Brooks and Economics of Healthcare

One of the things I miss in the current chattering classes commentary is a focus on market structure.  The questions of monopoly and pricing power don't play much of a role in current debates.  For me, I remember the strain surrounding the receipt of the monthly (I think) milk check and egg check.  We'd shipped off our milk and eggs, consigned my parents' work to the fates, and waited to see what we'd receive in return.  Open the envelope and see the check amount: maybe it's up, maybe down.  The closest parallel I can come to in today's life is the arrival of the bills for electricity and water/sewage.

In both cases, the person has no pricing power; they're at the mercy of the market structure.  

David Brooks has a piece  on healthcare saying Democrats believe in the power of government experts to cut costs, Republicans believe in the power of competition and consumer choice.  I'd say that misses the fact that government, as purchasing agent for consumers, can have pricing power; consumers in the context of the healthcare market don't.

USDA's IT Reforms

Described here at the CIO  blog.  Everyone is moving to the cloud for email and collaboration?

A Form for Everything

That's the motto of the bureaucrat: if something happens more than once, you need a form. 

Tom Ricks at the Best Defense passes on an example of one.

Having just watched the DVD No End in Sight (which I liked better than his more recent documentary) I'm not sure the form should be called a parody.  See for yourself.  BTW, I think "COA" is military for "course of action".

Erroneous Payments from OPM

Amidst the concern about government agencies making erroneous payments, add another to the list.  Apparently OPM has a problem making annuity payments to dead retirees or their spouses.  The article says they check the SSA's death data, so it's not clear whether it's an OPM problem or a SSA problem.

On Poor Farmers

There's a double meaning in the title of this post.  The usual meaning is farmers whose income is low, low compared to other farmers in the area or nation, low compared to what's needed for a good life in the nation, low compared to someone else. See this Treehugger/Oxfam post.

But the other meaning is farmers who farm poorly, poorly because their land is poor, poorly because they're far away from markets, poorly because they lack the knowledge, the social capital, others have.  Many would like to believe in the Lake Woebegone corollary, that all farmers are above average.  I regret to inform you that's not true; whichever nation or locality we're talking about, some farmers are good and some aren't.  Some land is good, some isn't.  Some land is on the railroad, some isn't. Some farmers have learned from experience what works, some are stuck in a rut.  Some farmers are open to new ideas and techniques, some are waiting to die.

Alfalfa: I Didn't Know That

"  It take alfalfa about a week in hot drying weather to turn into hay. "  That's from this post from Life on a Colorado Farm.

In Broome County, NY alfalfa was not a big crop, wasn't even a small crop that I remember.  Now I'm assuming that Colorado's "hot drying weather" has lots less humidity than we had.  But the big factor would be rain: our usual pattern would be to get rain pretty regularly over the summer, enough to damage and often to spoil any hay in the field.  But the timothy/orchard grass hay which was common didn't take that long to cure.  Mow one day, rake the afternoon of the next day, and bale on the third day would be the normal pattern.  Leave the hay in the field much longer and the risk of rain would be too great. 

So that, plus the difficulty of getting a good stand of alfalfa established, probably explains why there wasn't much alfalfa grown.

The World Is Moving Too Fast, I Want to Get Off

Seems only yesterday I was reading about quantum physics, and something called entanglement, and how it might lead to faster computers some time in the future.One of those things you mentally file in the "don't have to worry about this, after my expiration date" folder.

Now comes the Technology Review  which posts this--Lockheed Martin just spent $10 million of its hard-earned dollars (they do some work for DOD so some of those dollars used to be yours and mine) for a "quantum computing system".

Mother Love

Via Kevin Drum, see the video of mother and kitten.

Factoid of the Day: Median Age of Adoption in Japan

"median age of adoption in Japan is somewhere twenty-five to thirty?"

From Freakonomics on succession of businesses within families. Also interesting Japan is second to the US in adoptions.

Bad News for FSA?

From today's Farm Policy, a bit from the chair of House ag:

Chairman Lucas also offered perspective on House action with respect to the timing of drafting the 2012 farm legislation.  The Oklahoma Republican highlighted a very important caveat to his current thinking on Farm Bill timing: “Depending on what comes out of Vice President Biden’s working group, if there is a grand compromise on raising the debt ceiling which would entail a substantial cut in spending immediately, that over rules the way I would like to do it.  And we could conceivably have a Farm Bill this fall or winter in a hurry-up fashion.”  (Related AgriTalk audio available here (MP3- 1:37)).

 That could be very bad news for FSA bureaucrats for two reasons:

• a hurry-up farm bill to implement a "grand compromise" passed late in the year would give very little time for FSA to implement.  
• I assume FSA management has planned their MIDAS project to reach milestones by next summer--that is to get over the hump before they have to switch their attention to the 2012 farm bill.  If that's true, and you have to assume FSA management plans ahead, don't you, then a rush farm bill is also going to screw up MIDAS.  

The only good bit about a possible rush farm bill might be in a time crunch there would be less opportunity for new programs to come out of the blue; more likely the Hill would make adjustments in the 2008 programs.