SilverBulleits

Global Groundswell

It's easy to dismiss the Tea Baggers as red-neck Republicans. And/or as the Times recently reported, many ascribe more mainstream substance to it than meets the eye: i.e., last week, citing recent survey data, NYT asserted that, in the main, the Tea Bag Movement comprises largely affluent members of the Republican base.

FWIW, IMHO, there may something much larger and more pervasive afoot here.  And, I'll use and Op-ed from today's Times to make my point...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/opinion/19douthat.html?th&emc=th

Here you'll see Ross Douthat's incisive commentary on how the favorite to win next month's national election in Britain owes much to the American conservative movement: i.e. Tory  PM candidate David Cameron is promising to his traditionally-liberal followers a dramatic shift away from London and a return to more local government control on wide variety of fronts.  FWIW, I don't believe all of that either.  Rather, there's a groundswell of data, coming forth from all sorts of surveys, indicating that folks from all around the world are (or want to be) becoming materially more self-reliant.  And, finally FWIW, I don't think that the source of all this wanna-be autonomy has anything to do with partisan politics, ethics, morality, or any other kind of ideology.  Rather, folks are simply deducing what most exec's and other veteran managers of any large organizations, ironically, already know: the bigger the institution is, the less effective and responsive it inevitably becomes!

In other words, Tea Bagger chants of "we want our country back" have less to do with feelings of resentment (ostensibly over minority leadership placing undo emphasis on minority issues) than it does a proliferating belief system that, past a point that we're now nearing, larger government simply can't do any more for anyone.

And, in a Web 2.0/3.0 world, that may not be a bad thing at all!  For, if a by-product of measurable gains in self-reliance are more folks actually committing to things like consumer-driven healthcare we'll all be better off for it.

xxxilla In The Mist

Over dinner last night, my old friend Patrick Viguerie pointed out that there's a newer demonstration of the phenomena underlying Pink Mountain Paradoxes.  Check this video out to see for yourself...

A Pink Mountain Paradox

 

Years ago, there was a famous experiment conducted involving a clearly-absurd image superimposed upon the lenses in one of those ET-looking binocular sight-seeing machines. Somewhat surprising was the response of many sight-seers to the fake "pink mountain": i.e., no response at all.  They didn't see it!

And that, of course, was the point of the experiment: while we tend to assume that what we see is real, the reality is that perception happens higher up in the brain.  The light striking our retina's is only the beginning of a perceptualizing pageant; what we consciously think that we see can be something quite different.  Or, in this case, we often naturally ignore and erase images that make no sense to us.

IMHO there may be a pink mountain on the healthcare horizon.

A complete discussion of this troubling notion would require more statistical analysis (and more space) than I can give it here.  But, the long and short of it is this: steady advances of technology invariably contribute to more and better products.  And, as applied to health, that equates to most of us living longer better lives: doubtless, a happy outcome, right?  Sadly, however, people living longer, consuming more (not to mention more expensive) treatments and tonics create a "new dimension" of problems onto itself.  In other words, in a healthcare world already constrained by both cost and supply, higher per-capita consumption could create aggregate Access issues even more troublesome than ones that we do already see!

If there's a way out of this paradox it probably involves P4 (predictive, personalized, participative and preventive) medicine.  But that's a topic for another day (and another post or comment)