This post on the Atlantic web site by Olga Khazan is insightful, though perhaps not the way she planned it.

Olga’s surely a liberal. But even the blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn. Her lede is that most uninsured folks don’t understand the Affordable Care Act. Her conclusion, based on such a stunning observation, is that we should work ever harder to convince them how supercalifragilisticexpialidocious it is.

I’d suggest approaching the issue from a different angle. Let’s suppose for a moment that the clearer and less ambiguous a law is, all else being equal, the more likely it is to be effective once enacted. In other words, those affected by it have a better idea of the benefits and risks it presents to them, they can make more reliable decisions on how to act, and the collective acts of the populace are more accurately predictable—allowing the framers of the law to tell ahead of time whether it will achieve its intended outcomes.

The ACA clearly fails this test. As one who spent numerous weeks in many of my MHA courses facing assignments focusing on one or another of its endless provisions, I can attest that leafing through it (assuming you can hold it in your hands) is akin to opening Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. Progressives dumped a boatload of old favorites into the bill, took a single-state experiment (that, on further review, is a blazing failure) and took it national, added a generous dollop of “The Secretary shall“s, and larded it with goodies like the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase to get it through the Senate. No wonder people can’t understand it!

My take, in general, is that an act of such complexity stands a good chance of being a bad law. That is a generality, ignoring right vs. left or other distinctions. But I believe it to have plenty of validity. It is distressing, by the way, that acts of Congress are becoming increasingly obtuse over time, regardless of who’s minding the House, the Senate, or the White House. We’re better off with slimmer, simpler statutes that are easily understandable by those of us who aren’t policy wonks in our specialty field (or lawyers…).

To paraphrase a remark I saw on Facebook today, where the object of comparison was not the ACA but the case being brought by Hobby Lobby to the Supreme Court on behalf of religious liberty, if you know who got kicked off DWTS but have no clue about Obamacare, you deserve the continued removal of your rights.

Now that’s clear and concise.

Well, it’s official. At least the grades are posted. I have completed my Master of Health Administration program, and sometime early next year will get the diploma to go with it. Lots and lots of work writing papers and participating in group projects. Due in part to my Type A nature, I would agree with the university’s estimate at the outset of an average of 15-20 hours per week dedicated to course work.

Now that it is done, I pledge to be more regular here and on the Twitter feed; while I perhaps could have kept them up in some limited fashion, the last two years have been all about simplifying what I could. Simple is still good, but I feel like I can unleash my voice a little more now. (Readers can judge whether that’s a good thing….)

There’s plenty of grist for the mill these days. The health insurance exchanges are proving to be a major dud, and there is no shortage of worry in my business. Buckle up with me for the challenging ride!

Lately, much that’s in the news causes the observant to wonder how long our treasured rights, as allegedly guaranteed in the first ten amendments of the Constitution, will be available to us to exercise. My current reading is the eye-opening exposé by John Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. It documents how, slowly but surely, we the sheople are being preyed on by our exalted rulers with lethal force.

I am really prompted to compose this post today, though, by a semi-amusing story on the Huffington Post site, showing how an enterprising county fair game proprietor found notoriety by using President Obama’s face as a dart board target. Now, in today’s polarized atmosphere, reaction is sure to range from attaboys to calls for hate crime prosecution. But let’s look at it in the larger picture.

Does the vendor have a right to do this? Absolutely. He is protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause, which he did not overstep by infringing on anyone else’s rights. Fairgoers are free to play, or not to play, his game. And certainly Mr. Obama was not injured by the display.

Did he exercise good judgment? Probably not. He made a political statement distasteful to many, and that could harm his business as well as that of the fair he was at. It’s not a charitable idea in general to impute any approbation to children, who have been known to be quite numerous at county fair midways, in the matter of throwing a dart at the likeness of a person’s head. (Yeah, leave that to the adults….)

Interesting, though, that many current complainers would have been fine, eight years ago, if the visage were that of George W. Bush. Same right, same exercise of judgment. Why would some view it differently?

Does it in fact make any difference that it’s a president’s face at all? I would argue that it should not. One unfortunate reality of the last couple of centuries in this country is that the office has been raised far above the station intended for it by the Founders. As the character Joe Pesci played in the 1994 movie With Honors put it,

The President isn’t an elected King, no matter how many bombs he can drop, because the crude Constitution doesn’t trust him. He’s a servant of the people. He’s a bum, okay Mr. Pitkannan? He’s just a bum.

Indeed. Any President, any Congress critter, any supreme, superior, or inferior court judge, any bureaucrat or IRS lackey needs to remember that WE THE PEOPLE are their boss, and they serve at our pleasure. A president deserves the respect due any citizen of these United States. No more, no less.

And yes, I have specifically said CITIZEN. That will disqualify me from being a public servant in the city of Seattle, which is spending its time less in good governance than in policing the dictionary.

That leads into the topic of my previous “leisure” (i.e., other than work or degree program) reading, Walter Block’s provocative The Case for Discrimination. If you want a thoroughgoing libertarian’s perspective on the topic, this is it. You can download the e-book from Barnes & Noble for the princely sum of three dollars. Well worth it!

Yes, once again an inordinate amount of time has passed since my last blog post. Between work and school, there is so much going on that social networking and blogging are way, way down the list. I just don’t have mental room for them now.

I know not to go into too much detail on what is happening at work. Let’s just say that right now I am application lead for two huge strategic projects plus a major software upgrade. Both projects have executive level visibility and very tight timelines. In fact, both of them really should be spread out over three or more times what we need to get them done in. And, of course, there are all the other projects and assignments that the parties involved with them *think* are major. Need to stop there.

On the academic front, my thoughts at the moment are mixed. Just to keep everyone up to date, I started in January on my online Master of Health Administration program at Ohio University. As of tomorrow my cohort of 25 students will be halfway through the first of eight quarter-length modules. Each module is basically two four-quarter-hour graduate level courses. This module is called “Context of Leadership in the US Health System.”

On the bright side, so far my grades are very good. Individual assignments have gotten very high scores. Now that is with a certain amount of my Type A personality perfectionism, spending the time needed to get everything just so before submitting. There may be opportunity to figure out what lesser amount of time it may take to submit work that is still A quality, maybe not quite so stellar.

An interesting sidebar. I think back to my first undergraduate experience, where there was also lots of paper writing. I marvel at how much easier it is today. (Part of me also marvels at the difference in the grades.) Maybe it has to do with the bazillion e-mails I have had to craft at work in the intervening time. They have forced me to get specific and to the point. That’s a good thing.

But then there are the group assignments. Again, the right amount of effort vs. reward comes into play, perhaps even more so. The first one yielded my mates and me a score in the A- range, though below both the mean and median for the class. I was an average contributor, to be honest. My contributions were good, but I did not get as critical about my colleagues’ contributions as I might have. Now, we’re about to ramp up for the big group project for the quarter. The group members are different this time. We’ll see where it leads. All I know is, I’ll be plenty busy. Don’t expect to see many blog posts in the immediate future.

Although Thanksgiving Day is a federal holiday with definite secular elements in its origin (e.g., rejoicing at the end of the harvest), people of faith understand intuitively that this is a day to praise and give thanks to our Creator for the many blessings bestowed upon us.

We are, every one of us, truly better than we deserve, and today we recognize and celebrate that.

We give thanks for our families, our friends and neighbors, and our God-given talents and abilities. We give thanks that we still live in a place that leaves us free to leverage those talents and abilities to improve our earthly station, provide for our families, and worship without state interference. We give thanks that we can heed God’s call to share our blessings voluntarily with those who are materially less fortunate than we. For those of us (myself included) who work for non-profit entities, we give thanks that every day we do our job, we assist in providing tangible benefit to the communities we serve. We give thanks to those who safeguard our liberty, often at a great price paid by them and their own families.

So when we bow our heads today before diving into the holiday feast, let’s be so very thankful for all that we have and all that we are. And let’s remember the source of our blessings.

Happy Thanksgiving!