JustinIdea

If Food Doesn't Require Insurance, Health Care Doesn't Require Insurance

With all of the fuss in DC surrounding Congress working on sponsoring new health care initiatives, it doesn't seem like anyone has asked this basic question: is health care truly that critical?  Here's the short question and answer - if you don't have health care for a year, will the average person die?  No.  Some people may, but most people won't.

Here's another way to look at it:

1. If you don't eat for a year, will you die?  Yes, everyone will.  
2. If you don't get water for a year, will you die?  Yes, everyone will.
3. If you aren't able to shield yourself from the elements with shelter, clothing, and blankets will you die during the winter or get shade in the summer?  If it gets very hot or cold, then yes, most people will, especially if they don't have a source of fire or heat in the winter.

So if health care is less critical than food, water, shelter, and clothing, but the average person pays for their own food, water, shelter, and clothing, is able to afford it, and has seen the cost of each of those items drop over the last 50 years, then why are people arguing that we need to require everyone to expand the role of health insurance and government in health care?  It doesn't make any sense.  

You don't buy food, water, shelter, or clothing insurance in order to buy these most basic necessities.  Necessities, nonetheless, that you require in order to live and without which you will die.  If the average person walking into a store or looking at homes did need insurance for these, it would make prices go up and make people starve and die, because they would waste time having to get approval from their provider to see if they could buy the apples that went on sale for 99 cents a pound.  Sound familiar?

So if people can pay for their own food, water, shelter, and clothing, and small government programs like food stamps and charities, such as food banks, can provide the basic human needs we need without big insurance programs and mandates, then people should pay for their own health care, directly.  If people paid for their own basic health care without insurance, you would see costs drop, quality increase, and everyone would be able to afford it and would get it.  Insurance would be used just like homeowners insurance, in case something really bad happened.

If you want everyone to have health care and have lower costs for health care, people should be allowed to pay for their own basic health care and buy insurance for only things that are catastrophic.

Related Article:
Controlling Rising Health Care Costs - Give the Power to the People

The Next Industrial Revolution

Bob Hauge's research team at Rice University just announced they've created a method that can build pure carbon nanotubes that are currently measured in centimeters, but could eventually yield nanotubes of unlimited length.

For those who are wondering what's so big about carbon nanotubes, carbon nanotubes are small carbon tubes that are 1/50,000th the width of a human hair and at least 30 times stronger than steel.  Being able to mass-produce carbon nanotubes for cheap will create a revolution in manufacturing at least on the scale that computers of done and continue to do to information.

Carbon nanotubes are currently incredibly expensive to manufacture.  For example, 1kg of single-wallled carbon nanotubes at cheaptubes.com costs $50,000.  That's why this method is potentially so powerful.  If this method can drop the price by 100x-1000x, which would be $50-500/kg, cars would become lighter and safer, clothing would become bullet-proof, human space exploration would become economical, and the infamous space elevator would be able to be built on a budget (right now a low payload elevator would cost $450 million - how about a heavy-lifter for $20 million?!).  I can't wait until this process is commercialized.

Large Scale Genetic Studies of Diseases May Be Seriously Flawed

A group of researchers from McGill University studying abdominal aortic aneurysms published a paper in the July issue of Human Mutation that has serious implications for all large scale genetics studies that have been started in the last 15 years (except for those using DNA from cancer cells), including those funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute and studies that are the basis for new gene therapies and genetic testing.  

The group of researchers found that contrary to what had been previously thought, the DNA in every cell in a person's body is not essentially identical.  This is huge because genetic tests for diseases have traditionally used DNA from the blood in order to test a person for risk of a given disease (with many consumer genetic tests using saliva).  The fact that one cannot just use any DNA found in the blood or saliva, but must instead extract DNA straight from the problem cells, means that all previous genetic studies, aside from those that used cancer DNA, will need to be redone and all future studies cannot rely on just blood samples from people.  Not to mention that in order to perform genetic studies and tests, doctors will need to be able to get sample cells directly from the person's tissues that they are worried about.  

Learning Limb Regeneration From Salamanders

Back in high school, a friend of mine gave a presentation in an advanced biology class we had together about the potential to regenerate human limbs by learning about salamanders, which he also tied to how humans could eventually take-on the power of some superheroes.

Well, it looks like researchers are starting to make some important progress on learning about how salamanders are able to completely regenerate parts of their bodies, including limbs, jaws, skin, organs, and parts of their brains and spinal chords.  Imagine if humans had this type of power?  The Department of Defense certainly wants us to, so that amputees from war are able to regenerate their limbs and live a normal life, and has given a $6.25 million research grant to scientists studying the creature.

So where is the state of science on the salamander at?  Currently, scientists in Germany have genetically engineered a version by adding a green-glowing gene from a jellyfish to a wild mutant without skin pigment, so they are able to track the fluorescent proteins as the limbs regenerate.

The Genius Curve

A couple of friends had passingly mentioned it, so I decided to hunt down the paper on "the genius curve."  It's a very interesting paper published in 2003 about how the genius and crime curves are linked by the testosterone drop that happens in men once they get married and have kids - this causing men to be less competitive and hence cause less crime and provide fewer scientific achievements.  I was wondering what environmental effects might cause this.  The fact that married men still make contributions to science after they marry, even if there's a drop-off signals more than evolutionary biology is happening.

Some ideas that come to mind:

1. Time dedicated to work decreases.  Once married and with kids, you start to restrict your work hours.  Gone are the 80-90 hour weeks, and 40-60 becomes the new norm.  Unless you're ok with not seeing your family as much.
2. Time at work becomes focused on securing resources for the family.  The focus is no longer on trying to make amazing contributions, but instead the near-term need of making sure the bills are paid and that savings for the kids education is happening.  
3. They worry about keeping-up with the Jones's, so making contributions to humanity starts to take a back seat again.
4. They start to work-out less, especially strength training, due to increased time commitments elsewhere, which lowers their testosterone levels below the elevated levels they had when they worked-out.
5. They allow their minds to become less curious due to their shift in focus.  If you're having a tough time putting food on the table, will you really care about the latest developments in human genetics?  Although I'm guessing with amazing scientists that less curiosity doesn't necessarily become the case, but maybe more so, the men become more ingrained in their ways of thinking.

Another thing to look at would be the people who continued to be productive and contribute to science in their later years.  Are there any commonalities among them aside from not having married and have kids, and if so, do they do something that the ones that peak in their 20's don't or vice versa?  And what does this mean for entrepreneurs?  Seeing as I'm 23, an entrepreneur, not married, and without kids, I'm curious as to what things might cause men to achieve less later in life. 

Minorities Holding-Back Minorities

The fact that an African-American firefighter would punch a Latino firefighter, because the Latino firefighter stood up for equality under the law, is ridiculous.  It's sad that some minorities want their employers to promote them based-on the color of their skin instead of the content of their character, and these are the ones who have been holding back minorities for the last 45 years.  Did they not listen to Martin Luther King, Jr - a man that is held up as a martyr among men and in the same esteem as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln?

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

The content of one's character is judged based-on merit and how they deal with others.  Holding minorities to a lesser standard than whites is reverse discrimination and does not hold true to the words that King spoke on August 28th, 1963.  If minorities aren't up to par competing based-on merit, they need to shape-up and start working harder and smarter, instead of complaining about discrimination.  Focusing on championing educational achievement in minority communities by the minorities themselves, like Booker T. Washington had done, would be a great start.

But too many minorities feel entitled today because of injustices that occurred in the past.  But do you know what?  This is America.  We aren't limited by a caste society where you must stay in the same social bracket that your parents were born in and perform the same job as them.  We have the freedom to be our own people.  If your workplace is discriminating against you, then quit and start your own company whose policies of non-discrimination will make you out-compete the competition and put them out-of-business.  

Yes, there is still racism in America, but it isn't nearly as bad as it was 50 or 150 years ago.  Today's racism is peanuts compared to then.  So stop complaining and start working, doing otherwise is a disservice to those that were enslaved and faced heavy discrimination in the past.  And if American-born minorities don't start working, then the immigrating minorities will leave them in the dust (and hopefully change the culture of laziness among some of the American-born ones at the same time).  Just look at President Obama.  He's the son of a Kenyan immigrant (no American slave roots).  It's the work ethic that counts.  

p.s. Apparently Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor doesn't agree that merit should be held above color.

Translating the 10 Principles of Economics for Non-Economists

In case you were wondering what is guiding all of those economists out their making decisions right now that will decide the future state of our economy (or if we'll have one), Yoram Bauman does a brilliant job of translating the 10 principles, so that non-economists can understand what is going on in the minds of economists.

From his blog: Random Observations for Students of Economics