Author: Ann Marie Marciarille

After all, President Trump is famously germaphobic. He must have quite a SARS-CoV-2 avoidance plan in place at the White House?  Why does none of the press ask about this? Inquiring minds would like to know.

So, whether President Trump was really talking about a vaccination for a Corona Virus or for Ebola, it is clear that now vaccinations will save us?  OK, so let's get everyone in for a Measles vaccination while we are at it then.

Well, a brief but shining moment in the sun for the legalization of cannabis in this debate.  Got to admire Bernie Sanders for understanding that legalization would mean so much more with criminal record expungement for all those rendered unemployable by our nation's war on drug users.

Pete Buttigieg wants to talk about rural hospital closures in non-Medicaid expansion states. Speak! And shame on every other candidate for not responding to this point in this debate.

That is how we know she is Canadian, apparently. What about American Elsa?  Into the Unknown, I guess.

Missouri's is intact and illustrates a tangled web of confusion over implementation as well:

 

https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article235182192.html

Elizabeth Warren's September 12, 2019 debate retort that implied  Americans lose little if and when forced to change health insurers because nobody really like their health insurer brought a laugh at the time.  And, yes, she was partly correct and partly incorrect.  Those folks clinging to their current insurers often fear the unknown more than the devil they know or the devil they think they know, given the data on how many Americans do not understand their own health insurance.

So, why prefer the devil you think you know or you know? The devil you know proverb is apparently Irish in origin and can be found in print as early as 1539. Prefering something you don't like to the unknowable is probably pretty powerful sentiment  in health insurance decisions, backed by data showing that many are loathe to switch plans even when their current plan appears to serve them poorly, because of our system's mind-boggling complexity. The complexity itself may be no accident as it serves to bind those with fear of change to the existing plan as well as to thwart direct product comparison.

 

 

 

 

A recent article in the Economist discussing which is the "best" language stays on my mind.  The author's observation that "Tariana, from Brazil, has "evidentiality": speakers choose one of five verb-endings to show how they know what they aver to be true" makes me wonder if this might be a most useful linguistic characteristic in an era of truthiness.

A bit more (and only a bit more) research reveals that: "[i]n Tariana, an Arawak language spoken in the multilingual area of the Vaupe´s in northwest Amazonia,speakers have to specify whether they saw the event happen, or heard it, or know about it because somebody else told them, etc."

Yes, this would be most useful.

 

Margaret Sanger-Katz's "Is America's Health Care System a Fixer-Upper or a Teardown?" performs a great service in trying to use house renovation and re-model analogies to various health care reform proposals in September 22, 2019 New York Times.  The problem, sorry Tim Enthoven, is that the prose is poorly illustrated. By this I mean, if someone supports "tear down" then the image should be of a complete tear down as distinguished from a tear down and rebuild as X or tear down and rebuild as Y. 

Apart from that, I love this bold effort to make the health care debate more accessible to New York Times readers. Heck, I'd be pleased if all of the candidates evidenced that they had read and digested it.

Bernie Sanders got the closest  in his second round Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate to actually outing the practice of rationing health care by administrative hassle. To give credit where it is due, it is Brad DeLong who has discussed "rationing by hassle" long before I write of it here, but I can find many others using the term as long as twenty five years ago. 

Yes, you need to know how to work the system to obtain the coverage you believe you deserve. But, you pay with a considerable piece of your time and a little bit of your sanity.

As Bernie Sanders noted, "we have to deal with this incredible complexity that is driving every American crazy."