Stanford Center for Internet and Society

This is a great dialogue. See Don's latest post here. I feel like my understanding of the issues we're discussing is improving, and I think I've got a much better handle on Don's perspective. I'll follow the numbering system we've been using to keep the points ordered.

1. Government is getting involved because the current system has become so inefficient and ineffective in addressing society's need for broad based health care. The creation of HMOs in the 80s was an attempt to turn everything over to the private sector, and it has created many of the problems we're now encountering. You can't optimize the benefit of social expenditures on health through a largely unregulated private process, which is based on profit maximization. This reform preserves the private system we currently have but increases the role of government in regulating and managing it. There's nothing in that design that violates the laws of economics -- government is constantly changing rules and incentives in the marketplace, and the market adjusts in response. The only thing that will generate bad outcomes is if the government fundamentally disrupts the incentives for private companies to provide coverage and care, and I haven't seen anything that indicates this reform will do that.

Don posted his response to my blog entry here, and I encourage you all to check it out. Many thanks to him for all the quality thought!

I was inspired by the President's address tonight, and I feel it touched on many of the points we've been discussing. But I don't want his points to drive this conversation. So let me follow Don's lead and use the structure of his blog post to order my thoughts...

Dowd today: "...President Obama is so wrapped up in his desire to be a different, more conciliatory, beer-summit kind of leader, he ignores some verities.

Don Dodson and I went to high school together. And like all high schoolers, we pretty much resembled each other during the years we shared wandering the halls at our alma mater, the Greenhill School in Dallas, Texas. Much like the rest of the world, thanks to facebook we've recently reconnected. Interestingly enough we've chosen different paths for our lives in the intervening 20 (!) years. I am a secular humanist Democrat, living in the Bay area, working at an internet company resolving disputes -- and Don describes himself (on his blog) as "a follower of Christ first, a husband and dad second, a software engineer who designs algorithms for the new F-35 fighter, and of course a proud Reagan conservative."

As some of you may know, last week many thousands of people chose to make the following statement their Facebook status: "No one should die because they can't afford health care, or go broke because they get sick. If you agree, post this as your status today." I saw the statuses going up on many of my friends' accounts and decided to put it up as my status as well. Don saw my status and responded, pushing for further clarification.

From Valleywag (warning: heavily airbrushed and quite cleavagey model picture after the link): "...that's the thing about being impolite online: it might be needlessly abrasive 95 times out of 100, but those other five times it's awesome, conveying fresh perspective readers would not have seen were it not for the

Kristof in the NYT today: "Opponents suggest that a “government takeover” of health care will be a milestone on the road to “socialized medicine,” and when he hears those terms, Wendell Potter cringes. He’s embarrassed that opponents are using a playbook that he helped devise.

“Over the years I helped craft this messaging and deliver it,” he noted.

Mr. Potter was an executive in the health insurance industry for nearly 20 years before his conscience got the better of him. He served as head of corporate communications for Humana and then for Cigna.

He flew in corporate jets to industry meetings to plan how to block health reform, he says. He rode in limousines to confabs to concoct messaging to scare the public about reform. But in his heart, he began to have doubts as the business model for insurance evolved in recent years from spreading risk to dumping the risky.

Then in 2007 Mr. Potter attended a premiere of “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s excoriating film about the American health care system. Mr. Potter was taking notes so that he could prepare a propaganda counterblast — but he found himself agreeing with a great deal of the film.

A month later, Mr. Potter was back home in Tennessee, visiting his parents, and dropped in on a three-day charity program at a county fairgrounds to provide medical care for patients who could not afford doctors. Long lines of people were waiting in the rain, and patients were being examined and treated in public in stalls intended for livestock.

“It was a life-changing event to witness that,” he remembered. Increasingly, he found himself despising himself for helping block health reforms. “It sounds hokey, but I would look in the mirror and think, how did I get into this?”

Mr. Potter loved his office, his executive salary, his bonus, his stock options. “How can I walk away from a job that pays me so well?” he wondered. But at the age of 56, he announced his retirement and left Cigna last year.

This year, he went public with his concerns, testifying before a Senate committee investigating the insurance industry.

“I knew that once I did that my life would be different,” he said. “I wouldn’t be getting any more calls from recruiters for the health industry. It was the scariest thing I have done in my life. But it was the right thing to do.”

Is there anything more satisfying that academic research that confirms one's basic worldview? Thanks are due to William Galinsky and Adam Maddux for this one:

From Larry Susskind's great blog post offering advice to Congresspeople facing angry crowds at health care Town Halls around the country:

"Here are five suggestions that grow out of what we have learned about facilitating public dialogue in politically charged situations:

1. Begin by saying that you want to hear what the audience has to say. Ask 5 volunteers to come up on the stage to ask whatever questions or make whatever statements they think are important. Invite them up. Make it clear that you don't know any of these people and you are just trying to find out what people who bothered to come to the town hall meeting have to say. Pick five who raise their hands and appear to represent different age or other groups. Let them speak. Tell them that the ground rule is that each person has the mike for no more than five minutes. Invite them to sit on the stage with you. (Make sure someone is controlling the mike and make it clear that it will be shut off after five minutes.) Don't try to respond to each statement. Just listen.

I've wanted to post something on Obama's Beer Summit for some time, but I thought it best to let the dust settle before weighing in. The racial hot buttons made it harder to focus on the conflict management approach behind the engagement. I think now the time has come to process what happened.

As I've written before, I think that Obama's baseline personality predisposes him to conciliation. Momentary passions or demonstrations of calculated distress (such as the "stupidly" comment) can pull him away from that orientation in a particular window, but over time Obama resets back to the role of conflict manager. Hence this situation ending with the television video of the three men sitting at the table with beers having a civil conversation. This case became a media phenomenon because of the intersection of class, celebrity, and connections to the White House -- there are far worse examples of police over-reaction that have generated much less media attention.

From Burbia: "The Neighbor Lawn Chair Wars continue. Here's the most recent email string between a guy who seems to know no limit to being a freak & his frustrated (but pretty damn funny) neighbor-victim... Quick Cliff Notes of the earlier emails: