Michael Braun's Blog

For a year and a half, Lauren and I sent each other multiple emails during the work day. I went through and collected some of the best closings of our emails. Here they are for your reading pleasure.

Have a generous and magnanimous morning!
Have a fabulous lunch!
Have a reserved and subdued afternoon!
Have a swell end to you day!
Have a Jurassic and Cretaceous morning!
Hope you day is the bee’s knees!
Have a familiar and welcoming start to your afternoon!
Have a super amazingly wonderful afternoon!
Have a treat of a workday’s end!
Have a relaxing and darn good morning!
Have a delicious lunch!
Have a grandiose and headliner lunchtime hour!
Have a really fun afternoon!
Have a chatterbox and crackerjack morning!
Have a day mixed with whimsy and splendor!
Have a rich and creamy afternoon!
Have a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious end to you day!
Have a wonderful and quick morning!
Have a sweet hour, man!
Hope your morning  is tremendous!
Have a breath-taking and amazing end to your afternoon!
Have a gorgeous and grandiose morning!
Have a delicious lunchtime!
Hope your afternoon keeps progressing beautifully!
Have a splendiferous afternoon!
Have a saintly morning!
Have a rocking day!
Have a mountainous start to your afternoon!
Have a kitty-tastic afternoon!
Have a marketable morning!
Have an elegant eleven o’clock!
Have a galloping afternoon!
Have a lovely EOD!
Have a blessed and holy morning!
Have a stupendous morning!
Have a fortissimo start to your pianissimo afternoon!
Have a beautiful EOD on this beautiful day!
Have a sanctimonious and pious morning!
Have a [insert perky, positive adjective here] lunch!
Have an afternoon comparable to a vacation-time nap in Rome!
Have a splendid afternoon!
Have a splendid morning!
Have a jolly and joyful end to your morning and start to the afternoon hours!
Have a rousing time in the war room!
Have a riveting morning!
Have a terrific MOD!  (middle of the day)
Have a tigertastic beginning to your afternoon hours!
Have a kitten-tastic end to your day!
I hope you have a super, really great, and also awesome morning! 
Have, like, the bestest day, like, ever!
Have an in-tune afternoon, free of sharps and flats!
Have a bright, rainbow, kittens-playing kind of afternoon!
Have a jolly and merry morning!
Have a highly caffeinated midday!
Have, like, the most funnest morning ever, like!
Have an excellent lunchtime and start to your afternoon!
Have a Splenda-filled afternoon!
Have a kitten-tastic morning!

John Stossel, “reporter” for ABC and “consumer advocate,” appeared at a healthcare “forum” on Thursday in La Crosse. You can read more about it here. In brief, he claimed that the free market can reform healthcare better than the government can. I might agree with him if he meant that healthcare can’t be reformed, but instead must be destroyed and built from the ground up. But no, he meant that the government would screw it up and that the free market would make it perfect. All this from the man who has built a career around bashing the free market for hurting consumers.

Anyone who believes that the government’s efforts to reform the health insurance industry are a condemnation of the insurance industry is an idiot. The government isn’t saying that the free market isn’t doing well. After all, most Americans get their insurance from the free market and these companies aren’t exactly going broke. The problem, the government says, is that the free market has little motivation to ever try to cut costs. (After all, most employers would be vilified if they ever ended health insurance for employees and most employees pay only a fraction of the full cost of their healthcare coverage.)

The second problem is that the free market has no motivation to offer insurance to unprofitable groups. Let’s say that you were offered an investment opportunity in a company that was planning to provide insurance for adults age 18-30. The company wouldn’t cover anyone else and at its inception would hold policies for 25 million Americans at a competitive and profitable rate. Would you invest? With a reasonable amount of caution, you should pour your money into this company. Insuring young people is an absolutely win; the company cannot NOT make money. Let’s say there’s another company that will insure only old, sick, overweight, and poor people, and they can expect a similar market share when they open up shop. Investing in this company would be throwing your money away. There’s no profit in insuring people who will all need lots of healthcare.

But, says the government, all Americans deserve healthcare coverage. It’s a human right. We can’t expect the free market to cover these people, no matter what Stossel says, because the free market can’t make money doing it. The fact that these people can’t get coverage is proof that the free market does work! We can thank the free market for our lower premiums. If the companies were stupid enough to try to attract a sick populace, then healthy members would pay the increased cost.

What John Stossel doesn’t seem to understand is that the debate isn’t about whether the free market works or not. It’s a debate about whether all Americans deserve health insurance. Cost cutting must go hand-in-hand with this, because if it doesn’t, tax payers get stuck with the bill. But nevertheless, Stossel doesn’t seem to be having the same debate as his critics. As a so-called reporter, he should know that it is sometimes difficult to get people to answer questions. It seems like he’s avoiding an important question himself: is healthcare a right or a privilege? Until he answers that question, he shouldn’t enter the debate.