In my earlier posts expressing amazement that Mike Bloomberg takes seriously the wackos in Virginia, otherwise known as that the Independent Green Party, I focused on the fact that the Indy Greens don’t think there’s anything strange about supporting both Mike Bloomberg and Chuck Baldwin, an anti-abortion, pro-gun  right-wing nutcase.

I did, take at face value, the assertion by the Indy Greens that they gathered the impressive total of 70,000 signatures for the Bloomberg “campaign”

If in New York City education the signposts to the future are easy to see, that is even more the cast in health care, where an institutional collapse is slowly grinding on even as health care spending escalates. For the shrinking number of people with access to benefits paid for by others, ever more services of greater or lesser value continue to be provided at greater and greater cost — to someone else — with no end in sight. Meanwhile, a larger and larger number of people are entitled to less and less. The one thing that could head off a retirement crisis caused by rising lifespans, moreover, is that rising obesity and diabetes could slash the age of death or disability of those without the health insurance benefits to combat it. Average American life expectancy could fall as a result, the way it did in the former Soviet Union after its institutions collapsed, unless the increasingly long lives to those with the good deals are enough to bring up the average compared with the majority. Moreover, those facing pre-mature disability are, by and large, also those without access to retirement benefits other than an oversubscribed Social Security system. So we could have two classes — one that has to go on working though unable, and one that is able to work but doesn’t have to, and gets to live on while not working, and consuming lots of health care, for a very long time.