Intellectual Leftover Soup

[chris_gerrib]

On rare occasions, my dad, the king of leftovers, would make leftover soup. It would be regular soup or chili to which he added whatever odd leftovers were in the fridge. Consider this the blog version of Dad's Leftover Soup.

Health Care

The "no health care reform no way" crowd will tell you that if there is a public insurance option every employer will dump their employees into it because it's cheaper. In other words, buying employee health coverage is strictly a cost decision.

If that were so, there would be only one plan in the market in each area - a really cheap one. Except there are dozens if not hundreds of plans. The decision to provide health care is not solely one of cost - it includes value. It's just like any other fringe benefit, from coffee in the break room to paid holidays - the coverage is offered to attract and retain workers. A cheap package offering substandard service will not attract good workers.

Pirates

So, per CNN, a collection of Russian crooks decided to go into the pirate business and hijack a Russian / Maltese lumber ship. I didn't know the Somalis were offering franchises, but apparently these guys didn't pay attention in the training classes, as they are now enjoying the comforts of a Russian warship's brig. Gotta stay awake at those classes, dudes.

Space

Via jaylake, I learned of this really tiny nuclear reactor being tested for a lunar base. The test unit, which is a scaled-down model, uses a Sterling engine to get 2.3 KW. The "big" version would generate 40 KW. Of interest is the difficulties in radiating away the waste heat.

Women in Combat

Via the always interesting blog Edge of the West, I found a lengthy article comparing the modern integration of women into US combat units with the Korean-war-era integration of blacks into white units. The article is available here, and it argues that in both cases, the emergency needs of warfighting trumped ideological considerations.

Comments

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

On the health care side, what you say was true at one point but is probably not true anymore. When Carol and I co-owned a small publishing company 15 years ago, we had no end of troubles with our health insurance provider, and if offered the choice today, we would go with a public option in a heartbeat for a different reason: Our employees would be safer with it. The insurance companies we dealt with back when we were small (12-15 employees) did not want to enroll small businesses and forced us to jump through endless hoops. And then when we had three cases of cancer among the staff in two years, they raised the premium so high that we could barely afford it. We managed, but it was a near thing at times.

None of these were "lifestyle" cancers; all were the sort of thing that just comes out of the blue and afflicts relatively young and otherwise healthy people, one of them a lean, nonsmoking, athletic young man in his early 30s. It was simple bad luck, but we almost lost coverage, and there was no guarantee that some other company would have issued us a policy if we had.

This is not "insurance" as I define the term.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

When I worked for a small firm as a manager, we had similar issues, but not as severe. At my current firm, the (very wealthy) owners put themselves and their small children on our plan, so they care very much about quality and not so much about price.

My point was that you can't have a lousy public option that also drives out the private insurance providers. People will pay for "quality." And a factor of quality is safety - in this case, safety of having coverage.