Think tanks wrap-up III

WASHINGTON, May 6 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the third of three wrap-ups for May 6. Contents: universal healthcare and presidential politics; music sampling and creators' rights; anti-vaccine regulation.

The Reason Foundation

Democratic health care: the universal delusions of presidential hopefuls

By Ronald Bailey

LOS ANGELES -- Most Democratic presidential candidates are betting that healthcare will be the issue for the 2004 presidential election. Not the war on terrorism, not taxes, not even the sluggish economy.

And the polls support them. For example, in a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 80 percent of Americans said it would be "very important" for the president and Congress to address health care costs and senior drug coverage.

Consequently, Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., is boldly offering a huge, nearly universal healthcare plan that would subsidize employers' healthcare insurance purchases by doubling their 30 percent tax credit to 60 percent. Companies that currently don't offer employees health insurance would be required to pass through the tax credit by purchasing health insurance. The plan would be paid for by rescinding the Bush administration's 2001 tax cuts.

"We ought not to be the last industrialized country in the world to guarantee health insurance to all our citizens," declares former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. He would completely socialize medicine for the very young and the very old. For people under 23 he would expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program to cover them. He would complete the nationalization of healthcare for seniors by adding a prescription drug benefit. He, too, would pay for this by repealing the 2001 tax cuts.

"I see a new horizon for health care for all Americans with a universal, single payer system," declares Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. He would pay for it by levying a seven percent payroll and a 2 percent income tax.

"They recently announced that they'll be implementing a health care package for the children in Iraq. I want to know: Why can't there be a universal health care for the children of Buffalo?" asked Al Sharpton in a recent speech in Buffalo, N.Y. Again, to pay for nationalized healthcare, Sharpton would roll back the 2001 tax cuts.

And Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., has no specific plan, though he does say, "Universal coverage is a goal we need to achieve."

Bucking this trend, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., during the Democratic presidential candidates' debate in South Carolina this past weekend, denounced the Gephardt healthcare plan as one of the "big-spending Democratic ideas of the past." He added, "We can't afford them."

The siren song of universal coverage appeals to a surprisingly wide spectrum of Americans. Some corporate CEOs like it because they want to offload healthcare cost increases they can't control onto the government. Some middle class Americans like it because they are afraid of being wiped out financially should they have a critical healthcare emergency. And of course, progressives like it because it satisfies their egalitarian concerns -- we should all have equally bad healthcare.

Meanwhile libertarians and conservatives are failing to articulate a credible alternative, market-based vision of healthcare. At a recent conference in Washington, Republican pollster Frank Luntz suggested language and word choices for Republican politicians to use when talking about issues like the environment and tax cuts. However, he simply threw up his hands when asked how Republicans can address healthcare.

So brace yourself. The healthcare freedom we currently enjoy, limited as it is, is about to be assaulted again.

(Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent.)

Monster mash-ups: how musical collages are challenging traditional ideas of authorship

By Jesse Walker

LOS ANGELES – "Rock the Party" is an incredibly generic title, but the song is anything but conventional. Its vocals are lifted from "Let's Get This Party Started," Pink's catchy and forgettable hit du jour. Behind them, though, is the rattling beat of "Rock the Casbah," released two decades ago by the Clash.

Not an imitation of the beat -- the beat itself. A person or consortium called Ultra396 has spliced vocals from one track onto the music and chorus of another, and has done this so smoothly that it sounds like they were always on the same record.

While politicians debate the propriety of biological engineering, a similar sort of tampering is exploding in a network of underground laboratories. The results, alternately dubbed "bootlegs" and "mash-ups," crossbreed songs, not genes; they are remixed at home by amateur producer/collagists and released to the world via the Internet.

Technically, they are illegal. Practically, they are unstoppable. Search for a particular mash-up online, and you may discover that it has disappeared, swallowed by legal threats, software troubles, or -- most likely -- the high cost of hosting it on a site. Search for mash-ups in general, though, and you'll find a cornucopia of brilliant, foolish, and brilliantly foolish novelties.

Critics have long debated who "creates" a pop record: the artist listed on the sleeve, the producer behind the scenes, the composer in the wings, or the sometimes anonymous studio employees who actually play the music. In certain contexts -- experimental tape loops, freeform radio collages, Dickie Goodman novelty singles -- authorship seemed to splinter even further, as composers, DJs, and comedians inserted samples from older recordings into new and very different contexts. When rap exploded in the '80s, so did sampling; and so did sampling-related litigation.

Now cheap, easy-to-use remixing software and quick distribution via the Net have set off another explosion. What once was avant-garde, and then was monopolized by the entertainment combines, is now a populist art form that virtually anyone can practice.

Without much difficulty, you can lay one singer's vocal track onto another artist's music. With a little more effort, you can alter one or both to make the fit more snug (in Dsico's "I Need to Be Sedated," the Ramones' punk vocals have become more ethereal to match their new electronic backdrop) or more jarring (when DJ Andy Crane paired a Method Man rap with the theme from The Muppet Show, he chopped up the latter a bit, in what I can only assume was an attempt to make my brain hurt).

With still more effort, you can create even more elaborate bootlegs: Osymyso's "Intro Introspection," for example, spends 12 minutes fusing the introductions of well-known songs. But the real difference between "Rock the Party" and "Intro Introspection" isn't a matter of increased effort -- just increased inspiration.

Nor is music all that gets mashed. The Web contains a host of political remixes, in which politicians' and newscasters' words are recombined to satiric or sophomoric effect. In one early example of this subgenre, Ronald Reagan rhapsodized about poisoned meat. More recently, Bill Clinton has fielded questions about his "seven pounds of semen" and George W. Bush has declared America the center of world evil.

Interestingly, some of the same artists who benefited from the sampling boom of the '80s have been less than tolerant of their younger brethren. And no, they don't reserve their ire for those who didn't ask permission to use their work. The Belgian duo 2manydjs, a.k.a. Soulwax, spent nearly three years trying to clear the rights to all the records it intended to use on a mash-ups album. Along the way, it discovered that "a certain very well known hip-hop trio from New York, for instance, who once encountered some copyright-lawsuits of their own, will never, ever license one of their tracks for any compilation.

The trio in question -- the Beastie Boys -- was not the only act to deny the remixers a right it has no qualms demanding for itself. So did Beck, the Chemical Brothers, and the Notorious B.I.G., among other heavy samplers. Beck partially redeems himself, if industry rumors are true, by having helped convince his label not to sue RTMark for its Deconstructing Beck CD, which consists entirely of radically reassembled Beck tracks. Still, a ladder-pulling strategy appears to be at work.

Maybe that's hypocritical, and maybe it's just a part of the aging process -- as a once-controversial practice becomes accepted, a new group of upstarts comes along. If that's the case, there's little reason to expect it to stop now. In 20 years, Ultra396's heirs might be suing someone for appropriating "Rock the Party" without their permission.

"Bah," they'll complain. "Doesn't anyone respect the rights of authors anymore?"

Jesse Walker is an associate editor of Reason Magazine and author of "Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America."

The Hoover Institution

Vaccine development a casualty of flawed public policy

By Henry I. Miller, M.D.

Palo Alto, Calif. -- The death toll from severe acute respiratory syndrome continues to rise. Thousands have been stricken, and hundreds worldwide have died. With the discovery of the causative agent -- a previously unknown member of the Coronavirus family -- and researchers' ability to grow the virus in tissue culture, American drug and biotech companies should be burning the midnight oil to create a vaccine.

But flawed public policy discourages vaccine development; even supplies of vaccines from common, epidemic infectious diseases are in jeopardy.

Producers have abandoned the field in droves. From 1967 to the present, the number of U.S. vaccine manufacturers has fallen from 37 to less than 10, and the number of FDA-approved vaccines has declined from 380 to a few dozen.

Consequently, the nation has experienced shortages of essential vaccines, and many school systems have been forced to waive immunization requirements as a result of insufficient supplies. The reason is that, compared to therapeutic drugs, vaccines traditionally offer low return on investment but high exposure to legal liability.

This situation is largely the result of wrongheaded public policy. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control -- the largest domestic purchaser of vaccines -- uses its buying clout to compel discounts for purchases. Recently, the CDC rejected Wyeth Lederle Vaccines' proposed price of $58 a dose for its pneumococcus vaccine, demanding (and getting) a discount of $10 off the proposed price. Do not expect Lederle to invest much in vaccine R&D anytime soon.

Excessive regulation also blocks progress. Consider the FDA's inexplicable position on a vaccine to prevent meningitis C, an illness that infects thousands of Americans and kills hundreds each year. No state-of-the-art vaccine against this disease has been approved for use in the United States, although three products are available in Canada and Europe.

The efficacy of these vaccines has been amply demonstrated, with more than 20 million doses administered. Yet the FDA refuses to recognize the foreign approvals. In addition, the FDA has a history of removing safe vaccines from the market because of mere perceptions of side effects -- a prospect that terrifies manufacturers.

What can we do to make vaccine development more attractive? First, make vaccine regulatory approvals between the United States and the European Union reciprocal, which would cut development costs and rationalize the FDA's oversight of vaccines.

Second, stop public agencies from demanding prices for vaccines that are too low.

Third, give companies tax credits to defray research and development costs.

Fourth, ensure that companies' performing government-sponsored R&D under contract can realize commercial benefits when the vaccine is produced.

Finally, indemnify reasonable damages to consumers from harm caused by vaccines, and establish a regulatory-compliance defense against lawsuits for damages. Such a defense stipulates that, after a manufacturer has met the regulatory requirements for vaccine approval, any mishap from use of the product is considered to be unforeseeable and damages would be compensated by the government.

These much-needed reforms won't come easy. Getting the government to adopt them will be like dragging a child to the doctor for a painful shot.

Henry I. Miller, M.D., is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.