Switzerland has all private but non-profit insurance which has levels of coverage. The basic level is affordable for all (similar to the connector in MA). The highest level offers coverage in every country in the world. This also works. I could live with either system.

Like you, I am concerned that neither the current state nor the new health care law sufficiently hold down costs.

But seriously…the only way that costs are going to decline or be retrained is to cut services or make the entire population healthier. Which do you think is more likely to occur?

Or, does a Harvard/Yale degree open doors to jobs that give you the kind of experience that is necessary to be considered for these positions.

Or, do all the smart people go to Harvard/Yale?

Being a graduate from an Ivy League school is not a negative. The negative is that the Supreme Court is losing Educational Diversity amongst its members. A very simple example could be vanilla ice cream. Everyone likes vanilla ice cream. The problem arises when you limit your diet exclusively to vanilla ice cream. You get lots of calcium, but you lose out on all of the other needed vitamins and minerals to live a healthy productive life. The same can be said about losing the diversity of knowledge and diverse perspectives that people from other institutions can provide. The majority of the Supreme Court Judges should not be Ivy League graduates.

I am of the opinion that Supreme Court decisions may be considered biased, due to their common Ivy League education, and they are engaging in discrimination, by limiting the Court to Ivy League Graduates.

The following applies to Kagan, just as it did to Sotomajor.

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Obamas Appointment of Sotomayor Fails to Offer Educational Diversity to Court.

Sotomayor does not offer true diversity to our Supreme Court. The potential power of Sotomayor’s diversity as a Latina Woman, from a disadvantaged background, loses its strength because her Yale Law degree does not offer educational diversity to the current mix of sitting Judges. Once she walked through the Gates of Princeton and then Yale Law School she became educated by the same Professors that have educated the majority of our current Supreme Court Justices, and our Presidents.

Diversity in education is extremely important. We need to look for diversity in our ideas, and if our leaders are from the same educational background, they lose the original power of their ethnic and gender diversity. The ethnic and gender diversity many of our current leaders possess no longer brings a plethora of new ideas, only the same perspective they learned from their common Ivy League education. One example of the common education problem is that Yale has been heavily influenced by a former lecturer at Yale, Judge Frank, who developed the philosophy of Legal Realism. Frank argued that Judges should not only look at the original intent of the Constitution, but they should also bring in outside influences, including their own experiences in order to determine the law. This negative interpretation has influenced both Conservatives and Liberals graduating from Yale. It has been said that Legal Realism has infested Yale Law School and turned lawyers into political activists.

A generation of appointees with either a Harvard or Yale background, has the potential to distort the proper interpretation of our Constitution. America needs to decentralize the power structure away from the Ivy League educated individual and gain from the knowledgeable and diverse perspectives that people from other institutions can provide. We should appoint Supreme Court Justices educated from amongst a wider group of Americas Universities.

Harvard -

Chief Justice John Roberts
Anthony Kennedy
Antonin Scalia
Stephen Breyer
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Harvard, Columbia)

Yale

Samuel Alito – Yale JD 1975
David Souter
Clarence Thomas – Yale JD 1974
Sonia Sotomayor – Yale JD 1979

Northwestern Law School.

Justice John Paul Stevens

The Presidents we have elected for the last twenty years, have themselves been Harvard or Yale educated. This has the potential to create an even more closed minded interpretation of our laws.

Yale – Bush Sr. – 4 years
Yale Law – Clinton – 8 years
Yale – Bush, Jr. – 8 Years
Harvard Law – Obama – 4 – 8 years

When we consider that our Nation has potentially twenty – eight years of Presidential influence from these two Universities, as Americans, we should look long and hard at the influence Yale and Harvard have exerted on our nation’s policies. Barack Obama promised America Change, but he has continued the same discriminatory policy by appointing a Yale graduate over many qualified candidates that graduated from other top Colleges and Universities in America.

Mortgages are one cause, of course. Buying a home is the American Dream, and banks and mortgage companies were eager to grab all the dollars they could over the last 30 years by using variable rate mortgages, not thinking — or caring — about what happened down the road when the balloon inflated and mortgage payments became more than the average family could manage. This surely comes as no surprise. But in my opinion, the mortgage crisis will eventually settle itself, even if the government does nothing. The result may be a glut of rental property on the market, and, probably, a glut of renters, barely holding onto financial solvency, nevermind the American Dream. Those who can afford to buy will be attracted by lower property costs, and those who cannot afford to buy will rent those properties. An increase in class separation will result, but that is almost inevitable anyway.

The unavailability of credit, especially to small business, means that jobs will recover at a much slower rate than the overall economy. According to a recent count, the country has lost some 8 million jobs in the economic crash. There are some regulatory bills that are kicking around Congress at the moment that will provide incentives for hiring, but it is too little, and much too late. It is estimated that these incentives may create less than 300,000 jobs, a mere bucketful removed from a vast pool of unemployment. More must be done, of course. Surely this is no surprise. If the various financial agencies in the government do their jobs, credit should eventually recover and credit will once again become available (to those who don’t really need it, at least at first, but jobs are jobs), incentives will kick in, and the job market will improve — but not enough.

What will really improve the job market is one single force — consumer spending. As it is now, we are in a downward spiral: job losses mean less income, less income means less consumer spending, and less consumer spending means less enployment. We live in a consumer society, and jobs are created when spending allows, and sometimes forces, businesses to hire. Spending must be suffient to overcome the reluctance of the business owner to take on more employment tax and employee insurance expense.

And health insurance? Insurance companies, who are right now (and continously) asking for rate hikes, blame rising medical costs, and the medical community blame lawsuits (often frivilous, but increasing common as people grab on to what they see as an easy way to get rich), that cause an ever-increasing climb in the cost of malpractice insurance. Once again, the consumer is the helpless victim of the spiraling of health care insurance; some simply have not been able to keep up and they fall off the roles of the insured.

Here is, it seems to me, a key that can be used to increase comsumer spending by allowing American workers to keep more of their income, create jobs, and promote economic recovery. This is the one are that is not self-correcting. The health insurance and medical communities are on a road to self-destruction, “riding the bubble” as it were, which will burst, as it did in the housing market, and total chaos in health care will result.

One of two things need to be done immediately. Either the government should implement a Medicare-based public option, which will provide a downward pressure on insurance rates, or they should require that all private insurers be strictly non-profit, which will turn the focus of the insurance companies away from profit and shareholders, and place it on those who they are supposed to serve — the American people.

Will it happen? Almost certainly not. The Republicans in Congress cannot hand a Democratic president such a huge win as health care reform so close to mid-term and second term elections, not if they intend to re-take the seats they have lost. This vicious lack of bipartisan concern for the welfare of the American people is not only unconsitutional, it’s immoral — but that is another discussion for another time.