Tear up the health care bill and start over.

I wrote a comment on this same issue last night, but I wanted to make it into a post as well, given the importance. Marcia Angel, M.D., former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, is highly critical of the proposed "health care reform." Although she admits that it accomplishes a few things, it is worse than doing nothing.

It throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it.

Read the full post at Huffpo for Angel's clear and understandable ideas for meaningful (and not corrupt) health care reform. I agree with Angel that the current bill is an industry-coddling joke and that it is worse than doing nothing, for the reasons she offers. The House bill has a few pieces of low hanging fruit (e.g., portability), but at great unnecessary expense and waste. We need to tear up this celebrated new bill (celebrated by the Democrats, anyway) and start over. For more on Angell's ideas for reform, also see her recent appearance on Bill Moyer's show.

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Backroom postal employees paid to do nothing.

The Federal Times has provided a disturbing example of government waste. Situations like these cause many people to distrust the federal government (except, of course, when the government is invading another country with government employee-soldiers).

The U.S. Postal Service, struggling with a massive deficit caused by plummeting mail volume, spends more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing. It’s a practice called “standby time,” and it has existed for years — but postal employees say it was rarely used until this year. Now, postal officials say, the agency is averaging about 45,000 hours of standby time every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million per year.

According to Federal Times article, mail volume is way down (largely because of the Internet), and the USPS can’t keep all of its employees busy. This article states that union rules prohibit layoffs or re-assignment to locations that do need workers. Federal Times reported that postal officials admitted that 15,000 postal workers did least some “standby time” last year, many of them spending entire shifts in break rooms where they do crosswords and personal reading, and some even sleep through their shifts. The article notes that letter carriers are not among the affected employees; letter carriers are being kept busy due to reduced numbers of those positions and increasing numbers of addresses to service. Speaking of mail volume being way down, my letter carrier tells me that almost everything he delivers is advertising, magazines, bills or greeting cards. People are squawking about closing some post offices, but shouldn’t there be even a bigger cost-saving move to reduce deliveries to three per week? Couldn't I possibly wait an extra day for that magazine, for that bill or for that mailer worth 15% off on my next delivery of pizza? Think of all the fuel and money taxpayers could save if we delivered mail to residences only every other day instead of every day . . .

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What it’s like to not shop for a year.

Judith Levine and her significant other decided to not shop for a year.   She wrote about her trials and tribulations in her book, Not buying It: My Year Without Shopping. She also wrote about it in Washington Post in an article titled, "Don't Buy It." Here's an excerpt: People can…

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Question the significance of the “gross domestic product” (GDP)

I just finished reading a terrifically clear and concise article on measuring "the economy" by Jonathan Rowe, published by Harpers. It is entitled "Our Phony Economy." Please allow me to set the scene. Haven't you wondered why politicians and the news media so often obsess about the rising and falling…

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The fraud and waste in Iraq is worse than you ever thought

Here's the bottom line, as reported on Yahoo: The Pentagon cannot account for nearly 15 billion dollars in payments for goods and services in Iraq, according to an internal audit which members of Congress blasted Friday as a "shocking" accountability failure. Why didn't a government accountant catch the problem?  Good…

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