The purpose of insurance is to cover risks that a person cannot afford. All medical insurance should be for avoiding medical catastrophe. As other LW's have noted, if insurance covers routine costs that everyone has, it just adds a costly layer of bureaucracy. We have the worst of all worlds now. There is a lot of first dollar coverage, with low deductibles, but if something really bad happens many people are left out in the cold. As much as I detest Bush, his approach of decoupling health insurance from employment is on the right track. Why should the uninsured have to use taxable dollars for medical costs, when those who have employment based insurance have a tax-free benefit? It's all politics, however. Bush knows that many unions control the health insurance of their members. So the relatives and friends of the union chiefs get cushy jobs at the insurers. And a lot of slush funds to be used for political purposes.

When I managed a small company our family $5000 major med cost $290 a month. Every year we had it the cost dropped 15%. The agent told me that the insurer had set it high because of uncertainty. In a recent article I read that the cost of a $5000 family major med had dropped to $200 a month in CA. With that type of plan you can spend your pretax money any way you want, Viagra for men, birth control for women. However, if you are sickly it might cost far more than $200 a month. It costs $17,000 a year to care for the typical type 2 diabetic. What insurance company is going to insure that risk, without charging for it?

Neither of our daughters was ever spanked, although we told them that they would be if their offense was extreme enough. That would be endangering themselves or someone else. When they started driving we told them that they would lose driving privileges for six months if we ever found that they or anyone in the car was not using a seat belt. They grew up to be fine responsible adults.

OTOH, our family has always eaten a lot of fish. The consumption of the omega-3's in fish is correlated with far less misbehavior, which has been documented in studies done a several penal institutions. A diet of burgers and fries is not conducive to mental stability. I think the LW should try to get the brother in laws family to incorporate oily fish into their diet. Not farm-raised salmon, however, since their diet of corn makes them about as bad as a diet of burgers and fries.

The Earth has had at least 50 ice ages in the last 2.5M years. It also got pretty warm between glacial periods. Lots of species died out and others evolved into what we see today. We cannot hurt the Earth. Gaia is resilient. We can, of course, make it pretty uninhabitable for large numbers of humans. Which will make it habitable for large numbers of other critters, and lots of niches for others to evolve into. I am sick and tired of hearing how Global Warming is "destroying" the planet. That is total bullshit. What we are probably destroying is that lovely Holocene Climate that we have gotten so used to. The news (good and bad) is that it would have been destroyed anyway. We are still in a cycle of ice ages with brief warming periods in between.

I think that we will go through a period of enormous die backs of the human population. Those who are lucky (and maybe smart) enough to be in the right place and time will survive and procreate. I believe that technology is good and must be preserved. Since the Earth will inevitably settle into another ice age, after this brief human-induced warming spurt is over, we will need lots of energy to preserve technological civilization. Since the fossil fuels will be gone in two hundred or so years, that leaves solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and lots of nukes to keep it up. It took 1500 years after the fall of the Romans to get back to where we were with many technologies, like medical. I've read that the City of Rome had a million or so inhabitants in the middle of the 6th century. Around 560 AD some Germanic tribe or other got tired of being bothered by them and cut the aqueducts. Since the inhabitants were by then incompetent at anything but being entertained, they were unable to repair them. The population rapidly fell to 10,000. Sad to say that most people who can fix things tend to be pretty conservative. Scary! How many of the readers of Salon can fix anything? How many of you have used a backhoe, or driven a tractor, or done anything that requires mechanical skills? I thought so.