AgBlog

Megan McArdle makes the point that our health care debate is skewed because we are debating a full coverage program rather than also discussing the need for catastrophic coverage. The latter is in some ways much easier to justify and to insure, but our framing covers the entire health care market, with all the concerns about care rationing, government intervention, standards, etc., pushing aside what should be a far simpler to implement government mandate. One of the comments on her blog explains it well using an analogy of groceries and flood insurance. We all need food to live, but we are “trusted” to choose it and pay for it ourselves. For those with limited income, government subsidies in the form of food stamps and other programs help them and encourage but do not require good decision making. In healthcare, first-dollar care means our employer- or government-provided insurance is intimately involved in all of our health decisions, including normal checkups and things like breast cancer screenings. We are not making our own informed choices about which health care to pay for out of pocket (self-insurance) or which free market insurance company to choose. Since it is someone else’s money, there is no incentive for that sort of decision making, the market for services is not competitive, and thus prices rise.

In much the same way, we need shelter and choose on our own how and where to obtain it, be it by buying, renting, subletting, or taking advantage of a government assistant program if we are poor. But for people who live in flood zones, the government mandates flood insurance. This catastrophic insurance is required and usually subsidized or provided free by the government. In the event of a catastrophe, this insurance (in theory) kicks in. In much the same way, the government should mandate catastrophic health insurance coverage for all Americans. A policy that covers things like heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, etc. Since the shared risk pool is massive, the cost of insurance can be fairly low. While most people will never need it, it is a public safety net for everyone.

I’m not entirely convinced by this libertarian-minded argument, since I tend to see healthcare as an entire ecosystem with good choices in preventative care paying large dividends down the line, and with chronic conditions sopping up most of our health care dollars. But in terms of getting something passed through Congress to improve our system and cut costs, the idea of tackling catastrophic insurance first does have some appeal.

For the last time people, it’s not about specs! Processor speed, RAM, and graphic chips are not how you judge an Apple product. This is faster and that is smaller and this one does multitasking and has USB ports and a network jack. It doesn’t matter.

I won’t prognosticate about how the iPad will sell, or how successful it will be. I will simply say that the iPad is innovative in the same way that the iPhone and iPod Touch were innovative. It’s just a bigger iPhone, you argue? Of course it is! That is an argument for it, not against. Remember Minority Report? Remember every other cool movie or tech demo that showed amazingly slick touch screen interfaces? How many of them had standard menu bars, or windows with close and minimize buttons, or Start menus? None of them did. So why is it that when people talk about tablets, they talk about shrinking Windows or Mac OS to a smaller screen?

The iPhone succeeded in large part because Apple conceptualized a whole new user experience. The iPad, if it succeeds, will do so in large part because, like the iPhone, it is familiar. It uses gestures we use in life, its iconography is rarely confusing, and it just works in a smooth, clean, fluid way that totally abstracts away the whole notion that we are using a powerful little computer with files and folders and processes and RAM and software updates. The reason that every tablet so far has failed, and the iPad may just succeed, is because instead of taking a 1980s-era desktop metaphor and shrinking it down, Apple took an entirely new direction, the iPhone direction, and blew it up.

On Windows, every app has its own user interface conventions and different sized and shaped buttons and windows. Every version of Office re-arranges things and adds new colors and shapes and shortcuts. The modern Mac aesthetic, in contrast, generally strives towards minimalism. Most of the best apps use standard platform UI conventions with minor enhancements that are intuitive and clean. Powerful and expensive apps look simple and almost boring at first glance: the full potential is hidden and gradually becomes apparent as the app just works the way the user expects, the same way as other Mac apps. Still, almost all desktop computers, Macs included, overflow with confusing error messages, dialog boxes, file save windows, and various other extraneous nonsense. My codecs are out of date? You need to modify what registry? Windows demands to shut down right now to install critical updates? Why do I have to deal with all this stuff?

Apple has created a whole new set of interface conventions and user experience standards for the iPhone and, now, iPad. These opinionated guidelines and development frameworks make it very easy to do things the “Apple way” and much more difficult to do things in non-standard ways. Apple has cut off low-level access to the system, restricting applications (err, “apps”) so that if they break, they leave everything else as they found it. Apple has created standard system-wide gestures, buttons, and interaction paradigms that just work — everywhere. The iPad puts the content front-and-center, and hides all the needless chrome. I doubt you will be able to find any successful apps on the iPad that behave like a Windows or Mac desktop app. They will work like iPad apps.

Now, I was disappointed by the iPad announcement in one major way. I expected groundbreaking content deals for interactive media. Neat new technologies for reading magazines or multimedia newspapers. But now I’m convinced that Apple did not take that path because it just makes more sense for subscription content providers, like newspaper and magazine publishers, to create their own apps and try their own experiments. Apple has given them the platform, given them the guidelines, given them a UI that gets out of the way, and said, “innovate!” The ones that succeed will be the companies, like the New York Times, that embrace the challenge.

Judge the iPad, not by what you see, but by what you can imagine. If there are over 100,000 apps on the iPhone’s App Store, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that there will be thousands more made just for the iPad. The real wonder and power of the device will come from what those apps let you do.