In many blogs, I have commented on the issue the mailing industry faces with respect to the attacks on unsolicited marketing mail by environmentalists or privacy advocates. In particular, environmentalists argue that it would be better for the environment if everyone communicated electronically, instead of doing so in paper-based communications.

I am in the process of reviewing the increasingly robust research which suggests that electronic communication has substantial environmental hazards, in some cases, greater than physical mail-based communications. But the insight I want to share in this blog is that the boundary between physical and electronic communication is not clear, and is getting more muddied as time goes on. (more…)

One of the basic assumptions of many health care reform advocates is that a “richer” plan which provides a broader range of benefits and which has a higher percentage reimbursement for medical events is automatically better for the plan participant. This is flawed thinking.

A health insurance plan is better for plan participants and for society as a whole if it causes participants to engage in healthier behaviors and if it drives physicians, hospitals, and other providers to deliver a higher quality of health care. In the blog entitled “Results-Driven Health Care” explores the five steps to higher quality, and lower cost health care. (more…)

As we move into May, this is junior prom season at high schools, and I have a son who is planning to attend the prom. I remember my junior prom, which took place in May, 1965. It was a wonderful evening with a wonderful date, but what I also remember is that Brother Joseph Clark, our principal at my high school, Bishop Kearney High School in Rochester, New York, decided that the prom would start at 10 pm and end at 4 am. He said that no one would be allowed to leave the prom before 4 am unless he or she was picked up by parents. His explicit reason for this decision was to keep us in the prom venue until after the bars and nightclubs around town closed.

Today, this same issue has surfaced in a different way. New York City has decided to order all bars closed at 2 am, instead of 4 am. In the Sunday, April 27, New York Post, in the Page 6 Magazine, there were actually two op-ed pieces published on this subject, one opposing the earlier closing hour, and the other favoring it. The proponent, a female freelance writer, made the great comment that nothing much good happened between 2 am and 4 am. In fact, those extra hours probably led to more behaviors that people later regretted, if they could remember them, than during any other 2-hour period during the day. (more…)