Advancing Health Freedom

It is pathetic. Our health care system is crashing around us, but Conservatives are spending more time talking about Duck Dynasty than on overturning PPACA.

Health care is the key to saving this nation. Either the forces seeking to advance liberty will come up with a viable alternative to ObamaCare, or we will continue down this path of mediocrity.

The only way to create an alternative to PPACA is to talk about alternatives.

I scheduled a Health Freedom Workshop on January 2nd. This workshop will start with a presentation on free market health care. The presentation shows how a small group of people could realize the ideals of Dr. Ben Carson in a short period.

The presentation will present action items that could be used by the freedom movement to make 2014 and 2016 blowout victories for the Freedom Movement.

I can hold multiple presentations if you like.

The presentation is at 6:30PM. If there's under 10 attendees, the presentation will be at a private residence. I am considering boiling up a batch of chili before hand. The private residence has a view of this Utah landmark in the Salt Lake Valley. I will email attendees the address and map.

Artificial Deadline

Today is the deadline for PPACA. Everyone needs to go to HealthCare.gov.

When I worked in insurance, I discovered my life and the life of everyone in the company revolved around arbitrary deadline set by the insurance company.

Our actual health, however, is continuous.

Neither our incomes nor our health problems fit the artificial deadlines set by insurance companies.

For example, my father had a heart attack on January 31 a few years. The timing of the heart attack meant he had to pay two deductibles. 

If you break your leg on your Christmas ski vacation, the cost of your initial treatment and followup treatment will fall in two calendar years and you will have to pay two deductibles. If you break your leg on January 1st, you have to pay only one.

This is extremely problematic for people with high deductible health care.

The artificial deadlines of insurance is just one of many symptoms indicating that insurance is not the best way to fund health care.

If there is anyone on the planet interested in discovering a better way to fund health care; I will be holding a Health Freedom Work Shop in Salt Lake City on January 2nd. The workshop will look at the challenges of financing health care and will develop a free market alternative to insurance.

BTW: I did go to healthcare.gov. Since my income is well below the poverty rate, the government will give money to an insurance company on my behalf. I don't want the government to take money from you and give it to an insurance company on my behalf.

My income is below poverty line because I've been working to find ways to defend freedom. If we are wanting to preserve freedom in this country. Someone has to stand up and I am willing to put it all on the line to defend the ideals of the US Founders.

The presentation takes a little over an hour followed by an open discussion with action items to help overturn PPACA. BTW, if you are young and don't want to be forced into an insurance pool, this workshop shows a way out.

Open Inquiry

We are five years, going on six, in the Obama Health Care Debate. Other than Ben Carson, who is not really a conservative, I have not seen any quality discussion of free market health care in the media or in the local political scene.

So, I decided to take another stab at hosting a Health Freedom Workshop. I decided to pick the first Thursday of January, which happens to be January 2nd. I have access to a living room not too terribly far from the Olympus Hills Shopping Center. The meeting will start at 6:30PM. The meeting will consist of a presentation on free market health care reform followed by an open discussion about free market health care reform.

If you like Dr. Benjamin Carson, this meeting shows how to achieve a very similar vision within a few short years.

If you are reading my primary blog, you will see that I am extremely distraught with the pathetic job Conservatives have done at defending health care.

I've gone five years with the simple goal of attending a meeting in which Conservatives explored free market health care reform. The fact that Conservatives are unwilling to talk about the most important issue of our generation has me completely perplexed.

So, I've been question: what is "Conservatism."

The rants focus on a ruling by a Utah Federal Court which strikes down Utah's anti-polygamy laws. Polygamy will cause our society to devolve into a clan based culture (like Iran) with a polygamous Warlords controlling vast sections of our country ... like Colorado City.

My posts are very dark as I examine polygamy as the ultimate expression of conservatism.

People who defend the American Tradition of self rule have taken to calling themselves "conservatives." But we have a great problem, "conservatism" is not the answer. Modern Conservatism is as mixed up as mixed up as Modern Liberal.

The answer is open inquiry and the ideals of the US Founders ... not conservatism. Unfortunately, we cannot revive these ideals as long as people confuse the two.

The terms "conservative" and "liberal" are words which have been assigned to contradictory ideals. Trying to solve the health care puzzle by screaming the word "conservative" has not worked.

I love the ideals of the US Founders and their experiment in a limited government too much to waste it on an intellectual game in which conservative means freedom and liberal means socialist.

I want to break free of this failed conversation and engage in a real conversation that seeks solutions. Unfortunately, since I am stuck in the "Most Conservative State in the Nation." I cannot find anyone interested in discussing substantive free market reform.

Obstruction v. Education

A bad budget deal is the best deal that we can get with the current Congress. So, I am supporting the Budget dealt. Rather than fighting for one budget, the freedom movement needs to concentrate on switching the Congress and on ending the reign of Harry Reid.

In the last few years, the Tea Party has had decent success in supporting fiscally conservative candidates in the primary season.

Now, Imagine that there was a government shutdown during the primary season?

What would happen is the Tea Party would be framed as hard-lined obstructionists and the Tea Party candidates would systematically fail during the primary.

This is not a battle I want to fight.

IMHO the Freedom movement needs to transition from a reactionary group that attempts to preserve freedom to an affirmative group that seeks to promote freedom through education.

If we could establish an affirmative debate about which is better for the people: A free and productive society to a socialized and controlled society, the freedom movement would easily win.

Obstructionist politics leads to ruin.

The freedom movement needs to educate people on free market solutions to the problem of the day.

The education effort can start small.

One can impose socialism from the top down, but true free market reform needs to come from the bottom.

The freedom movement can start by small groups of people getting together to discuss issues.

BTW: This is what they left does. This why the win at every turn.

People talk to each other.

I've gone five solid years just trying to find one "conservative" group willing to hold a meeting on free market health care reform.

The is simply no way the freedom movement could win the day if someone who is actively looking to defend freedom can't find anyone in the conservative movement who is willing to give an afternoon to discuss the most important issue of the day.

The dictionary definition is "closed-minded."  It is patently absurd to think that closed-mindedness can win arguments.

I live in the most Conservative State in the nation: Utah.  Utahans are proud to be the most conservatives people West of Tehran.

Open discussion of solutions is forbidden in this state.

But closed-minded obstruction doesn't work. The closed minded surrender the future to the enemies of freedom who, at least for now, are willing to go through the formalities of listening to people in their grub for power.

Obstruction won't win the day. A second government shutdown for questionable gains is not worth the effort.

The way to win the struggle for freedom is through education. Education involves open-minded people discussing issues with one another.

I will try scheduling a workshop on health freedom at the beginning of January. I am hoping to get input for the date or location of the meeting. I have access to a living room, but prefer a formal meeting place.

The Role of Money in Health Care

My presentation on Health Care Reform takes about an hour to deliver.

I would love to make it shorter, but there are just so many annoying details involved in discussing health care that if I fail to address the issues, I feel that people will misunderstand the program.

The goal of the presentation is to create viable alternative to insurance. In the presentation, I present a mathematical model for the Medical Savings and Loan which replaces insurance with a combination of savings accounts, a loan reserve and grants.

The whole presentation is about the mathematics of funding health care & I spend a great deal of time talking about something called "money."

The problem I face is that people have crazy ideas about money. This is especially true in the health care industry.

The insurance industry is built on a strange notion that "pools of money" can provide health care.

In my presentation, I am forced to consume several minutes defining money.

I say that money is simply a tool that people use for measuring the cost of time and resources. The resources represented by money are far more important than the money itself. The most important resources in health care are time and human knowledge. The goal of a health care program is largely a matter of creating a mechanism that allows people to trade their time and resources in ways that improve care. Money is just a tool that we use to facilitate this trade.

The presentation needs to attack the notion that money is magic. Money is just a tool for measuring resources. Ultimately the resources behind the money matter more than the money. We developed a complex financial system that generates money out of thin air with Federal Reserve pushing the poison pill of debt financing. We've created a crazy financial system which is using strange mathematical formulas to undermine the wealth of the people.

I am caught in a trap. The Medical Savings and Loan is a mathematical formula to create an alternative to insurance. I am presenting this formula to challenge the formulas used by the insurance industry (and socialism for that matter).

In presenting my formula, it is fundamental for people to understand my view of money. I see money simply as a tool for measuring resources, while insurance is funded on magical ideas of money. The goal of my formula is to break the illusion that pools of money provide health care. In contrast the opposite happens. When we put our health resources in huge pools, we concentrate wealth and end up creating a society that needs artificial redistribution of resources to provide care.

Health Care Requires Interaction

Good, quality health care requires human interaction. To get the best results, health care reform efforts should start with human interaction.

The idea behind insurance is that intellectuals sitting in a closed office hobnobbing with power brokers can come up with a perfect equation for delivering care.
.
The idea that an actuary in a closed office magically create a formula for perfect care is absurd.

The programs that come from the insurance industry tend to create more problems than they solve.

A healthy approach to health care reform would involve people working with each other in open face to face communication.

The problems in health care come from both the Left and Right.

The Heritage Foundation was an early and vocal proponent of Health Exchanges coupled with Insurance Mandates. The Heritage Foundation contended that forcing everyone to buy insurance through state run exchanges would allow the perfect formulas from the insurance industry to work.

This thinking is flawed because it is based on the false notion that insurance executives can create the perfect formula for delivering care. They can't.

The flaw behind the Heritage Foundations thinking is that health care is a human activity and while it is possible to analyze human activity there is not a mathematical formula for controlling human activity.

Both RomneyCare and ObamaCare are based on the Health Exchange/Mandate model.

Mainstream Republicans and Democrats are behind the same basic model.

Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, Mike Leavitt, and Karl Rove are committed to the same basic structure as Harry Reid. (Hmmm, I wonder if they have anything else in common).

Now, the way to defeat this political machine is to create an alternative to insurance that recognizes that health care is a human activity. Such a system would start by analyzing the needs of humans. The health care reform effort would then build a health care solution around the humans.

The process of creating a human based health care system is not that terrible difficult.

The problem I face is that this approach involves something that I apparently am unable to accomplish.

It involves people meeting in a room to discuss free market health care reform.

I am adamantly opposed to coercion. The only way that a meeting could ever happen is if there was a group of people interested in restoring free market health care who would either be willing to attend a meeting that I host or that would invite me to moderate a workshop on health care reform.

I will try to host a meeting in January.

I ran out of money and cannot afford to pay the travel and hotel expenses. I am happy to travel, but I would need to figure out a way to pay for the trip ... such as running a fundraiser during the trip.

I live in Utah. FWIW: I am not LDS.

Bleak Times Ahead

I predict that 2014 will be one of the worst years for the freedom movement on record (unless ... and I will get to "the unless").

I predict that both the Democratic and Republican Parties will hit the remnants of the Tea Party with a degree of ostracism that few of us have seen in their lifetime.

I predict that in 2014 through 2016. People in the freedom movement will find themselves facing social, political and economic isolation like they have never felt before.

Progressives are skilled at isolating and ostracizing those who stand up for liberty. The ability to smear and destroy political opponents is the greatest strength of the progressive movement.

I fear that it will work.

One can only take so much economic and social isolation until one is just willing to just give in to whatever.

This technique worked quite well after the Goldwater campaign. Everyone who supported the free market view was simply shoved aside after Goldwater and it took a whole generation before people were even willing to consider free market ideas again.

The plan to isolate and cut out Libertarians, Independents and free thinkers will work unless people in the Freedom Movement do something that is outside of the conservative character.

In order to save freedom, people in the freedom movement need to support each other and on occasion actually physically talk with one another.

Matt Kibbe released this. If people in the freedom movement never interface with other people in the movement, they just languish. His group created the site "Freedom Works" which produced the FreedomConnector calendar. Here is the calendar for Utah.

Get serious, do any of you really believe the freedom movement could have an impact on elections if there is never any face to face interaction?


I've posted several events on the Utah Freedom Calendar. Well, nobody's attended any event. I've attended many of the events that appeared.


Personally, I am at wit's end. For five solid years, I've had the goal of simply finding people willing to discuss free market health care reform. All I've discovered is that people called "conservative" aren't willing to give others the time of day. I no longer believe conservatives are sincere about defending liberty.

BTW: I created a calendar system for community events in my Salt Lake Calendar. This calendar gladly lists any event.

Community Color Project

In the America of old, people used to turn to their neighbors for support before turning to the government.

There was a large number of small independent businesses along with an active network of local charities and community organizations.

I believe that such a structure is more resilient than a hierarchical system that starts with the government and trickles down.

I believe that the first step to restoring the ideals of the America of old is for people to become aware of their local community and for people to look toward each other before looking to big government and big finance.

Believing that actions speak louder than words, I began developing local web sites. I started this project up North and gave away the first sites I created. The sites I created had a visual guide, directory, calendar, forum and other interactive features. I removed all of the all of the interactive features because they proved to be spam magnets.

My business model was to use affiliate ads to fund a site that provided free listings and internet resources for local businesses.

The first set of community portals had marginal success, but not enough to fund a business with employees.

I gave away all the sites but Missoula.WS (My partners didn't like the WS extension).. In 2002, I moved back to Salt Lake and created Community Color project which would create community directories for the Beehive State. I later decided to expand the project to include directories for my home state of Colorado. These are DenverColor.com, BoulderColor.com and gjct.com (Grand Junction).

The goal of this project is simply to promote awareness of the local community. The full list of sites is on CommunityColor.com.

The basic model of the project is that I give free listings to all of the sites I can find for a town. If a company has an affiliate program, I join the affiliate program and run their banners as ads on the site.

The project has 27,000 active listings. Through the years, I've pulled some 12,000 broken links. About 5% of the links are affiliate links. The rest go to local blogs, businesses, artists, churches and non-profit groups. I mark the affiliate links with a *.

I put affiliate ads on a coupon site called aFountainOfBargains.com . aFoB is not a very good coupon site. Truthfully, I find coupons and internet commerce tedious. My disdain for the industry clearly shows. A good couponer gets excited about ten percent off UGG Boots, but my eyes curl back in my head and I just list the link while wishing I was doing something else.

Truthfully, what I would love to be doing right now is traveling from town to town holding meetings about free market health care reform and the advantages that free societies have over top-down engineered societies.

Anyway, Black Friday is coming up, so I've been infusing the sites with online coupons and holiday specials. What I do is add the coupons to aFountainOfBargains.com. I press a magic button and the coupons get loaded into pages for the affiliate merchants on the community sites.

In theory this is supposed to increase online conversions and result in some income.

I post the income from the Community Color project on this page.  For the last six quarters, I've made just under $300 per quarter (a hundred dollars a month). The cost of the site was $400 a quarter. I sold several domains and my smartphone and got costs down to $300 a quarter. Several years ago, I was actually earning up to $2,000 a quarter. That is not enough to hire a minimum wage worker (my goal when I started was to hire a minimum wage work.

Anyway, I still have the dream of holding a meeting on free market health care reform sometime next year. By infusing the sites with coupons, I might make enough to attend or hold a meeting next year.

Traveling from Town to Town

I am envious. Green Smoothie Girl travels from town to town spreading the message about the importance of whole foods.

A green smoothie is a salad (no dressing) processed through a blender. You can add fruit and create different recipes to make the smoothies taste better. It's just easier to eat a lot of salad in blended form. She pays the bills by selling books and Blendtec blenders which have the power needed to cut through beets, carrots and other ingredients.

Green Smoothie Girl spreads the concept of "food as medicine." We are what we eat and we can cure many chronic maladies simply by changing eating habits. It is great stuff.

I am part of that very tiny minority of people who love the ideals of the US Founders. I believe strongly in health freedom.  I worked in the insurance industry analyzing claims and calculating premiums. I realized the deep dark secret of the health care industry. Self-funded care would provide more care for more people at a substantially lower cost than insurance.

I would love to have a traveling show that went from town to town spreading the word that health freedom works. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find that first group of people who believe passionately in freedom who would help create a show that could take to the road. So, I sit here in envy of Green Smoothie Girl.

Blendtec has an affiliate program with Avantlink. The commission rate is 15%. If I sold one $300 blender, I would get enough money to pay for a cheap hotel room. If I sold two blenders I could get the gas to travel to a town and stay in a cheap hotel. This type of stuff is possible. BTW, I don't have a Blendtec Blender, but I did see one chop up beets and carrots at a Green Smoothie Girl show where I snarfed a free green smoothie.

I keep going through the math. I think I might be able to make ten dollars a day if I took a ton of photographs during my travels and put them on my photo site ProtoPhoto.com. My collection of Community Directories might make some money if people linked to them.

The cost of traveling the country giving workshops on health freedom would be about a hundred dollars a day (plus whatever it costs to rent speaking space). If there was any interest at all in preserving freedom, I am sure that I could find a way to pull off the stunt. But there is no interest and I feel sunk.

Progressives see self financed care as a threat

In the article The Threat of Self-Insured Plans Among Small Businesses by Maura Calsyn and Emily Oshima Lee, The Center for American Progress openly identifies self-insurance as a primary threat to the progression of socialism in America.

The article notes that small businesses faced with skyrocketing premiums and reduced acccess to care under PPACA are likely to seek alternatives such as self-financed care.

"small businesses that have not traditionally offered self-insured plans are now considering this approach"

So, the article advocates the creation of new administrative rules designed specifically increase the regulatory burdens and compliance cost of self-funded care; thus making the option less attractive.

"This outcome is not inevitable. State and federal policymakers can halt this shift even without new legislation. In this issue brief, we discuss the risks posed when small employers self-insure, as well as policy options to discourage this behavior, focusing specifically on possible federal administrative strategies."

Progressives advance their cause by identifying groups they feel are threats then creating administrative burdens to oppress those groups.

I am opposed to this progression toward socialism. History shows that this top-down imposition of state control is regressive. Just think of this argument by Maura Calsyn and Emily Oshima Lee. They want to increase the regulatory burdens of health care simply so their group has more power.  Maura Calsyn and Emily Oshima Lee openly seek to deny care to people in small business for their personal lust for power.

I've followed the health care debate since the 1980s when I worked as a minion for a state run health plan. My direct experience working for state run health care moved me to reject the progressive argument. I studied the numbers in detail and realized reduced the quality of effectiveness of care. I can prove that self-funded care will provide more care and better care.

My goal for the last five years has been to find people who are open to free market health care reform to review a proposal to restore the concept of self-funded care.

If you are opposed to ObamaCare and are looking for something to do, you could invite me to attend a meeting so that I can give my presentation on self-funded health care.

I live in Utah. I am not LDS. I am willing to travel.

This article "The Threat of Self-Insured Plans Among Small Businesses" is simply proof that progressives fear people discussing self-financed health care.

This is a no-brainer. A way to defeat ObamaCare is for people to talk about self financed care.

I put a meeting on FreedomConnector to have a meeting on self funded health care on November 14. The meeting will have a 45 minute presentation followed by a discusssion. The URL for the meeting is: http://connect.freedomworks.org/node/412830

---

BTW: This article shows the same type of thinking as was found in the IRS Scandal. Maura Calsyn and Emily Oshima Lee identify a group of people as a threat. They then create administrative rules to attack the people they see as a threat. This type of thinking is ubiquitous in the progressive movement.

Traveling Show

I am taking a second shot at listing a health care event in the FreedomConnector calendar. The response has been so overwhelming that I can hear the crickets. The event is titled "Health Freedom Workshop." I am limiting the number of attendees to six. So far, I've had one sign up.

Let's see. That one person is ... me.

Last week I attended a traveling show by FreedomWorks on managing media connections. The event has me thinking that the best possible course of action would be for me to transform my Health Freedom Workshop into a traveling show.

My initial estimates are that I could pull off the whole traveling show thing for one to two hundred a day. This would include gas, a hotel room and a conference room for the meeting.

The format of the show is simple. I would present a mathematical model of free market (self-funded) care and a model of socialized (group funded) care. With these two models, I can demonstrate why free market health care outperforms socialized care.

The meeting includes actionable items and strategies to defeat PPACA and restore free market health care.

The show develops the basic ideas espoused by Dr. Ben Carson and others and develops the ideas into a full working system.

Of course, there is no way to get a traveling show off the ground with zero community support.

There is no support for people looking for free market health care solutions in the Conservative community. Were I to go into deep debt traveling from town to town, I suspect I would accomplish nothing expect prove to myself that Conservatives have no interest in advancing freedom.

I will be at Freedom Works Tonight

The GOP capitulation after the government shutdown was disheartening. Unfortunately, capitulation was the only option because the GOP does not have a solid plan for rolling back ObamaCare.

Sad as the capitulation was, there still is hope.

The freedom movement could still roll back ObamaCare if a group of patriots simply got together and began talking about free market health care reform.

For some reason that I cannot fathom Conservatives are reluctant to actually talk about issues.

I've looked long and hard. To my horror, I have been unable to find any Conservatives interested in actually talking about freedom.

I created a system of calendars for Utah (Salt Lake, Park City, Provo) and I follow the freedom movement very closely. This is not just an idle complaint. I am basing this statement after spending thousands of hours following community events.

Conservatives simply are not involved in the community.

In the last five years, I have not come across a single event directly promoting free market health care reform in Utah.

There have been protests against Obama and rallies for Mitt Romney. All of the meetings and rallies have been about secondary issues, and not about free market health care reform.

I have found several conservative groups seeking to socialize health care at a state level and some that are simply shills for the insurance industry. But I have been unable to find any local events or organizations interested in developing or free market health care solutions.

IMHO, this silence on the core issue of health care is the primary reason that the freedom movement is failing.

For the freedom movement to win the health care battle, there must be open discourse about health care. Quite frankly, it is absurd to think that the Tea Party can restore health freedom if no-one ever talks about the issue.

Readers of this blog know that my goal for the last five years has been to either attend or host a meeting about free market health care reform.

I really am not as stuck on myself as this blog indicates. I strongly believe in listening to the ideas of others. My preferred strategy is to attend meetings and provide support to the groups hosting the meetings.

I am willing to host meetings. I have engaged in a substantive exploration of free market health care. I've put together a presentation that can serve as a basis for a discussion.



I know the paradoxes of freedom. One cannot dictate freedom. The path to restoring freedom is to hold a large number of meetings in which one listens to others while seeking free market solutions.

I have worked on solutions.


Long ago, I used to work for a state owned insurance trust writing computer programs to track claims and calculate premiums. I had access to quality data which I scrutinized carefully. During this period I came to the horrific conclusion that large insurance pools were doing more harm than good.

I left the insurance industry because I felt that I could not, in good conscious, continue to work for an industry that was doing harm.

After leaving the insurance industry, I began studying economics and developed a mathematical model called "The Medical Savings and Loan."

The Medical Savings and Loan is a model that can be used to break socialized health care into individual accounts.

In my presentation, I create a mathematical model of self funded care and a mathematical model of group funded care (socialized medicine). I then demonstrate that people would receive more and better care if we simply restored the self-funded paradigm.

The presentation includes actionable items and it suggests steps that legislators can take to cause ObamaCare to fail into freedom. The actionable item is to create a organization called "The Health Care Advocates Association" that promotes free market solutions to health care. The HCAA is a bit different from

BTW, ObamaCare is going to fail. It was designed to fail. The question now is simply: will it fail into socialism or will it fail into freedom.

The system was designed to fail into socialism. But it is possible for the freedom movement to influence things in ways that could cause it to fail into freedom.


I have policy suggestions that might help PPACA fail into freedom.

ObamaCare can only fail into freedom if people in the Freedom Movement spoke about health care. This involves people actually talking about the issue.

FreedomWorks is holding a meeting about managing media relations. This is only the second public meeting that the've had this year. It seems to me like they are putting the cart before the horse by talking about media relations before talking about ideas.

Anyway, I will attend the meeting with fingers crossed hoping that I might meet people interested in taking the radical step of actually talking about the issue rather than just politics.

To the AFP in Nevada

The following is a letter to Americans for Prosperity of Nevada.

I believe that the way to beat PPACA (ObamaCare) is to create and discuss free market alternatives.

My goal for the last five years has been to either attend or host a meeting in which people were interested in free market health care reform.

If I attended a meeting, I would suggest that a group create a legal entity to explore free market health care reform. I registered the name "Health Care Advocates Association" as a DBA. The goal is to create a named entity that explores alternatives to PPACA.

I admit. My idea is a bit grandiose. I want a group to create a cleanly defined business model to stand as an alternative to PPACA. I believe that such an effort could help the freedom movement.

For example, because the GOP did not have compelling alternatives to ObamaCare on the table, they were forced into a humiliating capitulation after the government shutdown.

I do not pretend that I have all the answers. But I am certain that the path to finding the best answer starts with people meeting together to discuss about alternatives.

My audacious goal is to get a group of people together and to put a cleanly defined comprehensive alternative on the table.

I am not a pushy person. I've invested a great deal of time into developing arguments against socialized health care.

I put together a presentation that argues that the problem in health care is the result of group funding of individual consumption and that the solution is to restore the concept of self funded care.

The presentation looks at the mathematics of financing health care and is a bit involved. In the presentation I create a mathematical model of self funded health care. I then create a model of group funded care. I create a mechanism for measuring the effect of both systems and then put forward the argument that group funded care underserves the middle class and working poor.

I've timed this information packed presentation. It takes about an hour and it has to be this long. The presentation creates a model of self-funded care. It then creates a model of group funded care. It then compares the two.

Because the presentation has so much information, it is likely to be followed by an open discussion that takes several hours.

The presentation will include the action item which is simply for a group to create a well defined alternative to PPACA. The alternative to PPACA could be used by GOP to find alternatives to the current health care reform.

Personally, I fear that PPACA was designed to fail. It will either fail into full blown socialism or it will fail into a free market structure.

The direction of the failure will be determined by the side that has the best ideas on the table.

So, my goal is simply to get ideas on the table.

I believe that my presentation would fit the message of Americans for Prosperity. The presentation looks at the mathematics of health care and argues that a system base on individual ownership out performs a system based on group think.

I live in Utah. Nevada is a day's drive from Utah. My modest goal is simply to present an idea to a group of people for review. My original thought was a group of a dozen people.

At this point, I would be delighted to find a group of two to three people willing to spend an afternoon discussing ways to role back PPACA. The presentation requires either a whiteboard or a chalkboard. It could be held in an office conference room or living room.

Blinders on the State Policy Institute

The State Policy Network is a collection of state level think tanks promoting Conservative ideas at the state level. The network includes many of the best free market think tanks in the nation including the Acton Institute and Goldwater Institute.

For the most part, SPN is a valuable resource for the free market community.

The one catch with The State Policy Network is that the organizations in the network exist to influence state policy; as such the entities end up arguing policy from the state perspective instead of the free market perspective.

For example, during the health care debate a group proposed using a "State Compact" to battle PPACA. The State Compact would regulate health care instead of the Federal Government.

This creates a false dichotomy: Should the health exchanges be run by a State Compact or by the Federal Government?

A State Policy Think Tank that answers that the exchanges should be regulated by a State Compact has just given tacit approval to the health exchanges.

What really needs to happen is for think tanks to challenge the health exchanges (which they failed to do.)

Common Core is another great example of state network policy failure.

Common Core is like No Child Left Behind. This is a Federal program that regulates schools through standardized testing. NCLB transferred a great deal of local control to the Federal Government.

Many people who were upset with NCLB ended up supporting Common Core which is similar in design, but is run by an Association of Governors. The question is: Should education centralization be controlled by the Federal Government or by the State Governments. A state's rights advocate would support a Governor's Association when the real question is: should we need centralized control of the curriculum?

Getting back to health care, State Policy Institutes approach health care from the perspective of state policy.

I contend that this very perspective is backwards.

I contend that health care is a business problem and that we need to find business solutions.

(NOTE: The etymology of "business" is "busyness." It means that that which keeps one busy. By business, I am referring to individual occupation and not corporate activity).

So, what I've been trying to do with the Medical Savings and Loan is to create a new business model for funding health care. (Again, by business, I mean individual business and not just another huge corporation).

This program starts with the mantra: "Those who can self fund their care should."

To help people self fund care, I create a structured savings program supplemented with a loan reserve. The savings accounts plus loan reserve will help those people who can self fund their care achieve this objective.

The program effectively identifies the people who cannot.

I create a generously funded grant program for people who cannot self fund their care.

This program helps the people who can self fund their care do so. It creates a huge pile of money for people who cannot self fund their care.

By starting with a business solution, I end up minimizing the state's role in health care.

This leads to a general rule of health care. If the health care debate starts with the role of the state in health care, the debate will result in a huge state.

If the debate starts with business at an individual level, the debate will end up with a system that minimizes the role of the government in health care.

The trap of the State Policy Network is that the entities in the network approach discussions from the state policy view.

Even when entities favor free market solutions, state policiy institutes can end up supporting less than optimal solutions for health care. Some institutes, like Utah's Sutherland Institute, get so caught up in the state policy perspective that they become openly hostile to real free market reform.

This creates a problem for me. To have a truly authentic debate about free market health care reform, one needs to create a new entity to explore health care reform from the individual business level.

Why Not Just Blog?

TheSelfPayPatient.com tweeted the following question: "Not a meeting, but how about a blog?"

Sadly, I fear a blog is insufficient for a quality discussion on health care. 

A blog, by nature, is a monologue. Health care requires dialogue.  The best way to create a dialog is with face to face meetings.

For that matter, the reason Obama rose to power is because his group held an extremely large number of face to face meetings in which enemies of freedom discussed health care. Community organizers in the Alinsky School of politics actively engage in the community.

I have never personally never met a Conservative who was willing to discuss free market health care. I've attended scores of meetings about different ways to destroy free market health care.

Yes, there are conservative pundits who want to promote themselves. Pundits who are promoting themselves are not engaged in discourse. They are involved in publicity campaigns and their own private monolog.

Punditry often undermines the cause of freedom. For example, I believe that the "defund-ObamaCare" group was so caught up in their own private monologues that they failed to appreciate just how a government shutdown would play out in the nation.

The shutdown diverted all of the conversations about the poor implementation of ObamaCare to the shutdown. Getting caught up in a monologue often does more harm than good.

In my opinion, attempts to save our freedom must be based on a dialogue that interfaces with the public in an intelligent fashion.

So, my goal isn't to dictate policy, but to start conversations. So, I put together a presentation that could start a conversation.

In the presentation I create a model of self-funded health care, then create a model of pooled insurance. I then show why the pool model under-serves the working poor and middle class. The presentation takes about an hour. It would be followed by a conversation that could rage for weeks.
I live in Utah, which is run by the LDS Church. The Mormon establishment is 100% committed to socializing health care through exchanges. They disagree on who should regulate the exchanges.

Harry Reid, Mitt Romney, Governor Mike Leavitt, Governor Jon Huntsman, Karl Rove, The Sutherland Institute, etc., are all for variations of the Health Exchanges. The Book of Commandments by Joseph Smith declares the following:

26 If thou lovest me, thou shalt serve me and keep all of my commandments; and behold, thou shalt consecrate all thy properties, that which thou hast unto me, wih a covenant and deed which cannot be broken; and they shall be laid before the bishop of my church, and two of the elders, such as he shall appoint and set apart for that purpose.

27 And it shall come to pass, that the bishop of my church, after that he has received the properties of my church, that it can not be taken from the church, he shall appoint every man a steward over his own property, or that which he has received, in as much as is sufficient for himself and family:

28 And the residue shall be kept to administer to him who has not, that every man may receive according as he stands in need:

The Book of Commandments is supposedly a direct revelation from The Heavenly Father and is to be viewed as the new Ten Commandments for the Latter Days. See The United Order of Enoch.

That quote above is the starting point of the Conservative argument in Utah. The sentence before this says:

25 Thow knowest my laws, they are given in my scriptures, he that sinneth and repenth not, shall be cast out.

In Mormon Theology, The Heavenly Father tells the righteous that they are to "cast out" people who disagree with the central authority of the church.

I disagree with the people like Harry Reid who are trying to socialize health care. But I live in a region where people are taught to cast out those who disagree with their central authority.

Anyway, back to the question of blogging. I live in an area where politics is controlled by a rogue group that dictates policy and does not tolerate open discourse. The most prominent politician in this group is none other than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) ... the primary author of PPACA.

I am not only against PPACA, the Health Exchanges and socialized care. I am against this method in which a roguish group monologues, issues dictates and casts people out. (The picture shows the Tower of Power from which dictates issue.)

Because I live in Utah. the only hope I have to engage in actual discourse about health care is to travel. The only way that this could possibly happen is if I found a group of a half dozen or so people near Utah that is willing to spend an afternoon debating health care.

The primary direction of my blog is to find people within 700 miles of the Beehive State willing to hold an meeting on health care. It's pathetic, but it is the only hope I see.

BTW: I could produce blog post after blog posts on the merits of self-funded care and fee for service medicine. But if I am never in a situation where I get to talk face to face with people, I feel that all such effort is meaningless.

Open Letter to the Gem State Tea Party

The Utah Tea Party has faded into nothing. I discovered that there is still an active Tea Party in Idaho called The Gem State Tea Party.

Readers of this blog know that, for the last five years, I've been trying to find a group brave enough to discuss free market health care reform. Here in Utah, the battle for defending freedom was lost before it started. Perhaps the brave folks in Boise are willing to stand for freedom.

So, I am issuing an open letter to the Gem State Tea Party:

Hello. My name is Kevin Delaney. I live down here in the Beehive State where I trying to make the stand against PPACA (ObamaCare).

For the public at large, the most unpopular aspect of PPACA is the insurance mandate.

The mandate is based upon the assumption that insurance is the only way to fund health care.

I believe that the best way to defeat PPACA is to challenge this false assumption.

The best way to challenge this assumption is to create a viable alternative to insurance. (By viable I mean a program that covers the same care for the same cost or less than insurance).

My assertion is that, if a Tea Party group discussed alternatives to insurance, that group would challenge PPACA at its core foundations. This discussion might help turn the tide against PPACA.

I am a computer programmer. I used to work for a state run insurance trust. I wrote programs that tracked claims and calculated insurance premiums.

I had access to a substantial amount of health data.

To my horror, I discovered that the state run insurance trust systematically underserved the middle and working class in favor of the ruling class. Even a state owned and run insurance company had the effect of transferring wealth and power from the people to the ruling elite.

I began running simulations and discovered that if we returned to a system based on self-financed care supplemented with charity, we would not only end the artificial transfer of wealth, we would end up with better health care.

Five years ago, I put together a presentation that I called the "Medical Savings and Loan." In this presentation I create a model for funding care that uses savings accounts, a loan reserve and grants.

I then demonstrate that this program would cover as much care as insurance. Best of all, it would restore the pricing mechanism in health care.

I then compare this model with the insurance model.

I am able to show that insurance transfers vast amounts of wealth from the middle and working class to the ruling elite while creating undesirable systemic faults in health care.

The presentation takes about an hour and a half to be followed by a lively discussion about funding health care.

Health care is the most important issue of our day. I believe that people would appreciate an intense discussion about the mathematics of funding health care.

Personally, I think the arguments I make in this presentation could turn the health care debate around.

Of course, I accept that I could be wrong. I am not like Obama. I do not assume that because I came to a conclusion that the conclusion must be right.

I believe strongly in the scientific method and peer review. Before I publish my ideas, I want to present the ideas to a small group to discuss the idea.

Sadly, I've been unable to find a group in Utah willing to review the idea.

My direct experience in Utah is that I get thrown out of the room the moment people realize that I am challenging the insurance industry.

I understand the challenges faced by organizations. Most conservative groups get funding from the insurance industry. So, holding a meeting that questions insurance might jeopardize funding.

Again, I understand the importance of funding. If a group loses funding because it questioned insurance, then the group is effectively silenced.

Unfortunately, since "conservative" groups systematically hold funding over principles, the policy of putting funding first opens our nation for the encroachment of tyranny.

The insurance industry wants people to think insurance is the only possible way to fund health care.

By accepting this assumption without debate, Conservatives have opened the door for politicos to make arguments for mandated insurance. The arguments for mandated insurance are usually followed by calls for Single Payer care or nationalized health care.

The only way to preserve liberty is for a group to brave the wrath of the insurance industry and to discuss alternatives.

I understand how frightening it is to stand against the powerful health care establishment.

Anyway, for the last five years, I've had the hope of holding a meeting that discussed alternatives to insurance.

Simply discussing alternatives to insurance strikes directly at the insurance mandates in PPACA. These mandates are the weakest links for this proposal.


I believe so strongly in this approach to fighting PPACA, that I've spent five years seeking out free market oriented groups brave enough to discuss the mathematics of funding health care.

I've had no success in the Beehive State. Living on the edge of last great wilderness in the lower 48 states, perhaps there is enough pioneer spirit left in Idaho to brave a discussion of self-financed health care.

The presentation takes an hour to an hour and a half and would be followed by a lively discussion that is likely to take two to three hours. Let's face it. Once people start talking about the actual mathematics of health care, they are likely to go on for weeks.

A discussion about the the mathematics of financing health care might even draw people out onto the streets to march against PPACA and the ruling elite in the state house.

I have not put the presentation online. I believe strongly in the scientific method in which one seeks peer review before publishing bold statements.

My goal is to present a model for self-funded health care, then to compare this model to insurance. I believe that such a discussion would lead people to demand for alternatives to insurance and not mandated insurance.

If the Gem State Tea Party, or any free market oriented group in the Mountain West, is interested in this presentation, they can contact me here.

The Timing of It All

Readers of this blog (all three of you) know that I have an obsession with meetings. For the last five years, my goal has been to attend (or host) a meeting in which people spoke about free market health care.

I am actually surprised that no-one is interested in this topic. But I accept that people are too busy to care about liberty.

PPACA is a bad law that forces people to buy insurance. The law officially kicked in on October 1st.

For the first time in five years, people were actually talking about the law.



I was delighted to see online chatter about issue at hand.

Just as discussion about the law was starting to have an impact, DC launched into this absurd government shutdown process.

All discussion about PPACA and the health exchanges stopped.

The health exchanges are being imposed at the state level. Shutting down the Federal Government neither slows nor stops the implementation of PPACA or the Health Exchanges.

Shutting down the government simply diverts attention from the exchanges and allows the administration to impose the exchanges without any scrutiny or discussion of alternatives.

I've followed the current health care debate from the start. My goal has been to find a small group willing to discuss the issue of health care. I've been turned back at every turn.

The first time in five years that I've seen people at large talking about the actual issue came to an inglorious end because of the government shutdown.

Because of the shutdown, it is unlikely that there will be an opening for a discussion about free market financing of health care for another two to four years.

Doesn't anyone else find the timing of this government shutdown suspect?

The government shutdown allows the government to impose the health exchanges with no public scrutiny or debate.

By shutting down discourse at this critical moment, the government shutdown accomplishes the exact opposite of what Republicans claimed to have supported.

Constructive Liberty

I hate spending my days ragging on the "conservative movement."

Like many Americans, I am at wits end.

I am delighted that the GOP has finally grown a back bone and is willing to stand up for liberty the day after the imposition of PPACA.

But, running an obstructionist campaign this late in the game is dubious strategy.

An obstructionist campaign may have worked earlier on in the health care debate.

At this hour, the freedom movement needs a completely different strategy.

We need a strategy to dig our nation out of the hole that Obama and Harry Reid dug for our liberties.

Obstructionism only widens the hole. It doesn't provide a path out.

Obstructionism is a strategy. To every strategy there is a counter strategy.

Obama uses the Alinsky Method.

The Alinsky Method can beat obstructionism. Obstruction campaigns allow community organizers to frame the obstructionist opposition as the source of the problem. In the current debate, the obstructionist campaign allows Obama to project the failures of PPACA onto the GOP.

The GOP has little to gain with the government shutdown, but the shutdown allows Obama to project the failures of PPACA onto the Republicans.

The Alinsky Method is a strategy that is premised on Conservatives acting a particular way.

The way to defeat the Alinsky Method is to act differently.

The way to defeat Alinsky and his student Obama is to create health care reform proposals that reconstruct liberty.

This strategy is easy to put together and accomplish.

Such a program could start by a small group of people meeting to discuss free market health care reform. (Something that I have not seen in this five years of health care debate).

The topic for the meeting is very simple. The meeting starts by asking the question: What would a true market health care system look like? This is followed by the question: How do we get there from here?

If a small group of freedom lovers were brave enough to attend to meeting on this subject, that group might be able to change the tone of the debate.

Simply discussing free market health care and how one implements free market health care changes the tone of the discussion from obstruction to construction.

If conservatives were engaged in a constructive discussion, it would break the Alinsky Method.

Remember. To every strategy, there is a counter strategy.

The Alinsky Method can break the obstructions strategy employed by the GOP.

The group that braved to talk about free market health care would be engaging in the one counter strategy that breaks the Alinsky Method. 

BTW, I am not talking about a government program. True free market health care reform is not dependent on the government.

Marx taught his followers to use the tools of the free market to destroy the market. The meeting would involve discussion on how to use the tools of PPACA to restore the free market. This discussion is how to work the government apparatus to ween our dependency on government. The discussion is about reducing dependency on the state.

I can see clearly how one could run a successful strategy to restore health freedom.

I've started ragging on conservatives because I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why conservatives so adamantly refuse to talk about health care.

The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that the GOP actually likes PPACA ... they simply want to be the one's holding the ring of power.

The Conservative Strategy is clearly failing.

So, what does one need to do to create a winnable strategy?

I think one might be able to create a winning strategy if a small group of people were to meet together to discuss these two questions:

What would a true market health care system look like?

and How do we get there from here?




Are these two questions too incredibly difficult? If you know any freedom loving group within a day's drive of Salt Lake (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Cheyenne, Boise) who are have enough interest in preserving freedom to discuss these issues, I would be happy to put together a meeting. The discussion might last a whole afternoon! (Contact Form)

Adorable Care Act

The cute animals of the world all support the "Adorable Care Act."

It is time to get all of your little ducks in a row as the deadlines for ObamaCare approach for PPACA is a duck soup recipe and you are the ducks.

So, what looks like a Duck, quacks like a duck, but isn't a duck?

Why is the ACA (also known as the Adorable Care Act.)

Defunding ObamaCare

This current effort to block the funding of ObamaCare is a fight that must be fought, but it is not the effort that effort that will restore health freedom.

The effort to restore our freedom must come from the people … not from the government.

The effort to defund ObamaCare has one huge flaw. ObamaCare is a network of health exchanges by the federal government. The exchanges are implemented at the state level.

The legislation includes a large number of federal mandates plus some social spending. Much of the program is implemented by the states.

Defunding ObamaCare reduces the social spending associated with the program. It does not remove the mandates and does nothing about the health exchanges being imposed by the states.

The Health Exchanges are based on the false premise that insurance is the only way to fund health care.

If there was a group of people willing to sit with me for an hour, I could prove this premise false.

The best way to strike at ObamaCare is to create a viable alternative to insurance.

If a group of patriots was brave enough to talk for a whole two hours, I could show the group how to go about creating a viable alternative to insurance that could be used in the effort to defeat ObamaCare.

The program would involve creating a professional association called "The Health Care Advocate Association." The association would create a business model. The business model does not even need to be implemented for the model to change the debate.

For that matter, ObamaCare outlaws alternative means for financing care. The charge of the HCAA is to create a business model, then to

You do not have to like the product. You don't have to use the product.

The goal at this point is just for a group of people to stand up and talk about alternatives to insurance.

Creating the product does involve basic mathematics. It involves creating a [gasp] database. The math is simply and I can make the database.

The place I am stuck is in finding a group of people brave enough to talk about health care. I live in Utah. I am willing to travel. But will have to contact me. I am not LDS. The LDS Church is for the exchanges. Harry Reid (D), Mitt Romney (R), Governor Huntsman (R) and Governor Leavitt (R) are all heavily invested in the exchanges.

Utah has a poisonous intellectual climate. However, I am willing to travel. Here is my Contact Form.

Unprecedented

Cato Institute just published a tome called "Unprecedented" by Josh Blackman which looks at the unprecedented legal and legislative tactics used to ram PPACA through Congress and impose a law that is clearly against the spirit of the Constitution onto the American people.

I can't afford the book. The Cato Institute has a phenomenal video in which the author's discuss the scope of this important tome which provides an inside look at the legal steps taken to push through ObamaCare and the legal challenges against. The book is available at Overstock.com or on Amazon Kindle or Hardcover.

Ahem, if people bought the book through my links, I might make enough to buy a copy for myself. I suspect that the book would serve as a primary reference about the legal history of the health care law.

I applaud this legal effort. Unfortunately, legal challenges are a bit like theological challenges to the program. The people engaged in the legal battles get caught up in the jargon of the industry. The people at large often fail to see the importance of subtle legal nuances. So, while I think the legal challenge to PPACA is important, I fear that it will fail to win the day.

From a legal perspective, the actions taken by Harry Reid and Obama to pass PPACA were outrageous.

Unfortunately, I fear that they are not that unprecedented. To the progressive, any thing is fair when they ram through their legislation. To the progressive, legal precedence and nuances of the law only matter when they are attacking enemies.

To a large extent what happened under Obama is just a repeat of what happened under FDR who used all means fair or fowl to ram his social agenda through Congress.

Both Obama and FDR managed to prolong recessions into depressions.

I chalk this book up as important. The legal effort against PPACA must be well documented and preserved.

The legal effort must be followed by efforts to educate Americans on why socialization of health care is a bad thing. This the right has failed to accomplish.

On the LDS Role in the Health Care Debate

I don't know Sharia Law. I suspect this Islamic approach to law contains some valuable insights and ancient wisdom.

There are some in this world who believe US law should be revamped along the lines of Sharia Law. Despite the ancient wisdom in Sharia, I oppose such efforts as attempts to impose Sharia Law would create a system in which our laws were set by isolated clerics haggling over interpretation of scripture while the people would be cast out.

In Utah, many believe that our nation's health care laws should be derived from the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

My experience is that individual members of this church have a very keen sense of the roles that self-sufficiency and charity should play in health.

Terrible problems happen once one says we should base our health care on the fundamentals of the LDS Church.

At this moment, Glenn Beck is promoting "Covenant Theory" which teaches that the US Revolution was staged by the Heavenly Father and The Constitution revealed to the US Founders for the express purpose of creating the conditions necessary for the restoration of the church in the latter days.

This restoration came with the revelation of the Book of Mormon. The BoM was followed in 1833 by the revelation of the "Book of Commandments" in which the Heavenly Father revealed the details of the new Covenant..

In Glenn Beck's theory, The Constitution was revealed to bring forth the Book of Commandments, making the Book of Commandments the greater of the two documents. Please, read what the Book of Commandments says! You can find a photocopy of the plate on The Institution for Religious Research.

25 Thow knowest my laws, they are given in my scriptures, he that sinneth and repenth not, shall be cast out.

26 If thou lovest me, thou shat serve me and keep all of my commandments; and behold, thou shalt consecrate all thy properties, that which thou hast unto me, wih a covenant and deed which cannot be broken; and they shall be laid before the bishop of my church, and two of the elders, such as he shall appoint and set apart for that purpose.

27 And it shall come to pass, that the bishop of my church, after that he has received the properties of my church, that it can not be taken from the church, he shall appoint every man a steward over his own property, or that which he has received, in as much as is sufficient for himself and family:

28 And the residue shall be kept to administer to him who has not, that every man may receive according as he stands in need:

29 And the residue shall be kept in my storehouse, to administer the poor and needy, as shall be appointed to the elders of the church and the bishop; and for the purpose of purchasing lands, and the building up of the New Jerusalem, which is hereafter to be revealed; that my covenant people may be gathered in one, in the day that I shall come to my temple.

When you hear Glenn Beck talk about Covenant America ... well ... This document is The Covenant.

The revelation starts with the command that those not in the covenant need to be cast out. Notice the intensity in which Beck casts dispersions at liberals. This method of thinking divides people with an "us-v- them" mentality and a need to constant attack people outside one's group.

 I've been to local political meeting where I've been labeled a servant of Satan and shown the door.

In my opinion, the thinking behind Covenant America creates a closed society in which a small corruptible group is determining the allocation of resources of the group at large with most people cast out.

The Book of Commandment by Joseph Smith goes on to say that property should be taken by the church. Former property owners reduced to stewards over the property. The leaders of the Church would give people what the leaders of the church deem sufficient for one's family. The Church wuold keep all capital gains (residue) which it will use to build a huge city to the glory of The Church. To sound progressive, they would give poor members of the church according to their needs as deemed by The Church. (Those not in The Covenant are cast out).

40 years later, Karl Marx expressed this basic tenet as "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." A great irony of history is that Marx formulated many of his ideas by studying the Mormons.

The LDS Church is considered far right. Marx is far left. They are different sides of the same coin.

After publishing the Book of Commandments, Joseph Smith found himself facing a mob (primarily of his own followers). People were not keen on giving all their property to The Church. Joseph Smith quickly revised the Word of God from "consecrate all thy properties" to "consecrate of thy properties." The new revelation was called "The Doctine and Covenants."

There is value in a theological discussion about the difference between "consecrate all" and "consecrate of."

For that matter, this theological split touches on the same basic issues of the culture war that is tearing our country apart. A primary question of the culture war is:: "How much should the centralized authority take from the people for the glory of the state?"

I am also intrigued with the transition from "property owners" to stewardship that occurs in the Book of Commandments. 

I believe that the Founders of the United States were envisioning a society with widespread property ownership.Smith issued a direct attack on widespread personal ownership in favor of a society in which property was owned by a central authority and people reduced to stewardship.

If you look at the American economy, you will see that the United States is rapidly transitioning from a society of property owners to one in which all property is owned by collectives (corporations are collective ownership) and individuals are mere stewards.

The history of the revelation touches deeply on the interplay between the central authority and the people.

The wording of the revelation changed after a riot. This touches directly on the conflict between centralized authority and the people (the mob).

Mobs tend to scare political leaders. Joseph Smith claimed to speak the Word of God. It is scary to learn that an angry mob actually changed the Word of God!

I am pro-religion. I believe that theological inquiry provides valuable insight.

Despite the importance of theological inquiry, I think it imperative that law of the land should be based on a broader dialog and verified through analysis and a broader intellectual discussion.

Just as I wonder if theological disputes about Sharia Law should be the basis of our Health Care system, I question if the theological dispute about the LDS Covenant should be the foundation of the US Health Care System.

I worry about Glenn Beck's insistence that the US Revelation was staged by the Heavenly Father to bring rise to the LDS Church, because this ideology has the effect of reducing the importance of the Constitution and of cutting hundreds of millions of people out of the picture.

Joseph Smith's revelation included the statement that those not of the Covenant need to be cast out. I dislike systems that cast people out.

Don't you see the problem? If you hold Glenn Beck's view that the Revolution was staged to bring forth a new Covenant, then you need to hold the Book of Commandments in higher regards than the Constitution (which was simply created to bring forth the real deal ... the new covenant.)

Of course LDS Church history provides some valuable insights.

The Mormon Church began as a commune. The Fundamentalist LDS Sects still practice varying degrees of communalism such as polygamy and communally owned property.

The mainstream LDS Church saw the negative effects of these experiments and has since been a strong advocate for traditional American values and respect for property rights.

At the beginning of the Health Care Debate, I was hoping that the Mormon Church would play a strong role in the battle to defeat PPACA.

In a related culture war debate, the LDS Church experimented with the redefinition of marriage. The D&C not only permitted polygamy. The new covenant mandated polygamy. Currently the LDS Church is a strong defender of maintaining the traditional definition of marriage.  (Fundamentalist Mormons want the definition changed).


BTW: I defend the traditional definition of marriage based largely on the experience the LDS Church had when they tried changing it. Large polygamist cults create a clan mentality.

I support groups in my community when I see them doing good, and question them when I think they are running astray.

Beck to Health Care.

I support and applaud the activities of Senator Mike Lee and Representative Jason Chaffetz in working to defund ObamaCare.

The overall activity of the LDS Community in this health care debate been a mixed bag.

Obama's Health Care plan was based on the plan of Mitt Romney. Harry Reid was the primary architect of PPACA. I suspect that both Romney and Reid believe that their efforts match their understanding of the LDS Faith.


Governor Mike Leavitt owns an insurance company that provides infrastructure and is a primary benefactor of the Health Exchanges. Jon Huntsman campaigned on imposing the exchanges.

Utah was one of the first states to impose a Health Exchange. Utah imposed the exchanges and suppressed debate against the exchanges.

The Utah conservative community has held few public meetings about defeating PPACA. I've been labeled a servant of Satan and cast out of the few meetings that I've attended.

The Utah attendance at the 2012 Stand Up for Religious Freedom Rally was so pathetic I actually felt sick. From a metropolitan area pushing two million people, only about 200 attended the rally. Of that group half were members of the press, speakers or family members of speakers.

Karl Rove was the architect  behind The Bush Administration.  President Bush greatly expand the role of the Federal Government in health care as part of that strategy. Karl Rove was the architect behind Romney's presidential campaign.

If you compared the county by county electoral map of the 2012 Republican Primary, it appears that Mormons voted as a block for Romney. If you have a voting block and a half dozen or more candidates, the group will the voting block will win every time.

Mitt Romney's campaign created a disastrous 2012 election pitting the father of RomneyCare against the Father of ObamaCare (which was based on RomneyCare). It was impossible for the GOP to really differentiate itself from Obama. Mitt Romney would vow to repeal ObamaCare at one stop; then promise to keep the majority of the bill in the next.

Karl Rove is currently working to isolate and neuter the Tea Party candidates seeking to defund PPACA.

While I support Senator Lee and Representative Chaffetz and I appreciate the discussion by members of the LDS faith who realize the need for both self-sufficiency and charity, I feel that, on the whole, the efforts of the LDS Community is falling on the side of tyranny and not on the side of freedom.

Again Harry Reid, Mitt Romney, Mike Leavitt and Jon Huntsman played an active role in imposing the exchanges. Karl Rove is leading a charge against the Tea Party and the ideology of LDS Church advocates reducing property owners to stewards.

I look at Glenn Beck's Covenant America which seeks to base our health care on the Doctrines and Covenants of the LDS Church with the same suspicion as I look on claims that we need to impose Sharia Law. Quite frankly, I believe the American Constitution and the classical liberal tradition of the US Founders makes a much better basis for governance.

On Defunding ObamaCare

PPACA (ObamaCare) is a network of state run health exchanges. The Exchanges are mandated and regulated at the Federal Government, but run by the states.

The Health Exchanges are an idea that came from the Right. The idea was that, if we forced everyone into health exchanges, we might be able to overcome some of the most egregious flaws of the insurance industry.

Republicans love the insurance industry and are happy to sell our God-given liberties to insurance lobbyists whenever the insurance lobbyists pull out the checkbook.

 The Health Exchanges are actually quite regressive. The laws will force everyone to buy into captured these exchanges which will result in the transfer of billions of dollars from the middle class to the ruling class the runs the exchanges.

The healt exchanges are inherently regressive. To make the exchanges appear progressive, Obama added a massive increase in social spending with the exchanges.

The exchanges are being implemented at the state level as we speak.

There is currently a push to Defund ObamaCare. I support this effort and signed the petition.

The problem I see is, that if we remove the social spending, we will be left with the regressive exchanges. These exchanges will transfer billions from the working and middle class to the ruling class. By creating a program that transfers billions from workers and small business to the cronies that run the exchanges the defunded health exchanges are likely to level a death blow against thousands of small businesses.

Don't you see the problem? PPACA is a collection of regressive health exchanges (run at the state level) coupled with some social spending to offset inherent problems with the exchanges.

Defunding ObamaCare will leave us with corrupt state run health exchanges which will transfer billings of dollars for small business and workers to a corrupt ruling class.

For the freedom movement to save the American Experiment in Self Rule, people in the movement will have to do something radical.

People in the freedom movement will have to come up with an alternative mechanism.

I happen to have developed an alternative to insurance called the Medical Savings and Loan.

For five years, I've been on my knees begging for a small group of people to get together for an afternoon to discuss alternatives to the exchanges.

I live in the most Conservative State in the Nation. With the possible exception of Tehran and Saudi Arabia, Utah just might be the most conservative place on the planet.

In five years, all I've learned is that Conservatives really are closed-minded people that the dictionary describes. Apparently conservatism really is nothing more than a belief in a closed society with a debased ruling class shutting out all ideas.

I live in Salt Lake City. I'm not Mormon. I've lived here since the 1970s, and have come to accept that closed-minded intolerant people incapable of engaging in civil discourses.

I spent ten thousand dollars traveling to Las Vegas, Reno, Phoenix and Denver ... hoping beyond reasonable that someone on this planet has enough love for the freedom our forefathers fought to defend might be willing to engage in the radical act of discussing the mathematics of health.

I know. Math is so scary. The are ten digits in the decimal system and hopeless complex operations like addition, subtraction and ratios.

The presentation involves really complex math: The actual presentation involves taking the sum of columns of numbers and calculating ratios.

I confess, the original model involved calculus, combinatorics (aka probability) and topology. I removed the complex for a really clean model.


I actually have one dollar in my pocket and things I can sell. If I sleep out, I figure I could safely travel 750 miles from Salt Lake.

The Freedom Movement could be doing better than this pathetic effort to Defund ObamaCare.

The entrenched reluctance of conservatives to discuss the issue of funding health care has me convinced that the end game of the Republicans, from the beginning, has been to impose a system of health exchanges with no social benefits to offset the concentration of power.


If there was a group within 750 miles of Salt Lake willing to discuss health care, I would pack my bags and hit the road with my last dollar in hand. It will never happen. There will never be a Conservative who is willing to discuss ideas.

MSL Screencast

Readers of this blog know that, for the last five years, I've been searching for a group of people to discuss free market health care reform.

I put together a presentation that starts with a Pithy Introduction to the health care debate. The pithy introduction should be about five minutes. The goal of the introduction is to define the term "Health Care" and to contrast the idea of "group care" with "individual care." I favor the idea of delivering health care on an individual basis.

The pithy introduction would be followed by a quick introduction of a mathematical model for funding health care that I call "The Medical Savings and Loan." This second part of the the presentation should be about 15 minutes.

A key component of the MS&L is a thing called the "Health Care Advocates Association." Introducing the HCA should take about 10 minutes.

I would then give a short presentation comparing the MSL and HCAA with the insurance paradigm and show why the Medical Savings and Loan would provide more care for less money.

In five years, I've found no-one interested in attending this presentation. I have received requests to create a video.

So, I bought a tinny microphone for $5 and plugged it into my 2003 Dell Computer. I deleted a whole bunch of files to make room for the CamStudio-Recorder. I bought a pile of microstock images and read the presentation into the tinny microphone. To produce the thing below.

The actual time of the video is 15 minutes.

I am so upset at this whole unwillingness of the Conservative Movement to take a positive stand on free market health care that I added a ten minute diatribe on the poor quality of modern debate.

The US Founders were not conservatives. The conservatives of 1776 stood with the British.

The Left/Right split took hold during the French Revolution when supporters of the ancient regime sat on the Right of the French Legislature and supporters of radical change stood on the Left. Modern dialectics took hold with the rantings of the arch-conservative thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Modern Progressive ideology was scripted by the Young Hegelians (Feuerbach, Marx, etc).

The fact that the GOP nominated Mitt Romney to run against Barrack Obama convinced me that the GOP has no intention of repealing ObamaCare. They simple seek to project negative images on President Obama in a snide attempt to capture the ring of power.

I suspect that there are many people who sincerely call themselves "conservatives" who want to restore the American experiment in self rule. The conservative movement is not defined by one's rhetoric. It is defined the the actions of the whole movement. The goal of the Conservative Movement from Revolution to present has been to preserve the centralized social order.

If a group was interested in discussing Free Market Health Care reform, I would pull out ten minutes of the Pithy Introduction. A primary reason that I added the diatribe was because I want to disassociate this presentation from the Conservative movement which I personally find as corrupt as the progressive movement.

I am not happy at all with this recording. The home of the recording will be at the URL hca.me/presents/intro.html.

Presentation on Health Care

I had a math background. Decades ago I worked writing programs to analyze insurance claims and calculate premiums. While engaged in this activity, I realized that insurance underserves large segments of the community.

I spent several years investigating alternatives to insurance, but did not find much interest.

I took to calling the model I developed "The Medical Savings and Loan."

During the campaign against HillaryCare, I contacted numerous free market groups. They were eager to use my insights about insurance to help defeat HillaryCare, but I found no-one interested in true free market health care reform.


In 2008, when I realized that President Obama was likely to repeat the drive for socialized medicine,

The weakest part of PPACA (ObamaCare) is the assumption that insurance is the only way to fund health care.

I happen to have developed an alternative business model for funding health care.

My goal for the last five years has been to find a free market oriented group interested in developing this plan.

I discovered something very disturbing during this period. The first is that, while Republicans love when people agitate for free market solutions, but they dismiss anyone who talks about real solutions.

The other troubling thing I discovered is that I would spend weeks trying to develop a contact to hold a meeting. Meetings would routinely be cancelled the moment that commissars that control the GOP realize that I am seriously talking about alternatives to insurance.

Anyway, in five years, I've been unable to find anyone in either the Republican or Libertarian Party willing to listen to my mathematical models.

Most people in the establishment are completely aligned with health care money. Attending a meeting about alternatives to insurance would involve an unusual amount of bravery.

My basic belief is that if the freedom movement created a mathematically viable alternative to insurance, the movement could use that model to attack the assumption that insurance is the only way to fund health care.

I am unable to force people into a room to talk about the mathematics of health care. For that matter, the reason I left the insurance industry is because the industry forces people to take actions that are against their best interest. I do not believe in forcing people to do anything.

I live in Salt Lake City. If anyone is interested in defeating ObamaCare. I have a plan. I have a very good, well thought through plan. I have a solid mathematical model that shows group funding of health care does disservices to workers and small business.

But, since I have yet to find anyone brave enough to sit in a room to talk about the mathematics of funding health care ... I can do nothing.

BTW, I live in Salt Lake City.

Defunding Obamacare, Then What?

PPACA (ObamaCare) is a federally mandated network of Health Exchanges implemented by the states.

A small group of Republicans is currently running an obstructionist campaign to stop the Federal Funding of PPACA. I applaud the effort.

But, here's the problem. Even if the Feds defund ObamaCare, we are stuck with the centralized exchanges. We will be in a horrific mess that will most likely be resolved by the creation of state level bureaucracies that are even worse than ObamaCare.

This leads to the fundamental problem of "conservatism."

Obstruction does not provide a path forward.

Obstructionism alone is not a path to the future.


If we want to restore health freedom, then there has to be a vision to work towards.

The one and only way that we can have a vision to work towards is if people spoke with each other.

Conservatives, with the obstructionist mindset, simply shut everyone out and kick their neighbors down.

But by kicking people down, conservatives destroy all hopes of finding solutions. Since conservatives refuse to talk, think or engage in discourse, they open the door for the next band of statist rogues who are willing to talk and engage in discourse.

Even if the obstructionist campaign works and Congress defunds the Federal component of health care, we are still saddled with the state component, which is where the real oppression in PPACA lies.

To get rid of the state component, the freedom movement needs to have a constructive solution. This can only happen if people in the freedom movement speak to one another.

The weak point of the health exchanges is the insurance mandate. The insurance mandate is built on the false assumption that insurance is the only possible way to fund health care.

I want to challenge the insurance mandate through a presentation that shows insurance is not the best way to fund health care.

The presentation involves mathematics and takes an hour or so. Attending the presentation might help empower activists against ObamaCare. I really don't know this for certain. In five years I've been unable to find a single Conservative who has enough interest in health care reform to spend an afternoon talking about the problem.

I live in Utah. I am not LDS. The Utah GOP does not allow participation of non-Mormons in the party (see Closed Society). I accept that. I am willing to travel. I would be willing to travel to Denver, Cheyenne, Phoenix, Las Vegas. Boise, Reno, just for the privilege of talking to another human.

What I want to talk about is the mathematics of funding health care. In the meeting I would present a mathematical model that shows that insurance underserves the middle and working class of this nation. I wish to argue that we could create a better model built around self-funded health care and a restoration of fee for service medicine.

I've spent five years with the single minded goal of finding a small group of people willing to spend an afternoon talking about free market health care reform.

I must confess.I am not a Conservative. I am what you might call a Classical Liberal. I define Classical Liberalism as the application of classical logic to the question of liberty.. I believe the US Founders were classical liberals. They had a liberal-arts education steeped in classical logic. They applied this education to the question of liberty.

I believe solutions are found in reason, mathematics and science. The scientific method involves detailed analysis of problems with a heavy dosing of peer review. I've engaged in analysis of health care, and I want someone to review the ideas.

I am not all that keen on obstructionism. I do not see obstructionism as a positive path to the future, but am willing to fight hard for American ideals.

Quite frankly, I believe that the reason our nation is falling apart is because Conservatives refuse to actively engage in discourse and spend too much time engaged in obstructionism.

I've spent over five years and over $10,000 just trying to find a person who is willing to review a mathematical model.  If people in the freedom movement are unwilling to engage in discourse, all hope for renewing the American Experiment in self rule is over. Obstructionism alone leads to ruin.