Health Care Reform at Last!

For so many of us in the US hoping for health care reform, the last year has been an emotional roller coaster. At times, it looked encouraging. Some of our legislators were promising that not only would a reform bill pass, but it would also have a strong public insurance option to compete with the private insurers who had been relentlessly raising their rates.

But especially when President Obama seemed so ambivalent about the public option, liberals who felt they were already sold out by the president for taking single-payer (Medicare for All) off the table were left to wonder whether what was left in the bill was even worth passing.

And when Republican Scott Brown (a.k.a. "Mr. 41") won the late Senator Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, things looked really grim since the Republicans now had enough senators to block any and all Democratic legislation by use of the filibuster. Sure there was an obscure technical way to bypass the filibuster called reconciliation, but President Obama seemed to many of us to be more of a professorial lecturer than somebody who would be willing to fight for a noble cause.

But his State of the Union speech signaled a change in strategy. Instead of staying in the background and letting Congress fight it out, the president finally took ownership of health care reform. When he finally figured out that the health insurance industry was not part of the solution but indeed the problem, he finally started calling them out on their abusive practices.

Most important of all, when he traveled around the country to rally people around health reform, he finally stressed the human cost our present policies were causing by including real-life stories of individuals who needlessly suffered through illness and financial catastrophe. Better late than never, but I think he should have stressed the moral imperative of health care reform from the beginning!

While the Democrats were stressing the human needs that had to be addressed, the Republicans persisted in talking about little more than the dollars and cents to pay for it, ignoring the human side of the problem.

Now that the bill has been signed, instead of helping to make the bill they disagreed with work as well as possible now that it is a law, the Republicans are now talking about doing what they can to repeal it — which is especially ludicrous with the Democrats now in control of Congress and the White House.

The Republican rhetoric about health care reform being socialized medicine doesn’t look like it’s going to go away any time soon. After all, it’s in their DNA going back to Ronald Reagan Speaking Out Against Socialized Medicine back in 1961 to try and head off a proposed plan to provide seniors with health insurance that we now know as Medicare.

In fairness, nobody knows for sure exactly how well this newly signed law is going to work. Unlike simpler plans such as expanding Medicare to all US citizens, this is a hodgepodge of different plans pieced together as a result of the legislative process requiring many compromises to get enough legislators to vote for it. The part I most worry about is that the ban against rejecting adults for coverage due to pre-existing conditions doesn’t go into effect until 2014. In the meantime, these people will have to resort to joining high-risk pools to get insurance which may or may not be affordable for those who most need it.

But if reform does work, the non-stop hysteria by those opposing health care reform over the last year is going to deeply affect their credibility. Medicare was controversial when it was first enacted. Today, only those on the fringe right would ever advocate taking it away from our seniors.

Conservative commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, had this to say on the day the health care bill was passed in his controversial blog posting Waterloo.

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

I can’t think of anybody more deserving!

The Emergence of the Amateur Professional

Every time the Olympics come around, there is the inevitable call by some to bring the amateurs back to the Olympics. One of the most memorable Olympic events ever was the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" in Lake Placid when the amateur US hockey team beat the Soviet Union team that consisted of full time “amateur” players.

While there are a number of reasons for finally allowing professional players in the Olympics, the one the stands out is that at the top levels it has become almost impossible to truly distinguish between the amateur and professional athlete.

At one time, the definition between an amateur and professional was pretty straightforward. The amateur is not paid for what he or she does, the professional is.

But when so-called “amateur” Olympic athletes from the Eastern Bloc were not paid a salary but had all of their expenses paid for by their governments, true amateurs who had to train in their spare time while holding a job were at a severe competitive disadvantage. So other countries had to resort to subsidizing their athletes through their governments or private donations which made the idea of pure amateurism little more than a joke.

But in many endeavors, the dividing line between professional and amateur is becoming more and more blurred. Let’s take the definition of a professional.

pro·fes·sion·al [prō féshən’l, prō féshnəl, prə féshən’l]

1. member of profession: somebody whose occupation requires extensive education or specialized training

2. somebody doing something as paid job: somebody who is engaged in an occupation as a paid job rather than as a hobby

3. somebody very competent: somebody who shows a high degree of skill or competence

As 3. suggests, while a high degree of skill and competence can be attained through formal education, there is a growing group of people who have also attained these skills and competencies — the amateur professional. (sometimes referred to as a professional amateur)

The concept and terms have been used, since 2004, as a descriptor for an emerging sociological and economic trend of "people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards."

Amateur professionalism occurs in populations that have more leisure time and live longer, allowing the pursuit of hobbies and other non-essential interests at a professional or near-professional knowledge and skill-level.

Am-pro fields today increasingly include astronomy, activism, sports equipment (e.g. in surfing and mountain biking), software engineering, education, and music production and distribution.

An example of professional amateurism on a large, and socially and economically notable, scale is the international open source and free software operating system project GNU/Linux which along with its many spinoffs has been developed by paid professionals at companies such as Red Hat, HP and IBM working generally indistinguishably together with am pro coders, and has become a major competitor to Microsoft Windows.

Charles Leadbeater, a London think tank researcher in this video talk “weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't.”

In Leadbeater’s initial example, he cites how the mountain bike was actually invented by enthusiastic amateurs before the mainstream manufacturers discovered its worth and eventually mass-produced it.

Many of the more recent discoveries in the field of astronomy have been a collaboration of amateurs and professionals. And not long ago, it was difficult for writers to share their thoughts with the world except for established authors and journalists. Now there are self-published authors and bloggers, many of whom have produced quality writing that rivals that of the full-time professionals.

Not surprisingly, there are professionals who take the prejudicial attitude that the term “amateur” necessarily means second rate as I wrote in Writing Is My Labor of Love in response to a local newspaper columnist who wrote:

Writing is a tough gig, and the fact that millions of people choose to do it for free is a mystery to us paid writers.

Leadbeater has also published a paper, The Pro-Am Revolution which explores this subject in more depth and can be accessed in this link.

I feel there are two things we need to take away from all of this.

One is that innovation is the lifeblood of among others, the manufacturing and educational processes. Instead of amateur professionals being cast aside as second-rate, we need to acknowledge and encourage their contributions.

Secondly, although many have lost their professional jobs due to a terrible economy, many of these same people have a great deal to offer through experience and knowledge acquired in other fields that they are passionate about. For those who want to or need to make a career transition, they should be judged on their own merits instead of simply formal education.

I conclude with this from Leadbeater.

Some professionals will seek to defend their endangered monopoly. The more enlightened will understand that knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will combine the know-how of professionals and amateurs to solve complex problems. That is true in astronomy, software development and online games. It should be the path that our health, education and welfare systems follow as well.