Health Care

I stayed up until 2:00AM last night talking with Dave about fixing health care in the US. What do we know about it? Well, nothing really, but we still like to talk.

We came up with the idea that malpractice insurance should be purchased by the patients, rather than the doctors, on an incident by incident basis. So, for example, if you're having a regular checkup you can wave the insurance altogether or pay a dollar just in case she overlooks your high cholesterol. On the other hand, if you are about to have major surgery, you pay more because the chances of something going wrong is higher.

This could keep the cost of providing health care down by offsetting one of the most expensive and least productive medical overhead expenses. It also reduces the overall cost by allowing patients to choose the level(s) of coverage, which will likely be lower in many cases than the doctor would otherwise be paying for. It could also make malpractice claims easier on the court systems by specifying that an arbitrator, not a jury, decides the outcome (unless the purchaser wants to pay extra, of course).

A similar option would be to build malpractice insurance into health insurance, especially for situations in which the purchaser may be unable to purchase the insurance up front (e.g. in an emergency), but we didn't discuss that idea very much.

Of course, this doesn't "fix" health care but it could help. Any thoughts?

Campaigns Wikia

Today I came across Jimmy Wales's blog (the Wikipedia guy) and read/skimmed the articles. One post I found especially interesting was for the Campaigns Wikia. This seems like a pretty interesting project. Here's the mission statement:

It's time for politics to become more intelligent, and for democracy to really involve the people. Broadcast media tells you what to think and doesn't let you get involved. It's time to focus on what you need, what you care about, and the messages you want to get out.

The site is obviously in its infancy. For example: there is a small article on Jeb Bush but not George. On the other hand, there are some very long articles such as the one on health care.

I'll be keeping a watch on the site to see what happens. I hope it goes well.

MySpace Spam Blocker?

I'm starting to get sick of MySpace spam. Every time I log on, I get bombarded with messages, invites, and friend requests from people with names like EZGrrrl and PinkFun.

I wonder: Do a lot of guys on MySpace get this junk? And why doesn't MySpace do something about it? Today I got around 50 of these bogus messages. I'm about ready to cancel my account. In the mean time, I will turn off email alerts so that my gmail account doesn't also get flooded.

Does anyone out there have any tips for preventing all the spam on MySpace? I Googled for answers, but found none.

I wonder if there is a market for a MySpace spam blocker. If anyone thinks it's a good idea and would like to help create one, email me with your ideas. I can provide some serious development muscle if someone else out there can provide some infrastructure and/or capital.