All posts by John Goerzen

Reducing Health Care Costs While Expanding Coverage

Society, Uncategorized

I heard an interesting interview on KMUW this morning while driving in to work. They were talking to Kansas Governer Kathleen Sibelius about her health care reform package.

One point she kept making is that providing basic coverage to the uninsured eventually reduces costs for everyone. They are no longer showing up at the expensive ER for everything, and a lot of costly illnesses get prevented by having good regular medical care. This translates into lower insurance premiums. That argument makes a lot of sense, and I wonder why it has taken people so long to realize it. And it also benefits the uninsured, who get better care.

She is also proposing ways to reduce overhead — “paper shuffling” in the system. Apparently 1/3 of the cost of health care is for administration.

On the more mundane side, she is combining several state agencies — including the one to run this new program — into a single health care office in the state government to reduce bureaucracy and expand negotiating power.

And part of the program is encouraging personal responsibility — expanding education programs targeted at both children and adults to encourage healthy lifestyles. She says that will give us healthier citizens down the road, which translates into reduced medical costs.

She plans to pay for it with a $0.50 increase in tobacco taxes. Fitting, somehow.

There’s also an article in the Wichita Eagle.

Latest experiment: Exim

Uncategorized

I’ve been running Postfix on all my servers for many years now. Postfix has proven to be fast, stable, and reliable.

I’ve had some complaints, though. The main one is its filtering support. It doesn’t support filtering during the SMTP transaction. (Well, OK, recent versions do, but not very well.)

The other problem with filtering is that all of the plug-in filtering solutions stink. I am using Amavis, which is the best of them, but it still uses about 40MB of RAM for each new message, and is rather unstable.

So, I’m trying out Exim. It appears to be much more configurable than just about anything, though its queue manager is not as powerful as Postfix’s. From what I’ve read, Exim has the same peak throughput as Postfix, but a gentler ramp-up curve. That’s fine with me.

For me, the killer app for Exim is exiscan-acl. Spam and virus checking at SMTP conversation time, and a RAM overhead of about 1/80th of Amavis.

I found the Spam Filtering for Mail Exchangers HOWTO to be quite helpful. There is also an exiscan tutorial out there.

So far, I’m really liking it, though I’m having a small problem on my Alpha.

A Bunch of Reactions

Politics

On Iraq and 9/11

I still don’t know why the Democrats fell in line behind Bush on Iraq so easily. Why did they let him get away with his “dissent is un-patriotic” line? And c’mon, Sen. Kerry, how could you really have believed he would exercise his authority responsibly?

I think the Democrats voted the way they did as a political calculation. It didn’t work. Next time, try actually standing up for what you believe. Maybe the voters will then see you as an actual alternative, instead of just Republican-lite.

The Media

In 2006, I want to hear more about issues than polls. More about issues than who is ahead at the moment. And far more about issues than the partisan spin doctors.

Not one of the major networks did a good job. NPR did a good job. Heck, British sources provided better coverage of the isues than many American sources.

On Paniced Democrats

A lot of Democrats seem to have a “world is falling” mentality. Let’s put this in perspective:

  • Nixon was initially elected partly on the basis of ending a war he had secretly helped to prolong, and we all know how his re-election campaign went. And a Democrat got us into that war.
  • Not too many centuries ago, you didn’t lose an election. Rather, you lost the war, and all your men were killed, your women raped, children enslaved, and resources looted.
  • We survived Watergate, Vietnam, Panama, etc. We can survive this.

On Daschle

He deserved to lose. He encouraged weakness among Democrats and had nothing but failed strategies as far as I can remember. He was clearly out-witted by Lott at just about every turn. Too bad the Democratic senators couldn’t manage to replace him sooner.

Gay Marriage

I am extremely sad that people are reducing tolerance and civil rights through constitutional amendments.

Unity

I think there is a slim chance that this will happen. The Democrats are rightly ticked about all the partison rancor, dirty tricks, and intentional divisiveness perpetrated by the Republicans and are not likely to just fall in line again.

Rather: \”Folksy\” or \”Weird\”?

TV

Slate has an article about last night’s coverage of the race. Among others, they made this observation:

7:52 p.m., CBS: I can’t wait till Dan Rather starts to get tired. As I remember from 2000, fatigue makes him folksy. I still remember him at around 1 a.m. that night, when the vote flipped back to Gore again, saying something like, “Well, I’ll be a coon on a red-hot skillet!” He’s nowhere near that point yet, but he did just tell Bob Schieffer, “Don’t taunt the alligator until after you cross the creek.”

The first time or two I hear one of these little Ratherisms, I chuckle a little. After that, I want to say “Shut Up, Dan!”. About the fourth time, the channel gets changed, or the TV gets shut off and I go back to the BBC. Because half of his “folksy sayings” make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Especially when he’s tired.