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Universal Health Care — It’s Addictive
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Opponents of President Obama's health care legislation were wise to attack it preemptively in the courts on constitutional grounds. If they hadn't attacked now, they would've learned that universal health care systems – sometimes a hybrid of public and private and sometimes single-payer national systems – are wildly popular in other countries. So popular that politicians can do no more than fiddle at the edges, as they have done in Britain recently and are about to do in France. No leader, not even that incontrovertible defender of private enterprise, Margaret Thatcher, dared or even thought, to privatize health care. In the industrial democracies, from Canada to Japan, people complain about their health care systems and would defend them to the death. Once universal health care is introduced and people are relieved of the fear of illness, leading to financial ruin, it is unrepealable. The opponents of Obamacare must know this, or they wouldn't have been so anxious to test it in court on the grounds of the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Kill it before people love it was an imperative. Now it's widely believed, after three days of hearings, in which conservative justices sounded more like they were conducting a congressional hearing than a judicial one, that Obamacare will be thrown out before it has ever been sampled by the public, which wouldn't come until 2014. It's been a bit like the Chinese and democracy: Don't let them try it, they might like it. So how is it the Republicans have been able to so demonize Obamacare? Partly, it's because the administration has done an appalling job of selling its own program. It's almost as though it's ashamed of its offspring because it isn't the child they really wanted: a simpler bill with a public option and such goodies as interstate insurance sales. The administration is frequently bad at trumpeting its achievements. As health care reform is its defining domestic issue, the fact that Obama and his cabinet have not extolled the virtues of the bill amounts to a curious dereliction, a sin of omission. Most people have been persuaded, if they know anything about the bill at all, that it's socialized medicine (it is not); that it will double expenditures on health care (it won't); that it's an enormous new dictatorial intrusion into individual liberty (it's not). It's not a great bill, but a good start. We in the United States spend about twice as much as other countries on health care – about 18 percent of our gross domestic product. Why? Everyone knows there's excessive testing and waste. The quick answer is to defend against lawsuits. Another answer is that doctors have no incentive to save money and through their investments in testing companies, often they have an incentive to order up the tests. Mostly, I suspect it's just indifference; the medical equivalent of not turning the lights off. I don't like Obamacare because it only does half the job and I'm uneasy about the individual mandate. Just two cheers from me. The uninsured should be assigned an insurer and the premium collected through the tax system. That way the insurers would compete for the most desirable prospects, young adults, and a real pool would operate. Another question that isn't asked: As new technology usually brings down costs, why does this not apply in health care? Why are CAT scans and MRIs not getting cheaper, as they would if they were in a different framework? Why not use the Republican idea of health vouchers as an incentive to keep patients from frivolous use of services – not as the substitute for insurance, but rather as an incentive mechanism. Pay them to stay healthy. We suffer from a failure of imagination in health care. There are good reasons to be ambivalent about Obamacare, but it's a start, a building block. Our medicine is without peer, but our concepts of care are quite sickly. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate - 2 responses
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Obama and Energy: What He Can and Can’t Do
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When the Obama administration seeks to explain its oil policy, it changes the subject mid-sentence.The most frequent practitioner of this verbal contortion is the president's press secretary, Jay Carney. It is as though he's a magician who has promised to pull a live rabbit from his top hat. This conjurer stands before his audience, recites some incantations and, poof, retrieves not a live rabbit, but a dead chicken.Carney, like others in the administration, starts talking about oil and switches to talking about "alternatives." The alternatives, with the exception of the nettlesome subject of biofuels (nettlesome because they produce little or no energy above what's invested in producing them), are ways of making electricity.The administration is adept at confusing these almost unrelated subjects.Oil is the stubborn problem. It affects every aspect of life and prosperity, from the balance of payments to war planning, from economic growth to our relationship with China. Worse, it may be in constrained supply for the rest of time, as the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – continue to suck up the precious commodity.New finds and technology relieve the gloom for a while, but as demand rises and supply struggles to adjust, the problem remains – even though conservative think tanks and trade groups fight the notion of structural shortage.But the United States isn't short of electricity and has no need ever to be. The electricity problem, if there is one, is environmental. Do we continue to burn coal on a massive scale while we search for an environmental fix? Or do we go wholeheartedly for nuclear – even though the Obama administration has abandoned the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada?Solar, wind, geothermal, wave, and even biomass energy come under the rubric of "alternatives" – and they're all electricity technologies.Then there's natural gas, thought to be exhausted in the United States, but now in abundance as a result of sophisticated technologies. That's another electricity fuel.It's enthusiasm for alternatives (a longtime love affair on the left) that has encouraged the confusing White House utterances about a policy of "all of the above." It's this that has spread the public perception that the president can do something about the price of gasoline. And it's this that makes him vulnerable to scorn over debacles like the loan guarantees to the solar-array manufacturer Solyndra.If Obama's reelection hopes aren't to be extinguished at the gas pump this November, he needs to separate oil from electricity – and the future from the present. He can't affect world oil prices, and he can't drill enough holes in the United States to change the world oil market.But he can change the debate, and push down the price somewhat, by taking up arms not against the oil producers, but rather against the oil traders, who are the market movers. They are concentrated in the New York Mercantile Exchange, where they daily bid up the price in a spiral that is unrelated to cost. The price of oil is set by traders, who use rumor, fear, and the knowledge that producers will be silent partners to jack it up.They aren't phantoms. They are real, flesh-and-blood people who manipulate the markets daily. What's happening to oil in the New York Mercantile Exchange is what happened to electricity prices in California when Enron's traders were running wild.There have even been shenanigans at the Cushing tank farm in Oklahoma, the installation that President Obama toured on Thursday. He might do well to read Leah McGrath Goodman's Fortune magazine article this month, on how ConocoPhillips warehoused oil at Cushing. That oil came in by the same pipeline that the new owners have now reversed, she writes, and it's now flowing to refineries by the very route it came in, but at higher prices.Goodman knows what she's talking about. The former Wall Street Journal reporter wrote The Asylum, the definitive book about the New York Mercantile Exchange and the madness of oil trading.Obama could jawbone the traders while providing more resources and moral support to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the poodle trying to do a pit bull's work.
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Mass-Transit Enthusiasts: Get on the Bus
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Even railroad fanatics like me have to admit that the future of passenger transportation by rail, particularly urban commuter rail, is pretty well frozen where it is. New rail – even light rail, an idealistic indulgence – is doomed by high costs, lack of appropriate track, and political squabbling.New subways, the elegant way to get around a city, by going under it, are an almost impossible dream. The costs are too great in times of austerity, and the costs of maintenance can be prohibitive as a system ages.Increasingly, the future appears to be the humble bus. Buses have low capital costs, are flexible, and can be adjusted to demand and population changes in ways trains cannot.Spare the groaning: The buses are coming. And today's bus need not be yesterday's – noisy, smelly, and unreliable.London, which has possibly the best transportation infrastructure in the world, with a huge rail network, is nonetheless betting on buses. It's deploying a new bus that is designed for the times and preserves some of the features that have made its buses emblematic of the city, like the two decks. And, yes, they are red.The new London buses are a meeting of nostalgia with high-tech and environmental sensibility. London was busy phasing out its traditional buses in favor of articulated buses, which bend in the middle, when a controversial and eccentric Conservative journalist turned politician, Boris Johnson, declared that if he were elected mayor, he would save the old buses, or at least the concept of double-deck buses. He won the election and ideas were sought from the public.The result is what the tabloids call the "Boris Bus." It's a high-tech beauty that meets many demands. It has two doors and two staircases, but it's so low that wheelchairs are easily accommodated.They are designed to have conductors during rush hours and to be operated by drivers only at other times.They use modern composite materials from the airline industry and are hybrids, with diesel engines and regenerative breaking. That has made way for the lowering of the bottom deck, increasing stability while reducing weight.The initial reception of this high-tech scion of the old and loved London bus has been so enthusiastic that Johnson is talked about as a future Conservative prime minister – riding the bus to the highest office in the land.Back to our buses. They, too, are getting better, but less dramatically so. Between Washington and New York, there's now thriving bus service with half a dozen competing firms offering WiFi, toilets, and many points of departure. The ticket price, about $20 each way, is a fraction of those for Amtrak and airlines.These intercity buses are diesel-powered, but many cities are using natural-gas-powered buses. That might yet seal the deal for buses as the future of urban transportation, reducing the use of cars. America is awash in natural gas. It also has less environmental impact.Buses are at their best when, as my wife pointed out in London once, they run like conveyors. Frequently, that means enough dedicated bus lanes.The Obama administration would be well advised to launch a bus initiative with emphasis on better vehicles, à la London, and dedicated bus lanes. The solution to urban congestion may be in a high-speed, WiFi-equipped, natural-gas-powered bus. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The Politicos Know for Sure Where the Oil Is
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Lemuel Gulliver is back! You remember him – he’s the hero of “Gulliver’s
Travels,” a satire written by Jonathan Swift, first published in 1726.Many adventures befall Gulliver, but the one most remembered is that he's
captured and pinned down with innumerable strings by the tiny
Lilliputians. By their standards, he was a giant, but they tied him down
so well that he was helpless.That, according to those seeking the Republican presidential nomination,
is the state of the U.S. energy industry – by energy, they mean oil and
gas.According to Newt Gingrich, who's echoed by frontrunner Mitt Romney and
his two rivals, the oil and gas industries have been cruelly tied down by
government, which imposes onerous environmental regulations and restricts
drilling in the most hopeful parts of our ocean shelves and on federal
lands.If these lands and ocean sites were just opened to drilling, the
Republican hopefuls argue, the United States would become the world’s
greatest energy producer, as it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Drill, baby,
drill and a gigantic cornucopia of energy awaits; energy for the United
States and the world.Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, the
take-no-prisoners trade association that represents nearly 500 oil and gas
companies, is a vocal advocate of more drilling in more places. He's a
Gulliver theorist.From Republicans and the oil industry, this is a new optimism born of an
old idea. The old idea is that if you drill enough holes in enough places,
oil will be abundant.That optimism has existed more in the fringe world of wildcatting than it
did in the big oil companies, which knew that there were limited reserves
of recoverable oil and gas in the United States. They also knew that once
a reserve is in production, you can calculate the point at which it will
decline; as has happened with the North Slope of Alaska, where less than
half the 2 million barrels a day produced at its peak is flowing today.Then came the new technologies, largely developed by the despised
government. Now in full deployment, these technologies have
incontrovertibly changed expectations for natural gas but their impact on
oil is debatable.The first of these is 3-D seismic mapping. Advanced physics enables the
companies to determine very accurately how much hydrocarbon a particular
formation underground might contain. Gone are the days when the
hard-drinking wildcatter followed his gut and mysterious patterns in the
tumbleweed.Next, is the hole itself. At one time, a well was a well – drilled
straight down, looking for a pool of oil, a cavern of gas or both.
Fracturing – the process in which water, chemicals and other substances
are injected down the hole to break up rock in proximity to the hole – has
been used to release more of the good stuff. With time fracturing, also
called “fracking,” has become more sophisticated.What has made the euphoria of the politicians and oil lobbyists possible
is the miracle of horizontal drilling, which allows as many as eight holes
to be spread out for miles from a single shaft. This and better fracking
has changed the prospects for gas out of all hope, and has somewhat
improved oil expectations.Much of the enthusiasm for new drilling has come from the success of the
new technologies in North Dakota, which has overnight become the the
fourth-largest oil-producing state in the Union. But beware. This isn’t
Texas circa 1945.Oil from North Dakota's Bakken Field isn’t cheap. Its “lifting cost” is
among the most expensive there is: It costs about $50 a barrel to bring
North Dakota oil to the surface, compared with about $15 in Russia and
Saudi Arabia. Is it oil or incense?API’s Gerard told reporters in a telephone conversation, designed to
preempt President Obama’s “all of the above” energy recommendations, that
technology in its inevitable advance would keep the oil flowing for many
generations.Only the government, in Gerard’s view, stands between the American people
and abundant oil.However, fields that have peaked – like the North Slope and much of Texas,
Louisiana and the North Sea – have seen declining production and no
technology has been enough to revive them. All the oil has been removed.
Gone, baby, gone.More drilling has already improved domestic oil production. But will
unfettered drilling really make a new Saudi Arabia of the. United States?
Can the resource base stand the exploitation? Can Gulliver actually stand
up?The next generation of technology won’t put more oil in the ground. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Expo 2017: The Lure of the Silk Road
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Second in a series ASTANA, Kazakhstan – Looking at Astana's futuristic skyline, you'd think that an international exposition had already come and gone. But Astana is competing aggressively with Liege, Belgium, to host Expo 2017, a three-month-long, themed world's fair. The competition is pitting a young, dynamic Central Asian capital against an old, industrial European city. The Paris-based International Exhibitions Bureau (BIE) will decide the winner in December. 
Astana has proposed “Future Energy” as its theme for the expo, which would take place from June 10 to Sept. 10; Liege, which last hosted a world's fair in 1939, has proposed “Connecting the World, Linking People.” “We chose energy because of global warming. You can see its effects here – -35 C is normal and today it's -3 C,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Roman Vassilenko told reporters on a mid-January day in Astana. “Also, Kazakhstan is rich in fossil fuels and uranium, but we want to develop alternative energy sources.” Energy is an integral part of Kazakhstan's future growth, Vassilenko added, and the country considers Expo 2017 to be “another step on its route to a new type of economy based on environmentally clean energy resources.” Kazakhstan's commitment to the development of alternative energy sources also stems from its “tragic nuclear test past,” Uzmirzak Shukeyev, first deputy minister and chairman of the Expo 2017 Organizing Committee, told a session of the BIE’s General Assembly in Paris last November. And for that reason, he said, “No one understands the importance of environmental issues and the future role of renewable energy better than the people of Kazakhstan.” Shukeyev, who is a former Astana mayor, also said that “since ancient times, the land of Kazakhstan has connected all people of the world through trade links of the old Silk Road. During the last 20 years, the growth in trade and cultural links between Europe and Asia has been enormous. And Kazakhstan and Astana have been at the heart of these new relationships both economically and culturally.” Zhanar Aizkhanova, a member of the delegation presenting Kazakhstan’s case to the 157 BIE member nations, emphasized that “by choosing Kazakhstan, you are also choosing not only multicultural, multilingual and multi-ethnic diversity, but also diversity of future energy resources for sustainable development.” Astana's Expo 2017 bid has even more going for it, according to Vassilenko. “An international exhibition has never been held in a Central Asian capital. But Astana has already hosted major world events, including the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the 2011 Asian Winter Games,” at which an estimated 30,000 people attended the opening ceremony.” Vassilenko said Astana is up to the challenge of hosting Expo 2017, which is expected to attract 100 participating nations and about 5 million visitors. “This is a dynamically developing country and its young population is enthusiastic about Astana’s bid to host the expo and the opportunity to build a big exhibition center,” he said. Fueled by Kazakhstan’s energy wealth, Astana is in the midst of a construction boom. Since becoming the capital of country in 1997, about $1.4 billion has been invested in building educational, healthcare and cultural facilities. A 279-acre area in southeast Astana has been designated for the Expo site. By the end of 2016, a 26-mile-long light rail system will be operating, connecting the international airport and the Expo site, and all the city’s cultural spots and residential districts. As part of Astana’s Expo 2017 bid promotion campaign, Kazakhstan has been participating in international trade shows. Last November, for example, the country set up an Expo 2017 bid booth at the India International Trade Exhibition. Kazakhstan is also participating in a BIE-supported traveling exhibition, entitled “EXPO x EXPO.” Currently in Astana, this exhibition-of-exhibitions tells the history of international exhibitions (which goes back to the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park in 1851) and seeks to strengthen relations among the BIE member countries. Liege, its competitor, is mounting a strong Expo 2017 campaign. Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme argued, “All the strengths of my country are with Liege in this beautiful challenge. This expo should be seen as an ideal opportunity to foster dialogue with the entire international community about the development, access and use of new communication and information technologies.” Hosting Expo 2017 on the Coronmeuse (the 61-acre site where the 1939 special world expo on water treatment was held) would be a superb opportunity for Liege to showcase its transformation from a steel-making city to a high-technology center, according to its Belgian bid-promotion campaigners. For many reasons, Kazakhstan feels the time is right for Astana to host Expo 2017. But there's a really proud one: the city will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2017. - no responses
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers