One of the goals of single-payer health insurance is to put the health insurance companies out of business. Another is to reduce the paperwork load at doctor's offices, clinics, hospitals and for other health care providers.

In fact, without accomplishing those two goals, it's unlikely that single-payer health insurance will show a savings, as another goal (perhaps not stated explicitly) is to increase the utilization of health care services, and that represents a big increase in costs. The offset that leads to a net savings is largely the elimination of health insurance companies and the clerical personnel health care providers employ to deal with insurance.

Fur pajamas would be nice tonight - it was 6F last time I looked. A song in honor of the mule deer, on my mountain top*, that stopped just short of coming up the porch steps to nuzzle me tonight. My kind of wild, wildlife.

Peace of mind? It's a piece of cake ...

*Mountain side,actually - the top is 5000 feet higher and 3 miles away.

The amazing bass guitar solo about halfway in is by Tal Wilkenfeld. The song is 'Cause We Ended as Lovers

With California fires still burning, I thought it might interesting to consider this:

In 1891 Gifford Pinchot, later to be appointed America's first Chief Forester by Teddy Roosevelt, visited the Kaweah Colony (pdf), a utopian Socialist community situated in a grove of California's Giant Sequoia. As related by Stephen Pyne in Fire in America (p 302):

... Kaweah colonists informed [Pinchot] that they had saved the grove from burning up 29 times in the past 5 years. To this, Pinchot wryly inquired, "Who has saved them during the remaining three or four thousand years of their age?"

Who saved the Giant Sequoias?

This is no way to start a week: Study Links Teen Pregnancy to Sexy Shows

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Exposure to some forms of entertainment is a corrupting influence on children, leading teens who watch sexy programs into early pregnancies ...

Quoting further:

"Television is just one part of a teenager's media diet that helps to influence their behavior. We should also look at the roles that magazines, the Internet and music play in teens' reproductive health," Chandra said, acknowledging still other factors can influence teen sex habits.

Matt Yglesias wrote an article not log ago entitled Laying the Groundwork for the Backfire, in which he concluded that if the Obama initiatives his article listed were enacted "... it would be the most dramatic shift in national policy since the high tide of the Great Society."

I want to concentrate on everything Yglesias itemized that he thought compared favorably to the "high tide of the Great Society" in the area of environment. It won't take long. Here it is:

... dramatic cuts in carbon emissions and investments in clean energy infrastructure ...

Really!?!

Via Suburban Guerilla, there's a link to the Dembot blog, where Andrew Baron posts an open letter to James C. Mullen, the chairman of Biogen, Inc. (the first link is just an excerpt of the second, which includes more detail).

Baron's father has multiple myeloma and is near death. Biogen Idec produces a drug called Tysabri (natalizumab) which might save Andrew's father's life.

As the golden sunlight of a late Michigan afternoon poured into Bob's neat but modest home in one of the oldest residential sections of Detroit, he smugly sank back in his leather recliner. Life had never been so good.

Oh, the Michigan-Toledo game this afternoon had been a little boring. When would those Mid-America Conference schools realize they could never defeat a Big 10 powerhouse like the Wolverines? If anything, Michigan football was better than the years when Bo Schembechler coached. It seemed impossible, but there it was.

There's a quote that's interested me for a while:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The assertion I've seen fairly often in the last week or so is that the credit markets are shutting down - businesses can't get the credit they need to operate.

Now I run a business, so I understand in my own small way the need for credit. We have a loan outstanding, a credit line, credit cards, and even a home equity line of credit (with no balance).

Nobody's called us up or sent us a letter saying "We're calling your business loan" (they can't, anyway - in fact it has a pre-payment penalty), or "We're canceling all your credit lines" or "Please throw your credit cards away." I'm half tempted to draw a few hundred thousand in credit just to prove to myself it's possible, because I'm sure it is.

I went to the doctor today and got my doxycycline prescription extended for 12 more refills (one per month). Doxycycline is a member of the tetracycline family of antibiotics, and may truely be a wonder drug.

It's effective against all kinds of infections - STDs, acne, anthrax, even the plague and many others. A special use is oral infections, like the ones that cause dental problems. But in addition to being antibiotics and killing germs, tetracyclines also have anti-inflammatory properties. That makes them candidates for treating aortic aneurysms (my use - currently off-label or not FDA approved), multiple sclerosis, even osteoarthritis, and they seem to be effective against certain cancers, like colorectal and eye lymphomas.