Lions and Eagles

Maybe it's a dream, or a parable, or maybe just the invention of my wild imagination...  Picture a D&D-type setting, if you will. Two great dragons are preparing to battle for dominion over the land. But rather than fight directly, each is recruiting armies of supporters from the land's population. One dragon is Neutral Evil. She claims to be Lawful, but her misdeeds are well known, in spite of the fact that bards dare not speak of them and no one has the courage to hold her accountable. The other dragon challenging her is Chaotic Evil. He has claimed a recent conversion to Good, but this dragon has a reputation for deceit, and everyone knows that a dragon doesn't change their scales easily. Besides, before this contest began, this dragon was best of friends with the other. I am but a low level Paladin. Lawful and Good. I have friends who have tried to convince me to side with one dragon or the other. Some say that the Chaotic dragon will be less of a d...

I've had this idea rolling around in my head on the economic effects of health insurance coverage mandates. It started in my mind over contraceptives, but could be applied to just about anything, from prescriptions to doctor visits. My wife had an economics teacher who told her, "If you don't know about supply and demand, you will fail!" You have to understand supply and demand. Quick Micro Econ 101 review. Look at the graph over here. If you've taken an econ class, you should have seen variations on this again and again. The blue line shows that as price goes up, the number of people willing to jump in and buy goes down, and vice versa. Red line shows that when price goes up, sellers are more excited about selling. Somewhere in the middle, the quantity of product that buyers want to buy meets up with the quantity that sellers want to sell, and there we have what we call market equilibrium. That market equilibrium price is what you will pay without insur...