State of Utah

Last night, Utah Governor Jon Huntsman delivered his yearly "State of the State" address. I think my state's governor is on to something. I can only hope that he's going to be able to put through the things he's talking about. Let me give you a preview.

As for education:

These fine teachers, and thousands of their colleagues, deserve our sincere appreciation. To show this gratitude my budget calls for 18.2% in new education funding. This includes $25 million for a one-time bonus for Utah teachers in the classroom. But we must continue to do more. Much more. For these reasons, my complete education proposal - which includes a 9% increase in compensation - represents the largest total public education budget in our State's history.

I think that's a good idea. A 9% increase in teacher's salaries will help, that's for sure. He's got a lot better chance of getting support for it because all the school administrators (which there are too many of) will be getting a raise, as well. I think another fiscally sound solution to getting more money into the places it needs to would be to fire a bunch of these administrative "middle men."

By fundamentals, I mean helping Utah children receive adequate healthcare. It is an irony that we live in a country which mandates insurance for our cars, but not for our children's health. For too long the lament over the large number of those without health insurance has been fragmented and unproductive. We must stop seeing this crisis as a one dimensional social issue. The large number of those without health insurance nationally and in our own State highlights a dilemma in defining the proper role of government and a critical challenge to the exercise of individual responsibility. I am recommending more than $4 million to lift the cap on the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which will allow more than 14,000 additional Utah children access to the health care they so desperately need.

In addition to the children, there are hundreds of thousands of uninsured adults. We must stop kidding ourselves that those who are uninsured are simply not receiving health care. They are receiving care, but they are receiving too little, too late - and typically in settings such as emergency rooms where the care is much more expensive than if it had been provided elsewhere. And who is paying for this care? In rare cases it is the uninsured themselves, but in the overwhelming number of cases it is government - which, of course, means taxpayers - and, the hospitals - which, of course, means the business community - in the form of higher and higher and higher premiums for those who are buying and providing health insurance.

Wow. Maybe he's been reading my blogs.

Health Care in Utah

Health Care may be coming up in the next Utah legislative session. It seems we have a budget surplus of over 1 billion dollars in the state. Now everyone wants a piece of the pie. I'm not against given it to some of them, as long as they handle it well. It looks like one Utah State Senator (D), Scott McCoy, wants to got beyond deciding what to do with the surplus and create a Utah state constitutional amendment that declares health care a human right.

This is a rough one for me. While I claim to be a capitalist, when it comes to issues like health care, I'm borderline socialist. There are two alternatives when it comes to issues surrounding the uninsured, and the under-insured. We either take care of them, or we let them die.

While our Republican legislative leaders are promising to fund various health care issues, they are also the first ones to talk about the amount of money the uninsured and the under-insured cost us each year.

My personal opinion is that the programs we have in place, such as Medicare and Medicaid, are rewarding the wrong things. Many times a patient's basic care won't be covered, but life threatening conditions will. What happens, then, is that the basic diseases and syndromes get worse, and contribute to the development of long-term life-threatening issues. It's the treatments for these life-threatening issues that cost so much. A better solution, in my mind, would be to fund the best of the basic interventions and preventions. I believe that investing in simple preventative treatments will help halt the development of the life-threatening ones, saving us money in the long run.

Maybe we should try and stop people from getting terribly sick in the first place, instead of enacting a constitutional amendment that may, or may not, actually do anything.

Spyware is Evil

My computer has started acting up a bit. About a month ago it started getting slow. In fact, as the month progressed it got slower, and slower, and slower . . . kind of like and old man on vicoden. Anyway, like any hack hacker, I started looking at my system processes.

Now, I don’t know what even half of these things do, but I’m willing to screw around with them. I’m kind of dangerous that way. My real computer guru friends all cringe, smile, and chew their tongues when I talk with them about this sort of thing.

So I started doing searches on the web for each of these processes. So far so good. Low and behold, one of the cropped up as a spyware program. I’m pretty careful, or as careful as I can be. I don’t open email with attached files that I’m not expecting, and so on. Computers have minds of their own, it seems, and mine got infected.

I found a really cool program, though. It’s called Spyware Blaster. It’s made by a company called Javacool software. They’re right. It’s cool. It doesn’t uninstall spyware, it just stops it from running. I installed it, ran it, and even set it up to automatically load when I start my computer.

My computer runs so much faster now. Amazing, isn’t it?

Iraq Report

The Iraq Study Group Report came out this morning. From what I've heard, there are no real surprises (or smoking guns) here. I've only started perusing the actual report (hat tip to the AP for the pdf link), it's 160 pages long.

The recommendation that may just be the most difficult one to deal with is the call for greater diplomatic talks with Iraq's neighbors. In times past our government has made many deals with governments that not only disagree with the ideas of democracy, but in some cases are down right evil in the way they deal with their people. In this case we've got Syria and Iran to contend with, both of which have shown that they talk out of both sides of their mouth. Iran openly hates us and calls for our destruction but then says it stands ready to help out in Iraq. I can't help thinking that it'll end up as a double cross. Worse, I suspect it's an attempt to create a stable U.S. supported government that will be another voice for the genocide of Israel. That would put the U.S. in a very difficult position, for sure.

By the way, if you don't think Iran, and the vast majority of Middle Eastern countries, wants Israel blown off the map, you really have been living with your head in the sand.

A friend of mine, who is "in the know" on such things, told me over a year ago that the problem with exporting democracy into the Middle East is that they are an essentially immature people. While I thought it was an interesting idea at the time, the more I see of what's going on, the more I understand what he was saying, and the more I think he's right. It takes a certain level of maturity to be able to assign value to other people. Children and adolescents often think only of themselves. Many care little if what they do hurts others, as long as they get what they want. What they want, sometimes, has nothing to do with reality. They just want to feel powerful.

This seems to be the same thing with the terrorist factions in Iraq, and elsewhere. They don't assign value to human beings, just because they are humans. For many of them, killing Americans, Israelis, or anyone who sympathizes with them has the same moral implication as stepping on a bug. Worse, by doing so, it makes them feel powerful and in control. Such control is an illusion, but how do we negotiate with that kind of a mindset?

It's going to get interesting.