Losing Weight

By the beginning of 2013 I was 50, my weight had crept up to 90kg giving me a Body Mass Index (BMI) of about 28, a reading considered to be overweight. I thought it was about time to do something about this as I didn't want to turn into one of those middle aged gents whose bellies hang over their trouser belts. Also, because I'm a cheapskate I didn't want to grow larger and have to replace my clothes before they've worn out. My initial aim was just not to get any heavier.

Let's cut to the chase. If my bathroom scales are to believed, I have lost about 15kg over about the last year (2013). Hardly Biggest Looser territory but a noticeable difference.

First up I should say I have been cycling to work for years so I've already got a bit of a head start by having built regular exercise into my routine. And, part of the reason I had gained weight was because I had been ill in 2011 and was not capable of cycling to work for about 6 months. But, I didn’t really change my diet to reflect my lower energy expenditure and so I gained weight while recovering from my illness.

I restarted cycling after that and had gradually been building up to 2 journeys per day on my bike and had lost some weight without any change to my diet. Just at that point when I thought I could return to 2 journeys per day 5 days per week I came off my bike and broke my arm and after that managed to put on the weight I had lost in 2012.

Thinking about this some more; whilst I've had a relatively low fat diet for years and exercised regularly I had gradually been gaining weight in my forties.

I recognized that I needed to consume less otherwise If I’m ill again I’d probably end up gaining even more weight.

Oddly enough if I hadn't been ill and had an accident I doubt I would have realised that I needed to do something until I was further down the overweight track.

As a brief aside I believe that cycling to work (if you live reasonably close to your work) is a great way of killing two birds with one stone; commuting and getting enough exercise. I live about 12-13km from where I work and it takes me 1 hour from closing my front door to being at my desk (that includes time for showering) probably only 15 – 20 minutes longer than the bus journey.

This is what I do now.

Go shopping with a list

I've done this for years largely because I don't particularly like shopping and wandering around wondering what to buy. I also try to avoid 'adhoc' shopping for food since it is too easy to get a snack on the way. I know this because I've just done it.

A recent innovation is that I use a pre-printed list of things I buy. Weekly items down one side and things I only need to buy occasionally on the other, with space for other incidental things as well. All I need to do is fill in the quantities during the week and highlight what I need to buy on the occasional side. See the end of this blog for an example.

Dietary Changes

I have high cholesterol and after the sudden death of my father from a heart attack some years ago I reduced my red meat intake, try to avoid foods high in saturated fat, and now consume more vegetables and mostly white meat and fish for protein.

The focus of my recent change has been to reduce my intake of food high in carbohydrates such as potatoes, bread, pasta, and rice and replace them with larger servings of vegetables. For instance if I make Curry or a casserole I'll have it with vegetables rather than rice or potatoes.

I generally have the aforementioned carbohydrate type of food less than once per day on average. For instance if I have noodles for lunch I wont have bread, potatoes, rice or pasta with my evening meal. Or for another example. I went out to lunch with a colleague recently and because I intended to have Eggs Benedict for my dinner I declined pizza and had a chicken salad instead.

I find cauliflower to be a good replacement for potatoes or rice and have it with many evening meals where I might have had a potato or serving of rice previously. Cauliflower is good for you too.

I stopped buying sliced bread. Its too easy to make some toast or have a sandwich if you are feeling peckish. Some weeks I managed to get through 2 loafs. I now buy those 500g Turkish breads which can be cut into 3 or 4 pieces and frozen.

Then, one morning, looking at my serving of muesli, I asked my self “Do I really need this much?” I had a fairly generous serving muesli and so changed from 2 scoops to 1 and replaced the 'lost' scoop with a few grapes, or couple of strawberries or some blueberries. At first my breakfast looked quite small but now it seems to be more than adequate.

The key point is to change your diet gradually. I'm not on a crash course diet and I do not expect to get heavier, provided I don't consume more or drastically reduce the amount of exercise I do.

I don't starve, I have 3 meals per day 365 days a year. I rarely have snacks other than a daily apple and orange. To reduce snacking the same principle applies, change gradually. Whilst not consuming a lot of snack foods to start with I was consuming 2 muesli bars and a packet of those cup soups per week. So when I decided to reduce this I stopped the soups one month and stopped the muesli bars the next. I don't miss them.

So I've gradually modified my diet reducing my food intake (though not drastically)

So what do I eat?

Breakfast: A ½ cup (125 ml) scoop of muesli, plus 2-3 chopped up strawberries or handful of grapes or blue berries with soy milk
Lunch: most days I have chopped vegetables 1-2 carrots, 1 tomato, ½ cucumber, ½ red capsicum (pepper) or soup and bread and small tin of fish. I also make my own soup; tinned soup, even those that claim to be 99% fat free, can have a lot of sugar.
Dinner: fish or white meat (chicken or pork) plus a carrot, peas, broccoli and cauliflower. Pasta once per week. Poached eggs and sliced salmon on Turkish bread once per week.

I also take the view that a variation on this infrequently will do no harm. So I don't worry too much about what I have on social occasions.

I drink wine and beer and I guess I average 2 standard drinks per day.

Snacks: One apple and one orange per day.

What don't I eat?
SUGAR - I avoid the non diet varieties of soft drinks (and try not to have too many "diet" drinks as well). I also try not to have more than about 1/2 a glass of fruit juice per day. Sugar is sugar whether you get it from soft drinks or fruit juice. There may be benefits of fruit juice over coke (for example) but would you eat the 3 - 4 oranges or apples it would take to make a glass of juice in one sitting? I don't need sugar in tea or coffee or keep things like cookes, cakes or biscuits at home.

My diet may sound monotonous and routine but I like it. I also believe by having a fairly routine diet helps me keep my INR (International Normalised Ratio) between 2 and 3 reducing the frequency with which I have to have blood tests and with which my medication dose has to be changed.

Results

One morning whilst doing up my belt I noticed that I was able to do it up tighter than the very well worn belt hole I had been using for ages. More recently I have been able to fit comfortably into pairs of trousers I had grown out of and hadn't got around to giving away to a clothing charity. I might have to give away my larger clothes instead.

Whilst doing a bit of background reading about weight loss I note that there certainly seems to a lot on reducing carbohydrate intake rather than just fat per-se to reduce weight and that consuming carbohydrates can actually cause hunger. This certainly seems to have worked for me as reducing carbohydrate intake is the largest change I’ve made in quite a few years. I'm doing the same amount of exercise as I was before I was ill and I'm sure I'm lighter now.

I had considered consulting my doctor about loosing weight as she had mentioned it on occasion but I'm glad I didn't because I suspect a dietitian may have started me on totally new alien diet straight away and as you may know many weight loss diets are extraordinarily hard to stick to.

So dear reader no I'm no diet expert but what's worked for me may work for you. I suspect its better aimed at the moderately overweight like myself rather than those who are morbidly obese. I believe I have a healthy balanced diet. I seem to be less hungry, have a smaller appetite and have been sleeping better of late.

The take away points are:

• Change gradually; eating less and exercising more. Even a moderate amount of exercise, such as walking for 30 minutes, will do you good.
• Cut down on foods high in carbohydrate and replace them with vegetables which can be just as filling.
• Use a shopping list.
• It takes time, possibly the most important point. Apparently loosing a lot of weight quickly can cause health problems. I suggest you Google Margie Cummins

Avanti Inc 2

As of the end of 2013 I'd spent about a year, on and off, looking for a commuter bike that doesn’t have the drawbacks of Derailleur gears, namely picking up dirt and grime plus frequent maintenance and adjustment. I eventually settled for an Avanti Inc 2.

Initially I was a bit worried that 8 gears would be not be enough but after trying several similar bikes I became convinced that a bike with an Alfine 8 speed hub gears would be fine for me. The lowest gear is low enough to cope with the short steep hills on my commute. The highest is adequate for level surfaces, thought it maybe not quite enough if you like to pedal fast down hill.

The gear change seems to prefer the rider to relax pressure on the pedals momentarily when changing gear. You can feel resistance to moving the gear change lever when pressing hard on the pedals, particularly when changing up. Of course one of the best things about the hub gears is being able to change gears whilst not pedaling at all and particularly when you are stationary. It’s also possible to change through several gears very quickly, this can be particularly useful when changing down.

By the way, check the adjustment of the gears after delivery. Mine, as delivered, needed adjusting as when I first rode as it was jumping out of gear and I was experiencing non-commanded gear changes, just like a Derailleur that needs adjustment. Fortunately adjusting the gears its very easy and doesn’t require any special tools. Put the gear lever in 4th and adjust the cable until the green marks, visible in the window on the gear box, line up.

I thought the lack of suspension on the front fork might make for a less comfortable ride but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Also the handle bars are noticeably wider than on other bikes but again, for me anyway, it seems to be OK. The saddle is also comfortable enough for my 45 minute commute.

The Inc 2 is labeled as a commuter bike. Now, in my book a commuter bike should, among other things, have full length mudguards, a rack and a stand. As far as I can tell Avanti doesn’t have any of these accessories for their Inc bikes. At the time of writing there is no section for accessories on their website.

There’s only one set of lugs on the rear of the frame for a rack and mudguard so they both use the same mounting lug. This isn’t too much of a drawback but the bike it replaces had 2 sets making it easier to fit mudguards and a rack. I was hoping to pinch the mudguards off the my old bike but this wasn’t possible as I had trimmed the stays on the front guard and they were not long enough to fit the Avanti which has the lugs further forward and just under the brake assembly.

After a bit of research I settled on Zefal 50mm mudguards on the grounds that they were adjustable. 

The front mudguard wasn’t too difficult to attach but it needs a very long bolt to secure it to the fork. I used an M6 x 60mm which is available from Super Cheap Auto. I also had to adjust the stays so that they attached to the mudguard at the very bottom as the lugs on the fork are very close to and just below the brake actuator and there’s only just enough clearance between the brake and the lug for the mudguard stay. 

Figure 1. Only just enough clearance for mudguard stays

The rear proved to a bit more of a problem. I bought 50 mm guards so that there would be plenty of clearance between mudguards and the tyres (width of 37mm according to Avanti) but found the frame is not wide to accommodate the rear mudguard at the bottom of the frame near the pedals. I had to trim about 5mm bit off each side of the mudguard to make it narrow enough to get it to fit. 

Figure 2. Trimmed Mudguard

The rack was no problem. I’m sure the frame on my bike is a different more conventional shape than the one as shown in the illustration on the Avanti website. This is good as between the time I ordered the bike and took delivery I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t take a standard rack.

Initially I bought a center mounted kick stand but that turned out not to be suitable. The bike would topple over when I had a load on the rack as the foot needed to be further away from the bike. Those kickstands that attach to both frame members (the horizontal and slanting ones) near the rear wouldn’t fit either because because of the rear disc brake assembly. I eventually managed to find a kickstand on eBay that attached to the horizontal frame member only.

The fitted bell not very loud unless you strike it the right way.

Finally, the supplied manual is for a generic Derailleur bike. Something more relevant to the bike I actually bought would have been good. The Inc models have been out for well over a year  now, time enough to write a manual I would have thought.

Pros:

• The Inc 2 is a fair bit cheaper than equivalent bikes with similar specs i.e. a carbon belt and an 8 speed Alfine hub gear.
• The bike is also easier to clean as the frame is less obstructed by the gearing mechanisms of a more conventional bike and the belt only needs to be wiped now and then.

Cons:

• Fitting accessories. There may be better, easier to fit options, than the ones I chose. Two sets of lugs at the rear would have been good as well as better positioned lugs at the front. Though I acknowledge that disc brakes may limit the position of accessory lugs.

Overall, I’ve had the bike for a month now and I’m very satisfied, despite the hassle of fitting some accessories.

Update, June 2015.
I've had the bike for about 17 months now. Whilst I am still satisfied I am very dissapointed with the  the brakes, as supplied. They have a very short life, for commuting use anyway. I'm lucky to 5 months of use out of them, the last set only lasted 4 months . Additionally, the design of the front brake is such that when the pads have worn right down the brake mechanism rubs the cable eventually cutting through it!

A Bill of Rights for Australia?

Do you trust the government to adequately defend your rights, or would you prefer to see your rights enshrined in law?

I for one would prefer to see my rights enshrined in law.

Believe it or not Australia is the only western country that doesn't have a bill of rights. I think it's about time that changed.

In the wake of the September 11th attacks in 2001 a raft of anti-terrorism laws were introduced some of which may curb terrorism but in reality could also be used to curb dissent or silence critics. We've already had people deported with out any due process or the relevant ministers having to account for their actions. Our spineless opposition didn't oppose our "anti-terrorism" laws. I think the root of this is the politicians fear of appearing to be "soft on crime".

The greatest threat to our liberty is not terrorism, it is the state. The protection we have from the state is the rule of law and the separation of the judiciary and executive. Rule of law protects us against arbitrary decisions by the bureaucracy and executive that could adversely affect our life. Possibly the most important protection is against deprivation of liberty except by due process. But above all this must sit a bill of rights that prevents laws from being enacted that could erode our liberty, all we really have is the "good will" of our politicians and their self proclaimed wisdom.

As of 2008 we've already had someone (Dr Haneef) who was detained under these laws on virtually no evidence at all. Once the Federal Police had detained Dr Haneef they waited several days to question him. He eventually obtained bail, through the strenuous efforts of his solicitor. But when he was due to be released the immigration minister acting by executive fiat (there was no due process) revoked Haneef's visa so that he could be deported, presumably to prevent embarrassment to the government and Federal Police. Subsequent inquiries have established that Dr Haneef had no case to answer.

Fortunately some states and territories in Australia have started to enacting a bills of rights. They could be overridden by the Federal Government if it felt it necessary to do so.

Politicians are generally very reluctant when it comes to bills of rights. There are many reasons cited but the most frequent seems to be "A Bill of Rights would be undemocratic to give unelected judges the power to override the judgment of parliament." This plays on the public's low opinion of lawyers. There's nothing democratic about politicians and bureaucrats removing our liberty without any check on their action. All other democracies have bills of rights and as far as I can tell they all function just fine.

Having thought about Bills of Rights for a while I came up with my own bill of rights, somewhat palgarised from the US Bill of Rights. It's not perfect and I'm sure a junior solicitor could pick it to pieces. Some possibly overlap as well.

Definitions
Government = Federal, State, Territory or any other law making body.

• Freedom of speech

The Government shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or right to publish such speech; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

• No search or seizure without warrant

The right of the people to be secure in their persons and property, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or property to be seized.

• Freedom from surveillance, right to privacy
  

The right of the people to be free from unwarranted surveillance whilst conducting their lawful business shall not be infringed.

• Due Process

A person accused of a crime has the right to legal counsel and to public trial by jury of his or her peers without excessive delay. A person accused of a crime has the right not to be a witness against themselves and to examine all evidence and witnesses against them. A person found not guilty of a crime shall not be tried again for the same crime except when new evidence is uncovered. Excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishments shall not be imposed.

• The right to die at a time of own choice

The right of a terminally ill person to make a free choice to die at a time and manner of their choosing shall not be infringed.

• Freedom of information

The right of persons to examine any government document, or accurate facsimile of, shall not be withheld except when exposure of such document would jeopardise national security. All government documents provided under this right shall be provided without monetary charge or unreasonable delay.

• Separation of Church and State
  

The government shall make no law abridging the freedom to practice a religion and nor shall any law be passed favoring any religion, or religious belief.

• Deprivation of Liberty
  

No person shall be deprived of their liberty except when found guilty of a crime that under common law would warrant a prison sentence or when held in remand before a trial. A person arrested and detained for a crime shall be charged or released without undue delay.

All rights not enumerated here shall be assumed to belong to the people.

This Bill of Rights can only be amended by popular referendum where the number of vote cast in favour is at least 75 percent plus 1 vote of the votes cast.

Unix Haters Handbook

I have just read the Unix Haters Guide which I found quite by accident whilst looking for a way to turn off an annoying feature in TOAD (an expensive tool for Oracle developers). It was a most enlightening book. I had no idea that Unix was so shonky. In short it is a pretty damning indictment of Unix.

I came to Unix from MS-DOS in the early 1990’s. I discovered, for example, that the toy operating system I’d been using had file and record locking capabilities whereas the real one didn’t. Even worse every program is apparently expected to implement it's own file locking routines; great until some other program (such as "remove files") just blithly does it stuff to your file because it is ignorant of your program.

Unix is written in C which may be ok for operating systems but is a not a great language to program in when it comes to applications. Needless to say just about every application program for Unix is written in C which lacks just about everything a good programming language is supposed to have such as array bounds checking. Fortunately I haven't ever had to do anything in C++ which is a lot worse to use apparently. Before I started using Unix I’d been using Turbo Pascal, a brilliant low cost development tool with a debugger that was years ahead of anything that was available on Unix.

Some bugs (or poor design features) in Unix persist for decades. The book accuses developers of being reluctant to fix a problem, consequently users work around the problem and now it is impossible to fix the problem because the users work arounds will break. I recently read about a bug in a Unix type system that had finally been fixed after 33 years (yes that's 33 years). Take the utility "make" for example. This utility reads a "makefile" which contains instructions on how to build a computer program without rebuilding the bits that haven't changed. The build instructions must be prefixed with a "tab" character. Not obvious if you view a "makefile" in a standard text editor, this requirement isn't obvious. If you don't know about it you could end up prefixing your instructions with 8 spaces and wondering why the make utility doesn't work and spits out some unintelligible error message. I struck this problem when I first tried to use make.

Ever tried to configure Unix? It has a multitude of configuration files in inconsistent formats, scattered around the /etc directory and its sub directories, it can also be difficult to find out what needs to be changed when you wish to configure something in particular. I don't know how people managed before Google.

Just out of curiosity I had a look at the sendmail manual. I decided it wasn’t worth it after reading about 1 page of the manual. It seems you need to write a configuration file and run this through some sort of generator to get a sendmail configuration file! WTF?

I've tried of some of the simple methods detailed in the book for crashing Unix, in the safety of a Virtual Machine, and they work well.

The authors of the book cite an announcement that Unix and C are a hoax. This apparently is an April fools joke.

Having said all that I've recently installed a Linux on my PC and will gradually be shifting my stuff off the Windows treadmill over in the next few months. The version of Linux (PCLinuxOS) I use is easy to configure, fortunately, and the user is shielded from having to mess about text files.

I'll probably be a bit more skeptical about Unix being an "advanced operating system" in future.

You can obtain this book in pdf form via this link http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

Petrol Price Hysteria

If you live in the western world you are no doubt experiencing a lot of hysteria about the rising cost of petrol. In Australia vast amounts of parliamentary time have been wasted on debating possible measures that at best will affect the price of petrol by a few cents per litre. The news is full of angst about the cost of filling up.

But, there are many costs of owning a motor car and petrol certainly not the highest part, it could be argued that it is the most "visible" component. The biggest cost is buying the car and the depreciation involved, made even worse if the purchase is financed with borrowed money.

An example

A 2003 Ford Falcon Futura, $35,000 new, resale value $11,000 (at best) in 2008. That's $4,800 (in depreciation) per year, add an additional $1,920 per year if the full purchase amount is borrowed over 5 years at a 10% interest rate. Driving this car 15,000km* per year costs $2,086 in petrol per year at $1.60 per litre (June 2008) if 11.5 litres per 100km is achieved. We'll only get petrol price relief immediately if the car is replaced by something costing no more than what we get if we sell the Falcon.

Let's look at the real cost of replacing this car and assume that petrol is $2.00 per litre, a price that may achieved this year in Australia but still a lot cheaper than in Europe.

If we look at what is most likely to happen, the car is replaced by something that costs more than the resale value of the car it replaces. Suppose the gas guzzler is replaced by a European size sedan with a 2 litre (or smaller) engine. A search around the web finds many second hand cars that are about 2 years old and costing less than $17,000. Using a Ford Focus as an example, this car achieves 7.1litres/100km (combined), 6.8litres/100km on the motorway, saving 4.4 litres per 100km (11.5 - 7.1). This saving has to repay $6,000 and and extra $1,620 (if this money is borrowed over 5 years at 10% interest) before we get ahead, we have to travel about 68,000 km or 86,600km, if borrowing is factored in, at $2 per litre before we start making a saving.

As a slight digression the oil companies are constantly accused of operating a cartel however, petrol retaining in Australia is a highly competitive low margin business. The last inquiry conducted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was conducted in 2007 and no cartel was discovered. Petrol prices rise and fall cyclically, Tuesday (in Brisbane) being the best day to buy petrol; if you don't mind waiting in long queues, burning your potential saving whilst you do (most people seem to be content to idle their engines rather than switching them off whilst waiting). When I was traveling in the USA in 2007 there was a lot of angst as the price of petrol approached US$3 per gallon. Naturally the oil companies were being accused of operating a cartel. The real reason is that no refineries have been built in the USA in the last 30 years and the USA has to import petrol. Why would an oil company spend billions building a refinery when they are able to run the existing refineries at capacity supplying a commodity that is increasing in price? No single oil company is going go out on a limb and put their shareholders at a disadvantage compared to its competitors.

Why I'm not replacing my gas guzzling old car purely to reduce my expenditure on petrol.

I will eventually have to replace my car but it won't be because it uses a lot of petrol. I own a 1986 Ford Fairmont. This car is a classic Australian gas guzzler. I get about 13 litres per 100km (18mpg US, 22mpg UK) for motorway driving. I haven't measured its consumption around town as I do very little of that. From searching around the web it is probably in the region of 16 litres per 100km (15mpg US, 17.5mpg UK). As I have owned this car since 1996 and its yearly depreciation is low and it's residual value is virtually zero. Suppose I replace it with a second hand Ford Focus as above. Firstly, I'd be out of pocket by $17,000 before buying any petrol, it would be even worse if I had to borrow the money (an extra $4,660 at 10% over 5 years). At $2 per litre that amount of money will buy 8,500 litres of petrol; enough to drive my car 53,125 km around town (16l/100km) and I'd need to travel just over 95,500 km to recover this money by reduced fuel consumption. Even if petrol were $3 per litre we'd still looking at a pay back period of that can be measured in years.

I actually do about 14,000 km per year, mostly on motorways so applying the above calculation I'd save about 6.2 litres/100km. I'd have to travel 137,096 km at $2 per litre before I start to break even, nearly 10 years of motoring.

My calculations are quite simplistic and don't take account of inflation. My point is that just buying a car to reduce petrol consumption is actually an expensive thing to do. In my experience cheaper motoring is achieved by buying a good second hand car without borrowing money and keeping it for a long time. If you do the same calculations on a hybrid car you'd probably find it even more expensive, apparently the batteries have to be replaced every 3 years and it costs a lot more than filling your tank.

* This figure comes from a recent article on the opinion page in the Australian on 20/6/2008. The figure is 7,500km per capita per year. I'm assuming 2 adults per car.

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) Is Utterly Useless

Or more precisely the reports from this product are utterly useless.

I'm trying to update a spreadsheet that's used to keep track of program migration information (may be not a brilliant idea but that's how my employer wants it).

The reports can be copied to the clipboard but...

Can I get a list of files with their version numbers, checkin user, last checked in date? No, I can get some of this information in a format that's not easily manipulated by anything really.

Can I get a list of files that I could cut and paste into a spreadsheet with out much manipulation? Kind of, but if the file names are long they get broken into two lines with the rest of the useless information about the file effectively corrupting the file name.

There's a little pop up window that shows the version with the file name but it can’t be re-sized and of course the info doesn't fit in the window making even screen dumping a non-trivial task. The content of this window can’t, as far as I can tell, be copied to the clipboard.

You can also preview the reports but they don't resemble what’s printed and a report that previews acceptably seems to only print in the left 1/3rd of the paper.

At the moment I'm using a combination of screen dumps from the main screen (which doesn’t show version numbers) for my file list and right clicking on each file to find out what the latest version number and checkin user is and typing this information into the spread sheet.

You’d have thought that something that controls versions of files might actually display the version number of the file with the file.

Also, VSS starts very slowly (minutes sometimes) and when I Googled for a fix to this I started reading about all the horror stories of VSS.

Apparently Microsoft don't use VSS for source control. I don't blame them.

The American Health Care System

I've just seen Michael Moore's new film, Sicko. I knew that the American "health care? system?" was broken but I had no idea that the health insurance companies are about as criminal as the tobacco companies. Some years ago I considered moving to the USA (from the UK). I'm glad I didn't. I moved to Australia instead.

I note that some Presidential candidates have promised to fix health insurance so that every one has it. But, that won't fix the problem because the insurance companies will just take the premiums whilst denying treatment (unless this is legislated against and I don't imagine the insurance companies would take such a thing lying down.)

As a little aside, I'm always amazed how cheaply American politicians can be bought through campaign donations. In Moore's film he mentions the donations made to politicians for what amounts to not many millions of dollars for what must be billions in benefits such as lack of regulation, low corporate taxes, poor consumer protection etc.

The table below uses figures from the World Health Organisation from a small sample of English speaking OECD countries. Even though the USA has a private, and therefore supposedly efficient health system; as opposed to an inefficient, supposedly, public system the USA actually spends more as a percentage of its GDP on health care to reach considerably less than 100% of the population. How efficient is that? I also note that a a similar proportion of government revenue is spent on the public health care system as other countries in the sample. A double whammy for your average American citizen.

English speaking OECD countries	Total expenditure on health as % of gross domestic product	General government expenditure on health as % of total government expenditure
Australia	9.6	18.5
Canada	9.8	17.1
New Zealand	8.4	18.2
United Kingdom	8.1	15.9
United States of America	15.4	18.9

A publicly funded health care system is much cheaper for the average citizen (through taxation) than rip off premiums for "insurance". Glad I live in the land of the free; freedom from fear that I'll end up a pauper if I become ill.