Happy Thanksgiving & a Last Ditch Effort

I decided to make one last ditch effort at hosting a meeting on free market health care reform.

To get the engine rolling, I had to file some legal documents earlier this week. I will give details on this effort next week when I get the paperwork back from the State.

Personally, I think it absurd that in this last four years of debate about health care that not a single Conservative has been willing to invest an evening to discuss free market health care reform.

Albeit. I live in Utah. Utah sports a different brand of Conservatism than the rest of the nation.

The plan still involves a trip to either Arizona, Colorado, Nevada or possibly Southern California. Since it is winter, I am inclined to go to Arizona since I could sleep outside and avoid the hotel cost.

I figure the cost of travel plus renting a meeting space in Arizona would cost from $500 to $750. Travel to Colorado or Southern California would cost $1000 to $1500.

Driving to Texas would probably cost $1500 to $2000. Driving to Florida would cost upwards to $3000.

I spent my every last penny in 2010. I am dead broke.

But today is Thanksgiving.

Which means that tomorrow is Black Friday.

The commissions on any sales from my e-commerce site A Fountain of Bargains will go to paying for this last ditch effort to promote free market health care reform.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Resisting the Health Exchanges

The health care debate for the last four years made me sick. From day one, the Republican establishment played a snide game in which they hoped the Democrats would burn their political capital creating health exchanges that the Republicans would capture with the 2012 election.

This game reached absurd levels when Republicans fielded the father of RomneyCare against the father of ObamaCare, hoping Americans would not notice that they were both the same health care plan.


Both RomneyCare and ObamaCare social medicine via state run health exchanges. The exchanges differ only in the band of rogues holding the ring of power.

The health exchange is premised on the flawed assumption that your health is the property of the collective and that your health care should be traded by massive centralized banks (pools) in a Wall Street like exchange.

The state run exchanges have the same basic structure as Enron. Enron, as you may recall, was a multibillion dollar fiasco built around a centralized energy exchange. The Enron sold the poison that its internal exchange would eliminate the risk associated with energy and reduce prices. Enron's exchange led to rolling brownouts in the community and ended in internal financial collapse.

Founding our health care on the business model of Enron is pure insanity.

The Republican Establishment loves the idea because it concentrates wealth and power. The far left promotes the exchanges because they see them as a step on the path to the true objective of socialism.

Unfortunately, during the health care debate. The Republican establishment actively suppressed real discussion of free market reform in the gamble that they would be able to discredit Obama and win the presidency in 2016.

This whole thing makes me sick.

However, I am an optimist at heart.

The Republican ploy to capture the health exchanges failed.

For the very first time in this four year long debate, I am seeing Conservatives questioning the health exchanges.

Republican run states are hesitating in the implementation of the health exchanges.

It is still possible to beat this beast.

If a group of patriots actually physically sat in a room to discuss real free market health care reform, that group might make a difference.

I live in Utah. The Utah Republican Party is run (lock stock and barrel) by "The Establishment." Utah Republicans actively repress any debate about free market health care reform.

I am a computer programmer/mathematician. I am not a pundit, nor a politician. I worked for several decades on the issue of free market health care reform and have insights that could be of value to any group wanting to resist the exchanges.

I love the American experiment in self rule. I do not want to see this experiment fail. I spent every penny I had driving thousands of miles trying to find even one person willing to discuss free market health care reform.

Freedom is not lost. If there is a group of patriots interested in saving the American experiment in self rule. I'd be happy to travel to your group to discuss ways to resist and turn back the health exchanges in ObamaCare (and RomneyCare). I have a presentation on funding health care that takes about two hours.

The presentation includes a step by step plan on how small business and free people can stand against ObamaCare. All is not lost.

The forces of freedom could easily win the health care battle if people approached the issue from the correct angle.

The Republican game of trying to discredit Obama so that they could capture the health exchanges (ie, the Mitt Romney campaign) was a snide and sinister strategy from the start. A direct campaign against the health exchanges with the eye of restoring health freedom could still win the day.

Multidimensional Data

Health Care is a fascinating multidimensional space. The Insurance industry (and socialism) attempt to project the complexities of this multidimensional space onto onto a two dimensional surface from which a corrupt impose their dictates.

When I worked in health care, I began seeing the complex dimensions of health care and realized that the free market approach will produce better results than insurance or socialism (insurance is privately owned socialism). To explore the concept I created a fictional entity which I called the "Medical Savings and Loan" as a simple tool to start exploring this space. With the limited data I had, I was able to show that the MS&L outperformed insurance and socialism.

People following this blog notice that I keep mentioning that I have an approach to health care reform that I desperately want to pursue. I don't produce data because it is time consuming and costly to get the data I want to display.

In the video below, Hans Rosling explores data dimensions. Please watch this video. You need to right click the video and select watch in couch mode.


Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen from TEDTalks on Vimeo.

The Medical Savings and Loan is a data driven approach to health care. The key component of the plan is a new position called health care advocate. The advocate is a clerical position. There would be thousands of advocates spending forty hour weeks accumulating information about health care. These advocates would be sharing their data through a structured publishing system.

Actuaries would study the data in detail then report back findings from the data back through to advocates to the people. If you were an advocate, your job would be to accumulate data while periodically giving your clients presentations like the one on the video showing their expected health costs.

Clients of the MS&L would keep the bulk of their health dollars. Each client would have a dedicated advocate who accumulates health and financial data. The advocate would give presentations similar to this presentation of Hans Rosling that would help people understand their health and how they can improve it.

We would replace insurance (or socialism) with a system where people had a dedicated advocate and access to quality information.

A group dedicated to free market health care reform could destroy ObamaCare if they just sat down in a friggin' room and created a program for publishing health data.

The people who are willing to take a chance to sit in a room and explore health data might find themselves owning businesses in which they made a substantial income.

Instead we have an idiotic Republican Party that spends its entire wealth parsing electoral information to pieces and FoxNews that loves to present news as conflict.

For four years, I've been begging patriots to meet and talk about free market health care reform. The goal of the meeting is to lay in place a structure that can accumulate quality health care data. With the quality health care data, we can prove that that a free market health care system would outperform a socialist model (aka the Health Exchanges).

Watch the video through, the first part of the video shows that our learned college professors have a studied ignorance about health care. The end of the presentation shows how countries changes through time. The first meeting would be to create a structure that can start accumulating data. Once we have some quality peer reviewed data, the group would start giving presentations that show health care is a multidimensional space and will argue that the free market, not socialism, is the source for multidimensional solutions. But I am stuck in a hole living in Utah where people simply refuse to talk solutions. I would be happy to travel to a location where people are willing to put in the effort to put together quality analysis like the video above.

Defeating ObamaCare

It is still possible to defeat ObamaCare.

The method involves something that Conservatives seem to be completely unwilling to do. It involves thinking out of the box and discussing ideas.


The weak part of ObamaCare is the insurance mandates. The way to beat ObamaCare is to create a viable alternative to insurance.

Please notice, I am not talking about a political program. I am talking about a business model. The idea is to create a new business model, once a group of people is happy with that model, then they can then argue for making that business model legal.

I called the business model "The Medical Savings and Loan." I am more than happy to change the name. The point of the program is to build, from the ground up, a method for self-financing health care.

The program uses a radically different system of contracts and a different mathematical model than insurance. For example, the program supplements care through a system of grants, rather than a system of legal contracts. The program will have the same amount of money. Replacing contracts with grants breaks the allusion that health care is a right.

The program is a business model. It is not a government program.

Fortunately, it is still legal for people to meet to discuss creating businesses.

To get the program going, all that is needed is for a small group of patriots to sit down for a weekend, discuss free market health care and to create an association for defining the business model. No money, beyond the cost of travel and hosting a meeting is involved.

Unfortunately, I live in Salt Lake City. I need to travel a great distance to find people interested in free market health care reform. I would be happy to travel a great distance if I could find a group interested in free market health care. Here is my contact form.

The Only Way to Beat ObamaCare is for People to Talk

ObamaCare (PPACA) is an attempt to socialize health care through a network of health exchanges implemented at the state level. Yes, that is right. It is Federal Legislation that requires the creation of RomneyCare type health exchanges in each state.

The Health Exchanges are premised on a bizarre notion that large capital pools should own the health care resources of the nation, and that a large centralized mechanism should do the thinking for the people.

ObamaCare was built on the basic structure of RomneyCare. The ideas for RomneyCare, ObamaCare and Health Exchanges flow directly from a work called "Das Kapital" from an 19th century psychopath named Karl Marx.

The heart of Marxian thought is The Material Dialectics. Dialectics is a game in which the ruling class presents the people with false dichotomies.

We are currently at the end stretch of one of the most shrill political cycles in U.S. history. People are more divided than ever but are choosing between two candidates who are essentially clones of each other. Republicans are somehow convinced that Health Exchanges imposed at the State Level is somehow the free market in action, while Democrats believe that Health Exchanges imposed at the State Level and regulated by the Feds is social justice in action.

This is a false dichotomy. The only real question this election is which band of scoundrels will hold the ring of power.

Millions of Tea Partyers and Libertarians will march to the polls on Tuesday believing that voting Romney might somehow make ObamaCare go away.

What they fail to understand is that PPACA is simply the legislation that created the Health Exchanges. The creation of theses beasts is already underway in every state.

The one and only way for us to rid ourselves of the mistake of PPACA is for people to discuss real free market health care reform for people to come up with an alternative to the health exchanges.

Unfortunately, the power brokers in the parties and media have such a myopic eye on the ring of power that it is unlikely that anyone will ever in the few hours to discuss free market alternatives to insurance and the health exchanges.

Personally, I will be voting for a third party on Tuesday. My thoughts are that, if enough people reject the false dichotomy between ObamaCare and RomneyCare, both parties will be forced to rethink their platform for 2016.

Voting Romney will not get rid of ObamaCare. There will simply be a token repeal followed by the imposition of Health Exchanges (RomneyCare) throughout the states. Voting Obama won't lead to a repeal of his namesake legislation.

PPACA is a bad law that will make health care worse. If both parties are forced to rethink their platform in the wake of a split vote, we might see some brave soul stand up and take the effort to contemplate real free market reform.

BTW, any group interested in discussing real free market reform is welcome to contact me.

Creating a Viable MS&L

Once again, during the Presidential Debate, Mitt Romney reiterated that his position on health care is to force everyone to buy insurance. In Romney's plan the mandates are at the state level instead of the Federal level. Other than that RomneyCare is identical to ObamaCare.

The health care debate is premised on the false assumption that the only way to fund health care is with group pools (insurance or socialism) and that challenge for government is to figure out how to force everyone into the pool.

I contend that the problem in health care is the use of group funding for individual consumption and that the solution is to create a viable alternative to insurance, which I've done.

What I need now is for a small group of free market thinkers to engage in a peer review process help creating a finalized accepted version of the program. With intense peer review, the plan can be presented as a recognized viable alternative.

I gave my project the campy name "Medical Savings and Loan." I developed this program in the 1980s, prior to the current HSA/HDP program of the Bush Administration. At the time people used the term "medical savings account."

The MS&L is different from an HSA/HDP program. The HSA/HDP is simply a high deductible policy with a savings account attached. It is still an insurance policy. The Medical Savings and Loan is built from the ground up  around the savings account.

My program starts with the claim that the problem in modern health care is the use of group funding of individual consumption, which creates inequity and distortions. The solution is to restore the concept of individually funded care.

The program starts with the statement: "Those who can self fund their care should."

Those who can self fund are expected to directly pay their expenses. We will then create a well funded system of grants for those who can't.

The first step is to separate those who can self fund their care from those who can't. To do this we will perform a full lifecycle analysis of individual. Imagine that we looked at a large random population and compared their lifetime medical expenses to income. If a person had lifetime earnings of $1,000,000 and had $150,000 in medical expenses, their ratio of expense to income is 0.15. If a person had earnings of $100,000.00 and $300,000.00 in medical expenses, the ratio is 3.00.

The first person could easily self fund care. The second person cannot.

If we graphed these ratios from low to high, we'd see some sort of hyperbolic curve similar to the following: Health agencies report that the US currently spends some 17% to 19% of the GDP on health care. The hyperbolic curve will have two legs with most people consuming less than average with a small number of people experience health expenses multiple times their earnings.

The graph of expenses to income shows that most people can afford to self fund care. A small number of people need supplements.

Policymakers in health care tend to start by looking at the people who cannot fund care and then makes the mistake of muddling the health care of everybody to pay for the care of a few.

The Medical Savings and Loan starts with the observation that, if everyone who could self fund care did so; the public policy issue would be much smaller and could be handled through private grants.

To help those who can self fund care, the Medical Savings and Loan creates a system of savings accounts with a loan reserve carved from the savings.

The program sets aside a massive amount of money to supplement care for those who cannot self fund their care. We would determine the amount to set aside by the real world experience of the population.

Imagine that we looked at a population that had an expected $10B in health expenses. Our analysis showed that $7B of the expenses could be self funded, while $3B of the expenses could not be self funded. Mitt Romney's health plan would want an insurance company to take $10B plus 10% profit from the group to fund health care. The MS&L would let the workers keep the $7B in savings account and hold aside $3B  for the grants.

Administering grants is less expensive than administering insurance. The key element of insurance is that people have a legal claim against the pool. This involves expensive law suits. In contrast a grant agency will hold funds with a legal obligation to dispense the funds. Both programs disperse funds, the grant process is more efficient and more equitable.

Of course the real difference between the Medical Savings and Loan and insurance is that that he MS&L allows people to keep the bulk of their money.

Like insurance, the program is scientifically oriented and data intensive.

For this plan to work there must be a large number of professionals who help people record their income and expense data. So, I created a new position called the Health Care Advocate that replaces the insurance agents, claims adjusters and medical transcriptionists of industrial health care.

Advocates will work one on one with each member of the Medical Savings and Loan to set up record keeping system and maintain records with a document management system. The program will include simulations of expected lifetime health expenses and income projections and will encourage preventive care and fitness. The advocates will help clients set up and maintain a structured savings program to prepare for expenses.

The advocates will be familiar with local health offerings. When a person needs care, the advocates will help clients find care providers and help negotiate expenses.

Payments to providers will be on a fee for service basis, which would eliminate expensive medical billing.

If a client does not have sufficient funds for care, the advocates will have the ability to approve loans.

If a client has health needs that exceed their ability to pay, the advocates will apply for grants.

Note, the grants are based on ratio of health expenses to income. The grant system is structurally means tested. A person with a lifetime income of $500,000 might only be able to self fund $50K in care while a person with a projected income of $10,000,000 would be expected to pay $2,000,000 in care before receiving grants.

If you are rich, you will pretty much be expected to pay for all of your care. It turns out that the rich are the ones that set the trends. If the rich are paying for their care directly, we would see a quick restoration of the pricing mechanism in health care.

A casual reader might notice that this program is substantially more "progressive" than ObamaCare. It lets the middle class keep more of their money and forces the evil rich to pay more for care.

My direct observation in life is that insurance is the primary driver of the growing gap between rich and poor. Insurance takes all of the health care resources of the workers, put the resources in a pool and the people who own the pools get immensely wealth.

A case in point is Warren Buffet. Yes, Mr. Buffet is a great investor, but the real source of Buffet's wealth is that he owns multiple insurance pools and gets a return by investing the pools.

If we replaced a $10B pool with $7B going into the savings accounts and $3B set aside for grants, we would see a break up of the pools which are concentrating wealth.

The Medical Savings and Loan has the same amount of money as insurance. Since people are better with their money than they are with other's, people will be able to buy more and better care.

The primary difference is between the ownership. With insurance and socialism, the resources are owned by a collective. With the Medical Savings and Loan, the resources will be owned by individuals.

Let's end by looking at an individual.

Imagine that a worker earned $40k/year and had a health insurance policy that cost $10k/year. This person's income would be $1,600,000.00 with $400,000 taken to provide care over a 40 year career. (This is not counting the money taken for Medicare).

The Medical Savings and Loan would put the bulk of the $400,000 in the worker's savings plan with a good portion held aside for grants. We might put $300K in the savings plan and hold aside $100 in grants. The worker would then be expected to pay up to say $400k in health expenses before receiving grants.

People who live a healthy lifestyle and who keep their health costs low will be rewarded. People with high health expenses will end up paying a little bit more, but people with extreme health needs will have access to well funded grants.

Now What?

The Medical Savings and Loan is a free market alternative to insurance. The program breaks apart the insurance pools that concentrates wealth and gives people direct control over their health care resources. The program empowers individuals by replace insurance agents with advocates.

I believe that such a program could be used in the fight to restore freedom in America by directly challenging the false assumptions at the base of ObamaCare and RomneyCare.

What is needed at this point is for a brave soul to engage in peer review. After peer review, I would like to set up a legal entity that owns the definition (a DBA is sufficient).

Once there is a peer-reviewed alternative to insurance, it would be possible for patriots to stand against ObamaCare and RomneyCare and argue that pooled insurance is the cause of the problems. Rather than having government force people to buy insurance, we need small businesses to create a self-funded alternative to insurance.

Presidential Debate

I am not sure which candidate won the Denver presidential debate. After watching it twice, I fear that the American people lost.

The reason the people are losing is that our pundits keep asking the wrong questions. For example, the political machine has made jobs the fundamental issue of the debate.

Guess what? The president, as envisioned by our founders, had nothing to do with jobs. I suspect the founders would recoil at the idea that the president was the source of jobs.

This is the type of top-down thinking behind the monarchy.

In the monarchy, people thought the wealth of the nation flowed through the king to the people.

The American founders had a bottom up vision in which the people owned property. They created a limited government charged with protecting the property of the people.

If we had a system of equitably distributed wealth and a government set on protecting the property rights of the people, we would have full employment. People who own property keep themselves and others employed in the maintenance of the property.

By arguing the wrong issue, both candidates get set on paths that destroys liberty. Presidents who feel compelled to create jobs are apt to do things that fall outside the scope of a limited government.

The health care debate is a mess as well.

Both candidates start with the false assumption that insurance is the only way to fund health care. I can easily prove that this is not the case if anyone would care to sit through a thirty minute presentation. It would be a fascinating 30 minutes.

Because the candidates hold the false assumption that insurance is health care, they are set on a negative path of mandating that the people buy insurance.

ObamaCare uses the taxing powers of the Federal Government to force people to buy insurance.

During the debate, Mitt Romney declared that he would pressure the states to impose health exchanges and complete with insurance mandates.

The debate has me disheartened. Our nation is clearly going in the wrong direction. This wrong direction is not set by the answers the candidates gave to the questions, but the form of the questions.

The only way to get our nation back on track would be for someone to come in and change the narrative.

I am going to continue my Split The Vote campaign. If a large number of people voted third party, we might see the parties re-examine their platform and start asking the right questions.