I miss St Lucia—the rainforest, the idyllic beach, most of all the rum punch—but Tyler Cowen brings me home with this out-of-the-park apercu:
Government-dominated health systems, insofar as they work well (a number of them do), succeed simply by lowering costs. Health care has a murky relationship to human health, pharmaceuticals and broken limbs aside. A version of the single-payer system, as might be adopted in the United States, would not lower costs. We would be raising taxes and lowering medical innovation to give poor people a good deal more financial security and a slight bit more health; that is the relevant tradeoff.
Our national debate would benefit from decoupling the healthcare problem into two disjoint issues: First, healthcare is (too) expensive. Second, the desire to provide (near) universal care. The separation is important, if for no other reason than sufficiently solving the former would make irrelevant the latter—the issue rests not just on the fact that healthcare is a basic component of well-being (so is water), but that it is very expensive, particularly for certain demographics.
Anyhow, I have the immune system of a wolf, so I spend my hours lying in the sun, inebriated:
Photos one through three shot on a Canon EOS 5D with EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens; photo four shot on a Canon SD800 IS by guest.