Brennan’s Blog

I have watched parts of presidential elections and one comment which has come up a few times from both Republicans and Democrats that has stuck in my mind. The comment is about how much the cost of paperwork makes up the overall cost of health care. A study at Harvard Medical School shows that the cost of paperwork was $294.3 billion in 1999. The numbers from Bill Richardson's website show that administrative costs are at 31%. Much of it is the paperwork related to insurance forms. Since the cost of health care seems to have skyrocketed the past few years it has become a big issue that the candidates have to address and most of them say the solution is to reduce the administrative costs by leveraging IT, which means replacing the paperwork with electronic documents and software.

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I believe that competition will help cable costs go down, but at the moment the laws protect exclusive rights for area cable providers. And these providers pay a hefty fee to the local governments for that right. They call it a franchise fee, but it really sounds like a bribe.

If you have seen any TV commercials lately you have seen the ads about cable competition. One set of ads is from Consumers for Cable Choice. This group supports the Video Choice Act which was introduced last year. It appears to have a good deal of support from many congressional representatives. And you should know this coalition is strongly backed by AT&T (formerly SBC) which is the company trying to introduce their own video services to the Milwaukee area.

On the other side is the existing franchisees who want to protect their turf. In Milwaukee that would be Time Warner Cable. The Wisconsin Cable Communications Association has fired back with their own ads to stop this legislation. At issue is the fact that the new competition would not start out by paying those franchise fees which Time Warner has labeled a "sweetheart deal." I think paying the local government to block competition is the real "sweetheart deal" which does not benefit the consumers.

If you look at the bill you will see that it aims to eliminate all barriers to competition and remove exclusive franchise rights. That sounds like a level playing field to me. I want the bill to pass. If you agree, you can sign the petition.

With the election in less 2 months away I have been trying to get the facts together behind all of the spin you see in the political ads. You see 87 votes for this and a memo about that and a flurry of response to support it or discredit it by people you have never seen before and may never see again.

This week on Slashdot a new politics section was opened. It will be interesting to see how things unfold since the Slashdot crowd can be pretty diverse. And since you can make comments and others can moderate up the best comments it is a great way to distill what people are thinking.

An early post asked about getting accurate political information about the ads the candidates and PACs are running. The person submitting the question had a couple of websites but many were suggested in the comments. I found from reading them that it is still difficult to come across as unbiased. And I wonder how unbiased some of them even try to be.
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I had a road trip this week so I decided to get a book on CD to give me something to listen to while I drove. I picked up "My Life" by Bill Clinton. The book starts out when he is young and goes up to this year covering the key events in his life. I think listening to it is better than reading it because he reads the book himself. I also found several things to be pretty insightful...
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A pretty bad example of how things get the wrong spin on a bad situation I found that Rush Limbaugh called the events at Abu Ghraib brilliant. He also says that nobody got hurt or physically injured when we know that prisoners needed medical attention and some even died. And then there is the misguided notion that we can do anything we want, just as long as it is not to the point it is as bad as Saddam Hussein himself. I hardly would use an abusive dictator as a barometer for this country's moral authority. But there is more...
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