Double ditto on the jam. If you don't want to go to the work of buying and sterilizing jars (which isn't that overwhelming, really), you can just stick it in the fridge and it should keep for a month at least.

What Erik said. In practice, official licensing guidelines mean state-enforced licensure requirements, which is why I'm disallowed from taking money for my services as an amateur interior designer across much of the U.S.

So I might say more about this later, but for now I'll just remark quickly that two of the most obvious downsides of state-enforced licensing requirements for physical trainers would be:

1. It becomes harder and more costly to get into the line of work.

2. Thanks to (1), hiring a physical trainer costs more.

Plus, it's obviously an open question whether the official standards would actually work to their desired ends; the key thing to note, though, is that the above consequences would fall most heavily on the already disadvantaged.

P.S. It just occurred to me that the beyond ridiculous fuss - which I didn't really follow - over the Photoshopped image of Palin and the baby could have been what you were referring to, in which case I withdraw my objection. But Sullivan consistently used this same line as a justification for spreading rumors about her supposedly faked pregnancy, so ...

Just leave her freaking uterus alone, please.

... the way that Palin’s camp simultaneously uses an infant for political ends and then declares that infant off-limits is disgusting.

What exactly does this mean? In what sense was Trig Palin used for political ends but the Obama daughters, say, weren't? Are the Palins really not allowed to pose together for photo ops, or to talk honestly - and some of what Gov. Palin has said about her struggles with that pregnancy has been remarkably honest - about what their family has gone through?

I'm not sure what you're asking, Freddie, since as things stand there's often not much that a person in such a situation actually can do. But as I've said many times, I fully support measures to make health care less expensive and provide the social safety nets necessary to ensure that all Americans can afford the medical services they need.

... universal affordability would be fine with me – as long as everyone was required to participate.

I think that's an awful idea; individual mandates are a perfect way to give the medical industry a chance to require people to pay for services that they don't want or need.

Let’s see some genuine proposals from conservatives.

Again, see Ross and Reihan's book for a start. Or see any of the dozens of health care wonks at NRO, Cato, and so on. I make no apologies for the incompetence of the Republican Party.

So a $5k tax credit will not help anyone not paying at least $5k in Fed income tax.

I think this is based on a misunderstanding of the mechanism; refundable tax credits can be used to give people back more than what they paid in taxes.

The next point is what does insurance cost? The latest I heard was around $11k or $12k annually for a family for employer plans – whether they are good plans or not I have no idea.

Yes, but part of the reason that they're so costly is because they aren't taxed, so individuals don't actually face up to the plans' real costs; hence part of the impetus behind a plan like McCain's was to create market incentives to help drive the cost of health insurance down.

If I step back, it almost looks like he’s protecting the insurance companies, not the un and underinsured.

How in the world do you get that, when the plan includes tax credits to families and individuals, mechanisms to ensure that no one has to pay more than they can afford, etc.?

Expensive could be, but McCain’s plan had just as much government in it as any other plan. Government action is the only thing holding his plan together.

That may be true, but it's only a problem if you object to government action per se, as opposed to government action of particular sorts.

Is McCain’s idea the only one out there?

No. See above.

... were any of those policies taken up by conservatives?

I think that McCain's proposal was very much in the spirit of Ross and Reihan's ideas, so (without making claims about the direction of influence) yes.

All I hear is how everything costs too much. That’s a policy, and it is a sane one – if you adopt the position that universal health care is not an end that should be pursued.

I don't follow this at all. If health care costs too much, then universal coverage will be impossible. But in any case I don't see why universality per se should be the desideratum; what matters is universal affordability, and in fact there's reason to think that mandates would actually make that less possible, not more so.

And P.S. Reihan's point in that post, at least as I recall, was that it was with an eye to starting rather than ending a conversation that they'd made multiple (sane, actual, etc.) proposals, rather than endorsing just one as their clear preference.

... if Reihan can’t do it, maybe you can point to an actual policy proposal providing for universal coverage put forward by someone, anyone, who you consider to be a conservative.

Huh? You mean aside from the dozen or so that Reihan proposes in his book? How dense are you, Jake?

A lot of the gov invovlment has been to give people health care who don’t have it.

The government involvement has also involved driving up the cost of health care through ludicrous licensing requirements, unnecessary mandates, hugely distortionary policies like the tax credit for company-sponsored health insurance, and so on. No, it's not to blame for everything, but it is to blame for a lot.

What you are failing to tell me is a way that people who are unable to afford it are going to get it.

I don't think that any serious participant in this debate is denying the need for financial assistance for those who can't afford health care; McCain, for instance, proposed (perhaps insufficiently) to deal with this through issuing vouchers. (Redistribution!) Another proposal in the vicinity, which wouldn't exclude the voucher option, would be to cap total out of pocket health care expenses at a certain percentage of household income. Or we could do away with some of the more draconian licensing requirements and so enable a flood of much cheaper options to be available to the poor. And so on. The idea that we should "entirely remove government from medicine is a red herring"; the question is whether having it involved in less heavy-handed and intrusive ways would more effectively deal with the relevant issues.

Riehan offers no suggestions for a “smart, sane, cheap alternative” because he knows that there is no such thing. There is only political obstruction the aim of which is to thwart universal healthcare.

Read his BOOK, Jake.

And what do you think a state-run system will do if it's going to achieve that goal without blowing up the economy?

It's simply not possible for everyone in America to have the highest-quality health care at all times.

Because being Very Serious means eliding entirely the actual reason why health care reform is imperative and focusing on the only thing responsible adults are supposed to care about, money and efficiency.

And does being Very Morally Serious mean eliding any considerations about which among the many possible reform proposals would actually work?

P.S.:

... many conservative blogs, from all the various strata of the ideology, have been doing a very poor job of frankly acknowledging the enormous amount of human suffering our health care system causes.

This is what set me off. Reihan is the author of a book that has (I think) an entire chapter devoted to health care reform, and he and Ross make it quite clear that they think the present system isn't meeting people's needs. The same goes, I think, for the NR symposium on health care that was published the other month. Not being in favor of a heavily state-run system does not at all mean the same thing as not being in favor of reform, and so obviously doesn't require insufficient recognition of the suffering caused by the current system.

To read your posts on health care, one would think there was simply no reason at all anyone would advocate reform.

That's demonstrably false, Freddie; I am absolutely in favor of reform and have said so often, but I just don't think that the way to do that is to make health care free.

So Reihan's not allowed to weigh in on the politics of health care unless he begins with a public show of tears and hand-wringing? Give me a break. He - like any sane conservative or libertarian - understands that the current system is broken, and indeed is explicitly advocating for reform. He just doesn't think that Obama's proposal is the best way to do this, and he also thinks that in the long run the crushing burden of unpayable debt would do no good at all for anyone. And these, too, are the honest and well-argued opinions of a lot of very smart people. This constant imputation of heartlessness and bad faith is getting old.

And how is the use of this phrase anything less than a perfect parallel of so much of what Sullivan derides as "Christianism"?

David Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church. And anything by Hauerwas.

And how much money do you think that leading Democrats are getting from the health sector, E.D.?

I haven't followed the discussion in the comments, but isn't it the longer-term deficits that are the real sticking-point? You can appeal to wars, bailouts, the stimulus package, etc. to explain the 2009 and 2010 numbers, and Bush et al absolutely vdeserve a fair share of the blame there. But it's the steadily-increasing deficits post-2012 - the "structural" ones, as von puts it - that are really terrifying. Borrowing money in a pinch is one thing, but you're bound for insolvency if you do nothing at all to, you know, pay it back.

P.S. By "this case" I mean the case at issue in Heller.

I think my example of the DC handgun ban being overturned is a really important analog.

I agree, but I think it's perfectly natural to claim that democracy has been subverted by the courts in this case; the question as ever is whether one thinks it deserved to be.

Now perhaps, John, you know of a way that something can be returned without first being removed, but I’m afraid here on Planet Earth, that’s how it goes.

He never said that it had been removed by the courts, Freddie; a perfectly natural way to read him is as lamenting the fact that the political process in general has - for obviously understandable reasons, given where the bar has been set - been unable to treat abortion as a democratic issue.