HSA and Marketers

Have you ever seen those slick ads telling folks they can get a free scooter from the government?

Slick marketers have learned that when a third party is picking up the tab, people are likely to spend foolishly.

While discussing the differences between the Health Savings Accounts and the Medical Savings and Loan, I should mention that the HSA coupled with high deductible insurance preserves the perverse incentives of third party payments.

Marketers are attentive to who is paying the bill. As such, they market unnecessary medical expenses to people who are getting their care funded by the high deductible insurance.

Patients, of course, are attentive to their deductibles and plan their doctor visits to get as much free care as possible.

The medical savings and loan has all expenses being self funded by the patient ... eliminentating the perverse incentives.

Supplements to the MS&L come in the form of grants. The grant givers are likely to be highly atuned to nature of the spending. They are less likely to give grants to people who spend frivolously.

Marketers would take a different approach to people in the Medical Savings and Loan. The sick will do a better job guarding their money, while the healthy would end up with massive amounts of cash in their Health Savings Account. Businesses would compete developing products that help the sick get the most out of their money and concentrate frivolous marketing on the healthy ... probably in the form of preventative care and savings related products.

A study on how the Medical Savings and Loan differs from Health Savings Account would be a wonderful addition to research related to liberty and health care.

I would be happy to help anyone with such an academic study.

A conference on the Medical Savings and Loan could result in numerous academic papers, publications and even new businesses.

It would cost very little to host and would produce a world of good. All the conference needs is a group of people willing to spend a day or two talking about free market alternatives to group funded health care.

HSA v. Medical Savings and Loan

Currently, a Health Savings Account with high deductible insurance (or government funded catastrophic insurance) is the only alternative to insurance.

Reports indicate the Indiana Insurance plan has an $8K yearly deductible.

Unfortunately, an HSA + high deductible insurance creates some ugly gaps.

Let's compare a person with a one time catastrophic incident costing $20K to a person with a chronic condition that costs $5K a year.

The person who has the one time catastrophe pays a one time $8K deductible and gets a $12K supplement.

The person with the chronic condition is under the deductible each year and will have to bear the full cost of the illness.

Since chronic conditions tend to reduce earning power, the person with the chronic condition is in a double crunch.

The Medical Savings and Loan is based on a full life cycle analysis. In the MS&L the person with the one time $20K event would end up paying what was in his savings account and get a loan to cover the rest of the $20K.

The Medical Savings and Loan supplements people with grants (not re-insurance).

Let's say a grant agency has $12 to dole out. The grant agency would notice that the person with the one time catastrophe had $22K in expenses (The one time event and some other doctor visits). The person with the chronic condition shelled out $5K a year for 8 years ... this person had $40K in expenses and diminished earning capacity and high future expenses.

So, in the Medical Savings and Loan, the guy with the chronic condition would get the grant.

BTW, I should also note that an HSA with high deductible insurance has one additional flaw: A person with high deductible insurance still must borrow to pay the gap between savings and the insurance. This borrowing is usually done with high interest loans.

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New Years Resolution

Health Care Financing is a business problem, not a political problem. We've been trying to finance health care through pay-as-you-go pooled insurance. This model has failed in so many ways.

The idea behind ObamaCare, the Utah PAC, etc., is that we can fix a failed system by making it absolute. The key feature of ObamaCare is to make buying insurance mandatory.

The better solution is to design a better business model. In the 1980s, I spent a great deal of time creating an alternative to Insurance. Despite the fact that it would provide substantially better care for less money, I found no local interest in the program.

So, my resolution for 2011 is to find a freemarket-oriented group seeking to repeal ObamaCare, and to present the Medical Savings and Loan.

Such groups do not exist in Utah. Utah is filled with Glenn Beck style creatures who spout plumes of free market rhetoric, but systematically reject any real free market oriented solutions.

To fulfill my resolution, I need to travel.
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To travel, I need cash. I thought about self-publishing a book. Selling 20 copies of a self published book is enough to buy a room at the Motel 6. But, I find self-publishing an unedited book distasteful.

I have a whole book written. Quality writing demands peer review and editing.

I am now thinking the best way to get traveling cash would be to add social media functions to the Community Color Web Sites. If I could increase the traffic through these sites tenfold, I'd make enough for a motel every other night.

The nasty catch here is that increasing traffic tenfold would mean I'd have to move to a new server.

Hmmm, I've been dearly tempted by the VPS.net cloud. The Western U.S. Servers are hosted in Utah Valley. Upgrading to a newer version of MySQL would mean I could use Stored Procedures which is more conducive to the distributed type of computing used in social media.

I seem to be good at stymying myself with chicken-before-the egg-type conumdrums.

First Day Sales

My first two days of sales are in. With a little bit of forum spamming and blog posts, I was able to scare up 50 clicks to the the Kindle Version of Brainwashing. From those 50 clicks, I managed to sell one copy of the work.

Okay. I was the person who bought the copy. I thought it would be worth $.99 to see how the work rendered in the Kindle Software. Buying a copy means I have statistics for the book.

The Amazon upload did not paginate or do the table of contents in the same way as the copy I compiled with the software from MobiPocket.com.

The one sale put my book at position #134,524 in the Kindle Store. A weeks ago, my sister published a short story for young adults called Bouncing Brad. She is in position #116,613. My guess is that she sold two copies (me being one of the two copies).

Both works suffer from the lack of an editor.

I suspect that, in the long haul, the large quantity of unedited works on Kindle will destroy it as a potential revenue source for unpublished writers. (Unless, of course, people develop an appetite for raw writing ... which is possible).

Were I to design a Digital Text Platform, I would include editing functionality. A writer could upload their writing as raw. People who enjoy improving writing could make modifications to works they like. Editors would end up getting a cut of the sale price of books.

As for Brain Washing. I wrote the book in the 1980s. I did a major edit in 2000. IMHO, There was sufficient time from the writing to the publishing for a self editing session. I added the section headers and made very minor corrections for the Kindle edition.

Anyway, my Kindle book was a test of Amazon's DTP.

I think will do a little more spamming. I gave up on the goal of recouping the $10.99 I invested in the project (I bought a $10 stock photo for the cover). My new goal is to get 50 more clicks on the title.

Kindle Stuffer

One Day Late for Christmas, I am pleased to announce the Kindle edition of Brain Washing.

This is a $.99 short story sold through the Amazon Digital Publishing Program. It is the tale of a philosophically inclined apprentice janitor.

The plot line was that a person works his way through college working as a janitor. He graduates in a recession and continues on as a janitor feeling bad about his social status.

He hooks up with a master janitor. After a series of triumphs and defeats, the master janitor goes through a self cleansing which is so thorough that the master janitor achieves nirvana (the highest state of being) and transcends.

You can read the story online.

The primary reason that I republished the story on Kindle was to test the Amazon kindle publishing format.

I uploaded the story a week ago. I originally clicked the 70% royality button. The lowest price I for an eBook on the 70% option is $2.99 (which is too much for a short story). So, I changed to the 35% option and republished. It took Amazon several days to encode the change ... so, I missed the Chirstmas market.

There might be people who just bought a kindle (or who got an Amazon.com gift certificate). So, I might get a few sales.

Moneywise, I spent $10 to buy a stock photo titled Commercial Cleaning by Pedro Castellano. I also bought a copy of the book to see what it looks like. I should be making about thirty cents per each book sold.

If I can sell 40 copies, I will break even. I doubt I will sell that many. But there might end up being a small market for dollar books as people with Kindles might buy such books to use up the loose ends of gift cards.

It's Illegal to Check the Expiration Date

This ruling by the Department of Justice makes no sense.

Hoover Manufacturing was sued because it required permanent residents working at their firm to provide new green cards when their old green cards expired.

The Justice Department says Hoovers is discriminating because Hoovers doesn't ask US citizens to produce new worker permits when their old worker permits expires.

Personally, I see this lawsuit as yet another example of how horrible our Federal Government has become.

The whole point of an expiration date is that people are supposed to check the expiration date.

If there is not an expiration date on a permanent resident's ability to work in the US, then there should not be an expiration date on their work permit.

I realize that half-witted progressive disparage me as a racist for criticizing their precious big government; however, a company checking on expired documents is not a social justice issue.

Accepting that it is a big hassle for permanent residents to update their worker's permit, one finds that failure of a company to require updated documentation can be as oppressive and requiring that they keep documentation current.

A worker without an updated worker's permit cannot change jobs without getting a new permit. The ability to change jobs is an important part of a free society.

An evil company that knows its workers have expired permits can be abusive because their employees would have to go through the burdensome task of renewing a green card to get a new job.

The Federal Government is the group to blame for our immigration problmes, not employers.

BTW: Problems like inconsistencies between work permits and residency status could easily be fixed through incremental reform.

Comprehensive reform simply creates a massive change with a new set of problems and corruptions that our ineffective Federal Government is unable to resolve.

Tying Our Hands

The world has changed dramatically since the original START treatise.

A generation was dominated by the prospect of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new fear was of soviet nuclear material flowing into the hands of terrorists.

The possibility of a US/Soviet war stopped being the primary nuclear threat to the world when the Soviet Union stopped existing.

At this moment in time the Middle East, China and rogue nations are more likely to prove major nuclear threats than the former Soviet Union.

I am thrilled that President Obama is seeking ways to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the world. Yet I wonder why we rushed to sign a bi-lateral treatise based on a resolved conflict when the world is experiencing nuclear proliferation among rogue nations.

The smarter approach to nuclear disarmament would have the United States and Russia working together to stop worldwide nuclear disarmament.

A bilateral treaty that ties the hands of the United States effectively lessens the ability of the United States to engage rogue nations in disarmament talks.

I am left wondering why we just witnessed an unprecedented effort to rush a major treatise through a lame duck Congress.

The START Treatise of 2010 looks more like a desperate drive by a narcissist to earn peacenik stripes than a serious contemplative step to make the world a safer place.

The Parasites Gather

On January 18th, a group called Utah Health Policy will hold a meeting on implementing Obamacare on January 10, 2011 at the University of Utah (and satellite locations across the state.

When I first read the announcement, I thought the public meeting would solicit ideas from the public on health policy.

Being an optimist a complete idiot, I actually started gathering information on the Medical Savings and Loan to bring to the meeting to see if I could find any interest in the concept.

On reading deeper into the site, my heart sank. I actually felt physically ill when I read the Myth v. Fact page of the project.

This group simply dismissed the Tea Party and the 2010 elections as myth.

I went to the tea parties, I spent a year closely following the anti-Obamacare movement. The Myth-v-Fact page completely mischaracterizes the tea party and utterly misinterprets the election. Using a myth-v-facts pages to spread myths is a classic Marxian style paradox, I imagine the web site creators are quite proud of themselves.

This biggest myth spread by the myth-v-fact page is the notion that insurance is the only way to fund health care. It is the way we fund health care today because government tax policy gives employer based insurance unfair advantage.

The current health care mess was created by the very progressives who are now stuffing Obamacare down our throat.

There is some truth to the myth page. For example Obamacare is not pure socialism, while participants in the tea party tend to call it socialism. Obamacare is not pure socialism. In pure socialism, the means of production are owned by the state.

A system national policy implemented through large politically connected firms might better be called "Fascism."

Obamacare is one of the many offshoots of the Marxian tradition and is counter to the free society created by the US founders.

The one part of the myth v. facts page that every patriot should read is the section on the role of states in Obamacare. This section points out that Obamacare is dependent on the states. It reads:

Health reform is designed to be a partnership between the state and federal governments, as it should be."

First off, this idea of states implementing the policies dictated by the Federal Government is not "the way it should be." The Utah Policy Project is essentially avocating the revival of the relation between the colonies and the king where the king dictates policy and the local governors implement the dictates.

This is precisely the structure that the US Founders rebelled against.

The US founders clearly created a federal government with limited powers. The federal and state governments operated in distinct realms.

Isn't it bizarre that a president who was supposed to be against colonialism is reorganizing the US government along the colonial structure?

Hope and Change appears to be a revival of the monarchy and the kings's court.

Instead of courtesans we now have a bizarre creature called a "stakeholder."

The system of stakeholders pulls together a group of likeminded courtesans into the king's court to influence and implement policy.

The stakeholder system is very simple: The intelligentsia would decide policy, then choose a selection of politically connected stakeholders who are sympathetic to the policy, then use the influence of the group to dictate policy.

I read through the list of participants involved in this Utah Policy Project. The primary stakeholders in the policy are the same big insurance firms, big hospitals, big HMOs, big government and big education that created the health care mess.

The King's Court stakeholder system cuts the people out of the equation.

So What Should We Do?

The groups pushing Obamacare in Utah are very powerful and very well organized.

Unless people who wish to preserve their health care freedom do something, Obamacare is as good as implemented in the Beehive State.

I suspect that similar efforts to the Utah Health Policy Project are taking on in every state of the nation.

If there is any interest in preserving health care freedom, patriots must act and must act now!

The best way of acting would be to create Health Care Freedom Conferences where people brainstormed on alternatives to Obamacare.

I would be happy to contribute my research on The Medical Savings and Loan to any such efforts.

The Medical Savings and Loan is a structured savings program that would allow people to self fund their health care, and would provide an alternative to insurance.

I do not have the resources or connections to organize a conference, but I can contribute ideas and help publicize an event. I would be happy to travel to a conference.

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Tyranny of the Center

I read the tweetstream of a guy claiming to be a centrist (RiseOfTheCenter). The stream is page after page of labeling the groups the author dislikes as extremists.

The tweetstream is little more than a long string of posts that projects hatred on groups that hold a position ... each having the hastag #NOLABELS.

The tweetstream feeds a web site where the author claims his dictates are magically the center.

This tweetstream is the perfect example of Hegelian dialectics in action.

In dialectics, the intelligentsia creates dichotomies then plays the dictomoies to centralize power.

Centrism and centralized power go hand-in-hand.

The author of this tweetstream is dedicating himself to a NOLABELS movement.

The NOLABELS movement is something that magically appears whenever the left is descending. I fell for it when Reagan was president. I aspired to be a balanced, rational centrist standing against those horrible conservatives and naive liberals.

The NOLABELS movement labels the Tea Party as far right ... despite the fact that the movement was primarily attended by independents.

The reason for the appearance of a coordinated centrist campaign after a progressive leap toward socialism is to hinder any steps back to a free society.

Progressivism is, of course, is a dialectical movement closely linked to centrism. The goal of the progressive is to systematically redefine the center.

The game is working.

Remember how Reagan said he never left the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left him. Today, we see a president who was essentially a fifties style Democrat defined as the far right.

Reagan was on the left in the 50s. He was a centrist in the 60s and far right in the 80s ... without any fundamental changes in his views.

This trick was accomplished by people redefining the center.

Many people try the centrist game. For example, Bill O'Reilly presents people he calls left, then people he calls the right then claims to be the fair and balanced centrist.

Anyway, I wasted several hours reading posts from this hypocritical NOLABELS movement to simply discover that the NOLABLES movement (with its partisan version of centrism) is more dependent on labels than the groups it dismisses as ideologies.

Ideologies, after all, are attempts to find a working set of ideas on which to base society. The US Founders did a great job finding ideas on which to base society. True ideologies are interested in ideas, not labels.

The term "ideology" came from the French Revolution. Hatred of ideology was core to Napolean's drive to re-establish the empire. Napolean's game was to play left off right to cease totalitarian power. Napolean created a centrist empire! Whoopie!

Hatred of ideology was also core to Hegel. I contend it was also central to Marx. Note, Marx never defined Communism beyond vague terms. He defined a conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat with the aim of inciting revolution. The revolution would resolve in a new center.

Progressivism seeks to redefine society by being to the left of a constantly changing center.

There is no center to the political universe and the self proclaimed centrists are usually among the biggest rogues on the politcal stage.

Dependency on Moral Character

For millennia, people thought the monarchy was the way to be. A top down government with one central ruler (be it a king or emperor) would provide for the people and issue justice. The system would be perfect were it not for a few bad kings that gave the system a bad rap.

In hindsight, one finds that the top-down centralized monarchy was a bad system. The rare good king gave a bad system a good rap.

One of the interesting aspects of the human condition is that people with strong moral character can make bad ideas work.

I am a fan of the strong moral character, and believe that that a society is wise to invest to promote moral character in education.

However, when discussing the organization of society, one should avoid building systems dependent on moral character.

For example, the mortgage system uses margin plays against the value of property to finance home purchases. This system depended on the integrity of both banks and borrowers. The system grew corrupt, which resulted in a bubble which made homes unaffordable and a bust that left a crippled economy.

Our progressive financial system was designed to the desires of central banks and corporate moguls. Center pieces of this system include fractional reserve lending and short selling. These financial tools allow corporate moguls to take hugely leveraged positions to dominate the market and drive out small business.

This ability to take out hugely leveraged positions allows business leaders of strong character to do amazing things. Glenn Beck fawns over Jon Huntsman. Many more idolize Warren Buffet. For that matter, there are folks in the elite media in bed with George Soros.

It is exciting to talk about the exploits of the warlords of finance, yet for each successful business warlord, there's a hundred others that simply wrought financial destruction with their leveraged margin plays. (Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Ebbers, etc.).

Although we all have business heroes that we admire, I wonder if this progressive system of finance designed to the desires of business warlords seeking market domination is better than one built to the needs of individuals seeking to build and preserve equity?

A progressive financial system built to the desires of financial warlords is called "Capitalism." This system was described by a man named Karl Marx and first outlined in a book called "Das Kapital." It stands in contrast to the free market envisioned by Adam Smith and supported by the US Founders.

Just as the monarchy was dependent on the character of the king, this system of market domination by business warlords is dependent on the character of the business war lords.

The free market of Smith, filled with billions of individuals optimizing their personal resources through the preservation and creation of capital, benefits from strong moral character, but is not dependent on it.

The Good Progressive from the North

I watched part of the Glenn Beck Show where Mr. Beck gushed over Jon Huntsman.

Apparently, Huntsman is a good progressive compared to bad progressives like George Soros (boo, hiss, boo, hiss).

But, wait a second?! The drones in the Open Society all see Soros as the good progressive. They have their list of bad progressives who must be censured. A great deal of the research of Soros's "Open Society Institute" is exactly the same type of conspiracy research done by Beck. The conclusion of Popper, Soros and followers is that they have to form powerful groups to overthrow the bad progressives like GW Bush.

I do not hate Huntsman, but recognize the guy as a progressive who used a combination of high power contacts in the Nixon administration, Utah's state church, and big business to become a billionaire.

During his career, Huntsman leveraged our progressive financial system to create products to help big firms (like McDonalds) drive smaller concerns out of business.

Some of the products like styrofoam BigMac containers created long lasting environmental damage for marginal gains.

Huntsman was a big supporter of Mitt Romney (who brought the world RomneyCare). That his family members jump from big business to big government on a regular basis indicates that the family is not above mixing business and politics in the grub for more wealth and power.

In Beck's world, Huntsman is the Good Progressive from the North, while Soros is the Wicked Progressive of the East and Pelosi the Wicked Progressive of the West.

Hmmm, is George W. Bush the good progressive from the South?

Apparently, Huntsman is a good progressive because he has "character."

Glenn Beck tells us that if we just had good progressives in charge of the centralized state-business complex, then things will be wonderful.

He is wrong.

It is the centralized monstrosity that the progressives on the left and progressives on the right are creating in concert that is destroying our freedoms.

The problem of progressivism is not a simple matter of character.

It is the highly centralized structure of the system which drives billions of people into poverty and artificially concentrates wealth.

Anyway, Glenn Beck provides a good example of the way modern dialectics is slowly strangling our freedom. He spends his day waving a flag yelling about how bad the leftist progressives are bad. His answer is that we need rightwing progressives in control.

Beck is playing the same game being played by Soros, Chomsky and clones ... but on a different side.

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Tell. Don't Do

I never liked the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy conceived by the Clinton administration.

The Clinton policy essentially tells people to lie. Nothing good comes from institutionalized lies.

Personally, I would prefer a policy of "Tell. Don't Do."

IMHO, the problem is not with individual gays serving in the military. The problem we need to avoid is widespread sexual misconduct in the army.

I say this because I've come across people who advocate using sex to manipulate society.

In my progressive days, I came across a number of people who wanted to define a new "gay lifestyle" that involved sexual relations with hundreds of different people. Some claimed to have had thousands of partners.

My progressive professors advocated the creation of a gay military. These progressives thought that, if there was a large number of promiscuous people actively living an active gay life style within the army, this group would form a progressive army within the US army.

It would be like the progressive party within the Democratic Party. You only need a small number of people dedicated to the cause to rule.

A group of people forming a sexual nexus within the army could jerk around those who weren't in the nexus. Imagine millions of people engaged in the fantasy that they were Hawkeye Pierces set in on a campaign of destroying the people they labeled and derided as Frank Burns!

Think about it. Sex could be used by Alinsky style community organizers to organize a progressive party within the US Army!

My progressive professors held the fantasy that a gay army within the army would be a force for progress.

However, when I have thoughts of an army within an army having sexual adventures with thousands of partners at home and abroad, I don't have visions of progress. I have the nightmare of Abu Greib on an epic scale.

Please note, I don't see homosexual misconduct as the only type of misconduct. I see the thousands of babies our hetrosexual troops abandonned in Vietnam as a national disgrace.

Here in Utah, Mormon pioneers experimented with polygamy as a way of progressing a society through sex. This historical record indicates that this was a terrible thing for a large number of people. I've met several people who've escaped from modern polygamist cults. Their stories of abuse are horrific.

The problem isn't a person with same sex attraction serving in the military, but the combination of sex and power politics.

My observation is that, when people develop systems of power politics centered on sex with multiple partners, things get ugly. What starts as a progressive fantasy turns into institutionalized abuse.

Rather than a system that excluded people for who they are, I would prefer a system that accepted all people, but that disciplined or expelled people for sexual misconduct.

I would prefer a system of "Tell. Don't Do," to the corrupt policy of "Don't Ask. Don't Tell."

There's really no problem with a person who feels same sex attraction serving in the military. Problems pop up when there's a group of people who have sex with eachother while engaging in power politics. Such people end up undermining the people around them.

Such behavior can happen regardless of sexual orientation.

Unfortunately, we live in a society where it is no longer possible to talk about problems.

Every time I hear people talk about the issue, I remember a progressive professor who was titillated by the idea of using Alinsky to organize an army within an army dedicated to the cause of progressive dominion.

The Challenge of Progressive Taxation

We've heard the sound bites. We all know by now that George Bush caused the recession (though we don't know how or why).

We also know that the Bush Tax Cuts are evil.

Oddly, despite the fact that we have the most progressive president in US history, legislatures are waffling on letting the tax cuts expire.

The BLS reported unemployment at 9.8% today. It would be higher if the BLS was honest in its definition of the unemployment and included those who gave up hunting for a job.

The fear is that higher taxes would cause a further jump in unemployment.

So, despite the fact that vilification of the Bush Tax Cuts is a primary stance of the Obama administration, the government is worried that letting the tax cuts expire would hurt a large number of people.

I am clearly an evil person because I don't blame Bush for the recession. Even worse, I favor the Bush Tax Cuts.

The problem faced by policymakers supporting a progressive tax system is that businesses make their investment decisions based on the highest tax rate.

Even though most small businesses fail to achieve a coveted position of being in the top income bracket, small businesses actually end up making many investment decisions at the top tax rate.

The top tax rate has an adverse affect on small business. There are many small business owners who live a modest life but throw everything into the business. Since their personal finances are tied in with the business, they end up paying the top rate despite a modest lifestyle.

My solution to the progressive tax challenge is to create a new tax system which I called the Object Oriented Tax. This system taxes an abstract object between income and consumption.

Basically, people would have an investment account and a spending account. There would be no taxes on investment related transactions in the transaction account. Taxation would happen when people transferred funds from their investment account into the spending account.

One could set a progressive tax rate based on the size of the investment account.

Warren Buffet would pay a higher tax rate than his secretary because he has a massive amount of investments.

The challenge of progressive taxation is that business decisions are made at the top rate. Taxes have an adverse affect on the very business decisions that generate wealth. Creating a new tax system that taxed an abstract object between income and consumption would simplify investment decisions while preserving a progressive tax.

As it stands, since businesses make investment decisions based on the highest tax rate, I believe the wise course of action is for Obama to ignore the wealth-envy rhetoric of his campaign and extend the Bush Tax Cuts. If we want to continue a progressive tax system, we might consider something like the Object Oriented Tax that cleanly separates investment decisions from taxes and taxes only consumption:

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