Tag Archives: responsibilities

Questions for Susan Collins

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Susan Collins is the Republican Senator from Maine whose refusal to vote for the health care reform bill on offer (and any of the prior efforts) is centered on her insistence that the bill’s cuts to reductions to growth in Medicaid payments to the States—Maine in particular—are too great.  Collins needs to be asked, and required to give straight, substantive answers to, a number of questions.

What is Maine’s government doing to reduce the costs to its citizens of health care and of health coverage?

What is Maine’s government doing to make health care available to its citizens in the absence of health coverage?

On what is Maine’s government spending its citizens’ tax money on instead of Medicaid?  What does the Maine government consider to be more important than the health of its citizens?

On what basis does she insist that the citizens of New York, Illinois, California, Texas—any of the other 49 States—must be required to pay into Maine’s Medicaid program?

Leaks

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Investigators are re-examining conversations detected by US intelligence agencies in spring 2015 that captured Russian government officials discussing associates of Donald Trump, according to current and former US officials, a move prompted by revelations that the president’s eldest son met with a Russian lawyer last year.

Emphasis added.

Why is Special Counsel Robert Mueller allowing these leaks?  Is he not interested in running an honest investigation?

The Cruz Amendment

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Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) has a provision in the latest Senate health bill that’s on offer, one that would allow sellers of actual health insurance to sell non-Obamacare compliant policies on the condition that they also sold Obamacare compliant plans on the ObamaMart.  The idea, and it’s a sound one, is that those plans, better tailored their customers’ needs, would soon have commensurately lower premiums, deductibles, and copays and thereby be more affordable.

Health plan sellers don’t like it, though.

While this setup could offer healthy people less expensive policies, insurers and actuaries say it would likely prove dysfunctional over time, pushing up rates and reducing offerings for people buying the compliant plans.

That’s a market decision, though; nothing in the provision or in the overall bill would require the plan sellers offer fewer compliant plans or at higher premiums.

Aside from that, those non-compliant plans would be better tailored—market forces would require it—have fewer items covered that a plan purchaser doesn’t want or need—market forces would push plan sellers to stop forcing contraceptive coverage on men and geriatrics or prostate cancer coverage onto women—and they would, as advertised, have much lower premiums, smaller deductibles, and lower copays.

They would also attract customers, low income and others, from those ObamaMart plans into the non-compliant market because those better tailored and cheaper plans would better suit their needs, too.

Maybe the health care coverage welfare plan providers—sorry, the health insurance companies—don’t want the noise of competition; maybe they prefer the steady, safe income of government subsidies in the form of customers trapped in their protected monopoly in the health “insurance” industry.  Maybe that’s why so many of these companies are leaving ObamaMarts, leaving folks with few plan choices or no plans to buy at all—because the industry as Obamacare has changed it is so sound.

On the other hand, the Progressive-Democrats in Congress should jump on this provision with both feet.  Obamacare plans are terrific, they insist.  Surely, in their wonderfulness, these plans would win resoundingly in the competition of the market place.  Especially with so many of those plans still subsidized through other provisions in the bill.  Wouldn’t they?

Using the Cloud

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“The cloud” is, in Internet jargon, the Internet, and in this context the jargon word means a collection of computers somewhere on the Internet that are tied together via Internet connections (they don’t have to be collocated; although, usually they are) and user reachable via the Internet.  The purposes of this sort of collection of computers are to centralize computational efforts, to centralize data storage, and for companies to pay the third parties operating a cloud facility to use it to do the computations or data storage.

The major risk of offloading these tasks is security.  The companies using an Internet-centered third-party cloud facility have to trust two things beyond their control: the security skills of the enterprise running the cloud facility for them and the Internet connection between the company and that cloud facility.

I wrote all that to write all this.

A huge data leak at Verizon Wireless exposed millions of customer records, but the company blamed an outside vendor for the breach.  The FOX Business Network‘s Tracee Carrasco reported, “Names, addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, the security pins of millions of Verizon customers publicly exposed online by one of the company’s vendors, Nice systems, based in Israel.”

And

According to reports from ZDNet.com, “An employee of Nice Systems put information into a storage cloud area and incorrectly set the storage to allow external access,” said Carrasco.

Whether that mistake was one-off, incompetence, or nefarious is neither here nor there.  What matters is the existence of a mistake of that magnitude and that the process used and the person using it were not under the control of the company using that cloud facility.

Mistakes of this nature actually are quite rare, but the magnitude of a failure of this sort (estimates of the number of customers whose data were exposed range from 6 million to 14 million) is too huge to make such risks useful.

It’s simply foolhardy to use any cloud facility that is not under the sole control of the company using it.  This kind of mistake still will occur, but at least the company would have full control over the equipment and IT personnel training and consequences, and it would be better positioned to take faster action to correct a mistake and mitigate its consequences.

On Whose Side Is He?

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Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) has said he will not vote for the latest Senate effort at beginning the repeal and replace process of Obamacare.  He claims he can’t tell the difference between this offer and the Obamacare that exists because, in part, it leaves some of the Obamacare taxes in place.

Never mind that a critical difference between the offer and Obamacare is that the offer does repeal some of the Obamacare taxes.

The offer isn’t a perfect bill, but it represents progress, and it’s not a final answer—and I know of no one, other than a few Senators, perhaps, who are arguing that it is; that there will be, can be, no possibility of coming back next year to make more progress and coming back in the next Congress to make yet more in each of those two years.

Furthermore, there aren’t enough votes to get all of the Obamacare taxes passed in this bill.  And, at least some Obamacare taxes must be repealed in order to be able to effect significant tax code reform.

Finally, the only politically possible alternative to passing a bill that repeals only some of the Obamacare taxes is to preserve the status quo and all of the Obamacare taxes.

Paul knows all of this, of course; he’s just virtue signaling.

I have to ask, then: on whose side is he?