Dream cars

I have a confession to make, one that may cause you to question the sincerity of my plans for doubling the price of gas and making drastic cuts in our energy consumption. I can't hold it in any longer, I must risk my credentials as an eco-liberal-libertarian by baring my soul. Forgive me, but (gulp)...... I love cars.

There, I've said it. I've loved cars all my post-pubescent life (there must be some testosterone connection, no?). I've owned dozens of them, very few of which ever came close to being my dream vehicle, but which were storied cars, nonetheless.

My first car was a hand-me-down, my grandfather's 1961 Dodge Dart, with a slant six and 3 speed automatic transmission on the column. It was not exactly the Porsche "Bathtub" Spider that I lusted after, but it ran.

That's more than I can say for my second car, which was a used Fiat station wagon affectionately called Sweet Charity (thanks to Shirley MacLaine). Italians may make fine leather loafers, but they make lousy cars. One day, a few short months after buying Sweet Charity, I had to get out and push it up Holden Road, while my father steered. The ironic part of the story is that the car was still running, in fact, Dad was racing the engine, but it didn't have enough ooomph to make it up the 3% grade. The Fiat was soon relegated to the junk yard.

There were other cars, too many of them now that I think about it. Such as...

* The Ford Torino that cost me all of $200, and which I had to intentionally drive into a tree (at about 10 mph) to realign the control arm that had slipped out of position.

* The VW Bug that burst into flames one day, and unfortunately was doused by the fire department before the fire could total the car and end my misery of constant maintenance.

* The old mail truck Jeep, perhaps the dumbest car purchase I ever made, which is saying something given how many dumb cars I've owned.

* Another VW, this one a Squareback with the infamous "pancake" engine. When it needed a major overhaul, I made the mistake of taking it to Art's garage. Art was very good at taking things apart, but not so good at putting them back together. After a couple of weeks of Art's telephone excuses, I visited him to see what was up. My VW sat there in his garage bay with its engine compartment agape, ringed by loose wires and bolts and hoses and such. I asked Art when he thought he might have it running. He told me "I come in every morning, make a cup of coffee and pull a chair up to the car. I sit there and stare at it for an hour or two, but I don't know how to put it back together..." I towed it home, bought a book, and cobbled it back together on my own.

* A couple of Renault's, one a LeCar and the other a Renault 5. Suffice to say that the French share many similarities with the Italians when it comes to the quality of both their shoes and their automobiles.

* A Mazda RX3, which was the first rotary engine automobile. My RX3 was a screamer, the first in a very short line of performance cars I've owned. Those of you who know how technology works (like Windows Vista, or iTouch phones) know that you never want to buy the FIRST version of anything. The second version, the one that has all the bugs worked out, that's the one you want. In the second version of the RX3, Mazda fixed the engine seal problem that doomed my Mazda. Too late for me (and my brother, who threw a wrench through the garage door in frustration after trying to fix it).

* A Dodge Caravan, which cost me more in repairs over the course of the three years I owned it than I paid for it. I finally wrote a letter to Lee Iaccocca, listing all the problems I'd had with his company's "family van". My letter ran to three pages. He never replied, which is too bad. I wasn't asking him for a reimbursement, I just wanted an apology.

So, you may wonder, given this long litany of folly and pain, why do I still love cars? There are two reasons.

First off, I am an automobile optimist. I love what the future may bring, my personal history notwithstanding. When the NY Times runs a slide show from the latest Auto Show I click and gaze in rapt wonder at the Concept Cars. All that sci-fi sleekness and all those airstream slipping curves make me drool as I imagine the g-force tug from down-shifting my yet-to-be produced CR-Z into a curve on the Pacific Coast Highway (where else would one drive one's dream?).

Secondly, I discovered Honda. About twenty years ago (right about the time I wrote my Dear John letter to Chrysler) I bought my first Civic. Since then, I've owned 5 or 6 of them. My current silver Civic is the epitome of ordinary. It's certainly no Porsche, but it's no Fiat either. Honda's non-Fiatness won me over. The Honda Civic is the simplest, most elegant, most economical, most reliable car I've ever owned. They sip lightly at the gas pump. They run and run, never breaking down, and seldom needing maintenance.

Which brings me to the point of my post. I'm afraid that Honda is slipping, and it saddens me greatly. I admit, I'm not the typical auto enthusiast. I don't want 16 tons of towing power, or 5-wheel drive, or 800 cubic inches or seventy-six cup-holders. I don't fit into Thorsten Veblen's conspicuous consumption class, I could care less what the hood ornament says about the size of my....wallet. I want a Euro-car; one that's compact, that's reliable, that's simple and that gets a gazillion miles per gallon. And this is where Honda and I have parted ways.

Honda lately has been "going American", getting all "horse-powery and cup-holdery". Their cars keep getting bigger, they seem to be designing everything to appeal to Joe Nascar. My first Civic DX (the DX is "entry model" Civic, I always buy the low-end even of the already low-end Civic) had a 1300 CC engine and got 45 MPG. Honda discontinued the 1300 CC engine in the US (not enough power, they claimed). My latest Civic, with a 1500CC engine only gets 39 MPG. Honda's trade-off of fuel economy for pizazz seems to be getting worse. The Honda Fit, which is the new low-end Honda even smaller than the Civic, is (according to Honda's web site) "snappy and aggressive". But it only gets 34 MPG! What kind of trend is this? In 1990 Honda's low-end model got 45 MPG, the low-end 2002 Civic I've had for 5 years gets 39 MPG and if I buy their new low-end offering, the Fit, I'll only get 34 MPG? Am I the only one who thinks we're going backwards?

In Japan and Europe, Honda sells a Fit with the 1300 CC engine (you can't get that here), which gets mileage in the mid-40s. I want Honda to sell me that car, but I don't think they know there are customers like me on this side of the Atlantic. I don't want the fat American Fit that yearns to be a Corvette. I could care less that the American Fit comes with 10 cup holders (it does). It only gets 34 MPG, as far as I'm concerned, it's a potbelly pig. I want a 50 MPG car. No wait, forget 50. I want 60 or even 100 MPG!

Let me tell you about my new dream car. It would be a small hatchback, like the 2009 Fit:


It would get 60 MPG - using extremely lightweight materials and with an engine designed for European gas prices. If I really want to go off the dreaming deep-end, I'd imagine a 100 MPG plug-in hybrid Fit, with lithium-ion batteries that could be charged by plugging it in overnight. Talk about a car that could rev my engines! It is to dream...

What's a memorable car from your past? What do you think about the cars that you see on the road and in showrooms today? What's your dream car, which car (real or imagined) can set your heart to fluttering??

Time to pay the pumper...

Everybody's screaming about the price of gas & oil, and they should be. The price today is far too low. Yup, that's what I think, at $3.10/gal gas is too damn cheap. Unless we set a price for petroleum that represents its true cost, one that's equivalent to what they are paying today in Europe, we're going to fall further and further behind economically while we slowly choke in our sprawling ex-urbs on the fumes of our cheap energy folly.

Here are a few tidbits regarding our oil habit (compiled from (http://epb.lbl.gov/homepages/Rick_Diamond/LBNL55011-trends.pdf) & http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/59901.pdf & http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2653):

1. In 1956, Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act, and we started building roads from coast to coast. Bus and train companies went out of business, as Americans moved from the cities to the suburbs. Per capita consumption of gasoline in America quadrupled between 1950 and 2000.

2. From 1950 to 2000 the "inflation adjusted" price of gasoline per gallon averaged $1.50, with one brief exception. In the late 1970s, as OPEC formed and established strict production controls to limit supply, the price of gas & oil rose to about $3.00 a gallon (again in inflation adjusted dollars).

3. This sudden price rise in the late 1970s had a dramatic effect. Americans stopped buying big gas guzzlers, and turned to small, efficient cars (which led to the rise of Toyota, Honda and Nissan, since American car companies were reluctant to make small cars). We turned down our furnaces, and insulated our attics. We installed solar hot water heaters, and hung our clothes out on the line. In the late 1970s we Americans, for the first time in the past 50 years, actually cut our consumption of oil by 10%. For about 3 years.

3. Reagan took office in 1981. His first act that January was to remove the solar panels (that had been installed by Jimmy Carter) from the White House roof. At the same time, a global recession coupled with North Sea oil coming online and differences of opinion between OPEC members, led to a flood of oil on the market in the early 1980s, and an equally steep drop in prices.

4. We quickly abandoned our gas-sipping ways, and got back to guzzling. In the mid-1980s Congress's CAFE standards for vehicle mileage went into effect, which had the perverse effect of making driving cheaper. Between 1980 and 1990, as vehicle efficiency rose and gas prices dropped, the fuel cost of driving one mile dropped from 15 cents to 7 cents. We could have kept on driving our little cars and pocketed all that savings. But what fun would that be? We opted to trade in our compact cars for SUVs and pickup trucks (which today make up 50% of all passenger vehicles) and get back to doing what we love most, which is driving. Between the 1980s and today we SUV-loving, road-tripping Americans increased the number of miles we drove and the amount of gasoline we consumed by about 60%. Yeehah!

5. Today the US has a standard of living (measured in GDP per capita) equivalent to Japan, the UK, Germany and France. We consume more than twice as much petroleum to generate $1000 of GDP as any of these other countries.

6. The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the US is about $3.10. The average price in the UK is about $7.15. The average price in Germany is $6.98. In France a gallon of gas costs about $6.50. In Japan the price is about $4.20.

7. The average American single family home is now 2,349 square feet, compared to 1,695 square feet in 1974, even as the average family has shrunk from 3.1 people to 2.6 people.

8. Today the US produces 23.4 tons of GHG (greenhouse gases) per capita. France produces 8.8 tons of GHG per capita. Germany produces 12.3 tons per capita. Japan produces 10.7. The UK produces 11.0 tons.

Our energy mindset is idiotic and bass-ackwards. On the one hand, we are coming to understand the depth and breadth of the problem. We wring our hands about the risks and costs of our dependency on oil imports. We are (most of us) greatly concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. We worry about smog, ozone, traffic congestion and the snaking growth of suburbia - all brought about by our lust for automobiles.

But we remain in denial about the solution. We do all these asinine things, like pouring billions $$ down the ethanol rat hole, and putting a few million $$ into subsidizing some windmills, all to avoid talking about consumption. We are loathe to admit that the solution is to consume LESS! We approach our petro-gluttony like the fat guy who switches to Diet Pepsi but refuses to stop eating donuts.

We have to drive smaller cars, and drive less. We have to build communities that are more compact, more livable and more efficient. We have to live in smaller, more efficient houses. We have to turn down the lights, raise the temp on the air conditioners, turn down the heat, hang our clothes on the line and a whole bunch of other things that are just common sense.

The reason we don't do these things today is because we hide the real costs of energy from ourselves. The price we pay at the pump (www.icta.org/doc/Real Price of Gasoline.pdf ) doesn't include the costs of suburban sprawl. It doesn't include the costs of military bases in the middle East. It doesn't include the cost of tax subsidies for biofuels, solar power and windmills. It doesn't include the costs of tax subsidies to the oil industry. It doesn't include the costs of the environmental destruction due to acid rain and global warming. It doesn't include the human health costs of mercury or ozone pollution.

Nor are all the externalities of falsely cheap fossil fuels on the cost side of the ledger, there's also our loss of competitiveness. We know that it takes twice as much oil for the American economy to generate $1000 as it does Japan, or Germany. We also know that the demand for global oil is increasing exponentially due to the growth of the economies of India, China, Indonesia and other developing nations. Barring a global depression, oil prices are only going to rise steeply for the next several decades. If we don't find a way to become as petro-efficient as Europe and Asia, then our oil dependence will price us out of the global market.

We know what we need to do. We have to radically reduce our per capita consumption of petroleum. We know what that takes, at least we have lived through one period of time (the late 1970s) when we actually accomplished that. We love our free market economy, and we know that in a free market the consumption of a commodity falls when the price goes up. The only way we are going to make ourselves reduce oil imports, reduce air and water pollution, stop destructive extraction practices, reduce our production of greenhouse gases and make our economy more energy efficient is to cut consumption. The only - ONLY - way to cut consumption of petroleum in a free market is to raise the price.

A reasonable goal is to double the price we pay for gas & oil by imposing a tax of 25 cents per gallon per year (every year) for the next ten years, such that we're paying $6.00/gallon by 2018. As we do this, we should cut income taxes by the same amount, so as to make this gas tax income and revenue neutral. As we have demonstrated in the late 1970s, we can and will adjust quickly. If gas and oil cost twice as much, and we halve our consumption, we can hold our energy expenditures to the level they are now. This is quite doable, because there's a tremendous amount of slop in our current energy habits. Our lives and lifestyles would suffer very little, if we trade in our Toyota Tundras (such irony in that name) for Corollas, and put clotheslines in our backyards. Most important, this one simple but painful measure would do more for our children and grandchildren than all of the proposed CAFE standards, biofuel subsidies, coal gasification initiatives, solar subsidies and carbon caps, combined.

You are my sunshine...

Okay, so ethanol is not going to free us from fossil fuels, but we can turn to solar and wind power. Right?

Of course we can, if we're willing to pay a whole lot more for electricity than we do now, and don't mind the lights going off from time to time. When we talk about solar power or wind power we're talking about electricity (although I do like the idea of a wind mill on the roof of my Honda powering the engine - the faster I drove the more electricity I'd produce :). Today, both solar and wind power produce kilowatts that are much more expensive than kilowatts from coal or nuclear power, and a whole lot less reliable. Given these economics, neither wind nor solar is going to supplant coal or nuclear power any time soon.

Our US electrical grid is made up of a mix of coal-burning plants (we burn about 1 billion tons of coal a year to produce electricity), nuclear power plants (there are about 100 nuclear plants operating today in the US), and a smattering of natural gas, diesel and hydro plants. This is an on-demand system, there's no storage. We generate electricity as we need it, and use every last (electron) drop as it passes through the wires. Because demand fluctuates, peaking during hot summer afternoons in warmer climes, and on blustery winter evenings in the colder climes, production has to be able to ramp up flexibly. To meet peak demands we shovel more coal into the boilers (and turn on standby plants that only run when demand is highest because they are most costly to run).

The economic beauty of an on-demand system like this is that we only have to pay for enough production capacity to meet our daily needs, plus a little extra. Most of the time we can run our most efficient (and least expensive) plants, and turn on the handful of more expensive systems only when demand peaks (and prices) are highest. This design, unfortunately, does not match up well with solar and wind power systems.

There are three factors in electricity costs - power plant installation, base operation and peak demand generation. The cost per installed kilowatt of a coal plant is about $1,300. The cost of an installed solar kilowatt is about $7,000. For wind power the cost of an installed kilowatt is about $1,000. The cost of an installed kilowatt for a nuclear plant is about $3,000. It would seem that wind is a great deal now (and it can be, under certain conditions), and that solar is not too far behind nuclear power.

As far as operating costs go, wind and solar systems are almost free. After all, we don't have to shovel coal into our wind turbines. But given the intermittency of wind (ideal winds for power generation are steady at 15-25 MPH, but actual wind speed fluctuates considerably, and even the windiest sites can have calm spells that last for days) and sun (half our 24 hour day is dark, and cloud cover significantly reduces PV panel output) it turns out that an installed solar or wind plant runs at 20-25% of potential capacity. Comparing this to coal and nuclear plants, which run steadily at 60-80% of their installed capacity, we can see that the installed kilowatt cost by itself is misleading.

And the economics of solar and wind power only get worse when one has to design a system to meet peak demand. In the Northeast our demand peaks vary by time of day and time of year. We see one peak in the late afternoon to early evening in the fall and winter, when families are returning home, turning on lights, cooking dinner, etc. We see another peak increasingly in the summer in the middle of the afternoon on hot sticky days, when homes and businesses are cranking the air conditioning. It's during these peaks that operators turn the dial up to 11 on coal and nuclear plants, and fire up idle diesel and natural gas plants that are too expensive to run during times of low demand. Wind and solar power can't "ramp up", they produce when the weather accommodates. Solar and wind can't replace coal or nuclear plants unless and until they can reliably meet peak demand needs. Such a peak demand alternative power system would not only have enough capacity to meet our needs on sunny and windy days, but also enough storage and spare capacity to meet our needs during a 3-day spell of calm, or during the nights and cloudy spells.

Think of it this way. I can install a solar or wind plant for my home which is also connected to the grid, and live with the vagaries of a system that only produces during sunny or windy days (during which times I'd happily watch it run my electrical meter backward) because I know that the grid (backed by the nuclear plant in Seabrook and the coal plant in Bow) is there when I need electricity at night, or during cloudy or calm spells. But if I want to live "off the grid" I'd need to install a solar or wind system that not only meets my needs during sunny or windy days, but that has enough excess production capacity to charge a large (expensive) battery bank that could get me through a 3-4 day "dry" spell. Scaling this up, a wind or solar system that could replace a 1 megawatt coal or nuclear plant now becomes a 3-4 megawatt installed plant with a 3-4 megawatt bank of batteries.

Wind power (if we are willing to pay quite a bit more for electricity), and even solar power (if we are willing to pay a WHOLE LOT more for electricity), has a role to play in our power grid today, but that role is limited. Denmark has invested much more heavily in wind power than the US or other European countries. Today wind generators meet about 15% of Denmark's overall electricity needs. Danes are willing to pay more for green power, but even so they'll soon stop installing wind generators. They've learned that no matter how many wind plants they install, wind can at best meet about 20% of their electricity needs. Installing additional wind generators above that 20% threshold provides no additional usable output. In Denmark nuclear and fossil fuel plants will continue to provide the other 80%.

I'm not saying that we should stop pushing for wind and solar power. Some of the apparent economic advantage of coal power stems from our refusal to pay for the externalities - such as the environmental destruction and health costs due to coal mining and smokestack releases of heavy metals and greenhouse gases. But we have to be realistic about the limitations of wind and solar power, and ask ourselves "how much are we willing to pay for green electricity?".

My Hummer's had too much to drink...

I don't get ethanol. I mean, I get ethanol, a bottle of Cabernet without it would be just (sour) grape juice. But ethanol as a fuel is one of the dumbest things we Americans (who have done a LOT of dumb things) have ever done. We're spending about $15 billion in tax dollars this year to pump corn into our gas tanks. We tell ourselves noble stories about "green" ethanol helping to wean us from fossil fuels, while cutting greenhouse gases and reducing our dependence on oil imports. Frankly, we're full of sh*t. Turning corn into ethanol is economic and environmental idiocy.

Ethanol from corn provides no net energy benefit. A number of studies on ethanol production estimate that it takes anywhere from .83 gallons of oil (this is the most optimistic study, produced by the National Corn Growers Association - http://www.ncga.com/public_policy/issues/2001/ethanol/08_22_01b.htm) to 1.3 gallons of oil (this one from Cornell was published in a peer-reviewed science journal - http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Aug01/corn-basedethanol.hrs.html) to produce one gallon of ethanol. The consensus of all the studies on the ratio of energy input to energy output of ethanol production comes out to about 1:1. The economic bottom line: we’re spending billions $$ to turn a gallon of oil into a gallon of ethanol.

Diverting corn (and other grains) to ethanol production raises food prices. Subsidies for ethanol production have reduced the proportion of agricultural land used for food production, and more than doubled the commodity prices for grains over the past few years (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-wed-world-food-programmar05,0,2800064.story?track=rss). These price increases concatenate down the grocery chain, leading to sharp increases in prices for everything from bacon at the Stop & Shop to tortillas in Mexico City. The nutritional bottom line: as crops are turned into fuel, food prices rise around the globe.

Corn based ethanol not only costs more than petroleum, and increases food prices, it degrades the environment. If it takes a gallon of oil to make a gallon of ethanol, then ethanol provides no reduction in fossil fuel pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. But it's actually worse than that. Farmers are clearing, cutting and plowing "idle" forests and meadows, in pursuit of subsidized ethanol profits. This land clearing displaces wildlife, releases stored carbon and increases air and water pollution. The environmental bottom line: corn based ethanol is more harmful than the fossil fuels it purports to displace.

We cling to our ethanol dreams, and refuse to admit they are phony fantasies. Politicians are happily willing to suspend disbelief, in their eagerness to win votes in the Midwest (there's a powerful synergy between the importance of the Iowa Caucus and the subsidies Congress pours into Iowa corn). And corn growers and agribusinesses are not about to question the illogic of ethanol, for fear of shutting off the flow of billions in tax $$.

It's time to ask ourselves - "how are tax payer funded ethanol subsidies a good deal for Americans?" (you can read what Cato thinks here http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=7308). We're paying far more for ethanol than we would be for gasoline (although the real price of a gallon of ethanol is hidden by government subsidies). We're increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing environmental damage. We're raising food prices. We're importing more oil than we ever have. And we're putting off doing the difficult things (which I'll tackle in an upcoming post) that we need to do to cut our use of fossil fuels.

What do you think - are we ready to stop fooling ourselves, put down our ethanol high balls and push away from the bar? Given the economic and environmental damage from our ethanol dreams, we'd be better off writing checks to Iowa farmers and ADM to get them to stop producing ethanol from corn.

Health Care Myth #3 - "Socialized" medicine is bad for you

Chrissy asked "why are you writing about health care, folks don't seem that interested?" Good question! I've been wondering why the comments have thinned out recently (is health care boring?). Bear with me, readers, I am almost done with the Health Care Myth series. Let's wrap it up by taking on Myth #3 - that universal, single-payer government-regulated health care plans like those found in western Europe and Canada (and which we've partially implemented here in the US in Medicaid and Medicare) result in lower quality & higher costs. The vast majority of Americans believe this unquestioningly, but does it make sense?

We're just not that rational (by the way, this podcast at Cato on the myth of the rational voter is brilliant - http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/01/15/irrational-voters/) when it comes to health care. I began to think this a couple of months ago when a friend criticized Hillary's mandated universal coverage plan. I wondered why Hillary would propose something so distasteful as mandated coverage for all, and found that universal coverage lowers costs for everyone (not that I am all that enamored of Hillary's plan, since she lacks the cujones to propose a single-payer universal plan). But still Hillary is taking a big risk, because we Live-Free-Or-Die-Hards automatically reject any and all mandated behavior, no matter how beneficial that behavior might be.

The more I researched, the clearer became the disappointing realities of our hodge-podge "free market" American health care system. So why do so many Americans cling to this crappy, costly "free market" choice ("You can have my Blue Cross ID card when you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.")? The only conclusion I can draw is that we Americans are (how do I put this gently?) - dumkopfs! American voters (along with the herd of poll driven politicians) are resolutely clinging to a "free market" health care system that costs us too much (see Myth #1), that delivers things we don't need (see Myth #2), and which provides a lower quality of health care than most any other western nation (see Myth #3). We absolutely refuse to consider a single-payer, universal health care plan, because...well, socialism is bad. Right?

We know that socialism is bad. The proof goes like this:
* The USSR was socialist.
* The USSR built lousy cars, baked crappy bread, and every comrade had bad teeth.
* All the bad bread and bad teeth led to the USSR's collapse.
* Ergo socialism is bad. QED.

It stands to reason that if socialism is bad, then socialized medicine must be bad. To which I say, "Not so fast, capitalism breath". There are a bunch of countries that have socialized medicine that provide much better health care than we have here in the US of A. Let's take a look at some statistics: (from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf):

Country	Life expect- ancy	Infant mortality rate	MDs per 1000 people	Nurses per 1000 people	Per capita spending on health (USD)	Health- care costs as a percent of GDP
Australia	80.9	5.0	2.7	10.4	3,128	9.5
Canada	80.2	5.3	2.2	10.0	3,326	9.8
France	80.3	4.0	3.4	7.7	3,374	11.1
Germany	79.0	3.9	3.4	9.7	3,287	10.7
Japan	82.0	2.8	2.0	9.0	2,358	8.0
Sweden	80.6	2.4	3.4	10.6	3,149	9.1
UK	79.0	5.1	2.4	9.1	2,724	8.3
US	77.8	6.8	2.4	7.9	6,401	15.3

Every industrialized country on this list (except us) has a form of socialized medicine. They spend half what we do on health care, and they have higher quality as measured by life expectancy, infant mortality (and a bunch of other statistics you can find on the OECD site), etc. Hmmm, all those politicians and voters who scream that socialized medicine bites the stethoscope seem to be ignoring the facts!

I even went to the Heritage Foundation (motto - "Government Sucks") to look at their statistics on government run health care (Medicare), and here's what I found - http://www.heritage.org/Research/HealthCare/wm250.cfm

• Spending for hospital and physician services by private insurance grew 18.1 percent faster than comparable Medicare spending between 1970 and 1999.
• Spending trends began to diverge in the late 1980s, coincident with Medicare’s move to price schedules and crackdowns on fraud and abuse in the traditional fee-for-service program.

Talk about cognitive dissonance. Imagine how those Heritage neo-cons must feel when their own statistics show a government regulated health care program provides better cost controls than the free market. Leapin' lizards, Ayn Rand!

And here's more, on the relative overhead of Medicare and private insurance (from http://www.medicareadvocacy.org/FAQ):

Medicare administrative costs	2% of expenditures	2004 CMS statistics (10/2004)
Private health insurance administrative costs	15% of expenditures	Kaiser, 4/2003
HMO administrative costs	20% of expenditures	Kaiser, 4/2003

Can it be, that socialized medicine might be a major improvement for us? I have come to think that it would be. Our American "free-market" for health care is an abject failure no matter how you measure it. It pales in comparision to socialized medicine, in costs and quality. So why isn't every American (Michael Moore doesn't count, in fact I get a little nervous when I find myself agreeing with him) screaming for Medicare for all of us? Why is it so hard to change, when it is this clear that single-payer, government regulated universal coverage is far superior to the quasi-free market morass of medicine we have now? Why are all the presidential candidates (the ones left standing) offering watery privatized health care recipes made from a pinch of Medicare, a drop of government finger-wagging but four cups of big pharma freedom and three pounds of private insurance? Do we voters have any clue what is best for us?

I'm not confident that we'll figure it out, but hey, maybe we'll wake up and smell the sodium pentathol. Or we can move, en masse, to Canada...