1. The current systems of providing Federal dollars to public schools allocates the most money to the schools that have the worst results. Parochial and many Charter schools provide better results at lower cost. Republican plan allows parents to decide where their children should be educated and allows the dollars that the government would spend providing a sub-standard education to follow them.
2. Since there is no final plan it is hard to specifically address what the alternative would be for pre-existing conditions. However, the insurance model does not, and cannot work. The insurance model essentially takes the probability of a bad outcome and multiplies it by the cost of said outcome to arrive at a premium rate (subject to some other factors like investment return and administrative costs, but these are actually minor, 2-10% of total costs). In the case of a pre-existing condition, the probability of bad outcome is 100%, as it by definition has already occurred, so the insurance company would still have to charge the full amount of the care, plus it's overhead, to pay for the occurrence. The original point of the mandate was to force people to purchase insurance before they were sick, but then set the costs of not having insurance so low as to still make it financially viable to game the system.
The Obamacare model effectively combines all of the worst features of both the insurance-based system and the single-payer. It took a bad situation and made it worse.
3. I hold a degree in Industrial Engineering and have worked in the field of extracting trends in large datasets for over 15 years. I have worked with concepts like signal-to-noise ratios, gage and systemic measurement bias, and multi-factor regression models on a near daily basis. I am utterly unconvinced by arguments that a trend of less than the magnitude of the standard gage error can be extracted from a system where the signal-to-noise ratio is less than 2dB, particularly when you claim that most of the effect is caused by multiple positive feedbacks. The technical term for the climate models is that they are over-parameterized, that is there are too many quantities that are not derived from an understanding of the process, but instead have their values chosen in order to make the data fit. |
