A Dutch friend wrote this up for a list I’m on, and kindly gave me permission to post it. It turns out that the Netherlands is to the left of Bernie and Warren when it comes to national health insurance.

Here are my friend’s comments.

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The Netherlands has privatised all government health funds in 2006. They were regional organized and covered 65% of the population.

The remaining 35% had private health insurance. Partially coöps/non-profits and others for-profit.

Those 35% were higher incomes and/or self-employed and students without a (part-time) job.

The Netherlands doesn’t have Medicare. Elderly people have to purchase health insurance. We do have a mandate, and there are transfers to low income people, paid by a partial income related tax on the wages of working people.

In short, the Netherlands introduced the “Heritage Foundation Health Care System”. It was done by a center-right government who saw an opportunity to privatise the public health funds.

There are some interesting differences how The Netherlands implemented the “Heritage Foundation System” in comparison to RomneyCare and ObamaCare:

1. Employer provided health insurance was grandfathered into an individual polis (you could keep it, but the employer went out of the system)
2. There is a mandatory list called ‘basic insurance list’. Every insurer has to offer that list. It is the cheapest available.
3. Contraceptive pills have been kicked off the ‘mandatory list’ by centre-right governments and put back on the list by centre-left. Currently they are off the mandatory list.
4. Abortion is outside the mandatory list, except for medical necessity in hospitals
5. There is a specialist ‘Pro Life Health Insurance’. No abortion, no euthanasia, no transgender operations, no in-vitro-fertilisation, no sterilisation and no morning after pill coverage etc. ample on palliative care and courses for natural family planning / counseling. When I drive on the highway through the Bible Belt, I see billboards for them. 
6. Pro-Life Insurance is also the health insurer promoted by the PCOB and KBO. The Protestant Christian and the Catholic associations for the elderly, both are mainline protestant and catholic social organisations. They cover a lot of elderly people with the insurance they negotiated for their members.
7. The Netherlands has a ‘conscience clause’. Those who don’t want health insurance for religious reasons or any other personal belief, can call it in. The government then opens a health account and fills it with your health-tax payments. The account can only be used for paying health care/cure. If it is empty, your on your own. If there is still an amount when you die, it becomes part of your estate and goes to your heirs.
8. If you want insurance, you relinquish your health account to the insurer of choice, but you cannot go back from insurance to the tax-authority filled health account.

As far as I understand it, Switzerland also made reforms toward a “Heritage Foundation health care system” in the 2000s. 

And as a final note: keep in mind that the ‘hot button issues’ like contraception and inclusion/exclusion of abortion on the mandatory coverage list are political footballs here too.

There were 17 abortion clinics in the Netherlands. 7 went bankrupt in the early ’10s due to too low demand for their services. 4 were relaunched, so there are now 13 abortion clinics on a population of 17 million. California has ca. 150 clinics for ca. 40 million. I think only South-Carolina has a lower ratio in terms of Abortion Clinics per 1,000,000 women. Kansas and Missouri are more on par with the Netherlands.

In general, abortion policies are far stricter in Europe. The Netherlands isn’t much of an outlier in restrictive abortion policies, where restrictions kick-in after 13 weeks of gestation and a 5 working day “rethink period” with adoption counseling is mandatory. The big outlier in Europe is Great-Britain, which has abortion policies a lot like the USA. Northern-Ireland however is very strict, just like Ireland.

Off course this is far from China’s ‘one-child-policy’, where it was encouraged to have single-child families and abortion is easy accessible.

There are some intriguing points to make, about what went different.

1. The USA didn’t grandfather private health insurance policies from employers to individuals and continued employer provided health insurance.
2. As a result demand for the “ObamaCare exchanges” was much smaller
3. Due to the existence of Medicare, untouched by ObamaCare, there wasn’t massive ‘insurance pool organisation’
4. US Labor Unions still negotiate health benefits with employers instead of operating as the middleman towards health insurers c.q. owning a stake in a health insurance fund
5. The absence of “Conscience Opt-Out” and “Pro Life Insurance”, combined with employer based health care, caused a Supreme Court case (Hobby Lobby) which forced a ridiculous decision that a corporate legal entity now can have a ‘religious conscience’
6. This of course did extend to Catholic Nuns too, who were forced to pay for mandates that went against their beliefs.

It all smacked as incomplete design and as a result a set of flaws due to provisions not taken, probably because of political expediency.

Currently the Netherlands has 11 health insurance providers after a lot of M&A had happened. The interesting result is that the big winners have been 

a. A rather high-end private insurer, offering expensive “we cover everything” policies 

b. A former health fund which had worked in a blue-collar region (Delfland-Schieland-Westland), being the repeated price-breaker and as a result is now the darling of consumer organisations etc.

What is really different between the Dutch implementation and the USA, is the bargaining positions in the system. The collectives that sprang up (some spontaneously, around websites) and went shopping. It makes a difference when in a market of 17 million and 11 providers, someone shows up at your doorstep with ‘I have 200.000 signatories looking for a good insurance policy …’).

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Well, here are two things I never heard of before. First:

Through this intriguing Register report I learned about the DNSSEC root-signing ceremony. It happens quarterly in alternating fashion on the east and west coasts of the US. The carefully scripted ceremony, lasting over two hours, is meant to anchor the web of trust in the DNS, the Internet’s domain name system. To this end it is streamed live and archived for posterity.

So writes Keith Dawson (twitter) in a post on the A Recovering Physicist blog.

Then he notes the resemblance to the second thing:

Reading about this modern ceremony, performed quarterly for 10 years now, immediately put me in mind of a similar ritual, the Trial of the Pyx, staged in London for 738 years, for a substantially similar purpose: anchoring trust in the English currency.

I’d bet against either of these on a “Bluff the Listener” game on Wait Wait Don’t Tell me. But they’re both real.

Here’s some information about the DNSSEC ceremony, taken from the post Keith links to:

The root DNS zone contains information about how to query the top-level domain (TLD) name servers (.com, .edu, .org, etc). It enables Internet users to access domain names in all TLDs, even brand new ones like .software and .bank, making it an integral part of the global Internet.

In How DNSSEC Works, we explained how trust in DNSSEC is derived from the parent zone’s DS resource record. However, the root DNS zone has no parent, so how can we trust the integrity and authenticity of its information?

The article ably describes the trust systems involved, which include trusted institutions and individuals, redundancy, and encryption. And ceremony.

Trust won’t anchor itself.

(Actually that’s quite contestable.)

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It is fantastic that 14 Paris museums have put images of 150,000 artworks into the public domain. Go take a look. It makes the world visibly better.

But …

…The images are easily accessible one at a time for a human who is browsing. You can also click to download it, and then do whatever you want with it. But they are, apparently purposefully, difficult to batch download. That deprives us of the ability to set computers onto the images and their metadata so that they can discover relationships, and patterns of relationships, among them. That’s a lost opportunity.

I understand it’s hard for institutions to give up on the credit they deserve for maintaining these artworks. Items put in the public domain can be passed around and duplicated without any reference to the source that made them available, or even to the artist who created them. But in return, the culture gets to freely share those images, and to incorporate them into new works, which helps to preserve and extend our shared culture.

So I don’t want to be ungrateful for this enormous gift to the world. But one more step – say, an open API that enables batch download – and the world can benefit even more from these museum’s awesome generosity.

(Hat tip to Keith Dawson.)

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Here are links to the earliest cartoons in Riochard Brody’s excellent article, “Draw Stars,” in the Dec. 30, 2019 New Yorker. (Note: Racist and other stereotypes below.)

Emile Cole, Fantasmagorie, 1908, restored. (Original)

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo, 1911:

McCay, Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914:

Max and Dave Fleischer, Out of the Inkwell: The Tantalizing Fly, 1919 (remastered):

The Fleischers, Jumping Beans, 1922 (remastered):

Wallace Carlson (Bray Studios), How Cartoons Are Made, 1919:

Wallace Carlson, He resolves not to smoke, 1914:

Gregory La Cava, The Breath of a Nation, 1919:

Joseph Sunn claymation: Green Pastures, 1919:

Wallace McCutcheon’s merging of Green Pastures with live action, in The Sculptor’s Nightmare:

Howard S. Moss stop action, Mary & Gretel, part 1, 1916:

Mary & Gretel, part 2:

Walter Ruttmann’s abstract Opus 1, 1921:

Lette Reiniger’s silhouette Cinderella, 1921:

Bryant Fryer’s silhouette Follow the Swallow, 1927:

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Upset that Holland has become associated with legalized drugs and sex work, the nation has decided to rebrand itself as The Netherlands.

Yet “Netherlands” has a history of bawdy associations that goes back far further than Holland’s. 

For example, in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (Act III Scene 2), Dromio is comparing an obese woman to a globe, mapping countries to her features.

The comparison ends with:

Antipholus of Syracuse. Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?

Dromio of Syracuse. Oh, sir, I did not look so low.

Oooh, that naughty, naughty Bard!

On the other hand, if Holland had run an Internet contest to come up with its new name, the Olympic teams would probably now be playing for the nation known as Weedy McWeedFace.

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I met Brad Turcotte, who goes by the professional name Brad Sucks, back in the Age of the Blogosphere. He was, and is, an indie musician who embodies the spirit of the open Web. He’s also an awesome song writer, singer, producer, and one man band.

Weirdly, we have been friends since way back when – Why weirdly? Take a look at the photo – although we’ve only met in person twice, including today. Brad was in town, so we had a long beer and a longer conversation. What a pleasure. And, frankly, a privilege.

You should listen to his music because it’s good. You should support him at Patreon because that’s one of the services that actually helps artists. We should all be working to enable creative people like Brad to flourish; he’s what the Web was made for.

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SPOILER ALERT: I’m writing this hours before the final episode and will spoil prior episodes.

Based on the end of Episode 5 of Season 8 — the penultimate episode — it sure looks like Arya is on her way to kill Dany. But that’d be a cop out. I hope GoT goes all Red Weddingon us.

The GoT is a pacifist work intent on reminding us of the cost of war. War is unpredictable at both its micro level — even obvious heroes can be killed without warning — and macro level.

At the macro level, Dany certainly seems to have lost her claim to be a virtuous ruler. But so what? GoT should not end based on what will make its audience feel good.

Dany should become the ruler of Westeros. That will require killing Jon since he’s the legit heir to the throne. After that, the script writers will do the old Towering Infernothing of deciding who lives and who dies — for God’s sake, why did they have to kill Fred Astaire? — and who makes it. If I had to guess, I’d say Sansa dies, Tyrion survives in some humiliating role, and Arya lives on as an enemy. Because GoT should not fully resolve … which, given GRRM’s pace, it looks like it never will.

[Confidence level: 12%]

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In response to a tweet asking writers what they write out longhand, I replied that if I’m particularly at sea, I’ll write out an outline, usually with lots of looping arrows, on a pad. But only with a fountain pen. Ballpoints don’t work.

My old bloggy friend AKMA wondered how he’d known me so long without knowing that I’m a fountain pen guy. The truth is that I’ve only recently become one. I’ve liked them at various times over the course my life, but only about four years ago did I integrate fountain pens into my personality.

It happened because I bought a $20 Lamy Safari on impulse in a stationery store. From there I got some single-digit Chinese fountain pens. Then, when I made some money on a writing contract, I treated myself to a $120 Lamy 2000, a lifetime pen. It’s pretty much perfect, from the classic 1960s design to the way the ink flows onto paper just wet enough and with enough scratchiness to feel like you’re on a small creek splashing over stones as it carves out words.

I have recently purchased a TWSBI ECO for $30. It has replaced my Safari as my daily pen. It’s lovely to write with, holds a lot of ink, and feels slightly sturdier than the Safari. Recommended.

Even though my handwriting is horrendous, I look forward to opportunities to write with these pens. But I avoid writing anything I’ll then have to transcribe because transcribing is so tedious. I do harbor a romantic notion of writing fiction longhand with a fountain pen on pads of Ampad “golden fibre.” Given that my fiction is worse than my handwriting, we can only hope that this notion itself remains a fiction.

So much of my writing is undoing, Penelope-like, the words I wove the day before that I am not tempted even a little to switch from word processors when the words and their order are the object. But when the words are mere vehicles, my thinking is helped — I believe — by a pen that drags its feet in the dirt.

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<rant>

Moral rights of creators are inventions grounded in a bad analogy with property rights.

If you want to maintain your “moral right” to what you’ve written, then don’t publish it.

If you publish it, you are making it public. Thank you for doing so.

You will make money from it for some fixed period — a period designed to provide you (but not necessarily Stephen King) with sufficient incentive to continue to create and publish works, but a short enough period that creative works can be assimilated by the culture.

Why put limits on the author’s exclusive right to publish? To keep culture lively. Which is the same as keeping that culture alive.

Cultural assimilation requires the freedom to talk about your work, to reuse it, misuse it, abuse it, to get it terribly wrong, to make it our own as individuals, to make it ours as a culture.

Imagine a Renaissance in which “moral rights” were enforced. Can’t.

Moral rights kill culture.

(Note that this applies to works that are published as copies. Please don’t take a hammer to any irreplaceable statues. Thanks.)

</rant>

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

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