4th Grade Math And Health Care Cost

I know why the discussion about heath care has been so poor.  It is because so few people know anything about 4th grade math.  This blog will use 4th grade math to reveal the truth about the state of our health care cost.

One of the main reasons that healthcare costs so much in the United States is because our doctors cost too  much.  Why do our doctors cost more than any other country in the world?  It is because of two factors.  Those are the cost of cost and time required to become a doctor and the time that the doctor has left to work to get back the total cost of their education.  Simple isn't it?  Here are the numbers.

Let's say that we have two doctors, both started medical school at age 20 and one graduated at age 25 and the other graduated at age 35.  The cost of medical school was $100,000 per year for each.  Each borrowed the money at 5% interest from their local bank.  When the first one graduated after 5 years, they owed $552,600 and the other second one, after 15 years owed $2,157,900.  Don't believe my numbers?  Do your own!

The next step is, "how are these two doctors going to get their bait back?"  Let's assume that both work to age 65.  That means the first doctor will work for 40 years and the second doctor will work for only 30 years.  Again, let's figure that they are still paying the same 5% like you would have with a mortgage on your home.  Next, let's figure that both doctors work 2,000 hours per year which is about average for most people.  Now, how much "extra" will each doctor have to charge per hour to cover the payment on their education.  The first doctor will have to charge $16.13/hr and the second doctor will have to charge $71.05/hr.  Is this more than you thought?  There is more.

The extra cost that the doctors charged did not make the doctors any richer.  It just paid back the money that they had to borrow.  We now have two doctors who expect to earn the "same" amount during their lives as doctors, but one only has 30 years to do that while the other has 40 years, from age 25 to age 65.  If you were the doctor who had only 30 years of possible working as a doctor, wouldn't you want to earn as much as the other doctor?  Yes!  If that first doctor expected to make $150,000 per year, then the second doctor would have to earn $200,000 per year to be equal.  Does that sound logical?  To earn that extra $50,000 per year, the second doctor would have to charge $25/hr more.  Now, let's add that to the $71.05/hr above and we get $96.05/hr.  Compare that to the first doctor who only had to charge $16.13 in total.

In most countries around the world they allow high school graduates to go directly into medical school and graduate by age 25, like the first doctor.  I think that if we were to allow doctors to "specialize" in a limited medical discipline from the start, it would have an even bigger impact on lowering the cost of doctors.  In a prior blog, I pointed out that a doctor who only does carpal tunnel surgery was not able to practice until they were over the age of 35 when they could have easily been qualified for that limited surgery by age 25.  Even Henry Ford figured this out over a 100 years ago to build cars cheap enough for most people to "afford".  Why can't our medical system figure this out?

PS--Have you noticed that there are "no" federal medical schools?  The cure for our health care cost situation is not in Washington DC, it is in the state capitals.  What is needed is for our state governors to step up and over haul our medical schools.  Is is the states who license medical doctors, not the federal government. It is the same with the predatory lawyers who plague the medical industry and drive up cost for all of us.  If you want change, start putting the pressure on your governor, not President Trump!

Better Health Care For Less

Do you really think that some politician in Washington DC can come up with a "better" health plan that actually will cost less?  If you think that, you must be smoking something.  That is what this blog is about.

This whole debate sounds like a  bunch of kids in the school yard discussing health care.  I have not heard a single one who really understands our basic problem.  This whole Obamacare fiasco started out with a "poison pill" right in the middle of it.  When Obamacare gave free first class health care to people who clearly could not afford it, he set politicians up.  If you look at our history and know anything about human nature, you know that once you give a Democratic some "free" benefit that they scream bloody murder if it is ever taken away.  Notice that our government has never had the guts to take away a benefit.  It does not matter that we could not afford Obamacare in the first place.  For our government, it is always someone else's money.  As long as our government does not want to take away a single penny from those who got the free health care, nothing is going to change.  What we need to do is to ask, "What did those people who now have free health care have before?"  If we would do that, we might start to make some progress.  What was wrong with your life regarding health care back in 1960 or 2000 or before Obamacare?  What people have to realize is that the cost of Obamacare has been paid for with money that was borrowed from China, not their tax money.

The other thing is that all the politicians keep talking about is "better" health care than Obamacare.  This is a stupid starting point.  What we need to do is to start with an estimate of what we can afford and then discuss plans that "fit" within what we can afford.  When Obamacare first started we were spending 17%-18% of our GNP on healthcare.  That is the highest in terms of percentage and absolute amount of any other country in the world.  Since Obamacare started, it is my estimate that we must now be spending at least 20% of our GNP on healthcare.  The cost of healthcare has gone up because Obamacare put more money into the pot, just like the student loan program put more money into the pot for colleges and universities.  Notice that the cost of both have gone up much faster than the index of inflation!

Now, what are people complaining about?  Many are complaining that they have to pay up to 10% of their family income on health insurance,  Is that so bad?  Remember that we spend about 20% of our GNP on healthcare, so wouldn't you expect families to pay this same percentage?  The median family income is about $50,000 per year, so 10% would only be $5,000 per year when it should be something like $10,000.  I can not figure out why people expect to pay less and get better healthcare.  I think that most people expect some one else to pay for their healthcare while they spend their own money on bigger homes and fancier cars or leave their estate to their kids.  What is wrong for a family to have to sell their home to pay for their medical bills?  Do you think that it is fair for them to will their home to their kids and have me pay for their health cost?

The bottom line is that there is no free lunch and we have to get used to living within our means.  We can not afford space age medical care for every one.  Most of the space age medical care is not worth it.  Why should a person who can not afford a new car expect that tax payers to pay for their space age medical care?  We need to get real!

PS---Remember that the life expectancy for the United States is going "down".  I think that we are about 38th in life expectancy in the world even though we spend by far the most on health care.  Keep real about all this healthcare BS! I think that, if you smoke, use drugs or are over weight, the government (tax payers} don't owe you free health care!!!

Computer Programmers Of The Future

Computers are clearly a great tool, but they are worthless without programs or people who can write programs.  Students from our major colleges and universities excel because they were selected as the smartest in the first place, not so much due to what they learned in college.  This kind of strategy worked in the past because we had an excess of intellect compared to what was needed.  The problem is that we are running out of this special intellect and need to figure out how we can get people with less intellect to participate.  That is the point of this blog.

Several years ago, I was preparing to teach a graduate class in human factors engineering which I never actually taught.  If you are not familiar with human factor engineering, here is what it is.  For thousands of years the human race has been shaped by "Darwin" to deal with the problems they faced. People think in terms of two dimensional space like a map.  If you were asked which city was farther North, Chicago or St Louis, it would be easy to give the correct answer.  If you only had a list of cities and their geographical coordinates to memorize, it would be very difficult to get the correct answer.  People with very high IQ's could work with the list of cities, but not most people.  What we need to do is to educate people and train them while taking into account their natural human factors.

Now to computer programming.  Computer programming is very "unnatural".  There is nothing in nature like computer programming and that is why only those of higher IQ's can do it well.  If we need more good computer programmers and we have used up all of our excess intellect, we need to figure out how to get those of less intellect up to speed.  The really smart kids can climb the programming ladder even if the first couple of rungs are off, but not the average kid.  What we need to do is to focus on getting those lower rungs back on the ladder so average kids can climb.  Here are my ideas on how we can do this.

First, we need to think about exactly what a computer program is.  It is a detailed procedure that explains to the computer what the programmer wants it to do.  That is what a computer program is.  People are programed by "Darwin" to think in an other way.  If a person explains to another person how to do some thing, the other person understands.  This leads me to the idea that we need to "first" train our kids to write down these procedures as a technical writer might do.  It is in "words" what a computer program does.  It is as simple as that.  I know that a lot of kids study English and English literature when they should be studying technical writing.  If we were to start with technical writing, we would have a lot of our kids on to rung one of the ladder to computer programming.

I can tell you that one of the biggest problems with the way we teach and execute computer programs is that we start by coding the program rather than doing the technical writing that is needed.  I have a lot of experience with programmers who never documented their programs.  They were too eager to get their program up and working that they did not document it.  Now other programmers can not do simple maintenance on their programs.  It is even a bigger problem because they did not first write the procedure down, others could not help them or judge if they were taking the correct approach or not.

I think that if a person first learned how to write detailed technical procedures that it would be an easy matter for them to code those procedures into computer language.  If we could do that, it would open up many more students to developing into good computer programmers.   Many kids are intimidated by computer programming when they would not if they first learned technical writing.  I think that our tech schools should seriously think about developing a program to develop tech writers with the idea that they could progress to valuable computer programmers.

PS---Here is another point.  If a person was good at tech writing, they would also be good at reading and following other's tech writing.  Isn't the purpose of school to prepare a person for life?  That means they should be able to follow procedures that allow them to stand on the shoulders of those who came before them.  Napoleon was able to command the largest army of his day because he had written down procedures for every thing. Soldiers who had been farmers a few weeks before could now be dependable soldiers.

Destroyer Fitzgerald Collision

This is about the collision between a container ship and our destroyer Fitzgerald.  I know a little about this, because I encountered a container ship off the Bahamas while sailing my Passport sailboat.

On my sailboat, I had a basic radar system that covered about 30 miles out in every direction.  I could see any boat or land mass within that circle and tell how fast and in what direction they were going.  You would think that one of our modern and expensive destroyers would have a radar system at least as good as the one that I had on my sailboat, so they could see any boat that was on a path toward them.  Container ships do not have any special features to prevent radar from picking them up, so I do not see any excuse for the destroyer crew not knowing what was happening.

Container ships are big and as a result, they can go very fast.  I know that they can cruse at 35 mph and higher.  Given the fact that the destroyer could see the container ship when it was at least 30 or 40 miles away, they could see the container ship for a full hour before it crashed into them.  During that time, the crew of the destroyer could have hailed the container ship and advise them of their position and risk of a collision.   When I saw the container ship coming my way on my radar off the coast of the Bahamas, I hailed the container ship to get advise on whether I should pass ahead or behind the container ship.  They advised that I could safely cross over their bow and I did.

Another point that needs to be considered is the fact that our modern destroyers are designed to have a minimum radar target.  I know from touring two of our modern destroyers while in dry dock at Norfolk, Va how detailed the design is to avoid detection by radar.  The crew of the Fitzgerald must have known that the container ship's radar may not be able to detect them.  If that was the case, it would have been the responsibility of the destroyer crew to do what ever was necessary to avoid a collision.  Given that the destroyer was just off the coast of Japan, I would have expected that the destroyer would deploy a special radar reflector so that commercial ships in the area could "see" them on their radars.  What we might find is that the crew of the Fitzgerald did "not" deploy their radar reflector.  I know that sailors take turns at the helm and many are only minimally qualified to run the ship.

It seems clear to me from what has been reported so far that our destroyer was at fault for the collision.  The navy will fire the captain of the destroyer, but this is like closing the barn door after the horse is out.

PS--The quality of our military has changed a lot since we went to an all volunteer military.  The IQ of our military has gone down significantly while the complexity of our ships have gone up.  More similar problems can be expected in the future as our military continues to becomes more "politically correct".  The Naval Academy does not accepts students on "merit" alone, they use nepotism for many.

PS--It happened!  The captain of the Fitzgerald was just fired along with much of his ranking crew.  That is exactly what I predicted.  Why did it take so long?

Tax Reform Myth

Have you noticed how politicians use the word "reform" so often?  It has no real meaning except something different and that difference is different in everyone's mind.  Obama used a similar word, "hope and change".  What we need is fewer of these mumbo jumbo words and real specific ideas and that is what this blog is about.

The bottom line of the current thinking about "tax reform" is that it means reducing taxes.  The idea is that by reducing taxes, it will stimulate economic growth.  This business of the tax level is not a simple "on", "off" switch, it is analog like adjusting the volume on your radio.  What happens if we adjust the tax up or down just a "little"?  How about looking at our history on the subject?  Under Obama, we only collected about 80% of the taxes that we needed and borrowed the other 20% from countries like China.  The affect of that was that our economy did "not" grow and we ended up with a big national debit.  If that is the case, do we need to lower the taxes so that we only collect 60% or 75% of the tax we need to impact the economy?

Borrowing money rather than living within our means is not the solution to any economic problem.  It only makes things worse in the end.  Look at the student loan program and how borrowing and spending over 1.6 trillion dollars on college education has stimulated our economy?  It did not! We spent the money and now, how are we going to pay it back?  Are you starting to see how we need to look deeper into all of these "reform" and "hope and change" ideas?  After spending trillions on higher education, we still have a shortage of engineers and doctors and a surplus of social science and political science kids who are deep in debit.

What if the politicians were pushing a tax "shifting" program that modernized our tax system so that it was more fair to our own companies?  If they used the word "shift" rather than "reform" I think that more people would get on board.  I am not talking about "shifting" the tax to the "rich" people, but off the companies who create jobs here in the United States.  The bottom line is that our companies are being screwed  by products from many countries who we try to do business with.  They charge us a big import tax and we don't charge them when they ship their products here.  Historically, we collected much of our tax from companies rather than directly from our citizens.  If we did not import or export anything, this system would have worked fine, but what we have is a bunch of countries gaming our tax system to their advantage against us.

If we were to do just these few things, it would have a major impact on our economy and jobs here.  First, I would take all the social security tax off companies and payroll and put it onto a federal sales tax.  That way products made in China would start paying their fair share for a change.  I would also take most of the medical coverage off the companies too.  Medical is now 20% of our economy and imported products don't pay and get a free ride.  Social security is 14% of payroll, so just these two items have a very big impact on our economy and when gamers avoid paying their share it impacts jobs here.  The talking heads always say that adding a federal tax to imports would make things cost more and that is true, but it would also mean that items made here would cost less.  Why don't you hear anyone saying that?

My plan is to "keep it simple".  Just doing the two changes that I have described above would have a major impact on jobs.  It would reduce the endless debates that are now going on and focus on the significant aspects of any change in tax policy.  Don't try to turn our tax system upside down, just do the few simple things that really count!

Cause Of Ice Age

Have you ever heard one of these Global Warming nuts explain why we ever had the ice age?  I did not think so.  I am not sure anyone knows for sure what caused the ice age or why it ended.  I know that there must be all kinds of theories out there as too why and I have mine too.  That is what this blog is about.

If you know anything about control systems, then you know about "feed backs" or "gains".  An example would be when you crest of a hill in your car.  As you crest the hill, your car might be going very slow, but as it goes over the crest, it starts to speed up and the farther that it goes down the hill, the steeper the road gets and the faster your car goes.  This is a gain or feed back that keep increasing your speed once you go beyond a tipping point.  Now back to the ice age.

The concept of green house gases is true.  Carbon dioxide is one of those green house gases and most of it is actually dissolved in our sea water.  Just like your cold beer, the colder the sea water is, the more carbon dioxide that can be dissolved in it.  The fact that the sea water might be getting colder speeds up the rate that the green house gas is taken out of the atmosphere and dissolved in the sea water.  The affect is a "gain" or "feed back" that causes the process to go faster and faster until it ends in an ice age.   It is just a case of the Earth getting to one of these tipping points where the process will start and then keep going faster and faster. Too many plants taking Carbon Dioxide out of the air could have started the whole thing.  Further, the lack of plants could have allowed the volcanoes to build up the Carbon Dioxide again and end the ice age!

The whole process could end with a different tipping point coming along.  Most of the Carbon Dioxide comes from volcanoes, not Native Americans building camp fires.  With liquid water, it can flow around the Earth equalizing the forces of gravity and rotation of the Earth, but when water builds up in solid ice at the poles, things change.  This might be the cause of greater volcanic activity and in the process the Sun's energy could be held close to the Earth by the green house gases.  This could start the thaw that we all know happened.

Here is another thing about control systems.  Many tend to "ring".  It is like a person in a swing.  The person goes up in one direction and then back in the other.  In this case there is friction that eats up some of the energy of swinging and over time the swing comes to a stop.  The fact is that this could take a very long time if the friction was low compared to the amount of kinetic energy in the swing, like a heavy person compared to a young kid.   Most systems "ring" and this is what we may have here on Earth.

This is one of my theories and I would be interested in what you think about it.

PS---Think about this.  At one time, the Earth was making a lot of coal by plants taking green house gases out of the atmosphere.  It must have been a lot,and it could have been the cause of the ice age as explained above.  Notice that the Earth is "not" making coal any more.  Why do you think that is?  Did you hear any global warming nuts explaining why the Earth stopped making coal?  Didn't think so!

Muslim Inbreeding And No Fear Of Punishment

It appears that we have a "perfect storm" within the Muslim community when it comes to terrorism.  You know what a perfect storm" is.  It is a situation where several factors come together that flow in the same direction.  It does not happen very often, but when it does, all bets are off.  Things can happen during these situations that no one would ever expect.  We are talking about things happening that you would not expect to happen once in a thousand years.  I think that this is the situation that we now have regarding Radical Muslim Terrorists.  That is what this blog is about.

In a prior blog, I pointed out that Muslims have been inbreeding for 1,400 years or for over 50 generations.  In the UK Muslims account for about only 3% of births, but 30% of mentally retarded births.  This is similar in other mostly Muslim countries.  If a large part of the population of a country is mentally retarded or have birth defects, their economies will not be able to compete around the world.  This means that most Muslim counties are doomed to be poor.  It is only where a Muslim country is blessed with oil or other natural resources that they are not poor.  We all know that people who are poor and on the outside looking in are the most vulnerable for radicalization.  This is what we have in the Muslim countries and Muslim communities in the west.  This is factor #1 in the "perfect storm".

The other factor is the lack of "fear of punishment".  In the west, all countries rely on the fear of punishment as the major means of keeping law and order.  In the west, the citizens fear being caught and punished if the try to rob a bank.  Even the "Ten Commandments" state that it is "bad" to steal.  In the Muslim community there is no fear when it comes to killing non Muslims and many will willingly kill themselves in the process.  Bring criminals to "justice" works in the west, but has zero affect on Muslim terrorists.

There is another factor within the Muslim religion and that is that it does not consider crimes against non-Muslims as crimes.  They can kill a non-Muslim and still go to heaven.  There is nothing like the Ten Commandments in the Muslim faith.  We forget that even if we had no civil law, we would still have most people following the Ten Commandments.  There is another thing about the Muslim faith that is significantly different from other faiths and that is the heads of the faith can meet out punishment here on Earth and they do.  This is in total conflict with any kind of civil order involving multiple faiths that have civil punishments here on Earth but leave their God to punish crimes related to the faith.  There is only one model possible where the Muslim faith has a chance of being compatible and that is if 100% accept the Muslim faith.  If there is not open conflict, you can bet that it is just below the surface.

There are so many things about the Muslim faith that are not compatible with the rest of civilization that I do no see any long term future for the faith.  The Muslim faith has taken the poison pill which expounds that they are the "only" true faith and all other are wrong and thus merit destruction.  If that is the case, what is wrong with all other faiths adopting the same view and get about the destruction of the Muslim faith?  Seems that what is good for one is good for the other.

PS--I visited India several years ago and learned about how the Muslims kill millions of Hindu's to forcibly try to get them to convert to the Muslim faith.  It made you sick at what the Muslims did to the Hindu's.  Most people in the west do not know this story.  The bottom line is that the Muslim faith has not changed from it origin 1,400 years ago.  Look at what happened when Hindustan was partitioned in 1947 by the British.  That was not that long ago and many of those killers are still alive today.

More Problems With Doctors

I have been thinking about my recent experience with a doctor at a major medical clinic.  I blogged about it before, but there is now a new chapter.  In that original blog, I thought that I had Lymes disease since I had all the symptoms and had been bitten by a tick recently.  The test was negative and the doctor refused to give me a prescription.

Since I came to the doctor with the idea that I had Lymes, she only responded to that idea rather than trying to find out what I really had.  It would seem that if I had all theses symptoms that looked like Lymes that I must have has something, but the doctor just focused on that one item.  I think that if I had gone in by "not" telling the doctor that I thought that I had Lymes that her brain might not have locked up on that single track.  It had to have been clear that I was suffering from something.

After continuing to live with the set of symptoms for a few more weeks, I tumbled to the idea that I may have sarcoidosis which has may of the same symptoms as Lymes.  I went to webmd and reviewed the set of symptoms and it seems clear that I have a flare up of sarcoidosis.  Both of my hands are swollen and so are my feet hurt, but not my knees and hips.  The original doctor commented that my ankles were swollen, but did not connect the dots that I might have sarcoidosis. There are some symptoms of sarcoidosis that are different from Lymes, like eye sight problems, night sweats and rashes.

I am working on a new appointment with a different doctor who is familiar with the symptoms of sarcoidosis.  We will see what happens.  One of my sister in laws is an optometrist and she told me that optometrists often are the first ones to identify sarcoidosis in patients.

Other than a poor diagnosis, the incompetency of the doctors is also causing my medical cost to be more than 10 times what it should be.  How do you think this kind of thing is affecting medical cost all over the United States?