We’ll start with the good stuff, and work our way down.

I quite liked this rosetta, the only one I poured for photo all day. Foam a little spotty, and the espresso pulled too fast, making the whole thing a little light in color. But it’s got a good aura.

This is a little heart. It is great. I’m not sure how I managed it, since none of my other heart attempts today came anywhere near mediocrity.*

This one made me giggle like a schoolgirl. I was attempting a tulip — the mechanics of which are to pour a heart, then another on top, then another, and ties them through with a stem. But what I got was a heart/bird (see the obvious beak on the right?) with a rosetta-ish bloom out the top. Happy accident, indeed!

In the spirit of transparency, here are three god-awful tulip attempts. No explanation given, because none exists — except that I don’t know how to pour tulips.

*I suppose I should explain the mechanics of the heart pour. Briefly, it’s like the beginning of the rosetta — pour silky foam in the middle, wiggle a bit for stripy contrast — but instead of wiggling back late to form more little blooms, you simply pour through while raising the milk up to thin out the line. Most people learn the heart first, then the rosetta; most of my employees can pour good-looking hearts consistently, while I’ve only poured a couple mediocre ones in my latte-art existence.

Fat-Bottom Girl.

Wiggles.

This one looked nice, with good, smooth foam. But the top disappointed me, so I tried to put a little crown on it. That part made it look dumb, but there’s no good way to undo it. So, there ya go.

(Seriously, at some point in the near future, I’m going to have something to say again. I think.)

Posted via web from third image.

Posted via web from third image.

If homeowner’s insurance worked like American health insurance, it would not only pay for fires but also cover utility bills, replacing broken appliances, baseballs hit into the window and all the food, drink and paper towels that pass through the kitchen. Certainly, a company could offer an insurance product that covered absolutely every expense of living in a home. But such insurance would be phenomenally expensive and full of ultra-complex rules; the insurer would also acquire an incentive to dream up excuses to deny payment. Just like American health care insurance!

— Gregg Easterbrook, “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”

Politicians seem to live in a two-dimensional world (think C.S. Lewis’ “flatlanders”), while the rest of us are out here in 3D, pleading with them to see features they simply aren’t built to recognize. Put another way, our representatives present us with black and white on health care — Bad Option A, and (totally different but just as) Bad Option B. Thus you have the “public option,” and the “leave it alone” camps battling for supremacy.

(You haven’t heard Republicans saying, explicitly, “leave it alone.” They talk about “sensible reforms” that are supposed to come if the Dems scrap all their current plans and go back to the drawing board. This is kind of like me saying, “Sure, I’ll exercise more, just as soon as I start getting enough sleep the nights before.” In other words, it ain’t gonna happen.)

Leave it to a football column to provide a far better alternative. In his “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” article at ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook takes a break from dissecting plays and mocking the punt — no, he says, it is NOT that risky to try on fourth down — to present a quite cogent and perfectly simple argument: Insurers should face price-controls, and providers should have to offer non-insured individuals the same pricing they offer insurance companies. (More quotes after the jump.)

Denying coverage to people with medical conditions is not only unjust, it causes insurers to waste money engaging in wars with their own customers. If health insurers must sell to anyone who wishes to buy, then their resources can be better invested in providing care. … Not enough attention has gone to a simple change that would remove much of the injustice from health insurance — standard rates with no denials for existing conditions. This is the key to the successful health care system of the Netherlands.

Good points, there, and we’re not even into the meat of the argument. Easterbrook — a conservative/libertarian hybrid, from what I can tell — seems to agree with my notion that human beings should not necessarily NEED health insurance, any more than they need car insurance. I could — and can — save the money I’d put toward high coverage on my auto every month, and when something does happen, I could use that money to fix the car myself. (I’m not speaking of liability coverage, which is a pretty sound practice.) Why is our health any different? Because health care is so expensive, that’s why. But WHY?

Recently, a family member needed an MRI. The clinic had a list price of $1,500 for the scan but was in the insurer’s PPO, and so discounted (“adjusted”) the price to $690, of which we paid 10 percent and the insurer paid the rest. Clearly, that $690 price allows the MRI clinic to do business … or else the clinic would not participate in the PPO. Yet if I’d walked in off the street and said, “I will buy this MRI myself,” the price would have been $1,500. Meanwhile, if the clinic had not been a member of my PPO, the insurer would have paid the same $621 it pays within the PPO, and I would have been on the hook for the rest, $879. …

The distinction between list prices and “adjusted” prices prevents health care services from functioning as a rational marketplace. It’s not just that many physicians refuse to speak about dollar figures. (“We don’t discuss prices over the phone,” a doctor’s office told me a few months ago when I had the gall to ask what something would cost, adding, “after the doctor has seen you, then we will tell you what the visit cost.”) [Bold mine-R]

This strikes me as one of those things a 7-year-old could figure out, but that a 55-year-old congressman just simply can’t quite crack open. It’s changing the system, it’s doing something rationally… in other words, it’s totally against everything Washington is.

Suppose insurance covered only catastrophes, and you paid the rest. You might think, “No way I am paying some doctor hundreds of dollars to set a broken arm.” But today a typical family’s health care policy that appears to cost the family $5,000 a year actually costs $15,000, it’s just that much of the money is hidden as employer’s costs — and thus, as higher wages the employer can’t pay. If you spent $5,000 a year for catastrophic coverage but earned an additional $10,000 a year, you could cover those strep-throat and broken-arm bills yourself, and probably come out ahead. Plus you’d have a keen incentive to comparison shop. Doctors could no longer loftily say, “We don’t discuss prices.” [Bold mine-R]

Seriously, the guy’s thoughts are just too hard not to quote. (You should really go read it yourself, but you’ll have to wade through thoroughly enjoy all the football talk first.)

Only those who recognize the omnipresence of sin—recognizing first of all that they themselves number among the sinful—can possibly anticipate the moral snares inherent in the exercise of power. Righteousness induces blindness. The acknowledgment of guilt enables the blind to see. To press the point further, the statesman who assumes that “we” are good while “they” are evil—think George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11—will almost necessarily misinterpret the problem at hand and underestimate the complexity and costs entailed in trying to solve it. In this sense, an awareness of one’s own failings and foibles not only contributes to moral clarity but can help guard against strategic folly.