Khmalye Memo

Health care in the United States has several defining characteristics: it's extremely effective and high quality for the wealthy, difficult to receive for the poor, and extraordinarily cost inefficient and expensive as a system. Everyone wants to stop the skyrocketing cost of the health care system, many want to establish universal coverage. The first step has to be to control costs, and the best way to do that is with a single payer health care system. The current system is patchwork and somewhat ad hoc, a mixture of public and private facilities providing care with a mixture of public and private funds. This fragmented system is different in every state and every community, built based on local priorities and resources yet straining almost everywhere to keep from falling apart. Politicians in the last two years have debated many strategies for reform, focusing on extending access to health care to more of the people who need it. That is a noble and just goal, but it has a fatal...

Public Information Research (or PIR), not to be confused with the Public Interest Research Group, is a company owned and operated by Internet provacateur Daniel Brandt, of San Antonio, Texas. According to statemaster.com (a source that may be a Wikipedia mirror, entry found here ) and its own website, it is a registered (501c3) charity with revenues under $20,000 per year.Whether that dollar figure is true or not, PIR (a follow-on of Brandt's previous company, Micro Associates) operates the website NameBase.org. Described by Wikipedia as "focus[ed] on the post-World War II era and on left of center , conspiracy theory , and espionage activities", the website purports to contain hundreds of thousands of entries with clippings and documents, scrounged up or received via FOIA requests, about "all sorts of spooks, military officials, political operators and other cloak-and-dagger types." (The Nation, 1988). Somewhat less known, however, is that Mr. Brandt is the ...