This is pretty cool. One window tracks the current location of the ISS over the Earth and the other shows a live feed from one of four HD video cams mounted on the outside of the station.
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload
Generally the movie was well written, acted and directed and was a lot of fun to watch. More specifically the first 5/6 of Gone Girl was very well done, but the ending 1/6 not so much. I have to wonder if they vetted this, or any other ending with a focus group, because in my opinion this one was clearly flawed.
In terms of genre, the movie is a mix, but in most general terms could be bucketed as “super-smart schemer sociopath manipulates everyone to get what she wants.” In the beginning you don’t know what the wife’s narration really is, that many of the scenes she describes are not real, but part of a grand and complicated revenge plot. As a result you get a who-done-it effect early on, not quite sure when and/or if the husband is lying or truthful and why. Then midway through, the scheme is revealed and the movie becomes more of a battle of wits for the highest stakes. All of this goes very well so long as you’re willing to suspend the disbelief that anyone could or would construct so elaborate a plan or that the husband would be so completely clueless that his wife of five years, girlfriend of two, was completely nuts. Excepting that, it’s great until the last part.
There’s a scene near the end where the wife, who has just returned from being “gone” with stories of kidnapping, rape and self-defense killing, tells this fabricated story to a room full of police and FBI investigators. She comes off sounding ridiculous – the theater audience around me was laughing – and the detective that was first going after the husband starts pointing out the story’s holes and absurdities with basic questioning. At this point I was sure the film would end with the master schemer arrested, but instead a higher ranking cop tells the detective to knock it off. There the story went wrong and stays wrong through the end.
I’ve heard there was some controversy over the scene where an ex-boyfriend explains how the master schemer had framed him for rape as revenge for some wrong he committed. A reviewer remarked on NPR that if the story hadn’t been written by a woman it probably would have been a big blaming-the-victim in sexual assault issue. I’m not sure that’s fair, as that scene doesn’t imply anything about sexual assault in general, though it does suggest that a man framed with enough care is essentially screwed. However, historically in the US the benefit of the doubt has gone against the victims of rape, so I can see why some would find the scene and its implication that women can fake being raped offensive. I find the controversy interesting but was not persuaded by the argument to the point it influenced how I feel about the movie.
Overall I think Gone Girl was very entertaining and well worth watching.
3.5/5
Oblivion is another alien invasion story but with a couple twists. First, the story takes place after a successful invasion and second the main character doesn’t know the aliens won nor does he know he’s in fact working for them against the remnants of Earth’s last surviving human defenders. Other than that, this is a pretty formulaic story.
In short, aliens show up to loot the Earth of some resource plentifully available throughout the universe – in this case energy in the form of heavy water from the Earth’s oceans – but first have to subdue the natives. This was more or less successful, chiefly through destroying the Moon and unleashing global tsunamis and earthquakes, though as noted there are still some resistance fighters. The hero, also as noted, takes a few twists and turns before becoming humanity’s last best hope but finally delivers a nuclear bomb to the alien mother ship, destroying it and sacrificing himself in the process. With the mother ship gone all the killer drones on the surface stop functioning and the resistance is saved in the nick of time.
There is a love story side plot involving the hero’s wife, who had been in suspended animation since before the Earth was conquered. He saves her, their love is rekindled, and she helps him see he’s a tool of the alien invaders. Love will hold us together.
Oh, and the aliens in this story are in fact a single very powerful artificial intelligence operating a giant space-craft capable of cloning huge numbers of humans and manufacturing all manner of equipment from battle drones to gigantic heavy-water harvesters. There is no hint as to what the giant robot ship’s purpose is, who built it, why, etc. It apparently just wanders around the galaxy sucking up fusion fuel from the oceans of worlds like Earth. Of course that premise is preposterous, but that’s the key problem with this sort of story. It’s very difficult to find a reason to invade the Earth.
The film looks good, the story is neat and tidy – too much so, in fact – and Tom Cruise delivers a fine performance, as usual. There’s some sex, plenty of violence and a jealous betrayal. But as with most stories of this sub-genre the premise is stupid, nor is it all that believable that the AI alien invader needs human clones as maintenance workers for it’s killer drone fleet. But it was still fun to watch.
2.75/5.0
How many weeks are there in a month? Four, right? No, not really. A quick tally shows four of our months have 30 days, seven have 31 days and there is one month with 28. Yeah, 28 days is four weeks, but that’s only 75% of the time. Every fourth year February has 29 days, aka leap year. In short, every month has four weeks plus some fraction of a week.
But so what? That’s how the calendar works, right? There’s just no way we can get to four week months, the days just don’t divide up the right way. Or do they?
If you take the 365 days in a full year and divide it by the 28 days of a four week month you get darn close to an even number: 13.03571428571429. Huh, that’s very nearly 13 four-week months, with just a little leftover. Well, if you tinker around some you will discover that subtracting one day from 365 gives you an even 13, with a one day remainder. That means we really could have a year full of four-week months, it’s just that there would be 13 of them and there would be one full day left over.
Really, one day isn’t so hard to recon with. There’s already a New Year’s Day holiday after all. How big a leap is it to strip this one day out of the rest of the year’s months and call it a stand alone New Year’s holiday? And every fourth year would be a double super holiday, aka leap year again. Done, every month has four weeks, 28 days, 672 hours, etc.
But what about your birthday, right? What about Christmas? We would lose track of all those special dates we are so used to celebrating every year, wouldn’t we? Well no, not really. Consider that the number of days in the year isn’t changing. To map your special date onto the new calendar, just count the number of days from the first of the year on the old calendar and it will be the same day in the new. Simple.
But where would the new month go and what would it be named? The most practical approach would be to fit in the new month right after December, though there’s no reason it couldn’t go somewhere else. For that matter all the months could be shuffled around or renamed. And since the international standard could be just the number of the month, week and day, every country could name the months whatever they wanted. Indeed the seemingly intractable naming problem could be rendered moot by letting every interested state or city name the months whatever they wanted.
So there it is. Our year really should have 13 months, not 12. I’m not particularly superstitious about the new unlucky number of months, but a great many people around the world definitely are. They will not like a 13th month, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fabulous idea.
Based on the poor reviews I waited until Skyline came out on video to watch it, would not have seen it at all if it hadn’t been available instantly on Netflix, and even then I wasn’t expecting to get through the entire film. But I was pleasantly surprised. It isn’t nearly as bad as the reviews characterize it, the effects are first-rate, the plot more or less the best alien invasion story I’ve ever encountered on film, except maybe Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the acting wasn’t bad. I will say that the characters weren’t particularly interesting – the actors portrayed them well enough, but something was off about them in the writing, something implausible or not true to life. But on the whole I enjoyed Skyline quite a lot.
As a big sci-fi fan I want to note a few things particular to the genre this film does really well. First, the aliens have a solid reason to invade and to do it the hard way. The alien invasion sci-fi sub-genre has a very tough time generating a reason for aliens to come to Earth and do the 1:1 invasion thing they typically do. But Skyline has it nailed: the aliens are after the humans themselves and need to capture them intact. And no, not for food. Not for slaves. But because the aliens have a sort of biotechnology that somehow can run on human brains.
Second, the alien technology is plausible as a mix of biology and machine and it is far superior to humanity’s best, as it should be. After all, no alien species is going to come to Earth and invade without being damn sure they have the power to pull it off without too much trouble. And these aliens don’t have a fatal weakness that lets the humans save the day in a last-ditch defense. No, this invasion comes off like the US army invading Iraq: not perfectly, but with only one possible outcome once it gets started.
Last, in the end all is lost but not completely lost, depending on how you look at it. Sure enough, all those people getting sucked into the big mother ships were getting killed. Or at least their brains were being ripped out and plugged into bio-machinery. I’m not sure if that qualifies as getting killed or not. The movie’s hero and his girlfriend finally get captured, but the hero has an advantage that the film hinted at here and there along the way, and that the aliens are apparently not prepared for. He was exposed to the blue mesmerizing light twice; the first time he was rescued and the second time he mysteriously had the will to resist it. Whatever trick the aliens use in that light, maybe some kind of nano- or bio-technology, it had unintended consequences for humans who were exposed but escaped. Not only did escapees acquire resistance to the light’s power, they also got very physically strong in a short time. And in the end, when the hero finally gets his own brain ripped out and plugged into a some big hulking bio-machine thing, his brain takes control of it. So, while the hero will never be the same again, and humanity is toast, that isn’t the end of it. Personally, I like that.
A lot of the reviews on Netflix expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the film’s ending. The hero, in his new hulking alien bio-machine body thing finds his girlfriend, saves her from whatever the aliens do with pregnant humans, and trots off to the next chapter which is beyond the scope of the film. The End. Probably a lot of people would have liked to see humanity finally start kicking some alien butt. I understand that, but it’s very implausible. And probably a lot of people would have preferred an ending that didn’t occur right in the middle of a very interesting turn of events. I understand that too. But nevertheless, this ending was intriguing and bold and it left me saying “Wow, wtf?” And that’s rare enough these days to be very satisfying.
3.75/5.00 Stars
Battle: Los Angeles is a fun alien invasion yarn based on a typically bad premise and a plot centered on poor logic. The combat feels realistic, the acting is decent enough and the visual effects are great. But the key sticking point, as always in this sub-genre, is why the aliens go to all the expense and trouble of travelling to and invading Earth.
News commentators reveal the invaders want Earth’s water, but even leaving aside the stupidity of that premise* there’s still no good reason for the aliens to invade dozens of humanity’s coastal cities. Why not just quietly set up shop sucking water in some remote ocean location? And if they’re paranoid xenophobes with crazed anxiety that won’t let them tolerate being on the same planet with live humans, wouldn’t it be vastly more efficient to just nuke all those human cities instead of occupying them via gritty house to house combat? The aliens seem to be intent on genocide, judging by their treatment of helpless civilians, so why bother bringing the huge and expensive invasion force? If it’s the radiation they don’t like, they could drop medium-sized asteroids for all the bang of a nuke but not radioactive mess. The heart of this film is the realistic urban combat that serves as a crucible for testing the metal of a variety of characters, but by any logical measure that combat makes no sense at all.
The plot winds up on sketchy grounds too. The hero’s deal a devastating tactical blow to the invaders, but only because these aliens are improbably stupid. They have mastered the olympian engineering and logistics required to bring to Earth, across billions of miles of deep space, an army large enough to simultaneously invade every major coastal city, but they have yet to grasp the all too practical concept of redundant command and control. In each battle zone the aliens control their air superiority drones with a single massive C & C vehicle hidden inside the combat zone itself.
Really? So exactly how is this all-in-one-basket tactical vulnerability necessary? Why not put a thousand redundant C & C satellites in orbit instead? They came from space after all, so they must understand the concept of a communication satellite, right? But if not, then why not park fifty little C & C vehicles in a randomly dispersed pattern offshore from each target city? It’s idiotic to bring only one to each battle and to keep it in such a vulnerable place.
The obvious answer to any of these questions is there would be no movie if sensible logic were taken into account by the writers. Or at least it would be a very different kind of movie than one of gritty house to house combat. Overall Battle: Los Angeles was definitely fun to watch. But as a reasonably intelligent sci-fi fan I always have trouble getting past this sort of lazy story telling.
Rating: 2.25/5.0 stars
*Water is by all observational evidence extremely common in the universe. Stealing ours is an utterly ridiculous premise for alien invasion.
Thor is a film with a plot so formulaic that you can quickly point out the sibling rivalry for the throne, with the manipulative and plotting younger son “bad guy” and the “good guy” heir who needs tough love before he’s ready to lead, as the key conflict and from there easily predict the fall of the latter and rise of the former with disaster for the kingdom as a result. The acting and direction was fine, the visual effects terrific, as always these days, and overall the film was fun to watch. Thor’s quick maturation to earn his hammer back seemed a little rushed but also cut pleasantly short the action hiccup this required plot element typically entails. The hero learning his lesson to get his mojo back and save the day can be tedious and painful to watch, especially if the film is taking its drama too seriously. All in all I liked Thor for the energetic action romp it is and I’m looking forward to the upcoming Avengers film.
3.5/5 Stars
Energy is both the foundation of modern civilization and the root of some grave global problems. Some might immediately think global warming and spoil for a climate science fight. And no wonder with all the money flowing into the US political discourse from the fossil fuel industry which apparently intends to protect itself whatever the cost. So that argument goes on endlessly so why bother? Indeed, climate change isn’t a necessary point to make the argument that fossil fuel alternatives are enormously important.
Economically and geopolitically, US dependence on largely imported oil is tremendously problematic. With the global oil market driven up by speculative traders, oil purchase increasingly bleeds the US of wealth better invested in our economy. Instead our wealth economically supports nations of questionable political and social character and encourages the US to follow-up with political and military support. Along with progressively tarnishing our moral authority, the practice underlies the Islamic extremist terrorism that has brought us terror, decades-long war, and a monstrous global security apparatus. The US finds itself financing the “war on terror” not just at the cost of increasingly scarce tax dollars but also at the cost of quietly undermining our basic freedoms, the values that define our identity as a people.
Today the race is on for alternatives to fossil fuels, and especially oil, whether the US chooses to run in it or not. Once the US owned 90% of global solar cell production, but now China does. Once the US was on the forefront of wind turbine technology, now Europe is, and China is by far the biggest market. Even the prototype commercial fusion reactor is being built in Europe, and while it is paid for in large part through US funding, the high technology jobs and infrastructure our money funds are all in Europe. Yes, the US has pushed hard for ethanol to offset gasoline use, but not because it’s a good idea, or even viable. (it’s not) No, our tax dollars are supporting the losing ethanol biofuel strategy because the Federal government has had an easy time passing and expanding farm subsidies, and it doesn’t hurt that ethanol will clearly never even dent the demand for fossil fuel. So the strategy makes farmers happy, gives the public the impression the US is doing something about foreign oil consumption, and simultaneously protects the fossil fuel industry.
Despite the US abstaining from the scramble for a piece of the 21st Century energy economy, a bigger truth is that we aren’t falling that far behind. While most alternative energy technologies are, as is, far better than biofuel, no alternative energy is truly viable for replacing fossil fuels. Yet. The race is only partially about engineering, building and deploying capacity for wind, solar and tidal energy. The big outstanding problem is the lack of a cheap and safe medium to put this energy into for easy storage and transportation and for powering vehicles.
The big advantage oil, gas and coal have over every other energy source is they are already in a stored and transportable form when extracted, which gives them a huge cost and convenience advantage. Fossil fuels in the most basic sense represent hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight, a form of “natural” biofuel production and storage (the “fossil” in fossil fuels can be thought of as fossilized biofuels…). Indeed, every common form of energy, excepting nuclear and geo-thermal, in simplest terms originates from the sun.
Solar photovoltaics is the most direct and obvious example. Biofuels are also fairly straight forward, since its sunlight that provides the energy for plant growth. But wind and wave ultimately come from the sun too. Sunlight drives uneven temperature change across the Earth’s surface resulting in warmer and cooler air masses, the former of which tend to rise and the latter sink, causing huge volumes of air to move around, which we all experience as wind. And wind creates waves. Even hydro-electric has its origin in the sun. Evaporation driven by sunlight rains out over the landscape and fills rivers with runoff which, in the right geographic configuration, are dammed and the energy of downward flowing water is channeled through turbines.
For fossil fuels the cost and efficiency loss from transformation into a transportable and storable medium has already been paid; through hundreds of millions of years of natural chemistry. For human civilization and for the companies that locate and extract these fuels, it’s a “freeby.” But not so with fossil fuel’s competitors. Harvesting wind, wave, solar, and geothermal energy is not particularly difficult, especially in comparison to the task of coal mining or deep sea oil drilling. But changing them into a medium that can be easily stored, transported and used to power vehicles without an excessive loss of efficiency (ie value), is no simple problem. And that’s where the research referenced below finally comes into focus.
One solution described in the article is the use of sunlight to directly split water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen. The structure used is referred to as an artificial leaf and it effectively does what natural photosynthesis does; transform sunlight into a usable fuel. But the advantage the artificial leaf has over natural leaves is that the fuel produced is in a liberated, energy dense, transportable, and storable medium. Unlike corn or grass, no harvesting and fermenting into alcohol is required, and there is no reliance on a growing season. Artificial leaves can directly produce fuel year round so long as there is sunlight available. And the best part is the experimental leaves are made from cheap and available materials.
The second solution described is an efficient means to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, an energy medium with all the advantages of hydrogen and more. Carbon monoxide can also be used as a source material for producing organic compounds like plastics and oils. And because carbon dioxide is the source material, this primary culprit in the greenhouse effect could conceivably be transformed into a valuable commodity, driving the development and use of carbon capture technology and resulting in a cost effective offset to climate warming. Furthermore, carbon dioxide can be captured and converted into carbon monoxide at any time or place, eliminating the significant disadvantage of requiring the sun to be shining (or the wind to be blowing or the presence of nearby crashing waves, for that matter).
I’ve long supported the need for, but been skeptical of a future reality of, a civilization powered entirely by the alternative technologies in the form we know them today. For this reason I’ve long supported alternative energy research. I believe without a doubt that viable, cheap, and safe alternatives to fossil fuels exist and identifying them and using them is just a matter of the will and the time to research the technology and engineer the infrastructure. Success once the real effort begins, supported with the resources dictated by sincere and earnest need, is a forgone conclusion. And the benefits for the US, if we develop this technology, will be economically and geo-politically priceless.
Solar Fuels Take Two Steps Forward
Two independent research teams report today in Science that they’ve taken key strides toward harnessing the energy in sunlight to synthesize chemical fuels. If the new work can be improved, scientists could utilize Earth’s most abundant source of renewable energy to power everything from industrial plants to cars and trucks without generating additional greenhouse gases.
Today, humans consume an average of 15 trillion watts of power, 85% of which comes from burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas. That massive fossil fuel consumption produces some nasty side effects, including climate change, acidified oceans, and oil spills. These problems are likely to grow far worse in coming years, as worldwide energy use is expected to at least double by 2050.
Renewable power sources, such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, aim to fill this demand, and they are making steady progress at providing electricity at ever cheaper costs. But electricity has a key drawback as an energy carrier. It’s difficult to store in large quantities, which means it can’t be used for most heavy industry and transportation applications, such as flying planes or driving heavy trucks. So researchers have long sought to use the energy in sunlight to generate energy-rich chemical fuels, such as hydrogen gas, methane, and gasoline, that can be burned anytime anywhere. And though they have demonstrated that this goal is possible, the means for doing so have been inefficient and expensive.
That’s where the new advances come in. In the first, researchers led by Daniel Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, report that they’ve created an “artificial leaf” from cheap, abundant materials that splits water into molecular hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2), somewhat similar to the way plants carry out the first step in photosynthesis. *snip*
In principle, the H2 can then be stored and either burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity.
In the second study, a team led by chemists Richard Masel of Dioxide Materials in Champaign, Illinois, and Paul Kenis of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, report that they’ve come up with a more energy-efficient approach to converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into carbon monoxide (CO), the first step to making a hydrocarbon fuel. Other researchers have worked for decades to devise catalysts and the right reaction conditions to carry out this conversion. But converting CO2 to CO has always required applying large electrical voltages to CO2 to make the change. That excess voltage is an energy loss, meaning it takes far more energy to make the CO than it can store in its chemical bonds.
*snip*
“These papers are nice advances,” says Daniel DuBois, a chemist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who works on catalysts for both splitting water and reenergizing CO2. But he cautions that neither solves all of their respective issues. The oxygen-forming catalyst in the artificial leaf, for example, remains slow, DuBois says. And the efficiency of the overall leaf is only 4.7% at most, and just 2.3% in its most simplest design. The catalyst in the CO2 system is even slower. But DuBois says that because other researchers in the field now have a good examples of systems that work, they can now focus on designing improved catalysts to speed them up.
Fiasco is the second novel by Stanislaw Lem I have read and overall the third work of his to which I have been exposed. The first was the US film version of Solaris, and while that was not particularly great, I have to assume the book is something special since it has been adapted into two films, one television series and a BBC radio drama. Reading it is high on my list of things to do.
The second work of Lem’s I encountered was His Master’s Voice, which I bought and read based on a trusted recommendation, but found to be a very dense, complex, and difficult (IMHO) read filled with mystery deliberately and dissatisfyingly left mysterious in the novel’s outcome. The book is infused with Cold War concerns, which in this day and age involves thinking and motivations that do not resonate so much anymore. I’ve been told that reading His Master’s Voice a second or third time is a sure way to appreciate its deeper riches, but as yet I’ve not had the time or motivation to make another go at it.
Solaris, His Master’s Voice and Fiasco, while completely unique works, all have at their core one of Lem’s most consistent themes. Generally, any aliens humanity ever came into contact with would be so alien that understandstanding between the two species would be impossible and the contact would have a good chance for disastrous results. Each story’s fundamental problem is the unresolvable inability to understand the “other.” Lem expertly uses this theme to create engaging scenarios of mystery that draw the reader in, but as likely as not, the mystery is never resolved and the scenario ends with fairly pessimistic results.
In Fiasco the humans were technologically superior alien visitors and the Quintans the more or less helpless, if tenaciously belligerent, victims. The plot unfolds with the seemingly enlightened and compassionate far future humans first resorting to intimidation, then to deliberate and brutal violence against the civilization they had traveled to, at great expense and risk, with hopes of gretings and mutually beneficial information exchanges. Whatever the reason, cost, pride, duty, or something else, failure was no option, even as genocidal attacks were.
Such extreme action simply because the locals were less than welcoming and refused to have a two way conversation? Sounds crazy, I know. But Lem renders the decision making process, itself a deelply devisive moral conflict, in very thoughtful detail lending the outcome a strong air of plausibility. I don’t know what lies beneath Lem’s apparent pessimistic view of humanity, maybe it’s the mere fact of growing up in post World War 2 Poland behind the Iron Curtain. That would fit with a scene in His Master’s Voice that involved a Nazi army unit exterminating Jews behind the lines on the Eastern Front. Or maybe Lem was simply lashing out a bit at the Star Trekish optimism of a future humanity with great moral refinement. He reportedly held Western science fiction in low regard all around, so that would not be surprising. Or maybe it’s both or more.
All in all every aspect of the story, humanity’s great technological achievements, the alien worlds, the scenes of catastrophic destruction, the conflicts within the crew, were written with artful and fascinating scope and detail. I cannot praise the book enough. It was one of the best sci-fi reads I’ve had in a long time and I very highly recommend it.
4.5/5.0 stars
Nobody in the US public discourse seems interested in identifying and/ or addressing the underlying causes of high and rising health care costs. The Big Idea recently floated in the House of Representatives was to simply cut and cap what could be paid out for Medicare and Medicaid. That might help the government’s deficit problem but it does not at all address the real problem, very high and ever rising costs of everyone’s health care. This morning NPR had a quick blurb about a study published in the Journal of Health Affairs that concludes a big underlying cause is high doctor fees.
The Journal article is here: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/30/9/1647.abstract
For your convenience, here’s the abstract:
Abstract
Higher health care prices in the United States are a key reason that the nation’s health spending is so much higher than that of other countries. Our study compared physicians’ fees paid by public and private payers for primary care office visits and hip replacements in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also compared physicians’ incomes net of practice expenses, differences in financing the cost of medical education, and the relative contribution of payments per physician and of physician supply in the countries’ national spending on physician services. Public and private payers paid somewhat higher fees to US primary care physicians for office visits (27 percent more for public, 70 percent more for private) and much higher fees to orthopedic physicians for hip replacements (70 percent more for public, 120 percent more for private) than public and private payers paid these physicians’ counterparts in other countries. US primary care and orthopedic physicians also earned higher incomes ($186,582 and $442,450, respectively) than their foreign counterparts. We conclude that the higher fees, rather than factors such as higher practice costs, volume of services, or tuition expenses, were the main drivers of higher US spending, particularly in orthopedics.
The US medical system’s fee for service payment method has been pointed to before as a cost driver because it incentivizes doctors to order unnecessary tests and procedures. The more a doctor orders up, the more the doctor gets paid, so the incentive is backwards for cost control. This study adds the dimension that, independent of expenses, the fees themselves are much higher than comparable fees in other industrialized nations. So a move from fee for service to a salary pay structure not only has a waste reduction potential, but would also right-size excessive doctor fees.
Are there other ways to address this problem, like legislated caps on fees based on benchmarking identical procedures in other industrialized countries? Workable or not, I can hardly imagine a situation in which Congress would even consider price caps on procedures. But is there a free market way to address this problem? How is it possible to introduce competition based downward cost pressures when the competition is in foreign countries?
Worse, recall that before the Medicare Drug prescription legislation, many people were crossing the border to Canada (or mail-ordering via internet pharmacies) to get around the high US drug prices. That looked a lot like market based competition, and the Bush Administration squashed it at the request of US pharmacy lobbies. Certainly the AMA and the like would respond similarly to any attempt to change the status quo of doctor fees, so is this just another non-starter? In my opinion, scrapping fee for service in favor of fixed salaries is one good way to attack a big part of the health care cost problem in the US. But with all the influence our political system lets private entities, especially wealthy private entities, exercise on policy, how can a problem like this ever be addressed?
