"Breaking the Cycle of Poverty-Related Illness"

Vera Cordeiro Rio tells her story about working for the poorest people whose children are hospitalized repeatedly. She started working without money so she sold her stuff and begged for money from friends, and now she is running a large organization Renascer that even has a profit-making arm Fish Hook. One quote about the non-profit/profit combination:

"Nowadays, if you want to change the world, a non-profit has to have a branch of profit. And also the profit companies, they have to have a branch of [social work]."

support for First Amendment is poor (but improving)

The First Amendment Center published their 2008 survey results about American's knowledge and opinions of the First Amendment.

Beware: they are frightening! People have very little knowledge of their freedoms, but worse of all they are willing to give up many of them. Thankfully, if you look at the numbers for the past few years, the trend seems to be improving (from my 2-minute scan of the data), though the improvement is very slight. This is not very encouraging news.

(Thanks to the Deseret News for their op-ed warning about American's attitudes.)

10-month blog anniversary!

Well, it's now 10 months since I've started writing online, and it's been enjoyable to learn what I want to do as I do it. At this point, I am recommitting myself to something I think I've forgotten: I am trying to publicize all the projects and stories that are making this world a better place, emphasizing those that encourage free association and also identifying where unlimited government is getting in our way. I want to make effective analyses, but I also want to point out every good project I hear. One improvement I'm going to try: I'm going to bookmark ALL the good projects I see, since del.icio.us is still improving and they have a great interface for searching through your tage; then I'll reference my blog entries from there so I can find the ones that are interesting enough to comment about.

Onward and upward!

Hey, Feds: solve our problems!

I am more and more disappointed in our federal governmental situation, but only partly because federal politicians seem to think they need to avoid every crisis and solve every problem in society: I see more and more evidence like this "Presidential Challenge" that shows how many people really believe our national government could and should impose it's will to try and fix every injustice. (Disclaimer: the one about bin-Laden really is a valid project.)

All I can do is sigh.

untrustworthiness

Two news items today showing why the state is not to be trusted:

• an individual's personal information was illicitly accessed after he was mentioned by a presidential candidate
• the Treasury Department is hiding exactly how much they're paying to a financial agent for help with the bailout, despite being "committed to transparency"

I never understand why people feel it helps to pass bills with extra safeguards or to set up regulations "the right" way; with the national state as large and unwieldy as it is, there's no way to ensure that things will be done even as promised in writing.

Senator Bennett on health care (and the money crisis)

Attended an early-morning health-care speech with Senator Bennett.

First mentioned the money crisis (at someone's request):

• story about Cannon-Grant and their struggle to get money to avoid bank crash in 1893 money crisis
  
• Andrew Jackson destroyed Hamilton's national bank, resulting in a bunch of money panics (eg. 1893), so the Federal Reserve restored our national bank
• He is in the banking committee; calls to his office were 493 to 1 against the bailout; the 1 call was a car dealer who wouldn't be able to make payroll.

Then talked about a federal bill to address health care:

• Ron Wyden asked Bennett to co-sponsor Healthy Americans Act (AKA the Noah's Ark bill); core of agreement is that Republicans must give up bias against universal health care ("every American insured"), and Democrats will allow markets to run the system
• tax code affects this somehow... dictates something about 16(?) % of GDP...
• person putting up money is different from payer
• changes tax laws so that payer controls spending: employee can change HMO
• government will subsidize up to 400% of poverty
• every individual must have coverage (he says we already do with mandatory emergency service)
  
• employer gives money to employee tax-free
• feds must create a minimum standard of insurance for people to meet; cannot be proscriptive because it won't improve with time (and everyone will want in); plan must be actuarial equivalent to average federal employee plan
• won't address medicare yet
• HMO, fee-for-service, concierge plan, whatever; just cannot provide less service than federal plan
• very poor may benefit since those who help them navigate the bureaucracy could get paid
• best health care: Seattle, Rochester, SLC
• greatest cost control factor is quality
• story: daughter graduated, went to work idealistically at nursing home, called him complaining about medicare manager
• story: doctor would proscribe wrong procedure so that they could pay for right one
• story: Michael Leavitt & wife needed colonoscopy; hospital couldn't tell costs until after breakdown; got price easily (at half the cost) in Utah
• prediction: next president will be a senator (and will know the cloture rule)
• will give the money to medicaid recipients
• by CBO, will be revenue neutral for first 2 years and save money after that; other say it'll save 1 trillion in 10 years

This talk was very informative, and I got a sense Senator Bennett is one of those politicians with integrity (though I won't make a final judgement based on one talk :- ).

My own comments:

• It was interesting to hear about the constant money crises without a national bank. I'll have to see if that's true; it seems to be worse WITH a central bank and national management! Anyway, at least it looks like Senator Bennett has tried to understand the history of the system, and really thinks there is a crisis where government intervention is necessary for our security (rather than totally a knee-jerk reaction to Bernanke et al).
• He talked about Heber J. Grant's efforts to get money to ensure their bank would not fail, but he seems to miss the fact that his exemplar made things work without even asking for government assistance. He worked hard and almost failed, but succeeded at the last minute with his own creativity and persistence, which is what should be happening. Some will win; many will lose.
  
• I still don't like the idea of forcing every American to have health insurance, even if we currently struggle under some emergency laws. It's more government encroachment: suddenly, everyone will be forced to pay a certain amount to the government; nobody will be free to choose where to put their money and how much risk and responsibility to take over their own lives. It's best to roll back some of our current, overly protective laws.

Unfortunately, the way this is presented and the way they're planning, I'm willing to bet that this initiative (or something with a similar universal mandate) will pass. This is the age of government absolutism! It can leap over crises with a single bound! Speak loudly enough and I'm sure it'll be able to fix your problems, too (... for a small fee for everyone else... at least until the next administration...).

Keyhole Gardens

Keyhole gardens are viable gardens for Africa that take up about as little space as you can imagine. (I've got to spend some more time at Send a Cow because it looks like they have a good number of interesting ideas.)