Obama's address to congress on health care

Just watched Obama's address, thanks to the wonders of YouTube. It's available at WhiteHouse.gov, along with a transcript.

Most of it ran as these things usually do. Lots of interruptions for applause, with various members or factions making a show of standing and applauding or sitting and looking stoic, depending on the side they're taking. I find this posturing to be a bit wearying... As his speech progressed he moved from descriptions of what he wanted reform to achieve, to what particular proposals he favored, to a description of the partisan bickering and fear-mongering, to a rousing call to action and American ideals. It had a good overall flow and structure. I was rather interested that he chose to call out and address some of the lies (his word) promulgated by opponents of his proposals. His directness, I think, reveals his frustration with the level of debate and the kind of politics being waged. And his final call to action and appeal to ideals and morality during the last ten minutes of his speech was quite strong. It's an appeal that I'm pretty amenable to, of course, but I think you can't deny that he performed very well. So in the end I felt it was pretty watchable.

A few days ago I watched his address to schoolchildren, also on YouTube. With both speeches I felt he needed to be a bit more camera-savvy. Reagan always knew to address the camera (he was a professional pitchman after all). Obama looks left and right at the audience, and clearly connects with them, but rarely, if ever, looks directly at the camera. As a result the feeling is that you're observing him talk to others, rather than listening to him talk to you. It's clear he has the charisma— his resolve and passion was quite in evidence with this speech— but he needs to figure out how to deploy it a bit better through the media.

Since I don't watch TV new or talking head shows, and get only a very biased view via reddit and web news aggregator headlines, I don't really know how this played out. Fox "News" probably didn't play it live at all, and I doubt there was much analysis on any program of what he said, as opposed to descriptions of how various factions received him, and talking heads trying to spin it this way or that. My sense is that it didn't move the national conversation quite as much as he needs to. It did seem to energize his base a bit, which I think he needs. Energized me to write this, anyway, though of course that's not saying much!

I don't know enough to assess the financial impact of what he proposes. What is clear is that he's trying to do this the right way, with the expenses budgeted and paid for, rather than through keeping it off books or pushing costs off into the nebulous future as we've done with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I'm not sure he's going to be able to save as much by reforming the system as he hopes— the folks extracting profits out of the current system are going to hold onto them as tightly as they can. Also, I suspect that much of the "waste" comes from the complexity of the billing and paperwork, which isn't going to go away if we continue to have multiple insurance policies with varying level of coverage and forms of payment as we do now. I suspect a lot of push towards higher costs comes from defensive tests and incentives (or lack of disincentives) for doctors to perform, and clients to request, procedures that aren't strongly indicated. Overly-aggressive end-of-life treatment clearly contributes its share of unnecessary cost, too, but that's a societal issue that's not easily addressed. High pharmaceutical prices due to non-competitive restrictions on bargaining are also a problem; he might be able to do something about this, though again big pharma is going to fight this with everything they've got. So these seem like large contributions to the problem of escalating health care costs that I don't see being addressed. But I really don't know how much of the overall cost is due to these features of our system, and how much is due to "waste and abuse" (or less prejudicially, how the system is gamed) by the people participating in the system— for example, when healthy people opt out of the system and rely on emergency room service, throwing costs onto others, or when insurers cherry-pick who they insure. I wonder if anyone really knows. I should explore the web a bit more, I'm sure there's data somewhere that would inform these kinds of speculations.

Anyway, I liked the speech. It was passionate and direct. He's a very bright guy, Obama is, and curiously optimistic still despite the difficult slog over the summer. Let's hope he succeeds.

Setting things up

I tried to enhance this blog today. Took a lot of time. I feel a bit constrained by blogger's templates and widgets, I just need to learn more about them I guess. The flickr photo badge came from a generator tool on the flickr site. I learned that there was support for tags— um, they're called labels, and there's this handy box you can type them into, so I switched to use them. D'oh.

I spent some time writing my own flickr photo viewer, which lets you page through the images instead of seeing them all at once, but I need to get a bit further with it. Maybe I'll switch to that, I can provide a bit more info on the photos.

Sigh, wasn't the idea for me to get off the net a bit more?

Klein Bottle

This popped up again on reddit today, it's been around— the bottles, by Alan Bennett, date from 1995. They're on display online here. The actual bottles are at the Science Museum in London.

It would be fun to visit London again. I've only been once.