On the Sicko posts, I am trying to stir up some debate, discussion, and conversation about our health care mess. I haven’t made up my mind on anything other than we can do better. So I’m in diligence mode and no I am not stopping after only talking to three Canadians. In fact I consider the 65 comments I’ve received on the two posts so far additional diligence. Count on more posts and more diligence. And thanks for being part of the discussion.

On the Marc/comments post. I am not criticizing Marc and Seth for turning off comments. Who knows why they chose to do it? They have huge audiences and the problems of managing community could be very different at that scale. I was just trying to say that I wouldn’t blog without comments. I need the feedback to keep me going. And I am sorry to see Marc lose that wonderful aspect of blogging so quickly after only five weeks. I’ll leave out the f word this time.

Regular readers know that I am in love with Marc Andreessen’s blog. I read it daily and he has not let me down yet. He has a post up on the 11 things he’s learned from blogging in the past "fucking five weeks" (that’s a inside reference).

I agree with all of them but one. You can’t turn off the comments and have a truly interactive blog with a community. Comments are where it’s at in blogging. If I turned off comments, I’d quit blogging.

It’s all of you, the people who take the time to read this blog and let me have it in the comments, who keep me doing it. Trackbacks and other forms of social media interaction are fine, but comments are the first line of interaction, discussion, and debate in the blog world.

I know there are plenty of high profile bloggers who don’t have comments, including my inspiration for blogging, Seth Godin. But when you turn off comments, the blog stops being a blog in my mind and becomes a publication. Seth and Marc will say that if you have a high profile blog, you get too many nasty, mean, ugly comments and spam to boot. True. I’ve had the same problems, maybe not of the same magnitude. I don’t care. You have to deal with it.

A blog without comments is a one way medium. And that’s not as good as a conversation.

Even though I really disliked the movie, I have been thinking a lot about the health care mess we are in.

So like Michael Moore, I decided to talk to some Canadians. I had the opportunity to have dinner with three of them last night although it’s hard to call Howard a Canadian.

I asked them if they liked their health care system. They all said yes, very much, particularly for the day to day needs and common procedures like childbirth. However, they also told me the system breaks down when you get really sick. There’s just not enough money for treating terminal diseases and so they "just let you die".

I also had a great email discussion with Fraser‘s brother David on the topic. David’s a doctor in Canada. A worthwhile perspective to get for sure. David points out that:

part of the reason the US is so innovative is because your system is designed for it.  as a VC, i think a single payer system would kill your VC friends in health/biotech.

quick point – canada has only ONE dedicated venture firm for healthcare ventures, and it is very early stage.  contrast that with the dozens in the US.  i worked with a health start-up, until we realized we have only one customer in the entire country – the government – which by all metrics is among the slowest and cheapest purchaser of health IT/pharma in the developed world.

These are good and useful perspectives. My take is we need "universal healthcare" in this country. Not socialized medicine and not nationalized healthcare. I am not a fan of a single payer system. But I am in favor of covering everyone, at least for day to day needs and also for providing some form of catastrophic insurance to everyone. I don’t honestly know how to do that part affordably. The issues Canada has are the same issues we have in this country for anyone who doesn’t have the means to pay for catastrophic care.

Howard asked me about the mexicans who come across the border illegally in his hometown of Phoenix and fill up the hospitals and schools. That’s an immigration issue more than a health care issue, but my take on that if they are working and being a productive member of our society, admit them, tax them, and bring them into the system.

I don’t mean to imply that these are easy issues. They are not. But they are going to be hot button issues in our next election. And so we should be discussing, debating, and doing our diligence so we can make informed and correct choices.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about and investing spam prevention. I was an early investor in Bright Mail, the first anti-spam company, which was bought by Symantec a number of years ago. I am also an investor in Return Path, which owns the Sender Score business which uses reputation scoring to help both senders and receivers eliminate spam and help legit mail get through. And we’ve been customers of Postini at Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures for as long as I can remember using a spam filter.

So it’s nice to see the team at Postini get a win with the sale to Google that was announced today. As good as Postini is, it can be better. Here are the things I’d like to see Google do with Postini:

1 – allow me to search my quarantined mail. i have no idea why Positini hasn’t offered this feature. i’ve been asking for it for years. Given Google’s credentials in search, this should priority number one.

2 – figure out how to stop grabbing verification emails. pretty much every service i sign up for sends me a verification email. and at least half of them are gobbled up by Postini. I am not complaining too much because Postini stops so much spam that I have learned to tolerate the false positives. but for some reason verification emails are always treated badly.

3 – let me manage my quarantined mail in the gmail interface. actually that would be a great way to solve the search problem. quarantined mail is still mail. i’d like to use my quarantined mail like a mailbox, not a trash can.

4 – let me see the reputation of the sender in the quarantined mailbox. i would like to sort by that as a way to find false positives. Sender Score can help with that.

The bottom line for me is quarantined mail is not all spam. And never will be. Google can make Postini so much better by focusing on all the mail that is caught by the filter and making it usable to me.

And in addition to the awesome team at Postini, I’d like to congratulate my good friends at Mobius Ventures and Foundry Group for their big win on their investment in Postini. Another smart investment pays off. Well done everyone, including Google.

In the past couple days, I’ve been re-connecting with old friends who I don’t see as much as I used to. Not in the real world though. On Twitter and to a lesser extent on Facebook. Susan Mernit talks about being enchanted by the status updates she is getting in her Facebook feed. I get that same experience with my Twitter feed. As more and more of the people I know start using Facebook and Twitter, I am starting to get re-connected to a set of people that I kind of lost contact with.

My friend Wences is a great example. He started Patagon.com and we made a very nice hit together almost a decade ago. He’s gone on to sail around the world, have a family, and try to change the world. I’ve gone back to being a VC.

Somehow we ended up following each other on Twitter and this weekend we ended up talking about sushi in Sao Paulo. We’ve traded a few emails over the years so you could say we stayed in touch. But not really. Hearing that he’s at a nursery or eating sushi in Sao Paulo is just different. It’s like you are chatting on the phone or something.

This "status update" thing, powered by social utlities like Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku, and most likely a number of other services is a big deal. At least it has been for me.

OK, for something I said I was boycotting, this is the third post. And the second cave this week. Or third. Can’t be sure.

But I am sure that reading Jackson’s liveblogging of the Live Earth concert was a hell of lot more fun than watching it.

I grew up with him and never realized how funny he is.

We were having lunch at The Clam Bar on Thursday and they were playing non stop Eagles. The Gotham Gal so hates the Eagles and it was killing her.  Lyin’ Eyes almost caused her to abandon her steamers and hit the road.

So it was with interest that I read tonight, courtesy of John, that Jeff Tweedy shares a dislike for The Eagles. Well that may be too strong, but he did say they aren’t a "particular favorite of mine".  Seems like Jeff’s gone PC on us.

The NY Times comes out today for withdrawl from Iraq and starts out its page long editorial with these words:

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

I agree with the editorial. Bush would love to wait and hand off the mess to the next President, but that’s not going to happen. There are too many Republicans who want to be re-elected in 2008 who aren’t going to go down in flames over their support of the war.

The 2008 election is not going to be about Iraq the way the 2004 and 2006 elections were. We’ll be well on our way out of Iraq by next November.

And that’s a good thing. Because we’ve got bigger issues to work out.

So I guess I upset a few loyal readers including my brother with my earlier post.

The truth is I care a lot about global warming and our reliance on carbon fuels (related but not the same issue).

But I am tired of these big concerts that try to inspire us to do more. They don’t work for me.

Bob Lefsetz says it better than I did this morning.