Wake Up to the Reality of Obamacare

It is estimated that 48 million Americans currently have no health insurance. Furthermore, tens of thousands of Americans are bankrupted every year because of exorbitant medical bills. The need for universal health care and cost controls is obvious. So I was hopeful and even a little excited when the Obama administration set about to create a system of universal healthcare. But in the end, Obama sold out to the insurance industry. Obamacare is little more than a gift and cash cow for private insurance companies.

For those that don’t have health insurance but make a living wage, don’t expect to find bargain insurance premiums through the government’s insurance exchanges. Obamacare does virtually nothing to reign in the rising cost of health care, and its insurance exchanges are nothing more than a shark pit of private, for-profit insurance companies. When the new health care law goes into effect, there’s no doubt that many will experience insurance premium sticker shock. I suspect that many will chose to pay the government’s tax penalty and continue to remain uninsured instead of trying to afford the monthly premiums.

Since health care costs will continue to rise, Obamacare will be fiscally unsustainable. The government will have to pay out more and more in insurance subsidies because of rising premiums tied to rising costs of health care. Medicaid, Medicare, and the Children’s Health Insurance Plan already account for around 21% of Federal spending. After Obamacare rolls out, Federal spending on health care will become completely out of control.

Do it right or don’t do it all. This is the mantra Obama should have adopted. If he couldn’t get a single payer bill through Congress, he should have let the bill die. Instead the president made compromises that shouldn’t have been made, and he signed a terrible bill into law. The worst part of the law is the individual mandate. For many, Obamacare will amount to little more than a new tax from Uncle Sam. Good going, Barack.

Unlocking Your Cell Phone Without Permission is Now a Criminal Act

The U.S. Library of Congress has made it a criminal act to unlock your cell phone without permission from the carrier that sold you the phone. The new law was ostensibly created to put a halt to operations that buy and unlock cell phones and then ship those unlocked phones for resale overseas. But the net result of the new law is that consumers will be getting screwed once again. Fat chance that your existing carrier will grant you permission to unlock your phone to switch to another carrier or for use overseas.

The free market in the U.S. continues to become more of an assortment of monopolies. Cell phone service is no exception. When only a handful of companies have a stranglehold on the market, it’s the consumers who often get fleeced. This latest law only works to limit choices for consumers.

I never realize just how much of a rip-off cell phone service is in the U.S. until I travelled to Southeast Asia. In Thailand I was able to buy a SIM card from 7-11 for around $3.25 that included some airtime. I then bought a basic Samsung phone and charger for around $12. I simply inserted the SIM into the new phone and voila, I had service. I used that phone various times over a four week period and was surprised that I never exceeded the included airtime. I then went to Vietnam, where I bought another SIM card and swapped it for the Thai SIM card. The cost of the Vietnamese SIM card with minutes was only around $2.00. I made various calls during my four week stay in Vietnam and never had to top-up the card after the initial purchase. I was amazed.

Cell phone customers in the U.S. have more to be unhappy about than a limited choice of providers. Taxes on cell phone usage are exorbitantly high. Nationally, the combined Federal, State, and local taxes average 16%. If you live in a State with a government that just can’t get enough money, like New York, then over 20% of your bill will come from taxes. If anything is criminal, it’s such high taxes on the ability to communicate with one another.

For more on the issue of unlocking your cell phone, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Website.

Scraping the Bottom of the Oil Barrel

Have you thought about how the extraction methods for oil have become more and more extreme?  In the Gulf of Mexico, oil companies are drilling thousands of feet below the seabed to get at oil deposits.  In the northern plains of Canada, companies are using monstrous machines to devour the land to try to squeeze oil from rock and dirt.  When it comes to oil, we’re starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

There is plenty of ingenuity and zest to get at whatever oil is left in our little blue marble.  Unfortunately, the same ingenuity and zest aren’t being put forth in the same scale to find a replacement for this finite resource.  There is very little sense of urgency in replacing oil, and this is a huge problem.

The world’s consumer society is built on oil.  Just take a moment to think about how critical oil is to our daily lives.  From the cars we drive to the plastic parts in computers, petroleum-based products are integral to our way of life. The very existence of our consumer economy is built on this finite resource.  You’d think that this would scare the hell out of everyone and lead to massive action to develop a replacement plan.  Nope.  Instead, we just dig deeper for more oil.

Maybe oil will last another one hundred years.   But we all know what happens when a resource gets scarcer while demand keeps rising.   The days of cheap oil and gasoline are over.  The future will be one of upward cost.

U.S. workers by and large use cars to get to and from work.  It’s not uncommon for workers to commute an hour or more in their vehicles.  The cost of gas for that commute is far more now than ten years ago.  But this impact on commuter’s wallets only leads to calls for cheaper gas, not a change in paradigm.  When I hear people complain about gas prices these days, I wonder if they are ignorant to the realities of finite resources and supply and demand.

It’s not just the cost of commuting by car that rises with increasing oil prices.  The cost of our most basic necessity rises, too.  The production and distribution of food is highly dependent on oil.  The fertilizer that is crucial to high-yield farming requires petroleum for production.  Of course the trains, trucks, and ships that distribute our food are reliant on oil.  Our food system is built on an unsustainable model.  But even this isn’t scary enough to motivate massive action.

Personally, I think we’ve already waited too long to phase out of fossil fuels.  I think that a period of chaos is guaranteed sometime down the road. Too often humans take a crisis management approach because we are attached to short-term gains.  The challenge of replacing petroleum is so enormous that a crisis management approach is complete madness.  But that’s the route we seem to be taking.  Complete madness.

-VT  

Hydro-Fracking Money Corrupts Academics

The natural gas industry knows what every other industry does:  money can buy just about anyone, including university researchers.  The natural gas industry’s attempt to buy the halls of science is another example of why fracking for natural gas should not be a self-policing activity.

It’s common sense that when you’re pumping liquid cancer into the dermis of the earth, sensible regulations should be in place to protect public health.   But the natural gas industry would like everyone to look the other way as they spill their toxic fracking fluid onto the land, while claiming the right to not disclose the dangerous constituents in the fluid.

Fracking fluids should be regulated in a fashion similar to pesticides, where a Confidential Statement of Formula (CSF) is submitted for federal review.   A CSF is the exact breakdown of a mix of chemicals, including the identity of each ingredient and percentage in the formulation.  By submitting a CSF, toxicologists can determine how best to handle fracking fluids to safeguard workers and the population at large.

Considering such disasters as the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and various coal mining accidents, it’s imperative that the natural resource industries get things right the first time.  Regarding fracking, the natural gas industry has been evasive, dishonest, irresponsible and resistant to any oversight.  Their whole lobbying effort serves only one purpose:  to put profits before operating safely.

-VT