Short Attention Spans

I have a presentation on free market health care. It takes about an hour followed by a discussion.

I've tried putting my presentation online.

What I've discovered is that online attention span is too short for the presentation to work.

This is what I do in the presentation:

I start by defining a few basic terms. I create a mathematical model of free market care. I create a business model built on the the mathematics model.

I create a model of group health care. Group health care includes both insurance and socialism.

I discuss some of the inequities caused by the group care model such as restricted access to care, the problem of portability, the problem of pre-existing conditions and the breaking of the pricing model.

With two models on the table it is now possible to compare and contrast group care to individual care.

To lay the ground works for a substantive discussion takes effort.

People browsing on the internet rarely look at anything for more than a few seconds. Every time I tried hosting the discussion online, it was diverted and hijacked by completely inane comments.

For example, the presentation is extremely critical of the insurance industry. Progressives read the criticisms of insurance and immediately begin sloganeering for the current version of socialized care not understanding that single payer is simply insurance pushed to an absolute.

I've found that conservatives will start listening to the discussion, but the moment I criticize the insurance industry, they become hostile. After all, insurance is the magical device that puts millionaires in mansions and puts billions of dollars in the GOP's coffers. Conservatives will never do anything that disrupts the feeding trough of the ruling elite..

The models I create confront both sides of the debate with issues that they do not want to face.

This will sound strange to some, but the final reason that I want a meeting is that I operate on the assumption that I may be wrong.

I worked for low wages for a state run insurance company thinking that I was doing something that was benefiting the world. After come face to face with the system and studying the numbers, I concluded that I was doing more harm than good. The state should not be taking money from people if it is doing more harm than good.

I developed this presentation to explain why I lost faith in state run health care and what I would do to fix the problem.

I do not believe that I have magical powers that make me right and my political opponents wrong. I believe that the best approach to health care reform is to create different models and to discuss the differences between the models.

The process of creating models takes time. People browsing web sites simply will not take the time to delve into a substantive conversation. The feedback simply lacks the quality necessary for substantive discourse.

One final reason why I want to give a presentation face to face. As you see, mathematics is largely an oral tradition. For anyone one reading this post. When is the last time that you read a web page that was about mathematics? While it is easy to talk about mathematics. It is extremely difficult to write about it.