Sunday, August 17, 2014

Ron Suskind

I have been reading Ron Suskind's book Confidence Man, and it is quite an education regarding the financial crisis.  However, considering the detail he uses to describe events, for example a private conversation between Elizabeth Warren and Obama, which, almost requires a complete disclosure by either party.  He better be telling the truth, which I think is impossible.

It is however, gasp, making me a bit more understanding of Liberal policies, he offers such non confrontational presentations of "progressive" viewpoints that they are almost palatable. 

It also seems to describe a very smart Obama.


but....


He describes the whole of the Bush presidency as a reflection of the last months, which by any objective measure not a proper description.  The financial crisis, actually it was much more complex that just a financial crisis, was a long time in coming with many parties at fault, mostly people who started buying homes they could not afford and financial institutions investing in products they did not understand.  Much of the Bush presidency was prosperous.

Obama's signature legislation, Obamacare, is intended to make an inefficient system....better.  The point made in the book was that there was no correlation between level of care and outcomes, something now which must be addressed day after day in my profession (not delivering care, just documenting care).  The lack of logic and analysis is....not smart.  It is going to make things worse.  The most efficient system is for the consumer to pay for what they receive.  Obamacare is the opposite. 

The cure they chose to apply?  Transferring responsibility for care to yet another entity (Accountable Care Organizations) further removes the receiver of heath care from the payer of health care.

Also, if outcomes (money spent for benefit), is going to be applied to Medicine, should it not be applied to other concerns, specifically Poverty?



While I admire his change of heart regarding Gay and Lesbian issues, his missed opportunity to heal race and have us move beyond (which ultimately is going to require black people to say, apology accepted, lets move on) is really, really regretful.  He could have changed the conversation to, "we are all in this together", yet chose feed the fire of oppression and entitlement.


For me his lasting legacy will be the enlargement of the entitlement state.


On another note, the inconvenient truth about An Inconvenient Truth, is the graph that Gore showed with the hockey stick (and the models projected to show a flooded earth) has not happened and should have by now.  After 6 years of unfettered Liberal Green, is the problem better?  Crisis averted?  Did the miniscule number of electric cars stop the tide and prevent disaster or did it just not happen.  Climate change is mostly a poorly studied and politically biased theory.  As in all things, the economic and personal desires of a free people is the best way to cure such ills (Tesla).

The belief that a controlling entity can manage complex problems, poverty, race, percentage of rich/poor, environment, never ceases to amaze in its immaturity.