Wouldn’t it be great if your health plan covered at least 90% of your expenses? And if it didn’t exclude preexisting or expensive conditions? And if it avoided really unpleasant medical procedures, such as colonoscopies or even shots. The New Universal Coverage for All Plan (NUCAP) does just that.

Consider what happens when you go to a doctor or are hospitalized? You spend a lot of time in waiting rooms. A typical doctor visit involves a wait in a more or less pleasant waiting room with magazines that might have been published during the past year. You are then called in, and your vital signs are measured. You then go to a waiting room and undress as needed. After a further wait, the doctor appears and examines you. You then put your clothes back on and wait for a discussion with the doctor. Afterward you pay and leave. A typical hospital visit also involves a lot of waiting -- waiting to be seen, waiting for an operation, and waiting to recover.

Perhaps 90% of your time is spent in waiting rooms, examination rooms, or recovery rooms. The NUCAP plan provides for waiting room expenses, thus covering the majority of your time spent seeking medical care. It drastically reduces expenses by cutting out the relatively expensive actual medical treatment and covering just the waits.

NUCAP provides a nationwide network of medical waiting rooms, tastefully furnished and with a variety of current magazines. Most are conversions from abandoned big box stores. When you need medical care, you go to the nearest NUCAP waiting room. A greeter welcomes you, asks what your problem is, and then directs you to the appropriate section of the waiting room. You fill out a medical history form and describe your current symptoms. After an appropriate waiting time, you go to checkout and leave. There is no need to endure painful shots, embarrassing examinations and weigh-ins, and mysterious objects inserted into personal orifices.

NUCAP dramatically reduces the nation’s overall medical expenses and at the same time provides universal coverage. What more could you want?

Remember Project Impact? This was a FEMA program to mitigate the impact of natural disasters started under Clinton and run by people who knew and cared about what they were doing. B* killed it shortly after the start of his administration. Fortunately not all references to Project Impact have been removed from the FEMA website.

Here is a brief description from a 1999 FEMA press release (http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?... ).

"Through its four-pronged program, Project Impact builds safe communities when individuals, businesses, and community leaders take the following steps:

* Identify and recruit Project Impact partners in the community
* such as local government leaders, civic and volunteer groups, businesses, and individual citizens. Determine the community's risk for falling victim to natural disasters.
* Set priorities and target resources to reduce impact of future disasters.
* Keep the entire community informed and focused on Project Impact's ability to reduce damage and costs of future disasters."


Project Impact has apparently been replaced by the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.
http://www.fema.gov/government/grant/hmgp/...

It is possible that either structure could be effective if run by people, like Bill Clinton and James Witt, who took it seriously as an appropriate government program for disaster management. But the current administration does not have a credible track record on government action in this area, so we'll never know.

I have seen a lot of not especially constructive threads on the California fires and other recent or potential disasters in the past few days. I would like to see the discourse shift to a more productive direction. Where can people live safely? What possible changes to buildings and other parts of the infrastructure are needed to do this? How can they be implemented? What is the role of the federal and state governments in disaster management? You can probably think of better questions than this.

Lots of people on DU are advocates of specific presidential candidates. Where does your candidate stand on Project Impact vs. the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program vs. possible alternatives? If he or she does not have a position on disaster management, why not?

I did a search on Project Impact before posting this message and didn't find anything past 2005. If I missed something recent and this is essentially a duplicate post, I apologize.

Suppose you are embezzling money from your company. Suppose you are creating fictitious customers and companies. Suppose you are pretending that students did work they didn't. Suppose you are upgrading medical problems for higher reimbursements.

What do you want to do? Cover your tracks. Make sure no one notices. Make sure no one else gets access to the books you are cooking or the records you are falsifying.

What don't you want to do? Take time off. Take a vacation. Get sick. If you're not there, someone else will be filling in for you. Unless that person is a confederate of yours, there's a good chance they will notice what is going on. And you may get caught.

Forced unpaid leave or furloughs are are a different issue because these are essentially pay cuts. But forcing people to take vacation can be justified on the grounds of both security and health. Paying people for unused vacation is a bad idea because it encourages people not to take it. Take it or lose it. It's vacation, not a bonus.

One of my Senators (Lindsey Graham) posted the following on his web page:

“The censure resolution smacks of a political stunt at a time when we need serious and thoughtful discussions about how to succeed in the War on Terror. While I disagree with some of the legal arguments put forth by the Administration, the law in this area is evolving and less-than-settled.

“A censure resolution would do tremendous damage to the President’s standing during a time of war. Based on the facts and law, it is not justified.”

I sent him an email comment supporting censure anyway. I also sent one to our other Senator, Jim DeMint, one of whose major campaign promises was that he would basically support anything * did.