The Top 10 Technology Trends of 2009: I Pick them!

10) Mobile. It’s the future. Mobile cars, mobile cigarettes, mobile gummy bears. Mobile is the buzz word out there and it’s here to stay. If it’s mobile, invest in it. In 2009 your i-phone will become the j-phone, it will become not just a restaurant locator, credit card and way to ignore other people in awkward social circumstances and seem busy, but also become truly mobile based, leveraging mobility, perhaps even becoming a vehicle, much like the segway.

9) Breakthrough in the toilet industry. This is an often overlooked piece of technology, literally! But can you imagine the market size here, I estimated it at over $19 million annually, in toilets alone! I actually predict a facebook app that will predict when you have to use the restroom, and then just go for you! I’m thinking it will work via some kind of anal catheter maybe directly connected to your i-phone that will be RSS based with your profile. Can you imagine that shit?

8) Green. Again, just one of those buzz words people keep talking about, just over and over again, everywhere, just constantly yapping about it non-stop. So it must be good. It’s right up there with mobile for slick little web 2.0 mini-segments on the Today show and faddish editorials in the WSJ. I think the biggest green technology in ’09 will almost assuredly be tote bags. Think purses, but bigger. People will not want to use things or purchase things anymore, waste not want not! So they will have to carry everything that they could possibly have to use during the day with them at all times. Car oil, knives, cat nip, Kleenex, Styrofoam, all in the new green tote bag. It’ll get heavy, so I’m thinking the deluxe models could be on wheels with smallish gasoline engines to propel them. BIG $.

7) 2012 Presidential election. We just got through one of the quietest political seasons ever, with very limited citizen involvement, and people will look to finally get back off the sidelines and there could be real excitement for the upcoming 2012 election in ’09. To tell you the details I would need you to sign a non-disclosure, but I am heavily invested in a new web-based news platform that will basically focus exclusively on politics, providing a sort of insiders look at the campaigns and key players and general political intrigue. Huge untapped market with absolutely no competition here. I’m still looking for that breakthrough once in a generation candidate, but ’09 could be the year we finally get one.

6) Robotics. Ever since most of us were kids we knew this was just going to be a money factory some day. It has already been 8 long frustrating years since Stanley Kubrick set our expectations so high with his masterful space drama 2001 a Space Odyssey. It’s bound to happen in ’09 baby, I mean it is two-thousand –and-nine. Come on already Honda! Figure it out!

5) Professional sports franchises. If you find yourself in a position to become the owner of a major league sports team in ‘09 I highly recommend pulling the trigger. You will not regret it. I am currently exploring turning my fantasy NFL, NBA, NHL and MLS teams into actual franchises. It’s legally complicated, but I think the courts have left some wiggle room here. If I pull it off I will pretty much be living in one of those sweet luxury boxes full-time! And with several owners out there clearly senile, I’m talking to you Al Davies and Steinbrener, it is a wide open competitive landscape.

4) Anti-counting movement. Counting will really lose momentum after being the mainstay of societal organization for over 15,000 years (15,000 is now so whatever!) The world is all 0s and 1s anyway. So yeah, 10 is way bigger than I thought so I’m skipping to number 1.

1) Credit default swaps. I am up to my eyeballs in these things. I swap agreements on e-trade on an hourly basis, betting on everything from daily rainfall totals in the Amazon basin to municipal tobacco ordinances to John Mayer’s relationship status to pooled toxic-ass mortgages and I just keep going in deeper and deeper. I am clinically addicted to credit default swaps. Anything that sounds as pro as “credit motherfuckin’ default swaps” has got to be just sick. In 2009 AIG will emerge from this little bumpy patch unscathed, and look for Lehman Brothers to rebrand with a sexier Lehman Sisters and as Kanye says, watch the money pile up.

A Housecall for Incoming Health and Human Services Secretary Daschle

HHS Secretary-designate Daschle will have a lot on his plate. He will oversee the largest federal agency, administering everything from Medicare to the FDA to global health initiatives, at a time when his boss has promised massive reforms in healthcare. It’s going to be a tough job. To kick things off, Daschle has said he plans to embark on a discussion of healthcare reform with households all across America, a sort of big-tent experiment in brainstorming. This is a genuine and admirable goal, if not hard to understand coming from a man who has spent the last 30 years visiting people as a professional politician. Both Obama and Daschle have literally been on the road for years, and they are not short on (often very personal) stories about healthcare in America. But how could a couple more months of it hurt? I think Secretary Daschle should focus on three key areas if he hopes to simultaneously improve the quality of care Americans receive, and the number who receive it.

One, he needs to contain costs. Healthcare expenses are growing far faster than the revenue base is expanding and at the current trajectory, non-discretionary spending will eat up the entire federal budget in about 25 years. A good model of controlling prices can be found in Japan, where they have half the per capita healthcare costs and twice the per capita utilization rates as Americans. That sounds good. In Japan the government has sole purchasing power of pharmaceuticals and healthcare procedures. They use their massive negotiating power to exert downward price pressure on everything from the cost of antibiotics to the cost of an EKG. Private insurance providers can still design their own policies and set their own prices, but the basic inputs that go into those plans are purchased in bulk by the entire government. The same concept is already pervasive in the private sector, where a few key buyers negotiate entire supply chains. Secretary Daschle’s HHS would be a great place to house the Office of Negotiation, where they set up 5-year forward purchase agreements on the largest and most common drugs and procedures.

Second, just like decoupling in the electric utilities sector, there needs to be decoupling in the medical sector. Utilities over the last decade or so have realized that electric providers in a normal market have no incentive to be efficient; in fact they have an incentive for their customers to use as much energy as possible because it translates into larger profits. This results in excess energy usage and general inefficiency. This has been more or less solved via utilities taking a percent or two out of monthly electric bills and redistributing it based on a formulaic measure of a company’s energy efficiency. Suddenly energy efficiency is monetized and energy providers start paying attention. The same basic idea should be established in the medical industry, where doctors, particularly specialists, have an incentive to carry out, and charge for, expensive procedures. Daschle’s HHS should charge a small fee to existing healthcare providers (maybe .5%) and reward medical providers who are particularly efficient in their utilization. This does not mean doctors will be rewarded for not doing expensive procedures for sick patients who need them; it means they will have an incentive not to do procedures just because they are profitable (which is perfectly rationale). HHS could measure certain key and widely available statistics, like referral and utilization rates and costs per treatment at the institutional level, and then reward those institutions accordingly, decoupling profit from wasteful overutilization.

And three, if Obama and Daschle really want universal coverage they will have to subsidize about the lowest quintile of American households. This is a decision Americans will ultimately have to make, but controlling prices and rewarding efficiency will still not be enough to provide universal coverage. Obama proposes instituting a healthcare tax on employers who do not contribute to their employees’ coverage as a means to fund subsidy programs. This seems like a good idea, as it preserves price parity across the market, as every firm will have to meet the same basic operating costs (chipping in to provide basic healthcare and not free-riding on firms that already do). Revenues here could be distributed by Daschle’s HHS based on a family’s combined income level to provide basic coverage for the uninsured.

I don’t think Secretary Daschle will be knocking on my door anytime soon, but I hope that once he hears from all these households that he starts getting specific soon. Generic goals or hollow bromides have gotten us nowhere with healthcare reform in the past, and today’s no different. Healthcare reform will be a long difficult debate, and policymakers should start working on the nuts and bolts now. None of these ideas is easy or particularly desirable, but neither are higher taxes in the future for worse benefits.