Why Not Smart Cards Instead of EHRs?

As the gathering storm of health care reform threatens individual privacy in the form of electronic health records (EHRs) that can be accessed nationwide--and no doubt cleverly hacked into just as everything else is hacked into--a simple solution is to leave the data-keeping to individual patients.

Some countries, notably Taiwan in this comparative study, issue each person a smart card, onto which physicians and other health care providers encode the patient's medical history, medicines being taken, and other pertinent information. Patients carry the cards with them and can present them at any doctor's or specialist's office, and the smart card functions not only as a data center but also as a credit card to bill the government.

Cost for a family of four is just $650 annually and co-pays are low, just $7 for doctors, $1.80 for dentists, and a maximum of $6.50 for prescriptions.

Problem is, like our Medicare, the system is going broke.

Just proves the old adage that you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Sacre Bleu! Managers Held Hostage in France?

Let's hope American labor leaders don't read international news reports.

Turns out that a new habit is taking hold in France in labor relations. To wit: When employees hear bad news, they hold their manager hostage until s/he changes the bad news. Police refuse to intervene for fear of violence.

A manager of a French sbusidiary of 3M is, as I write, being held hostage after he announced a layoff of 110 workers. Employees say they won't let him out until he makes amends. Just what amends aren't clear--whether they want no or fewer layoffs, better severance packages or what--but Luc Rousselet is barricaded in his office until he pulls out his magic wand and makes things right.

Rousselet told reporters (presumably by phone, but that's not clear in the story either) that he "knew there was this risk when I came here."

There's some recent precedent for the union and workers at the 3M factory in Pithiviers, near Orleans in the South of France. Earlier this month, employees at Sony, also in the south of France, held both the chief executive and human resources director overnight until they agreed to better pay packages for workers being let go.

Who needs the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) when a good ol' lynch mob will do?

Personnel Concepts Attuned to Obama Changes

There's some glee over at Personnel Concepts, even among those who may have voted otherwise, at the thought of the changes being sought and made by the Obama administration on the labor law front.

Change is like the ka-ching of a cash register to firms that help businesses comply with workplace regulations and laws, and not just labor law poster and information firms like Personnel Concepts.

Labor and employment lawyers' eyes also grow wide these days as they ponder the opportunities under the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Human resources firms are busy scheduling seminars and offering training courses on CDs and in books for the changes to Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the Americans With Disabilities Amendments Act (ADAAA).

There's more change to come, so look for companies that deal with labor law and workplace regulations to develop new products and programs, and new products and programs mean additional opportunities for sales. Ka-ching.

Recessions never do hit everyone equally, do they?

Deja Vu All Over Again With Health Care Reform

Two admittedly left-leaning columnists, a married couple (he a pollster, she a lawyer), have produced a comparison of polling results then and now. "Then" refers to the Hillarycare hubbub in 1993-1994, and "now" refers to the Obamacare hubbub in 2009-?.

Results are a bit different than you would expect if you listen to or read what our left-leaning media have to say about health care reform.

Surprise, surprise, there was more public support then than now!

You can read through the nitty-gritty polling numbers in "A New Day or Groundhog Day," but let me focus on just one of the results to show you why Obama and the Democrats are going to stuff health care reform down our throats whether we like it or not.

A poll in 1993 when Hillarycare filled the air found 66 percent agreeing with the statement, "I would be willing to pay higher taxes so that everyone can have health insurance." Just 30 percent were opposed. A poll released March 1 of this year found just 49 percent agreeing and 45 percent disagreeing.

But wait--here's where it gets interesting. When those who agreed with the statement in 1993 were asked how much they'd be willing to spend a month so that everyone could have health insurance, just 25 percent said $50, 40 percent said $30, and 61 percent said just $10.

The same breakdown isn't available for 2009, but I bet you'd find few people willing to pay $50 more a month in this economy. I'm not even sure you could get a majority to commit to $10 (unless they thought that they would then get health care for free, an extraordinarily popular delusion in this day and age).

That in a nutshell is why the Dems are rushing to pass "reform" before anyone can sort through the details (which in any case won't be fully available until the thing is published as law). They know the nation can't afford it and taxes will be flying at everyone (and not just the rich) right and left to try to fund so-called reform (to say nothing of the long lines to see doctors, waiting lists to get hospital treatment, and medicines and procedures banned to save money).

Medicare is already on the fast track to go bankrupt in 10 years or less, and somehow our sleight-of-hand artists in D.C. are trying to get us to believe that spending more money actually saves money (in the long run, they add as a disingenuous qualification).

Welcome to life in our Brave New World, where deficits result in savings and less health care is better health care.

Chinese Use Card Check to Unionize Wal-Mart

I've written previously about the card-check union organizing provision in the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) now before Congress. It turns out that this is the same method, gathering signatures, that Chinese workers used to set up unions in every Wal-Mart branch in China.

This was fairly revolutionary for the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which had been accustomed to being co-opted for a price. Generally, the union would approach the management of a company and strike a deal for one of its own to be given a mid-management position to oversee the union branch, and in the bargain would receive two percent of all wages for its operations. That two percent, naturally, would go to the main union, but it would also be used to buy presents for the workers at Chinese New Year's and so on. Workers' rights would hardly be considered.

Wal-Mart, however, balked at this process and wouldn't accede to hiring a union rep or to paying the two percent. It pointed to Chinese law, which said that the workers had to request a union. This was anathema to the ACFTU, which had never had to organize and by law couldn't even strike. ACFTU had no experience in grass-roots mobililzation.

Surprise, surprise, however, came when workers at the Jinjiang Wal-Mart in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, met in the middle of the night and collected the 25 signatures necessary to form a union. Wal-Mart at first threatened to fire anyone who joined the union, but as branch after branch went through the "card check" process, Wal-Mart accommodated the ACFTU and is now unionized nationwide.

So, you can see why American unions thirst for EFCA and card check.

Somehow, though, I think unionization would cost Wal-Mart U.S.A. more than two percent of its payroll. That's why its opposition to EFCA is so ferocious.