Our Future Healthcare...

The best model we have for Obamacare is the Massachussetts experiment with RomneyCare.  The more I read about that debacle, the more pessimistic I get about ObamaCare.  Now Megan McCardle points out an entirely new game the political geniuses in Massachussetts are playing: punish the winners and reward the losers. But I forget – that's what socialists do, isn't it?

The short version of the story: the fiscal effects of RomneyCare are making it almost impossible for hospitals in Massachussetts to make a profit (i.e., to avoid going broke).  The politicians quickly realized that this is an unacceptable situation, and that it must be fixed.  So their “fix”?  Steal $100 million  from the precious few hospitals that have managed to remain profitable, and give it to those hospitals that would otherwise be failing.  Sheer genius!

If I was on the Board of Directors of any of those hospitals, I'd be examining all possible options for moving the entire operation out of state...

The Great Dying of Thermometers...

JoNova has a nice animated graphic of the peculiar way that the number of thermometers in the IPCC data increases and then decreases.  The accompanying discussion shows how the thermometers that were removed from the more recent data somehow mysteriously tended to be the ones recording lower temperatures (thus making the average temperatures in their reported data look higher)...

Unions and Schools...

Megan McArdle on teacher's unions, with a particularly interesting example that's a nearly perfect side-by-side test of unionized vs. non-unionized...