The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
The 2006 annual scientific meeting of the American College of Physicians used six or eight auditoriums simultaneously over a three-day period, to accommodate the gratifying number of new advances in medical science. I wandered into one session devoted to pulmonary embolism because it affects a close member of my family. But every citizen ought to ponder the non-scientific message of this session. Indeed, the anti-scientific message.
It turns out that 1% of the relatives of patients with pulmonary embolism will test positive for inheriting a gene that promotes this often fatal disease. But the speaker, invited as a national authority to speak for the College, cautioned the audience that it would be wrong to test the relatives of their patients with pulmonary embolism for the possibility of running a significant risk of this disease themselves. Why so? We have a pretty good way of preventing this often-fatal disease, by giving blood-thinners, and blood thinners are getting better all the time. So, naturally, there were questions from the audience of doctors. Why in the world wouldn't you test people for this preventable condition?
With obvious discomfort, the speaker did a little tap-dancing in his answers; but here is the substance of it. There is a risk of complications from the therapy, of about 5% a year so you must choose carefully among those who have a positive test. If the individual tests positive but is not treated, he may develop an embolism and sue you for not having treated him. Even if he doesn't develop the condition, he will probably be stigmatized for life and find that health insurance is overpriced or unobtainable. If you treat everybody, you will cause problems more often than the disorder would. So, don't test. If you don't know about the problem, you can't get into trouble for acting in an ambiguous situation.
Personally, I doubt that. If the person has an embolism, a keen lawyer can ask if any relatives ever had the same thing, and if so, the other doctor can be sued for not testing the relatives, hence not discovering, and not preventing the present sad, sad, situation. I'd like to think the rest of the medical profession will join me in disregarding this preposterous advice, testing these families to identify the people who are at risk, and then treating them with the best method then available.
But, you know, in the present climate of managed care and lawsuits, I'm not so sure that's what will happen. Meanwhile, my own children are all going to be urged to go get themselves tested, whether the test is covered by insurance or not.
THE LIMITS OF GOVERNMENT. Most budgets appear balanced at the beginning of the year because projected revenue has been overestimated; those deficit budgets are balanced at the end of the year by borrowing the shortfall. The most efficient level of taxation has been experimentally shown to be around 18% of the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. That's essentially shorthand for the whole national economy. If government debts exceed the GDP or even grow faster than the GDP does, no one will loan that government money. It's hard to escape the logic that if federal spending levels average 18% of GDP, budgets can be ignored. There's a marginal error in the 18%; but there needs to be a margin of error, perhaps as much as 2%. Go back and read that short paragraph three times.
Gross Domestic Product,
State and local governments are different; only sovereign governments can print money. State and local can be allowed to fail, and that disciplines state and local spending. Sovereigns are limited by GDP, with overall money creation linked to it, while the public makes the leap of faith that an independent Federal Reserve will match money creation to GDP. Moreover, since entitlements like Medicare and Social Security already make up most of U.S. government spending, and will soar in a few years when the baby boomers reach retirement age, demographics make Federal predictions somewhat more precise. Raising taxes is now recognized to reduce the net value of that 18% number, while infinitely rising deficits will be blocked by the bond market, first by rising interest rates, if necessary by a boycott. Unless you just ignore the recession which will eventually be caused by soaring long-term interest rates, spending must be cut severely. Just about the only remedy left is to shift the cost of entitlements back to the private sector. By increasing private savings and drawing compound interest, some unknown amount of progress might be made on this problem. The retirement age must also be increased, second careers after retirement must be encouraged, the costs of retirement must be reduced -- and all other ideas must be explored, too. But one of the main arguments for increasing private savings is that all of the ideas anybody has suggested, rolled up in a ball, are questionably sufficient to finance the approaching problem. It will simply not be possible to evade a serious examination of any suggestion, including this one. Privatize. The public sector is just not big enough to handle the matter, and if you make the public sector bigger, you will destroy the whole economy. Privatize.
DON'T LOSE FAITH IN SCIENCE. It's the common belief that financing Social Security is not nearly as difficult as financing Medicare, but that's just the extrapolation fallacy announcing again that trends in motion will continue forever. Medicare seems to be getting more expensive for three reasons, all temporary. The costs of dying are shifting into Medicare as the population lives longer; eventually, just about everyone will live long enough to die at Medicare's expense, and terminal care costs must then stop shifting. Second, the cost of dying is going to decline as medical research turns to the engineering costs involved, separate from heroic efforts to forestall dying. No one is suggesting euthanasia; just simplifying the issues once a final decision has been made. Third, the cost of chronic illness and disability needs both curative and engineering improvements. Take rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for example.
Thousands of people are painfully crippled every year by RA. They are treated, medicated, pensioned, operated on, and provided with complicated equipment. Suddenly, some new medications have come along which promise there will be a much less further progression of RA in patients who have it; if we use them, the number of cripples will eventually decline. It has a real cost to use new medications, of course; it will cost several thousand dollars a year to offer this miracle to the rheumatoid sufferer. But when the patent protection on those miracle drugs runs out, even on the inevitably improved variants of these drugs, the cost of treatment will surely go down to a thousand or so dollars a year. Meanwhile, the backlog cost of repairing the injured joints of patients who got the disease long ago will fade away. And the engineers will figure out how to make crutches, canes and electric go-carts out of plastic or equivalently cheap ingredients. Most of those patients who now have to be pensioned will be able to find gainful employment. Maybe, maybe, someone will figure out what causes this disease and invent a simple cure for it, but it isn't necessary to pray for miracles on that level in order to predict a major decline in the cost of managing this nasty disease. It is safe to predict that other diseases will follow the same trajectory as RA, leading eventually to a resolution of the fearful costs of Medicare. Social Security is something else; if everybody lives a longer healthier life, non-physicians are going to have to figure out how to pay for living it. Wiggle and squirm all you please; call me names, call the police.
There is no solution to the cost of increased longevity, except to raise the average age of retiring from work.
Byron S. Comati, the Director of Strategic Planning and Analysis for SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority), kindly gave the Right Angle Club an inside look at the hopes and plans of SEPTA for the near (five-year) future. Students of large organizations favor a five or six-year planning cycle as both short enough to be realistic, and long enough to expect to see tangible response. If plans continuously readjust to fit the five-year horizon, the concept is that the organization will move forward on these stepping stones, even accounting for setbacks, disappointments, and surprises. Furthermore, a serious level of continuous planning puts an organization in a position to react when funding opportunities arise, such as the sudden demand of the Obama Administration that economic stimulus proposals be "shovel ready."
The Silverline V
So, SEPTA is currently promoting five major expansions, based on the emerging success of an earlier plan, the Silverliner V. Silverline is a set of 120 shiny new cars, built in Korea on the model of electrical multiple units, which are expected in Spring 2011 to replace 73 cars or units which were built in 1963. Obviously, 120 are more expensive than 73, but they are more flexible as well. And less wasteful; most commuters are familiar with the model of three seats abreast which unfortunately conflict with the social preferences of the public, tending to make the car seem crowded even though it is a third empty. When a misjudgment like this is made, it takes fifty years to replace it with something better. For example, there's currently a movement toward "Green construction", which is acknowledged to be "a little bit more expensive". The actual costs and savings of green construction have yet to become firmly agreed on, so there's an advantage to being conservative about what's new and trendy in things that take fifty years to wear out.
Septa Regional Map
Four of SEPTA's five major proposed projects are in the Pennsylvania suburbs. New Jersey has its own transportation authority, and Philadelphia is thus left to struggle with the much higher costs of urban reconstruction assigned to its declining industrial population. And left unmentioned is the six hundred pound gorilla of the transportation costs of new casinos. A great many people are violently opposed to legalized gambling, and even more upset by the idea of crime emerging in the neighborhoods of gambling enterprises. Even the politicians who enacted this legislation are uncomfortable to see the rather large expenditures which will eat into the net revenue from this development. Nevertheless, if you are running a transportation system, you have an obligation to plan for every large shift in transportation patterns, no matter what you might think of the wisdom of the venture. The alternative is to face an inevitable storm of criticism if casinos come about, but without any preparation having been made for the transportation consequences. At present, the public transportation plan for the casinos is to organize a light rail line along the Delaware waterfront, connecting to the rest of the city through a spur line west up Market Street; it may go to 30th Street Station, or it may stop at City Hall. That sounds a lot like the present Market-Frankford line, so expect some resistance when the cost estimates are revealed. Because all merchants want to have the station stops near them, and almost no residents want a lot of casino foot-traffic near their homes and schools, expect an outcry from those directions, as well. It would be nice to integrate this activity with something which would revive the river wards, but it seems a long stretch to connect with Wilmington on the south, or Trenton on the north.
The planned expansions in the suburban Pennsylvania counties will probably encounter less controversy, although it is the sorry fate of all transportation officials to endure some hostility and criticism for any changes whatever. Generally speaking, the four extensions follow a similar pattern of building along old or abandoned rail lines, following rather than leading the population migrations of the past. When you are organizing mass transit, there is a need to foresee with some certainty that there will be a net increase in commuters in the region under consideration. The one and two passenger automobile is a much more flexible instrument for adjusting to the growth of new development, schools, retail, and industry. Once the region has become established, there is room for an argument that transportation in larger bulk is cheaper, cleaner or whatever.
The Norristown extension follows the existing but underused rail connections to Reading. Route US 422 opened up the region formerly serving the anthracite industry, but now the clamor is rising that US 422 is impossibly crowded and needs to be supplemented with mass transit.
The Quakertown extension follows the rail route abandoned in 1980 to Bethlehem and Allentown, although the extension is only planned as far as Shelly, PA.
The Norristown high-speed extension responds to the almost total lack of public transportation to the King of Prussia shopping center, and will possibly replace the light rail connection to downtown Philadelphia.
And the Paoli extension follows the mainline Amtrak rails as far as Coatesville.
All of these expansions can expect to be greeted with huzzahs by developers, land speculators, and newsmedia, but resistance will inevitably be as fierce as it always is. Local business always fears an expansion of its competitors; the feeling is stronger in the suburbs than the city, but local business always resists and local politicians always follow their lead. To some extent, the suburbs have a point, since radial extensions are usually much cheaper to build than lateral or circumferential transportation media; bus routes are the favored pioneers in connecting one suburb with another. Therefore, the tendency in these present plans remains typical by threatening the suburbs with a need to travel toward the center hub, then take a reverse branch back in the general direction of where they started, in order to go a short distance to a shopping center or school system. The two main river systems around Philadelphia interfere with the construction of big "X" routes from the far distance in one direction to the far distance in the opposite direction. Euclidian geometry makes the circumferential route elongate as the square of the radius. And jealousies between the politicians in three states create rally foci for the special local interests which feel injured. Since it seems to be an established fact that the proportional contribution to mass transportation by the surrounding suburbs of Philadelphia is traditionally (and considerably) lower than the national average, a political reconciliation might do more for the finances of SEPTA than any federal stimulus package could do. For such reconciliation, a few lateral connections in the net might pacify the suburbs enough to justify the extra cost. Unfortunately, the main source of unjustified cost in regional mass transit is the high wage and benefit levels of the employees, a situation inherited from the old days when commuter rail was part of the stockholder-owned regional railroads. Just as featherbedding was the main cause of the destruction of the mainline railroads, health and pension benefits threaten the life of mass transit. In the old days, local governments acted as a megaphone for union demands. So the railroads just gave the commuter system to the local governments, and let them wrestle with the unions themselves. Since the survival of the urban region depends on conquering this financial drain, the problem must be gradually worn down. But it has been remarkable how long the region has been willing to flirt with bankruptcy rather than bite this bullet.
If anything, this friction threatens to get worse. In 2009, for the first time, a majority of union members in America -- work for the government, the one industry which thinks it cannot be destroyed by losing money. True, SEPTA is not exactly a government function, but it has enough in common with a government department to arouse suburban voters, who regularly refer to it as an arm of the urban political machine. SEPTA isn't too big to fail, but there exists little doubt that government at some level would probably try to bail it out if it did.
It's hard, nowadays, to know what age to select as dividing childhood from working adults. The age transition is slowly getting older, at least in the public mind. According to the Wall Street Journal, quoting William Kremer of BBC, the following was a quote from the Venetian Ambassador to England in 1500:"The English keep their children at home until the age of seven or nine at the utmost, then put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years. Everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he in return, receives those of strangers into his own." In the 14th Century, Florentine merchant Paolo of Certaldo advised: "If you have a son that does nothing good, deliver him at once into the hands of a merchant who will send him to another country or send him yourself to one of your close friends. Nothing else can be done. While he remains with you, he will not mend his ways."
In the 20th Century, children were considered adults at 18, when they graduated from high school, then it became 21 or 22 corresponding to a college graduation. And now it is 26, as set down by the rules of the Affordable Care Act, which probably has Graduate School in mind. Or, because of the recession, perhaps it reflects the current difficulty of even a 26-year-old to find employment. This is a book about medical financing, not sociology or anthropology, but it must be noted that the official age of the end of childhood tends to reflect the difference between taking advice from your family and taking the advice of your classmates. In that sense, the education industry is crowding out the advice of the family, with resultant conflict during the period between nine and twenty-six. It seems to be the main source of friction from ninth grade to the end of graduate school, and probably also hastens the decline of religion as an influence since the teachings of school and the teachings of religion are sometimes in conflict. Religion may well play a central role in the coming revulsion against the education industry, judging by the undercurrents of teen-age rebellion. Underneath it, all would appear to be a dispute about the responsibility for paying the child's expenses, in collision with surrendering control of how expenses are to be spent. Just as there is growing rebellion about college expenses, medical care expenses will probably share in the coming rearrangements that appear inevitable. Finally, to get back to it, it is possible that age 26 will be lowered to a new point where parents really could be expected to pay the medical expenses of children, willingly. Meanwhile, the abrupt outwelling of sympathy for a sick person can be expected to blur these boundaries more than in other dependencies.
Admitting it is arbitrary, and mostly to maintain comparable statistics with the Affordable Care Act, we now define children as comprising the age group from birth to age 26, even though they may have risen to officer rank in the military forces, where many would be offended by the idea. For the same reasons, 26 is accepted as the age whose medical bills are "normally" considered the responsibility of parents, within the Health Savings Account system. We would like to recommend they be enrolled in an HSA at birth, with a single payment gifted by the parents at birth, sufficient to pay for all medical care to age 26, and including the option of including the child's own obstetrics in that calculation as well. That is what would be most convenient for insurance administration. Let's do some hypothetical math, along the line of what worked fairly well for somewhat older adults.
The purpose of this table is to illustrate that much might easily be achieved with a 10% return, but the same result cannot be confidently expected from lower returns. Lower returns are a definite possibility over a 26-year span of time. To achieve total health coverage with lower rates of prevailing return will almost certainly require more capital to be invested at the beginning, perhaps four times as much. A 3% return during a 3% inflation period, such as we have had for many years, would amount to standing still. Therefore, a gift of $1000 is going to stretch a great many budgets, so the best this approach can promise is to reduce, not eliminate, childhood health costs. Success can only be achieved by raising premiums later in life to make up the shortfall. It would take a skillful politician indeed to persuade half the population to stretch its budget this way, but we make the calculation in case politics demand it. Because this reproductive controversy would quickly degenerate into wrangles about which parent has what moral duty in the case of a divorce, this looks like an option which the affluent population should probably try, but government intervention in this direction is not easily foreseen.
One virtue in waiting for something to turn up lies in the mathematical near-certainty that things will be much more favorable if the trend toward increased longevity persists. For both mathematical and biological reasons, the curves of revenue and expense are not parallel straight lines. The laws of compound interest which make childhood investing risky, also make investing by old folks easier. While almost ridiculous amounts of money accumulate at 10% in the eighties, even more, ridiculous amounts are generated in the nineties. In the present example, 10% investing heads north of 3 million dollars at age 85, but comfortably exceeds 6 million at age 93. This mathematical pressure is made even greater if terminal care moves eight years later, without much more illness cost in the interval. The longest of long-term trends is for health costs to concentrate in the first year and last years of life: everyone is born, everyone dies. There's a gamble, of course. Living eight years longer may simply present the old geezers with eight additional years of medical costs, or eight more years in a nursing home.
But at least an optional choice becomes necessary because obstetrics and neonatal care are presently included with the mother's health insurance, but sometimes not. A complicating issue with small-amount investing is that the amounts are ordinarily so small that managers of Health Savings Accounts rebel at the administrative overhead. On the other side of it, the generation of compound interest for 26 additional years significantly reduces the cost to the parents to the point almost anyone who achieves middle-class status could afford the single payment option. Generously estimating the lifetime average medical cost, of a child from birth to age 26, to be $10,000, it would take a payment of $925 to cover it all, at interest rates not likely to reappear soon. However, that same $925 would more than generate $4.9 million lifetime revenue to age 91. Assuming, at the other extreme, the mother's investing age to start at 26, her lifetime costs using present prices would be covered up to $412,000 to age 91. All of these suppositions are based on the strong hunch that the present Medicare deficits are unsustainable, not on any wish for them to be so.
When a child, who has been covered by a single payment at birth, reaches his 26th birthday, he finds his medical costs insured to the day of his death aged 91, but perhaps that was not the purpose of the gift. If the parents want the money back, they are probably entitled to it, since financial obligation only extended to age 26. Therefore it is important that some of the surpluses in the fund should be transferable to the original donor as an option. The annual gift tax exclusion probably removes the tax consideration, although it is true that that the Account has carried an option to supplement it, throughout the 26-year interval, and therefore the Account might contain enough money to buy out the second policy. The tax implications are therefore uncertain; when they are clarified, the issue of splitting the policy may be clarified, as well. It would seem that the birth of the first child might be a good time to start the parent's policy, since the parent would want to have some coverage for the obstetrical costs, and therefore often be the owner of ordinary health insurance for that purpose.
One thing remains as an absolute: very few newborn children pay for their own delivery. As a normal thing, all health costs of a child up to age 26 are born by the parent, who either makes the child a gift or loans him the money. Any changes in the law ought to follow the habits of society about this overlap of responsibility.
Childhood Coverage, A Summary. It remains attractive to search for ways to include childhood health costs in an HSA. The small amounts administrative cost could be addressed by issuing an interest-bearing bond at birth, redeemable at age 26, and preferably redeemable by rolling it over into an adult policy. However, no presently foreseeable opportunity to issue 10% bonds with 26-year call protection is available; the bond market simply will not sustain it. If it did sometimes sustain it, its repetition is uncertain. Single-premium insurance might be purchased by grandparents, but any government involvement would probably cause populist resentment. The only available non-subsidy method of funding this problem seems to be to borrow the money from later years when the revenue curve is more favorable.
Borrowing from a pool, especially if funded by unused surpluses which appear at death, might be acceptable as an interest-free return of a moral debt, but most sources are going to require the payment of interest on the loan, which defeats the investment purpose of the HSA. All in all, the best available interest-free loan equivalent would be to raise the cost from the individual's later account. After all, all childhood costs are paid by adults, as an interest-free loan to the next generation. When the child gets to be thirteen years old, the generosity may temporarily seem to have been foolish, but one that is eventually revised. Nevertheless, borrowing from yourself is only fair justice, and if the parents wish to give gifts, let them do it without coercion.
During the Obamacare uproar, I was giving some speeches, and I can tell you that old folks didn't care a hoot, one way or the other. Obamacare wasn't going to affect their medical care at all, so they had only one passing concern. They were afraid Obamacare would cost so much, it would be necessary to raid Medicare to support the promises. As long as no one brought up that issue, retirees didn't care. But as soon as I tested them on the point, they uncoiled like a spring. Plenty of politicians saw the same phenomenon, and nick-named Medicare insurance reform "the Third Rail of Politics". Just touch it, and you're dead. The mathematics is already so strong, no mathematical argument is going to influence any opinion. Essentially, there's a way to make Medicare almost free, but it doesn't matter. What matters is if politics get ugly, political candidates will say almost anything. Right now, and for some time to come, nobody wants to listen to mathematical arguments. They want to know if a red-mouthed opponent can upset them at the polls, by using reckless attacks. They can, and will, and there isn't much that can be done about it. The consequence is, the easiest argument for using compound interest to pay for health insurance is to privatize Medicare, but it has the most political obstacles to overcome.
Whereas, using the same approach for younger people has difficult math because of the shorter time periods. But it has a much easier time of it politically, because young people often don't have insurance, or need insurance, and so they have very little to lose. Furthermore, the regulations issued for Obamacare were often selected for the purpose of hindering Heath Savings Accounts. Much of the coming battle in Congress will be fought over trenches and fences, seemingly erected for the purpose of making progress difficult. That will be true for more than Health Savings Accounts, but that fact is just another irrelevance.
Here's another unexpected twist which will influence future trends. When Medicare emerged from the sausage factory of legislative construction, the hospital part (Part A) was entirely funded by government subsidy, and therefore is an obvious target for adding revenue, based on the fairness argument. That tends to crowd this heavy expense into the category funded by something else and makes the pressure stronger. By another quirk of legislation, Medicare is a subchapter of the Social Security Act, which is now starting to need revenue. So the mechanism already exists to merge retirement income with Medicare surplus, if we ever get a Medicare surplus. The doctor reimbursement part of the Act (Part B) is what people nominally pay for when they pay their Medicare premiums. Now, add the DRG squeeze into the mixture.
Seeing hospital revenue for inpatients squeezed by the DRG, the hospitals have responded by enlarging their outpatient areas and hiring practicing doctors to join their staff on (somewhat above-market level) salary. Although hospitals pay higher salaries, there can be little doubt they would squeeze those inflated salaries if revenue got squeezed. Meanwhile, Medicare is confronted with a mass movement of doctors from Part B to Part A, and so it raises the premiums in extraordinary jumps, which only affects the premium still more. Unless things are changed, that means there will be less money for Social Security, and the hope of merging the two programs will be greatly injured. Meanwhile, if the hospitals squeeze the salaries, there will be a surge of physician returnees to private practice, ultimately raising Part B premiums, or else lowering physician incomes, leading to a doctor shortage unless reimbursement is raised, and new medical schools founded. Patchwork will be applied. The long-run consequence of single-payer would be to slow the merger of Medicare with Social Security. The latter merger would have some mutual advantages, whereas merging Medicare with private insurance would be an acrimonious take-over of one way of life by the other. What a tangled web we weave.
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
