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Reconcile the Bill

Remember before the election and Rush Limbaugh was telling us all to watch out for Barack Obama, the ruthless machine pol from Chicago?

Well, watch out.

Chicago Barack is hosting a nationally-televised health care summit tomorrow at the White House. He's invited every influential Republican to come over with their ideas to fix health insurance. He says he's ready to listen.

I always love it when you can pull off a Brazilian jiu-jitsu move that takes all the energy of your opponent and flips it back around on them. I try to do this all the time in court cases. It works great. Just when your opponent is sticking it to you the hardest, you pull back a little and watch him fall flat on his face.

WHITE HOUSE HEALTH CARE SUMMIT

SCENE I

Barack: Step back.

Republicans: Fall on face.

Republicans have been whining for months that they haven't been included in this health care redesign. It's been too closed-door, they said. Too wonky. Too inside-beltway. It's taking over "one-sixth of the economy," they claim, and isn't bipartisan.

Well, come on in and have a seat at the bluff-calling table.

Chicago Barack has done this before—to John McCain, when Mr. McCain "suspended" his campaign to supposedly deal with the economy. President Bush called a big meeting—presumably to let McCain shine as the leader-to-be, while the young community organizer from Chicago sat in the back, trying to poke his ears above the crowd.

At the end of the meeting, Chicago Barack spoke up. In jiu-jitsu style, he asked McCain for his thoughts. Problem was, McCain didn't have any. Obama even chuckled. Even Bush Sec. of Treasury Hank Paulson was blown away by Obama's brashness and McCain's bumbling.

Now we're there again. Republicans are hard charging after winning their 41st Senate seat (the least powerful minority in a generation). Health care is dead, they said.

Chicago Barack is talking about pushing health care through on a so-called reconciliation vote—bypassing Scott Brown's 41st Senate vote.

That's how they reconcile things in Chicago.

The iPad State of the Union

I'll admit it. I watched Steve Jobs' iPad keynote instead of the State of the Union last night.

After returning home from touring an airplane hanger with my local Boy Scout troop (I did have the State of the Union tuned in on the radio for the boys to listen to on the way home), I ate a little dinner, kissed Suzette on the forehead as she sat on the couch watching "Grey's Anatomy," and headed straight for the office to watch Jobs work his magic as he introduced the new Apple iPad.

Nevermind that I had texted Suzette from the hangar to ask her to please record the State of the Union speech. And nevermind that I was mildly intrigued on the way home hearing President Barack Obama declare his intention to seek significant cuts in the student loan burdens most graduating college students face after school (me included).

But what I was really intrigued about was how Steve Jobs was going to convince me that I must have Apple's most recent invention.

I have mixed feelings about Mr. Jobs. In a fit of rage one day during Apple's fetal stages, Jobs fired my dad (Jon Selden, Apple employee #29) for speaking up about the technical limitations of Jobs' then latest creation, the ill-fated Apple Lisa.

The Lisa, Apple's precursor to the Macintosh, was the first computer to use a newfangled thing called a "mouse" along with a "graphical user interface"—the first modern personal computer. Dad, a Princeton- and Standford-educated computer engineer, was on the original Lisa design team.

Apparently dad attracted Jobs rage by criticizing him for not considering other, non-mouse "pointing devices" like the touch screen. Jobs fired him, and a few other engineers on dad's side, on the spot.

We all heard the story second-hand from mom. Dad (who passed away with brain cancer in 1991) never talked about the episode. But, in a videotaped interview shortly before his death, he called it "the first time I ever failed at anything."

I won't claim vindication for dad, but I imagine he cracked a little smile of self-satisfaction wherever he was yesterday, watching Jobs unveil what he called the "magical and revolutionary," mouse-less, keyboard-less, 100 percent touchscreen iPad.

And don't worry Dad. I'll be standing in line in March to get one.

Winter

It's 32 degrees in Austin today and water mains are breaking. The Austin American-Statesman front page this morning declared: "Arctic Blast Arrives."

I'm going to Minnesota tomorrow for my Grandpa Walt's funeral. The high is expected to be 5 degrees. The low is -15 degrees. That's negative 15 degrees. Electrons stop revolving around atoms at temperatures much lower than that.

But I love the cold. It's in my blood. My Dad grew up in Minnesota winters and told us stories of playing ice hockey on frozen fields and ponds.

He moved our family to the cold, cold mountains of the Inland Northwest when I was five. He bought a Ford Bronco to drive around in. The kind with the rubber floor coating.

I grew up pushing old cars out of snow banks. I can't smell the gasoline-infused exhaust of an old car and not think about pushing my friend Brian Holdaway's '66 Mustang out of three-foot snow drifts on the way home from school.

Cold and snow and dim grey skies freeze themselves to your soul and never let go.

So I wore my wool sweater and put on my trench coat this morning and tried to get cold—even though I was sweating.

Read the bill

I just got a "Health Care Reform Alert" from my senator John Cornyn (see picture below of the Hon. Mr. Cornyn and my sweetheart at a Pat Green concert at the Nutty Brown).

In what has become one of the Republicans' primary attacks against the health insurance reform bills, the first sentence of Cornyn's email lambasts the Senate's "2,074-page health care bill."

Who cares how many pages it is? Or how long it takes to read it. What does the number of pages have to do with the purpose of the law?

Sure, some big bills are also horrible laws. President Bush's Patriot Act, which snuffed out centuries-old civil liberties after just a few hours of congressional debate, was 348 pages long. The U.S. tax code is currently 67,204 pages long and counting.

A lot of big books are classics. Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" tips the scale at almost 1,400 pages. Heaven only knows how many pages are in the Bible. And some small texts are equally poignant. The Gettysburg Address is famously only 186 words. Depending on what you think about hunting from helicopters, Sarah Palin's "Going Rouge" is a meaty 413 pages.

In the same way, small page numbers don't necessarily correlate with good laws. The Congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq War was just six pages long, including this goodie: "Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and...continu[es] to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seek[s] a nuclear weapons capability, and support[s] and harbor[s] terrorist organizations."

The much-reviled "Troubled Asset Relief Program," also known as the Wall Street bailout bill, was comparatively light reading at just 169 pages. The "Cash for Clunkers" bill handing out $4,500 of your hard-earned tax money for P.O.S.'s like 1998 Chevy Blazers: 21 pages.

And what about reading through all these pages? Reading a bill is not like reading "The Catcher in the Rye." A lot of it is made up of endless references to and quotations from previous laws—striking out, amending, and adding new language.

I wonder when the last time Sen. Cornyn curled up by the fireplace with a good copy of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (the goliath legislation largely responsible for our current health insurance system that he's defending). I doubt he has. I know I haven't.

Worth a lot of money

Last night the Congressional Budget Office leaked its cost numbers for the Senate health insurance reform bill: $849 billion over ten years. Move that decimal point over to the left and that's almost $85 billion a year. Sound like a lot of money? It is. Here's what else costs a lot of money:

Social Security: $612 billion a year

Iraq War: $117 billion a year

NASA annual budget: $19 billion

Interest payments on the national debt: $249 billion a year

All national defense spending: $613 billion a year

Department of Transportation: $68 billion

Microsoft annual revenue: $58 billion

UnitedHealth Group annual revenue: $81 billion

Aetna Inc. annual income: $31 billion

Humana Inc. annual revenue: $29 billion

ExxonMobil annual revenue: $477 billion

Wal-Mart annual revenue: $406 billion

American's annual spending on tobacco products: $89 billion

Americans annual alcohol expenditures: $97 billion

American's annual spending on health care: $2,200 billion ($2.2 trillion)

My point? A lot of big, important things (roads, exploration, defense, secure retirement for senior citizens) cost a lot of money. But, of all the things we choose to pool our tax money together and buy, health care may just be the most important.

We pool our money together to make sure the elderly have some kind of retirement fund (Social Security) and free health care in their golden years (Medicare). We all pitch-in to explore outer space (NASA). Of course, we gladly contribute a hefty sum to make sure we're safe at night (defense). And we all necessarily pay a little each for freeways and air traffic control systems (Dept. of Transportation).

But, so far, the insurance industry has kept us from deciding to pool our money together to buy adequate health care for almost a quarter of our population.

To come clean, I'm perfectly happy with my current health insurance arrangement. I pay a modest co-pay when I go to the doctor's office and my premiums are a little over $2,000 a year. But that's just for me—a (relatively) young and healthy 34 year-old man. But what if you're a woman who just found out she's pregnant? Or a middle-school kid with diabetes? Or you lose your job and can barely make the mortgage payment? Then finding reasonably-priced, adequate health care coverage is impossible.

Does this mean, under a national health care plan, that we're all going to get better care for less money? Maybe not. I imagine there will be less access to care like I've enjoyed in the private system. I might have to wait a few extra minutes in the waiting room. I may have to endure government bureaucratic headaches as I navigate a new national health insurance plan. But so will everyone else—because they will have access to care. And that's worth it.

Let me get this straight

A few weeks ago a great friend of mine, who also happens to be a physician, forwarded me the following email. The subject line was "Let me get this straight."

"Let me get this straight. We're going to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president that also hasn't read it, and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's nearly broke. What possibly could go wrong?"

To this, I simply reply:

Let me get this straight. Our health care industry is run by MBA's in suits, who pay doctors who are millionaires and hospitals owned by Wall Street shareholders a fraction of their overinflated bills, but no one knows how much they pay for their medical bills because health insurance companies send 'Explanation of Benefits' letters that read like an Enron income statement, but patients can't change health insurance companies because their employers select which insurance company they get, and the same insurance company spends most of its time tying not to pay bills because it's searching for 'pre-existing conditions,' even though it earns more profit every year and charges so much that almost a quarter of the population can't afford it, and, in the end, we all end up paying twice as much just to be half as healthy as the rest of the civilized world? What is wrong?