I think transparency is a good thing. We should start with politicians. When you trade your money for a contractor's labor, there is a legally defined set of deliverables spelled out in a CONTRACT. However, when politicians like Obama make promises, they often make promises that they have no intention of keeping. In Obama's case, this is shown in his healthcare 'plan' which - CAN'T POSSIBLY WORK as its written, indeed, if the cost of healthcare per individual is defined as the cost to provide the service plus a set profit, Obama's plan, with his recent changes (to make it look 'universal') WILL ACTUALLY END UP MAKING HEALTHCARE MORE EXPENSIVE FOR 90% of AMERICANS - ! (if he truly does make it so insurance companies can only price by age, then the setup will be much like that in New Jersey, where individual health insurance is expensive, or Seattle, where its very hard to get a policy.)

Do the math!

Wikipedia article on Adverse Selection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_sel ection

Mathematica Adverse Selection Simulation (free download)
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/Advers eSelection/

http://www.economist.com/research/Econom ics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=A

Adverse selection

When you do business with people you would be better off
avoiding. This is one of two main sorts of market failure
often associated with insurance. The other is moral hazard.
Adverse selection can be a problem when there is asymmetric
information between the seller of insurance and the buyer;
in particular, insurance will often not be profitable when
buyers have better information about their risk of claiming
than does the seller. Ideally, insurance premiums should be
set according to the risk of a randomly selected person in
the insured slice of the population (55-year-old male
smokers, say). In practice, this means the average risk of
that group. When there is adverse selection, people who know
they have a higher risk of claiming than the average of the
group will buy the insurance, whereas those who have a
below-average risk may decide it is too expensive to be
worth buying. In this case, premiums set according to the
average risk will not be sufficient to cover the claims that
eventually arise, because among the people who have bought
the policy more will have above-average risk than
below-average risk. Putting up the premium will not solve
this problem, for as the premium rises the insurance policy
will become unattractive to more of the people who know they
have a lower risk of claiming. One way to reduce adverse
selection is to make the purchase of insurance compulsory,
so that those for whom insurance priced for average risk is
unattractive are not able to opt out.

But if we get a new username - as I had to two weeks ago after being here for four years - you lose all the connections, comments, diaries and relationships you've built up. It shouldn't be necessary.