Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

On health care...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/

Definitely worth a watch.

On energy, and I've finally come up with a passable hypothesis for why the relatively more evil technologies (military-backed oil exploitation, nuclear, giant hydroelectric boondoggles) get the subsidies and relatively benign approaches (smaller wind and hydro, solar, energy efficiency) get the shaft: the classic distributed cost and concentrated benefit problem, with the twist that if you can get the government to invade other countries, fund nuclear research / pay for the waste storage for you, or get behind some gigantic dam, you are probably the only corporation set to win the contract or get the benefit. But policies and technologies that decentralize energy production (the natural environmental and national security choice) also decentralize power.

But as you said, if the bad had to pay its environmental costs we'd probably be set already. Imagine if gas had been $6 a gallon for the past 60 years (but the extra $4-5 a gallon didn't go to government general revenues nor rich people's profits, but was redistributed equally to... everyone). Everyone would be living more ecologically, all our vehicles and other technology would be far more efficient, and it wouldn't take me 38 hours to travel from St. Louis, Missouri to Framingham, Massachusetts by Amtrak. Someone can check my math; I leave 8 a.m. this morning and should be in shortly after 10 p.m. Tuesday night.