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Hey, Democrats: Quit defending Obamacare! Let's fix it — by moving toward a single-payer system – Salon
cited in article July 2, 2017 Hey, Democrats: Quit defending Obamacare! Let's fix it — by moving toward a single-payer system – Salon2017-07-02T11:40:47+00:00 Maine Marijuana News No Comment
I've spent my life in politics, and the health care bill Mitch McConnell appears so desperate to revive is the single worst piece of legislation I've ever read. I say "appears" because I still can't quite believe he wants to pass it. Its actual enactment would threaten his Senate majority as surely as it would the health of tens of millions of Americans. McConnell's judgment is so clouded by partisanship and ideology one can easily see how he'd be blind to the bill's moral dimensions. What's harder to accept is that so sly a political fox wouldn't sniff the enormous risk.
As is their custom, Democrats are doing all they can to help him reduce that risk. Hell-bent on proving they can beat something with nothing, they offer criticism but no alternative. Their one tangible vow is to save Obamacare, not fix it. They studiously avoid telling us how they'd do either. This approach has the advantage of allowing even the most corporatist Democrats to stage scripted protests; when nobody asks what anybody's for, any street-fighting man can be a member of "the resistance."
This fight feels like a reprise of the Democrats' 2016 presidential campaign, heavy on moralizing, light on detail. Now as then, the words Democrats live by — "Why take a chance?" and "Don't scare the donors" — leave them precious little to say. Sixty percent of Americans favor single-payer health care. Zero percent of Democratic leaders in Congress stand with them. The only other practical way to cut costs is a public option. Democrats only whisper its name. Why risk getting lost in the policy weeds or ruffling the feathers of their sometime allies in the insurance industry?
What they do instead is what Bill Clinton guru Dick Morris called "triangulation." Democrats claim to hate Morris, but 20 years later still crib from his playbook. The idea is to seize the center-right and drive Republicans to the far right, so Democrats soft-pedal even a public option and train their sights on the richest Republican targets: a proposal to let insurers go back to denying coverage based on prior medical conditions, and one to slash Medicaid to finance another massive tax cut for plutocrats. Democrats talk of little else.
Clever, but what if Republicans figure out that to enact such policies would be covert suicide? What if they drop the tax cut and stretch out the Medicaid cuts to make them seem less draconian? Or ban insurers from denying coverage, but let them charge exorbitant prices for it? We may know soon. McConnell's trying to do just that. It's not inconceivable he'll round up the 50 votes he needs. What then?
Republicans will have co-opted every Democratic talking point without adopting any Democratic policy they didn't have to swallow just to pull their own caucuses together and save their own skins. The top 1 percent won't get a windfall right away, but they'll do fine, while millions of the poor and the middle class will be denied what all other developed countries regard as a basic human right. What will Democrats say? What they say now, I'd expect: Obamacare is good. Republicans are bad. Trump's a liar and a fool. It's not enough.
It doesn't help in this fight that Democrats have retained the services of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Pelosi, once a pretty good speaker, is now a very bad minority leader. It's a job that requires a firm grasp of policy and the ability to live off the land, neither of which she has. Like Pelosi, Schumer rose by raising money from the rich and doling it out to colleagues. At heart a tactician, he's better at explaining how a policy benefits his party than how it may benefit the public. His deep ties to Wall Street subvert the party's core values, identity and mission.
Pelosi and Schumer bleat on about "bipartisan legislative fixes" and challenge McConnell to "come to the table." To discuss what? How many elderly and disabled to throw off Medicaid? They see the bipartisanship riff as a harmless pander, but it fosters a false equivalency and gives Republicans much-needed cover. There won't be any bipartisan negotiation. Calling for one only makes GOP extremists look respectable. Fixing health care means moving in a whole other direction. Why waste time pretending otherwise?
Democrats spend lots of time "defending Obama's legacy." I suppose it's unavoidable. But Obamacare doesn't need to be defended. It needs to be fixed, and not just tweaked. We start with a strategic choice: Go direct to single-payer, or look first to a public option? As I know a bit about the latter, I'll take a stab at framing the issue.
Twenty-six years ago, I proposed what I think was the first public option introduced in a legislative chamber in America. I'd just been elected Connecticut state comptroller and was the final signatory on the state employee health care contract. Negotiations with insurers were coming up and I was trying to get up to speed. Reading the plan, I saw how good it was and wondered if there were a way to open it up to the public. I found people in Connecticut and other states mulling over similar ideas, but nowhere was a program underway. I almost flinched. I was new to the job. The insurance industry, a local behemoth, wouldn't be happy.
But the idea, if enacted, could transform the marketplace and it had an irresistible simplicity. We'd open the state-employee plan to small business, the self-employed, nonprofits, municipalities and municipal retirees. The program would be mandatory for municipalities and their retirees but voluntary for everyone else. If you liked it you could stay; if not, you could go right back to getting gouged in the individual market. Everyone paid their own way, so state taxpayers were off the hook. In fact, the state saved money, first due to lower per-capita overhead costs and then to lower prices due to increased market clout. In the fight over Obamacare, analyses by the Office of Management and Budget, the Congressional Budget Office and staff of the Bowles-Simpson Commission all found the same thing. Having government provide a public option lowers government's own cost by a whole lot.
The big winners were those refugees from the individual market, small businesses and the self-employed. They often paid double what big corporate or government buyers paid and for worse coverage. Insurers said it was because they got sicker and it cost more to solicit and administer their business, but wouldn't divulge data to back up the claim. I soon realized the industry was lying. Small businesses pay more for insurance for the same reason groceries cost more in inner cities; they had no market clout of their own. Our initial survey was startling. By lending them our clout we could cut their health care costs by a quarter to a third. That's how much rent our antiquated, parasitic insurance industry was extracting from them.
The president of the Connecticut State Senate was my then-rival and now good friend John Larson, today a leader in Congress. He loved the idea and introduced the bill. It passed the Senate. The uproar from the industry was instantaneous and deafening. Angry men in expensive suits crawled the Capitol. The bill died in the House. It was reintroduced every year for 20 years, but never passed.
In 2008, candidate Barack Obama backed a public option and opposed a mandate that would force people to purchase insurance. He observed drily, and correctly, that the main reason most people don't buy health care is because they can't afford it. His chief primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, promised the opposite: a mandate but no public option. Obama made other related promises, among them that he'd allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. He even vowed to let C-SPAN cameras into heretofore secret health care negotiations.
In office, Obama reversed himself. In early 2009, in meetings to which he forgot to invite C-SPAN, he made private pacts with leaders of the insurance and drug industries. He dropped negotiated drug prices and the public option, and picked up Clinton's mandate. Experts said he needed it to pay for the whole thing. But it also guaranteed insurers permanent, expanded control of the "market." According to his own analysts, he thus passed on the two greatest sources of savings in his entire plan.
The fatal flaw of the Affordable Care Act is that it costs too much. Early on in the debate over the bill, we heard the novel phrase "bending the cost curve," a sure sign the White House had given up on actually cutting costs. Those hardest hit were the very small businesses and self-employed the public option was meant to serve. When the law took effect in 2014, a single person previously insured and earning $46,000 a year got no public subsidy but saw her premiums, deductibles and copays soar. Many lost what coverage they had, and paid a fine to boot. When they realized what had been done to them, they didn't need Fox News to rile them up.
In 2016, backers of Hillary Clinton called Bernie Sanders' single-payer plan a "fairy tale," but the real fantasy is that you can grandfather in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and still contain costs. Obamacare brought health insurance to upwards of 20 million people, an historic achievement. But for the millions of unsubsidized, the mandates and exchanges with which it is most closely identified just made life harder.
America is descending into cartel capitalism. It's become a nation of middlemen we call "entrepreneurs" but who are really mere gatekeepers and toll collectors. Own the pipeline, own the product. It's why Google gets money that should go to the New York Times (and Salon), and why Comcast owns NBC. New technologies account for some of the phenomenon. Pay-to-play politics accounts for the rest.
By reputable accounts, close to 30 cents of every health care dollar we spend goes to overhead. As it happens, Canada has the second-highest overhead in the world, at about 16 cents. If we could just tie Canada for last place rather than having it all to ourselves, we'd save enough money to pay for the health care of every one of the 20 million people served by Obamacare, and all of the 28 million it has yet to reach. We could even bring relief to those left out of its equation, who due to high copays and deductibles must splurge on insurance and scrimp on care.
A single-payer system is, hands down, the most cost-effective way to finance and administer health care. But how do we get there? Recent experiences in Vermont and California suggest the barriers to entry at the state level are high, due largely to fragmentation of program jurisdiction. Progressives, who at present are the only political force in the country dedicated to the kind of systemic change the system needs — and the public overwhelmingly supports — must consider their next move carefully.
We must build our system piece by piece, and at low transition cost. A "robust" public option, one that is self-administered as well as self-insured, would do the trick. Our workforce totals 125 million people. Government, nonprofits and businesses employing 100 or fewer people account for one-third of that total. If state employee plans were to invite the others in, they'd quickly recoup their investment and see savings of their own. A third of the country could soon be enjoying its own single-payer health care system, with the rest busting down the door to get in.
Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of populism.
More Bill Curry.
« How Republicans Can Fix Obamacare in 3 Simple Steps – Madison.com
Going Small on Health Care – New York Times »


A harmonious office is a successful one, and when your team gets along well, they are more productive. Businesses across the country have become more successful in the past year. A strong team could be one of the reasons why.
In all group environments, it's important for there to be a strong bond with one another. That way people can look out for one another and support each other, which also keeps employees satisfied. When there is no bond, there is no support and work will suffer. Thus, team building is important, so here are a few reasons why you should be doing it.
When you and your employees spend day in, day out in the office, it can get a little stale. But taking the day away to do some fun team building exercises can make a huge difference.
It may seem like taking a day away from the office is counterproductive, but it's not. Team building is an essential part of any business and without it, the business could suffer.
It doesn't need to be in a boring conference room either. There are plenty of activities that are a great day out and make for a fantastic bonding experience. Here are a few benefits of them.
One of the main goals of team building exercises is to boost productivity in the office. When everyone learns how to work together in a productive way, you'll find that more work gets done.
Choose activities that need teamwork and creativity to complete. This way your employees learn new ways to get things done. This carries through to the office and they can use these skills to boost their productivity.
They can also find ways to identify what isn't making them productive and learn how to change it.
As with all aspects of life, good communication is key. Effective communication means that people work a lot better together.
One great way to foster this is through a lot of teamwork exercises. You can do this in a fun way such as an escape room. They need to figure out the best ways to work with one another and communicate their needs.
Even the tensest of office feuds between workers can be worked out, and these exercises are the best ways to do it. An office who can communicate well is a productive and happy one.
In every office, there are people who don't speak to each other very often. This is understandable when they come from different departments who don't often interact.
But strong relationships across the office is never a bad thing. When you take them out of the office to do something non-work-related, they let their guards down. They get to know each other as friends and not as co-workers.
When strong relationships exist across the office, it makes it more productive. They can learn new ways to work together or impart useful advice to each other. It's a useful form of networking that can be beneficial for everyone.
On the flip side, if you're the boss and you attend these team building exercises, you get to let your guard down too. Your employees will see you as a friend instead of a boss and you can build stronger relationships. This can help you manage your staff in a much better and productive way.
Another great reason to have team building exercises is to build morale in the office. When people are in happy spirits, they're inclined to work harder.
They are particularly useful after a stressful or challenging time in the office. Has it been a busy season and tensions are high? Getting everyone involved in a fun exercise could be the best way to unwind and have some fun.
Doing some fun group activities can reduce the stress of the hard work they've done. There's nothing worse for productivity and morale than feeling burnt out. So get them on their feet to forget about it and help them get their motivation back.
It's a fact that when people are happy and in high spirits, they work harder. A fun activity or day away can help you and your staff let go of stress and have fun.
When they aren't thinking about reports to do or deadlines to meet, they'll be more motivated. Then once they return to the office, they will feel refreshed and more confident in their work.
Combine this with positive reinforcement and you've got a winner. When you recognise the hard work and effort they put in, it boosts productivity too. When people feel confident and not stressed about their job, they tend to do better at it.
Team building has a lot of fantastic benefits and it makes a huge difference to your business. When you take the team out of the office for a day of fun, the possibilities are endless. These can be as simple as going out for team drinks or a meal, or going mountain climbing or golfing.
Focus on building strong relationships and bettering communication. When you do this away from the pressures of work, it's great for the office. Get the team out there to try something new and see how much they can achieve!
Looking to make employee management more efficient? Check out our employee management tool to see how it can help you.


Alia Instruments BV, The Netherlands A Dutch-based builder of production monitoring equipment for a variety of industries, serving customers from all over the world. 21 September 2018: Alia Instruments brings abrasive slurry density measurements to the next level. Limitations of other measurement techniques – including the nuclear one – will be overcome by using the Alia Density Meter. The device measures slurry density in-line in near real-time, independent of external process conditions and slurry composition, and for any size of slurry pipe. This makes this density meter ideal for challenging conditions, including dense slurries that contain sand, metal, rocks & stones and air bubbles that are present in various applications.
The Alia Density Meter uses Newton's universal second law of motion principle. Inside the in-line device, a force is exerted onto the slurry, its resulting acceleration is measured and the slurry mass is calculated as the ratio of both. Dividing by the known volume inside the meter yields the slurry density. The simple and direct measurement method is nearly immediate (< 5 seconds) and accurate (within 0.5 % of full scale). This is ideal for monitoring density in e.g. tailing and concentrate lines, for quality control purposes to monitor the process consistency over time, or to prevent the pipe from becoming clogged due to 'too dense' slurries. The density is measured under dynamic conditions, i.e. when the slurry is flowing, but can also be measured for non-flowing, stationary fluids.
Accurate measurement results are obtained regardless of pipe diameter. Internal slurry pipe diameters with metric or imperial sizes typically up to the largest pipe diameters can be dealt with. As Newton's law applies to everything that is inside the slurry pipe – water, seawater, sand, metal, rocks & stones, large parts, high-density sediment but also air inclusions – the density measurement is independent of slurry composition. This is specifically an advantage because with other working principles the accuracy is often reduced in large pipe diameters combined with high slurry densities.
Furthermore, the Alia Density Meter avoids issues that are related to radioactive technology: no legislation constraints, no transport or dispose of nuclear sources, no special training in nuclear technology for maintenance engineers, and no fear to perform checks and repairs. All improving the sustainable and social responsible image of the density meter's user. The density calculation is basically unaffected by the surroundings in which the Alia Density Meter is installed, including temperature variations. Horizontal, vertical and tilted installation is possible. External vibrations and disturbances, for example due to other machines or components in a plant, ship of neighborhood, will not interfere with the measurement. These vibrations – if any – are measured and will be compensated for in the mass calculation. Active damping suppresses the influence of external vibrations even more. The easy installation comprises only the mechanical installation of the density meter in the slurry pipe, and electrical installation for connection to the power supply and an external control & read-out device. The density meter can easily be integrated with existing systems and software. A direct control & read-out device is part of the meter.
After installation, the meter is virtually maintenance-free. For highly abrasive applications, the rubber tube in the meter that gets in direct contact with the slurry needs to be replaced a few times during the service life of the density meter. In the mining industry, the Alia Density Meter can be used as part of a production meter, where the combination of both flow and density provides valuable data about the efficiency of the mining process. Moreover, with respect to sustainability, the meters have a task as well in slurry streams around dewatering processes in the mining of metals and minerals. The use of this density meter can contribute significantly to saving large amounts of water by providing the operator with an accurate and immediate reading of slurry densities, resulting in an optimal use of often-scarce water.
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It goes without saying that college is not cheap and more often than not leaves graduates drowning in debt.
Here's why: When we don't talk about the hard stuff—even the obviously hard stuff like money and finances—we often end up taking the easiest path. For college students this path is paved with loans and lots of them!
Thankfully, if you just kick your brain into high gear and think about the hard stuff, you'll find plenty of options to pay for school with zero debt. And we're here to help with some alternatives to paying for college with student loans.


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Baltimore Relaunches Speed Camera Program
A proposed contract is expected to go before the city's spending panel by May.
March 31, 2017 •
Luke Broadwater, The Baltimore Sun
(TNS) -- City lawmakers and a drivers advocacy group welcomed the announcement of a smaller, better-monitored camera system, but said they wanted to make sure whichever company runs the program doesn't issue erroneous tickets as previous vendors did.
"I have no problems with a speed camera program. I have constituents on some roads who are dying for them to come back," City Councilman Brandon Scott said. "I hope we are awarding it to a company that can operate it in a fair way, where we aren't making the same mistakes as before."
Baltimore officials solicited bids on operating a new camera system last January and said Wednesday they are deciding among six finalists. Typically, the city releases the names and proposals of those who respond to a request for bids. But on Thursday, the Pugh administration withheld the names of the speed camera bidders.
Department of Transportation spokeswoman Adrienne Barnes said the names of the competing firms will be disclosed once a winner is selected. A proposed contract is expected to go before the city's spending panel by May.
"It's still an ongoing process," Barnes said. "We want to wait until the process is complete."
With millions in profits at stake, several speed camera companies have registered lobbyists with city government, including Optotraffic, Xerox State & Local Solutions, and American Traffic Solutions.
Pugh revealed her plans to restart the camera program as she unveiled her $2.8 billion budget Wednesday. Pugh's budget director said the projected $8 million the cameras would generate next fiscal year would help close a $20 million budget gap.
"It has always been considered a revenue-producing tool, but it's also a tool to slow down traffic and make our city safer," Pugh said.
This will be the city's third program after two failed attempts in which cameras issued erroneous tickets. The system, which was run for years by Xerox and briefly by Brekford Corp., was shut down in April 2013.
At its height, Baltimore's speed camera system brought in nearly $20 million a year for the city. But the system was dogged by questions about its accuracy after a Baltimore Sun investigation revealed numerous problems, including tickets issued to stopped or slow-moving cars.
Pugh assured drivers the camera system will be smaller and better monitored that it was before. "We expect them to be accurate," she said.
City officials confirmed Thursday they have hired former Prince George's County Police Maj. Robert V. Liberati to oversee the program. Liberati previously ran the Prince George's speed camera system.
Ragina Averella, public and government affairs manager at AAA Mid-Atlantic said she was "encouraged" by the city's plans for a better-monitored system. Averella served on a city speed camera task force under Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
"We're hopeful we won't see similar issues to what we've seen in the past," Averella said.
A spokesman for City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young said the president was also pleased the cameras are returning in smaller numbers.
Last January, Baltimore's Transportation Department issued a request for bids for 10 red light cameras, 10 fixed speed cameras and 10 portable cameras to relaunch its once-vast network. City officials said Thursday they also plan to use six cameras to catch commercial trucks traveling on car-only roads.
The camera program will begin no earlier than June and then will issue warning citations for a month. Transportation officials said they've added new "quality control staff," including an ombudsman to deal with allegations of erroneous tickets. All camera locations will be published on the city's website before the program launches.
Most of the pledges made by city officials are required by a 2014 law passed by the Maryland General Assembly. The law mandated that jurisdictions employ ombudsmen and banned the so-called "bounty system" in which contractors were rewarded financially for issuing more tickets. The law does not apply to contracts that were in place before it passed.
Jurisdictions are also required to alert motorists to the presence of mobile cameras by posting signs and waiting 15 days before issuing tickets from them. The law did not include some reform proposals, including requiring time stamps on tickets to help verify accuracy. But it did require local governments to publish detailed annual reports, and it subjects contractors to damages if their error rate exceeds 5 percent.
State Sen. James Brochin, a Baltimore County Democrat who is against the cameras, was the lead sponsor of the Senate version of the bill.
"I hope they go through the legislation that passed and make sure all the safeguards are in place," Brochin said of plans to relaunch speed cameras in Baltimore. "Everything in that legislation was the result of something they were doing that wasn't right.
"They got speed camera crazy. They became the jurisdiction that had more speed cameras than anywhere in North America."
After a months-long investigation beginning in 2012, The Sun documented erroneous speed readings at seven cameras in Baltimore, including one in which the driver of a car stopped at a red light was accused of speeding. The investigation also showed that several jurisdictions, including Baltimore and Baltimore County, were engaged in contracts in which the vendor was paid per citation.
Amid continued questions, Baltimore took its entire speed and red-light camera system offline in 2013. The system, once the largest in North America, had brought in $140 million since 1999 to city government.
At the time, a single Baltimore officer reviewed 1,000 to 1,200 of the machine-generated citations per shift — sometimes as many as five or six per minute.
Critics of the automated cameras have argued that running such a large system relies too much on technology, which is known to sometimes produce false readings, and makes it harder to do a substantive review of the tickets. For instance, city officials have acknowledged that, in 2011, their red light camera system issued about 2,000 tickets to motorists with a signature bearing the name of a dead police officer.
Ron Ely, chairman of the anti-speed-camera Maryland Drivers Alliance, said he doesn't believe the basic problems with the cameras have been fixed.
"The fundamental problems that made erroneous citations possible have not been solved," he said in an email. "Unfortunately the rest of the speed camera programs in the state think Baltimore's real problem was that they ultimately ADMITTED that errors took place. I am worried that anyone hit with an erroneous citation in the future may be presumed guilty and denied access to exculpatory evidence."
Local governments can use the cameras to issue $40 tickets to drivers found to be traveling more than 11 mph over the speed limit in school or work zones. In Baltimore County, the speed camera vendor, Xerox, receives $19 of every $40 ticket paid.
©2017 The Baltimore Sun Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Lohrmann on Cybersecurity
Chip Implants: Opportunities, Concerns and What Could Be Next
· Dan Lohrmann
Opinion: Underrated Traits of Successful IT Employees
· Jim A. Jorstad
What Can Be Done Federally to Improve Cybersecurity for All?
· Jule Pattison-Gordon
Can Flying Taxis Overcome Civic and Legal Turbulence?
· Thad Rueter
Study: Small Electric Shuttles Ideal for Last-Mile Transit
· Skip Descant

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl