How Many New Doctors?

It has been reported over the past couple of days that the health care reform legislation will include the hiring of 16,000 new IRS agents in order to police conformity with the mandate that each tax payer has health insurance. I spent some time Googling this morning without any result as to the question of how many new doctors will the legislation provide?

The United States this year will produce approximately 51,000 new lawyers and 16,000 new doctors. Do you see anything wrong with that picture? We have a judicial system over burdened with frivolous law suits and a healthcare system over burdened with the cost of malpractice insurance and we allow an academic system to go on turning out numbers that exacerbate the situation.

Massachusetts has recently continued this foolish trend with the acquisition of the failing Southern New England School of Law. Massachusetts has the fourth highest total per capita of lawyers in the nation, what constituency in the state is crying out for more of them?

As it relates to health care, the more lawyers we have in the country, the more likely we are to continue to have soaring cost of malpractice insurance. Already nearly 10 cents of every medical insurance premium goes to paying malpractice awards. The answer to curtailing these exorbitant costs is to cap the awards that can be made by juries in malpractice cases.

Of course every case is not the same, a person at 25 with a life long earnings potential ahead of him is likely to win a higher award in court than a person who is 85, however, at some point there is a convergence of a reasonable number for the plaintiff versus a reasonable number for the system. Juries are prone to thinking exorbitant awards will be paid by the insurance companies when in reality the cost is passed on to all of us in the system.

That reasonable number should be arrived at and placed as a cap on the entire system. Tort reform is reasonable and it should be included in any overall health care reform legislation passed by congress. At the moment, it is not included in the massive bill being discussed and perhaps passed today.

Tort caps and tort reform should be the cornerstone of any health care reform legislation. Is the reason it is not is because the trial lawyers are one of the largest donor constituencies of the Democrats?

Another simple tweak of the system that could provide significant relief would be interstate competition by health insurance providers. Why in a country that was built on competition do we have a health care system that prevents it? With an aging population needing more care in the future, how will more lawyers and IRS agents address the problem?

Sunday Vexations

The first picture here is Sunday morning Southbound on Rte 128 just before the Mall Road/Rte3A exit. We have 2 state DPW trucks trying to manage the water flowing along the break down lane.

Picture number 2 shows the flow of the water along the exit ramp itself as you approach route 3A.

Picture number 3 shows the source of the water. This is what formerly was a woodland just below the Trammel Crow/Burlington Centre site. As you can see it is no longer a woodland but now an overflow swamp that is killing all of the trees that formerly existed there. Will continued build out and water run off from impervious surfaces in the town increase the number of these vegetating woodlands that are being turned into swamps?

Picture number 4 is the Center Street standpipe. This was formerly painted a beautiful sky blue color which almost made the tank fit into the landscape. Since the town leased out the standpipe to antennae companies you can see the visible deterioration of the tank. The orange color that you see is a large and continuing build up of rust on the exterior of the tank. Is the income from the rental worth the obvious damage that is being done to the tank? Has the town explored what the damage means to the life of the tank as well as the safety issue should the tank continue to corrode?

Lastly of course is a picture that we are all familiar with. These are the pumps at the Terrace Hall lift station pumping raw sewerage directly into the Vine Brook. This happened two weeks ago as well during a heavy rain storm and some snow pack melt. This has been an increasingly more common occurrence. What will be the effect when more development comes on line or if the economy improves and our vacancy rate declines significantly?

These issues are not going away and in fact are getting worse. Another area similar to the Trammel Crow site is down behind the old Star Market on Middlesex Turnpike. This used to be a woodland with the Vine Brook passing through it. It has now become a denuded area which is covered by water a good deal of the time.

Also of concern is the Great Meadow it self. Many large expansions have been approved in the area. Where is all the water going to go from roof and parking garage drains? Will it flood the Great Meadow and kill all the vegetation there?

The Planning Board, Board of Selectmen and the Conservation Commission need to take a serious look at the solution to this problem or we are going to have additional open space simply turned into swamp.

Contemplating a Move to the Dark Side

I have been a Democrat my entire life. That is not to say that I have not committed heresy a few times by pulling the lever for a Republican but it has been on a relatively rare occasion.

Over the last few months I have seriously considered a move to the dark side. All the reasons are to numerous to mention here but the general theme runs along with the Democrats coming into control of the house, senate and the presidency.

Since the election of President Obama it seems as though the entire Democratic Party suffers from blindness, deafness and dementia. What happened to the most ethical congress in history? What happened to the most transparent government in history? Apparently Obama, Reid and Pelosi weren't counting closed door payoffs for votes or appointing an array of tax cheats when they made those comments.

As we sit here on a Friday night the Democrats are conniving behind closed doors to alter the rules of government to ram through a piece of legislation that is by many accounts terribly unpopular in the country, will be a boon to big Pharma and increase the budget deficit to over 10 trillion dollars.

Despite what now is an endless stream of information completely under cutting the global warming crusade, we still have our own Senator Kerry trumpeting the idea that great progress is being made in passing legislation that will impose new taxes on industry and transfer American wealth to third world countries all resting on the dubious premise that we are responsible for damaging the planet.

The foreign policy front is even worse. The campaign promise was to restore respect for America lost during the cowboy years of the Bush administration. Good God! Nobody laughed at Bush except for the nuts at the New York Times and MSNBC. Obama is becoming a laughingstock through out the world.

The Biden visit and the subsequent call to the Israelis by Secretary of State Clinton have significantly damaged our relations with Israel. The Turks are up in arms over the Armenian genocide description and the Brits and the French seem to have little respect for our rookie leader. The Chinese are openly mocking us on financial matters and human rights issues.

Virtually no progress has been made on North Korea, Iran, Venezuela or Cuba. In fact, the only policy successes that the administration can claim is in the democratization of Iraq. The same Bush policy that Democratic Party sycophants said would be a complete failure not to long ago.

The failure of the Democrats has not been exclusive to national politics. Take a look across the land and see what states appear to be suffering the most from this economic down turn. The biggest concerns are in the blue states. New York and California are in complete disarray with enormous budget deficits. Michigan is in such bad shape that the mayor of Detroit is actually talking about abandoning parts of his city. Massachusetts still can't close its budget deficit despite significant tax increases.

Of course, you have Democrats like Barney Frank who lay this economic mess at the feet of George Bush but here is my problem with that, I have been in the finance business for 20 years and was around to see the elimination of the ban on interstate banking, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the enormous expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. President Clinton signed the repeal into law and of course Barney's hands were all over the collapse of those two entities.

Anybody, any party or even a country can have a run of bad luck. The Democrats seem Hell bent on extending that bad luck right into the mid terms. You might think Democrats would have thought twice about following the Reid, Pelosi Obama healthcare agenda following the debacle in the Massachusetts election for Ted Kennedy's seat. But no, it has been damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. If they continue on this course I am sure that I am not the only life long Democrat thinking that the Republicans look like a better alternative.