[ExI] Class Differences Among Black People

[Olga Bourlin]

From: "J. Andrew Rogers" <andrew at ceruleansystems.com>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 9:37 PM
> I am actually on the "dissolve" side of this issue.  The state has no
> business giving special recognition or privileges to homosexual
> marriages any more than it has business doing so in heterosexual
> marriages.
>
>> * He is against minimum wage;

> Any economist worth a damn would be, for well understood reasons.
> The only reason people even care about the minimum wage is that some
> union contracts have wages that are set as a fixed multiple of the
> Federal minimum wage -- if you increase it 40%, the union guys get a
> 40% pay raise or something along those lines.  Raising the minimum
> wage is nothing more than pandering to the unions.  It has no other
> significant consequences other than pricing labor out of the market
> on the low end.
>
> In a way, I support radical increases of the minimum wage.  It will
> bankrupt the companies and break the unions, putting that idiocy to
> rest.

>> * He is against affirmative action (but he's seemingly not opposed  to 
>> white
>> affirmative action - I mean, I've heard no complaints from Sowell  about 
>> the
>> current affirmative action baby in the White House (no pun intended));
>
> Any economist worth their degree would be against affirmative
> action.  The costs and consequences far outweigh whatever nominal
> benefits these poorly thought out programs have.

>From what I've read, white women have primarily benefited from affirmative 
action, and because of that, therefore, many white men.  What was poorly 
thought out about that?  Our society has changed, and affirmative action 
helped bridge some of those changes.  It's a good thing women have joined 
the workforce - can you imagine going back to 1955 when many women were 
wasting away at home? (Whew!  I was fortunate to have both a mother and 
grandmother who worked "outside the home" as they call it ...)  Have you 
read about? - or seen? - a time when entitlements in the workforce went 
primarily to white men?  (I have ... and it's a good thing that's 
potentially in the past, because ...

As I mentioned ... why hasn't Sowell worked up a sweat about the affirmative 
action that put Bush in the White House?  And talk about the money Bush has 
frittered away ... unbelievable.

>> * He is against universal / socialized health care;
>
> Socialism is not expensive per se, but entitlements destroy societies
> by reducing flexibility in the economy.  If you keep accreting these
> kinds of liabilities, the lack of economic flexibility and
> adaptability will cause a very predictable downward economic spiral.
> Any economist worth a damn knows this, and the result has repeated
> itself numerous times in the real world.  (Which is not to say some
> private systems such as the US are not broken; clearly wholesale
> restructuring is needed in US medicine, but those problems can be
> solved without government healthcare.)

I've been hearing this for decades ... even while other countries have 
figured out how to provide this to their citizens.  I don't understand the 
reluctance the good people of the United States have against universal 
health care.

(http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/opinion/26gawande.html?hp )

May 26, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Katrina Health Care System
By ATUL GAWANDE
This is my fourth week as a guest columnist. Let's take a look at the health
care news that's transpired in that time.

First, DaimlerChrylser sold off 80 percent of its Chrysler division for
three pebbles and a piece of string. O.K., the cash payment was actually
$1.35 billion. But for an 82-year-old company that built more than two
million cars and trucks last year, took in $47 billion in revenue, and owns
64 million square feet of factory real estate in North America alone, that's
almost nothing. Yet analysts say that it was a great deal for Daimler. Why?
Because the buyer, Cerberus Capital Management, agreed to absorb Chrysler's
$18 billion in health and pension liability costs.

Stop and think about this for a minute. The deal meant that the costs of our
job-based health insurance system - costs adding $1,500 to each car Chrysler
builds here, but almost nothing to those built in Canada or Europe - have so
broken the automaker's ability to compete that giving it away became the
smartest thing Daimler could do. Chrysler's mistake was to hang around long
enough to collect retirees and an older-than-average work force. As a
result, it now has less market value than Men's Wearhouse, Hasbro, the
Cheesecake Factory, NutriSystem, Foot Locker and Pottery Barn. Oprah is
worth more than Chrysler. This is not good.

Meanwhile, officials at West Jefferson Medical Center outside New Orleans
reported that the number of indigent patients admitted there has tripled
since Hurricane Katrina. The uninsured are now 30 percent of their emergency
room patients. Officials in Houston hospitals are reporting similar numbers.
Conditions seem worse rather than better. Katrina caused a vicious spiral.
Large numbers of people lost their jobs and, with them, their health
coverage. Charity Hospital, the one state-funded hospital in New Orleans,
closed. The few open hospital emergency rooms in the area have had to handle
the load, but it's put the hospitals in financial crisis. Four hundred
physicians filed a lawsuit against the state seeking payment for
uncompensated care, and massive numbers of doctors and nurses have left the
area.

In Washington, a conference held by the American College of Emergency
Physicians revealed that New Orleans may have it worst, but emergency rooms
everywhere are drowning in patients. Mandated to care for the uninsured,
they are increasingly unprofitable. So although the influx of patients has
grown, 500 emergency rooms have closed in the last decade. The result: 91
percent report overcrowding - meaning wait times for the acutely ill of more
than an hour or waiting rooms filled more than six hours per day. Almost
half report this occurring daily.

A few days later, the Commonwealth Fund released one of the most detailed
studies ever done comparing care in the United States, Australia, Canada,
Germany, New Zealand and Britain. We've known for awhile that health care
here is more expensive than anywhere and that our life expectancy is somehow
shorter. But the particulars were the surprise.

On the good side, the study found that once we get into a doctor's office,
American patients are as likely as patients anywhere to get the right care,
especially for prevention. Only Germans have a shorter wait for surgery when
it's needed. And 85 percent of Americans are happy with the care they get.

But we also proved to be the least likely to have a regular doctor - and
starkly less likely to have had the same doctor for five years. We have the
hardest time finding care on nights or weekends outside of an E.R. And we
are the most likely (after Canadians) to wait six days or more for an
appointment when we need medical attention. Half of Americans also reported
forgoing medical care because of cost in the last two years, twice the
proportion elsewhere.

None of this news, however, did more than lift a few eyebrows. So this is
the picture of American health care you get after watching for a few weeks:
it's full of holes, it's slowly bankrupting us and we're kind of used to it.

That leaves two possibilities: (1) We've given up on the country; or (2) we'
re just waiting for someone else to be in charge.

I'm pulling for No. 2.

Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a New
Yorker staff writer, is the author of the new book "Better." He is a guest
columnist this month.

> I have yet to see a good idea for how to keep a social program,
> particularly a universal one, from calcifying into an entitlement
> with all the economic damage that causes.

Economic damage trumps emotional and physical damage?

I say, it would be a good idea for lying politicians to spend less money on 
pre-emptive wars against petty dictators ... and more money on health and 
education at home.

Cheers back,
Olga