts that have benefited few average wage earners set us on a path where many of us will not be able to get the health care we need. The crisis may not affect you today, but it will in the next ten years.

Here's some things you should do:

• Ask to see the contract your employer has with the health claims administrator. There's a good chance that the contract does not put a burden on the third party administrator to ensure you get you care covered, but focuses on lowering the cost to the employer
• Find out who the consultants are that are guiding your employer. Most of them are charging needlessly large fees to provide cookie cutter solutions that don't benefit the employee, and many have conflicts of interest with the very vendors they are hired to monitor.
• Unionize because they only group that has the slightest chance of countering the bad deal be given to employee is an employee union. Unions are imperfect an have too often feathered their own nests, but they are part of the solution.
• Demand Congress step up and make investigations of the health care system part of its agenda. Congress has focused on those without health care, but done little to address the impending crisis facing even those who have limited coverage.
• When possible, and unfortunately this is a hard one, make your doctor give you a cost estimate and coverage evaluation every time they want to do something.
• Get healthier because you aren't going to want to be unhealthy in the future. It will be a bad time.
• Spend time now finding out who qualified specialists are and getting to know them. As someone who recently found myself needing a specialist over the Thanksgiving holiday, I can tell you that the vacuum is huge.
• Stop settling for inefficienct health care that makes you wait as if your time is of no value. It relfects an unacceptable arrogance on the part of health providers, and the reality is, they don't really have to behave that way. That you have to wait so long is a function of poor management.

Health care is about 20 percent of GDP now. It's time we as consumers starting have our rights considered. Don't think for a minute that because your employer pays a share of your costs that you are somehow not the purchaser. It is simply another form of compensation and you have earned it with your labor. It's not a gift.

Blog 1

This is my first blog. I guess I've finally gotten swept up in the process. I have chosen the title iconoclast for the simple reason that I often find myself having views that run counter to the conventional wisdom. So, my comments are likely to reflect my views of the nature of what's going on in the world. I may or may not offer some unique insight, but I figure that I have got as much to say as the next person.

Most importantly, I believe that I, like many others, am distressed at the distructive pattern that we seem to be in in our world. As someone with a focus on economics, I believe that our aims should be to create and to add value to the world, not tear down. Yet what I see is entire segments of the world with no aim but distruction. We destroy groups who don't believe like us or who threaten our beliefs, rather than asking if we can find common groud to build uppon so that we can all be better off.

There are those who argue their acts on the basis of some set of moral tenets, but these are sharlatans. They offer nothing. Their sole aim is their own power. Nothing else. We must simply say stop!

These may sound like idealistic ramblings, but one need only look at Ghandi and Martin Luther King to find the strength in what I say. Parents, tell you children that destruction is wrong. Pastors tell you flocks. Imams tell your faithful. This is not about whether you believe in one God or another. It is simply that destruction is wrong. Period. Just wrong.