Just running it up the flagpole, to see if anyone salutes....

There can be no doubt that with passage of Obamacare, this may be a moot point, but I started thinking about how a truly deregulated health services market might look. For whatever reason, people seem to believe that health insurance, one of the most comprehensively regulated industries in the US, suffered from a lack of regulation that was driving up costs in the health industry. I started considering how a broad health services market, employing everything from deregulated plans which people could buy across state lines, to decoupling of employment and insurance, to the inclusion and promotion (through advantageous, or at least fair, tax treatment) of health savings accounts, might look like. One possibility that I haven't heard about but seems like it could be interesting would be the possibility of "a la carte" health insurance. We already have it, in a way, with Medicare Advantage, and the fact that we buy glasses and go to the dentist's with separate insurance (or even out-of-pocket). Why couldn't there be a larger insurance market for selected services? For example, say you have a pre-existing condition, or maybe a family history of heart disease. Is there any reason that you couldn't be put into a high-risk pool exclusively for treatment dealing with your pre-existing condition, but, say, if you fell down skiing and blew your ACL, your "regular" insurance policy would cover it like normal?

It's true that pre-existing conditions lead actuaries to understand that some people are at higher risks for, say, lung cancer. That's why smokers pay more for health insurance. (Strangely, I didn't hear anybody talk about this unjust treatment of a lifestyle choice during President Obama's year-long push for health care nationalization.) And it's undoubtedly true that sometimes a pre-existing condition can lead to multiple health problems, and identifying the pre-existing condition as *the* cause would be difficult. But considering the situation we find ourselves in now, could it really be worse?

If anybody has any clever comments on this, or if I'm overlooking some common-sense reason (or a very complicated and highfalutin' reason) why I'm completely off-base, I'd appreciate it.

A Book List

Over at the Weekly Standard blog, M. Continetti wrote a list of his Top Ten Books. This is always fun to think about, and your correspondent couldn't help himself.
In no particular order:

1. Democracy in America. I have the Mayer version, but I guess the Mansfield tome is pretty interesting. So much good stuff in there.... Groundbreaking, groundsmashing work of comparative political science. And still valid for its theoretical insights.

2. The Brothers Karamazov. Long hard slog. But worth it. Not recommended for reading in winter -- I was talking with a friend of mine, we considered the idea that Dostoevsky should be illegal between November and the 1st of March, sort of on the same principle of why alcohol is so highly taxed in Scandinavia. One alternates between the beautiful and sublime to the horrifying in such a brief time, or even at the same time. If ingested by someone weak-willed, the consequences can be disastrous.

3 and 4. Republican Party Reptile and Eat the Rich, by P.J. O'Rourke. Some of the first books I ever read where I truly felt "my goodness, this guy gets it." Unbelievably funny. One of the best writers a conservative can read, especially after reading Dostoevsky. O'Rourke's conservatism, if it can be called that, is not that of policy wonks or some patrician aristocracy. Nor is it populist hell-raising. It only is maybe more like, well, discernment, an insight into what is important, and what can be laughed at, and which is both.

5. Reflections on the Revolution in France. A handy guidebook to unintended consequences, irrational rationalism, and the worthiness of the little platoon.

6. The Road to Serfdom, by Hayek. The dedication alone is worth the price.

7. Talks with T.G. Masaryk, by Karel Čapek. Another democratic heart pumping life into the mind of an aristocrat, and the wisdom to understand the necessity of both.

8. Promised Land, Crusader State, by Walter McDougall. A wonderful rendition of American foreign policy history. The pages turn so quickly one needs a hair tie. And the only serious book on foreign policy that analyzes The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in a historical policy context.

9. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Because there isn't room on the list for Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise of Government and the other great contractian philosophers.

10. Finally, there was a big astronomy picture book in the public library back home. I still remember learning about how wonderful it was to discover that there was a science that contained so many great ancient stories, that demonstrated such amazing human progress, and was just so darn big. In lieu of knowing what this book is, I'll put Pale Blue Dot instead, a text that we students used with Dr. Berendzen. It wasn't bad either.

Continetti writes that "It occurs to me that the books you read between the ages of 13 and 21 turn out to be the most important in your life." I'm not sure that's always the case. There are certainly cases where something so drastically changes in one's life that new springs of ideas well up, and new places in one's mind begin to be mapped out. For these times, one gravitates to new sources for inspiration, though, as a concession, perhaps always filtering them through the books of one's youth.

An interesting little article

http://acus.org/new_atlanticist/estonia-nato

This article came across your humble correspondent's virtual desk a while ago, and in the interest of finally clearing it off, it was decided to post it on the blog. In sum, it's a little bit of a cheerleading for that fine American ally, Estonia. While President Obama and much of the rest of the US foreign policy establishment seems to be re-orienting itself away from Europe and toward more strategically significant areas, and with some even calling for the US to abandon NATO completely, the US-Europe dialogue seems to be in a bit of a trough after Pres. Obama's brief honeymoon period.

The alliance is worth keeping, but as with all relationships, it needs maintenance and communication. Additionally, NATO is an especially important tool for US relations with Russia. This article touches on the delicate relationship with Russia, as well as the ways that modernization of the alliance can strengthen it both internally and externally.

Written by former US Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker, Estonia in NATO manages to realistically and respectfully assess the abilities and challenges of small nations and their abilities to contribute to alliance power projection outside their immediate theater of operations. Where Ambassador Volker is particularly enlightening is his discussion of Estonia's counterattacks on cyber-warfare. Though Ambassador Volker is too polite to point it out, Russian hacking abilities represent a real and credible threat to American and alliance security,* and it is reassuring to know that the alliance is responding to these "21st century threats" proactively. Moreover, while tensions between Russia and the West are certainly less than in the past, it is clear that Moscow continues to regard much of Europe as in its sphere of influence. It would be foolish for western European policymakers to ignore pressure from Moscow, or to sell out their EU partners to the east for cheap energy supplies.

I spoke with a friend of mine earlier about perceptions of threats in Central Europe vis-a-vis their neighbors to the west. For many western Europeans, Central Europe sometimes merely an irritant which tends to prevent the gas from freely flowing, and for all the talk about European citizenship, some in Western Europe could really give two hoots about Russian muscle-flexing in the internal politics of EU nations and on the EU's border, as long as there's a Euro to be made.

It is certainly true that the ideological struggle with the Soviets has been won, and that certainly opens up the prospects of working with Russia in a constructive way. They have their interests; we have ours. That's fine, and reasonable. It is also true that the US simply cannot have the same relationship to Russia as its neighbors do -- as its neighbors must have. After all, they're neighbors. Nevertheless, the US should encourage alliance cohesion and help its partners recognize that energy policy is often security policy. For that, a strong, innovative, and healthy NATO is crucial. The article points out that every nation can contribute in big ways.






*I heard from a few IT people in Brno that the Russians tend to make the best anti-virus and anti-spyware software around, precisely because their fellow countrymen are also so good on the other end of it. Where your typical American hacker tries to break into the Pentagon for fun, your typical Russian hacker has already moved money from your bank accounts and bought 15 liters of borscht and a dacha for his mom. He's then hired by the mafia, or the government, or the government mafia to continue his work.