Blogging will be light for a few days while I concentrate on other commitments.

Green technology. Yuck, right? I mean, Greener rarely means ‘better’ – it usually means worse, not as good as, not quite as awesome but in return you use less energy, contributing something impossibly tiny to the global efforts to cope with what is, in fact, the limit of existing means of generating energy.

The abundance of usable energy is intimately linked to success for life on this planet – food, light and heat for example. The same is true for humanity – the cheaper our energy, the richer we all become. This is because cheap energy frees up resources for other uses, and so is an increase in the total volume of work that can be done – whether it’s boiling kettles 30 seconds faster or moving two hundred people from a to b in half the time, or even just continuing to washing clothes by pressing a button.

Any cap or limit on energy, whether imposed by man or nature,  increases the cost of energy. That makes us poorer, and it decreases our quality of life. In fact, if we’re to share the available energy with all people on the earth equally, we’re going to experience a serious decrease in the quality of life.

The more expensive energy is, the less we have to spend on other things. Eventually we also have to reduce our energy usage – often at the expense of time but sometimes it’s less obvious signs of reducing wealth: Having to accept slightly sub-standard, not quite as enjoyable versions of things we once took for granted – like cars, bulbs and even 50″ plasma screens. Okay so maybe it’s not a life or death matter – but it is a sign we’re getting poorer. Having to switch to a super economical micro-mini and scrap your hulking sports saloon because you can’t afford to run the latter? It’s because you’re poorer. You used to be rich enough not to even think about the running costs.

Energy is used in the manufacture of everything. If you increase the cost of energy, you’re increasing the cost of everything.

So it’s simple: The cheaper energy is, the richer we are. The more expensive it is, the poorer we are.

So this is what the Green Movement’s up against when they want to increase the price of ‘bad’ energy to get us to use less. They suggest this course of action because they believe the earth will react badly, making the planet unable to support human life – or worse, it’ll support human life but every other animal and plant will die, and then we’ll have to live with the guilt forever.

So here’s some common ground between evil free market types like me and the eco-hippies – neither of us rate the existing energy supply as adequate. That’s where the common ground ends.

Many push wind and solar as viable alternatives, but the truth is these in their current form make our energy more expensive, not less. So they’re making us poorer. Thanks to stupid communists’ attempts at running Nuclear Power stations and our complete inability to figure out what to do with the radioactive waste, fission of uranium isn’t exactly a popular – or cheap – or sensible – alternative, despite being a CO2 free.

We need better energy. A source that’s practically limitless and so cheap we barely notice paying for it. This is the holy grail of technology, the economic nirvana.

Those brain boxes at MIT appear to be onto one such winning strategy: Storing solar energy. I like this. I love it, in fact. I don’t give a monkeys whether or not it’s ecologically sound – I do care about the fact that this looks like it’ll be extremely cheap, which makes it win in my book. This is the sort of ‘Green’ technology I can love, because it’s a natural progression of what came before, rather than a reactionary retrograde step.

Call me a hippy, but if something Green can make me richer I’m suddenly all for it. I’m off to go put flowers in my hair..

Of all the foregone conclusions, universal health care isn’t something that we’re getting rid of (short of complete bankruptcy of the State forcing it). Should we even want to get rid of it though?

Consider: We need health care the most when we’re retired and when we’re sick. We’re never going to find another way for pensioners and people with chronic conditions to afford medical care without making making health insurance mandatory, spreading the cost of your life-time’s medical bills through your working life.

Then there’s people who, through no fault of their own, will never ever be able to afford to pay for the lifetime care they receive.

It was decided that this was intolerable and on the back of the war mobilisation the NHS was created.

Was this a good idea? Probably. It costs the person on the average wage £236 a month to pay for all this. The more you earn, the more you pay. Is it Marxist? Yes, of course it is – from each according to his ability, to each according to his need – it’s very Marxist. That doesn’t mean to say that it’s entirely irredeemably evil though.

The Government’s obvious role in all this is ensuring that medical care is paid for for everyone who needs it when they need it. No-one’s seriously challenging this in mainstream politics. People simply won’t accept the idea that people who haven’t paid for care should go without (as happens in America where health insurance is voluntary and many millions choose not to bother, in addition to those who can’t actually afford it).

The question: “Should families who can’t afford health care (for themselves, for their children and for their retired parents etc) go without health care?” Well, the answer’s been decided already – no. We’ve formed ourselves into an extended family – again, very Marxist – but the system works and it’s overwhelming popular as a means as paying for health care.

The real debate comes into the nitty gritty of who runs the hospitals and employs all the doctors and nurses. It’s here we’ve got room for manoeuvre to make the NHS better. For example, why does the state need to run all the hospitals? The answer is that it doesn’t. The chapter on health care in the Orange book made a very compelling case for an insurance model, where each individual treatment is paid for by medical insurance and the money goes to whomever the patient chooses to carry out the treatment for them – rewarding good efficient hospitals and seeing to it that the people running bad hospitals get fired.

You can have multiple insurance providers competing with each other – in fact that’s almost certainly essential. You can have private hospitals, too. All of them can be private, in fact. The difference is the state would only get involved to subsidise people’s insurance premiums when they can’t afford to pay them.

In other words, you can radically change the way medical treatment is provided without removing the basic ‘universal, free at the point of use’ element.

The rewards from such changes are obvious – the cost of medical care should come down and the quality of care should go up. If we look at the Singapore model and the Dutch Model we can see how these sorts of systems do deliver better outcomes.

The left wing blogosphere appears to be revelling in going out of the way to bully and castigate anyone who cares criticise the NHS – but this is, in my opinion, pure arse covering for their own failure – the truth is that the NHS is not perfect, and the only people who really want us to think it is are the people who’ve increased funding by 80% as their one single solution to the problem. The NHS has gladly absorbed this money without people feeling it’s 80% better. That ‘more money’ is the only tolerable answer is pure Labour dogma.

The question is are Labour more interested in preserving the status of nurses and NHS bureaucrats as employees of the state with cushy state pensions and conditions than they are in providing a human, better system for health care in the UK? 1.4 million people depending on the state for their employment make for a much more useful electoral block than employees of privately run hospitals. There’s not enough gratitude for simply funding healthcare. It’s less glamorous and exciting. It reduces politician’s ability to take personal credit for saving the lives of pensioners and children.

I hope that Lib Dems – and Conservatives in fact – can resist the temptation to be keep their opinions on how health care can be improved in this country to themselves for fear of being shouted down as extremists.

We live in a seriously screwed up country.

We say, hey! Politicians! Stop being puppets and say what you really think! Then, if we find a politician stupid enough to listen we lynch them for it. Hell, you can be lynched for being seen to agree with someone speaking their mind these days.

If the subject matter is the NHS then the politician is doubly cursed. Any criticism of the NHS is a sign that you don’t love your country, that you’re obviously a foaming right wing nut job that’s into eugenics and laughing at people dying of cancer because they’re too lazy to get a job to pay for their medical bills.

Yep. That’s the kind of screwed up country we live in.

Liberal Conspiracy, for example, have exploded into what can only be described as an outpouring of pure bile, mixing nationalism and socialism and extreme hostility towards anyone who dares even mention the NHS in anything other than reverent, respectful tones. In the most overtly nationalistic thing I’ve seen from the mainstream British Left since “British Jobs for British Workers”, the author condemns Dan Hannan (who is, at the end of the day, just an MEP) as a  ‘A national disgrace’ for the crime of bring critical about the NHS to foreigners! Oh my frickin’ Lord!

UPDATE: It’s been highlighted that I’m probably overly sensitive to nationalism, even ‘good’ nationalism. There’s no ‘good’ nationalism.

The problem, as always, is that when politicians do speak their minds, there’s opportunist scumbags waiting for a nice easy straw man to torch to death.

Here’s a news flash – to improve the quality of politics it needs all parties to take their fingers off the triggers and start behaving like sane rational adults – and let people speak, let them be heard and let the actual arguments do the talking.

Sure it’ll mean sacrifice – after all, rhetoric is so much easier than winning a real argument. Sure it’ll be difficult to get used to – but don’t complain about brainless, moronic robot politicians if you’re the first in line with the cudgels whenever one opens their mouth.

… like hostage victims love their hostage takers. The world’s most disheartening hash tag on Twitter today: #WeLoveTheNHS, throwing up lots of rather highly strung debates.

Why disheartening? As with most things in the political realm, one emotion dominates: Fear. Fear trumps everything else. Most of the hostile comments I get on this blog come from people absolutely terrified of something or other.  For many unscrupulous politicians, fear is the simple and easy way to bypass people’s reason and make them believe… well, whatever you want them to believe, really.

In the UK it’s fear of losing free at the point of use health care that makes people go quite mad at any suggestion of tampering with it. In America they’re afraid that by adopting a universal health care model, especially a ‘single payer’ model where there’s only one source of health insurance they’ll end up with rationed health care ‘as bad as the UK’s’.

What both countries suffer from is a generally poor standard of health care – for different reasons, but enough for there to be some political will for change.

America’s health care is the most expensive, per head, in the world. As a side note: contrary to popular opinion, Health Insurance in the US is highly regulated with significant restrictions on what Health Insurance are allowed to exclude from their coverage. There’s also help for the poorest and pensioners – it is not a lassez faire free market system. There’s room for improvement, things that could be done better, actions that could be taken to start bringing down the cost of health care but, for all its faults there’s people really really scared of losing it.

There’s plenty of reasons to complain about the NHS, too – rationing, waiting lists, MSRA, half a million bureaucrats and poor cancer survival rates compared with the rest of Europe are obvious issues – saying ‘you love the NHS’ uncritically helps absolutely no-one…  but things aren’t quite as bad as the Republicans would have you believe: Palin’s pressed the thermonuclear panic button by referring to ‘Death Panels’ which… which strongly suggests the GOP aren’t changing ‘any time soon’.

This sort of rhetoric is utterly toxic, but it’ll influence those who won’t be bothered finding out for themselves what the truth about the NHS really is. And, worst of all, it’s not even a real argument. It’s just fear-mongering and low politicking of the worst kind.

But I note with some irony it is the US system that is always used by NHS advocates in the UK as a terrifying example of the horrors that await a.. gulp.. privatised… gulp… National Health Service.

When Republicans use the UK as an example of a horror story, we call them propagandists and liars and cheats. But when we use America as an example of a horror story where people will be left dying in the streets? Well that’s WELL TRUE and so it’s perfectly fine.

Sheesh. I bang both your heads together.

Of course I’m left disheartened, wondering if it’s ever possible, anywhere in the world, to have a rational debate about health care.