Every few months, I have dinner with gawp. His blog is pretty much dead, but, in Real Life, he has lots of interesting things to say. Our conversations are always fun.

Books to Read

• A Darkness in the Sky, by Verner Vinge.
• Mr Someone and Somebody Else, by some other author. Something tells me that this one is a little off, I’ll have to bug G about it.

Thoughts on My Thesis

Will remain hidden until it’s published.

Thoughts on Life

• Consider indexed funds for investing
• Before looking for a house, draw up requirements with your spouse. Agree on the requirements before starting the search.

Thoughts on the Green Party

We should try to turn the perceived medicare crisis into an opportunity. All industrialized nations are trying to deal with the rising costs of healthcare, but no country has managed to do anything to limit the rate at which those costs grow, let alone lower those costs. Instead of wringing our hands over the state of medicare, we should try and build a system that:

• Raises the value of each dollar spent, annually. In other words, instead of raising healthcare spending, our healthcare system should become more efficient.
• Improve healthcare’s IT infrastructure. We spend very little on IT for healthcare, which is stupid, because effective treatment depends on high-quality information. That information must include the history of the patient, and ensure that relevent information is brought to the attention of the staff.
• Use the improved IT infrastructure for long-term analysis of the quality of treatments, and value of healthcare spending. We should be able to determine: the success rate of specific procedures; health trends by demographic; and the relative performance of different hospitals.
• Uses our nationalized system to lower acquisition costs of drugs and equipment through bulk acquisition. In a situation where we cannot acquire pharmaceuticals or other items at a low enough cost (or high enough quality), we should spin off companies to do that production.