For the last year, the government health care idea known as “the public option” has been the focus of intense discussion and debate. There has been so much debate, in fact, that the future of the whole idea is far from certain. The public option has been inserted into legislation, taken out, put back in, cut again. Currently the public option is in, so let’s take a look at the idea and see how it works.

The simple summary of the public option is this: The government runs a health insurance company, and citizens can choose to use it or not. This idea sits in the middle of a spectrum of ideas. At one end of the spectrum is a world in which private insurance companies provide all health insurance in the United States. At the other end of the spectrum is a single payer system, where the government provides all health care coverage for everyone in America. The public option is more toward the former end than the latter. With the public option, there is simply one more company in the pool of companies providing health care coverage. That new company happens to be run by the government on behalf of its citizens.

It should be noted that most other developed nations have trended toward a single payer system. Single payer has the potential to dramatically lower health care costs for a nation. It also removes health care coverage from the backs of businesses, lowering the cost of doing business. In the United States there is concern that the single payer idea doesn’t have enough support to pass into law. It might also be economically disruptive in the short term, since it would fundamentally change an industry that makes up 18% of the American economy.

The approach behind the public option is not unusual. For example, the government-run post office competes with private companies like FedEx and UPS to provide letter and package delivery services. At last check, UPS and FedEx were doing fine and competing well against the government-run delivery system. In the same way, there are many public universities created by states and they live in harmony with private universities. This despite the fact that many public universities have significantly lower tuition costs because they receive state subsidies. These two examples demonstrate that public and private companies can coexist in a marketplace.

Why would the government want to set up a health insurance company? The idea is that a government-run system could provide service at a lower cost. This is important because health care costs are rising fast, and they could eventually cause serious problems for the economy. One prediction shows costs nearly doubling by 2040 and consuming 34% of the nation’s GDP. The public option would create competition that could, in theory, compel private insurance companies to lower prices and cover more people.

How might a government-run health insurance company lower costs? First it would eliminate the need to create profit and dividends for shareholders. Second it would be able to do away with multi-million dollar executive salaries. Third, it could probably lower other administrative costs. And it would, through its size, probably negotiate better rates on drugs and services.

Where would the money come from? The stated goal of the public option is to create a system which covers its own costs and is self-sustaining. People choosing the public option would pay premiums like they do to a private insurance company. People unable to afford insurance would receive subsidies from the government, which could be used for either public or private insurance.

Opposition to the public option idea comes on several fronts. Existing private insurance companies express concern that the public option will put them out of business. But as mentioned above, this seems unlikely. Pharmaceutical companies are concerned about the bargaining power of the public option. Some view the public option as a first step toward a single-payer system. It will be interesting to see if these opposing forces can eliminate the public option, or if it survives.

See also:
- the state of health care reform and how we got there
- Healthcare in the U.S. costs $7,290 per person. In Denmark it is $3,362 per person. 95% of Danes are satisfied with their health care – the highest in Europe
- Small businesses are seeing a big increase in insurance premiums, an average of 15%
- BCBS plea to customers on reform hits a nerve

A very interesting little memory test that will check two different memory functions. When it says that you should take a 5 minute break, you should heed its advice to get an accurate reading.

Face Memory Test

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Oasis of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship, set sail this past weekend from its Finland birthplace to Florida, getting ready for its maiden voyage in December. You can get some sense of its size from this video, taken over the weekend in Finland:

Inside the world’s biggest and most expensive ever cruise ship, the £810million Oasis of the Seas

The Oasis of the Seas, which will be sailing mainly in the sunny Caribbean, catering to younger, more active passengers with children offering a wider selection of activities, including 21 swimming pools, an aqua park, a carousel and a science lab.

Here is an overview of the ship’s features and attractions:

Birthplace is in Turku, Finland at STX Europe:

View Larger Map

Oasis of the Seas journeys home to Fort Lauderdale

Quick stats:
- Length: 1,180ft
- Width: 154 ft
- “65 metres (213 feet) above the waterline”
- 16 decks
- 2,700 staterooms
- “6,360 passengers (max) and 2,160 crew members”

The ship costs on the order of $1 billion. How can they ever recoup that investment? Assume that the ticket price per person includes $500 for paying back the ship. Assume each cruise has 5,000 passengers. Assume 40 cruises per year. On each cruise they recoup $2.5 million. Each year they recoup $100 million. It takes 10 years to pay off the investment in the boat.

More info: How Cruise Ships Work

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Lithium ion batteries are the current state of the art in battery technology, but they have two problems:

1) They have a nasty habit of exploding

2) They are relatively expensive

Now there may be a better technology on the horizon:

Rechargeable zinc-air batteries can store three times the energy of a lithium-ion battery

A Swiss company says it has developed rechargeable zinc-air batteries that can store three times the energy of lithium ion batteries, by volume, while costing only half as much. ReVolt, of Staefa, Switzerland, plans to sell small “button cell” batteries for hearing aids starting next year and to incorporate its technology into ever larger batteries, introducing cell-phone and electric bicycle batteries in the next few years. It is also starting to develop large-format batteries for electric vehicles.

More info from RevoltTechnologies.com: Rechargeable Zn-air Batteries

See also these zinc-air batteries used in a bus:

More info: Electric Vehicle Division

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A Mars Rover Named “Curiosity” – “The small, car-sized rover will ramble about on the rocky surface, gizmos at full tilt, not only brushing dust off rocks but also vaporizing them with a laser beam, gathering samples to analyze on the spot, taking high resolution photographs, and more…” More on curiosity:

Microsoft Researchers Developing Muscle-Based PC Interface (w/ Video) – “Microsoft researches have teamed up with the University of Washington and the University of Toronto to develop a muscle-controlled interface that allows for hands-free, gesture-driven interaction with computers…”

Ride Waves and Explore Depths in a Scubacraft – “It’s not a pressurized submarine, which means that those on board must wear scuba gear before submersion. With no cranes needed to lower the craft below water and no boat needed to carry it out to sea, a Scubacraft is significantly more versatile and less expensive than similarly sized submarines. Scubacraft won’t say how much the craft costs, but other sources put the figure at $164,000…”

Esquire looks to energize print with 3-D animation – “Hold Esquire’s December issue in front of a webcam, and an on-screen image of the magazine pops to life, letters flying off the cover. Shift and tilt the magazine, and the animation on the screen moves accordingly…”

China claims supercomputer among world’s fastest – “China announced its fastest supercomputer yet Thursday in the country’s latest show of its goal to become a world leader in technology…”

How the Spaceship Got Its Shape – “The cover of the March 22, 1952 issue of Collier’s magazine made an audacious promise. “Man Will Conquer Space Soon,” blared the headline, above a painting of a multi-stage rocket with engines blazing, bound for orbit. Designed by German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, whose name was still unknown to most Americans, the Collier’s spaceship was a sleek, needle-nosed beauty; its winged third stage would be piloted to a runway landing. But it was all wrong….”

Construction robot inspired by sci-fi flick Aliens – “The Dual-Arm Power Amplification Robot gives users superhuman strength and resembles the hydraulic exoskeleton worn by Sigourney Weaver in the climactic scene of the sci-fi classic…”

Where smoking kills most people – “NEARLY one in five deaths in rich countries is caused by smoking, according to new data released this week by the World Health Organisation….”

Netflix Prize: Was The Napoleon Dynamite Problem Solved? – “I just gave a talk at work on “Recommender Systems and the Netflix Prize”, and included the two major popular articles about the prize in its final year or so. One was in Wired Magazine and one was in the New York Times., and each focused on one outstanding problem that the competitors faced. Wired looked at the quirkiness of users as they rate movies, and the NYT focused on the difficulty of predicting ratings for a handful of divisive movies…”

Computer science documentaries

New Unmanned Chopper Sniffs Out Improvised Explosives While Looking Adorable – “The Pentagon is testing an unmanned helicopter that can detect electromagnetic emissions from IEDs. Codename: HELIPANDA (we wish)…”

Willing to give up blue skies for climate fix? – “We can probably engineer Earth’s climate to cool the planet, scientists say, but are we willing to live with the downsides? Those could include creating more droughts, more ozone holes and, oh yeah, a thin cloud layer that obscures blue skies and gives astronomers fits…”

Robot driving companion brings emotion to navigation – “You might think a robotic head mounted on the dashboard of your car would be a distraction. But car maker Audi and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think it will actually provide less jarring directions than a standard satnav – because it will be sensitive to your moods and habits…”

Mapping the ‘great wheel of water’ – “Satellites have a reputation for being dull, functional boxes. However, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (Smos) spacecraft is anything but routine…”

We see problems, they see solutions – “It is this sort of science that we celebrate here, through the work of 15 men and women who have set their minds to some of the most pressing problems of our time, such as clean energy, better medicine and feeding the world’s growing population…”

Inside Chernobyl’s Sarcophagus

Physicist Makes New High-resolution Panorama Of Milky Way – “Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece….”

A Gamma Ray Race Through the Fabric of Space-Time Proves Einstein Right – “New results are in from the Fermi Space Telescope, which settled into orbit in the summer of 2008, and the findings seem to prove Albert Einstein right once again. Man, that guy was good…”

Fifty Years of Scientific History For You – “Here’s a most interesting graph from the latest issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery….”

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