Dr. Everhart's suggestions for the amelioration of some social ills.
1. Medical expenses.
A.  When I look at what hospitals charge, I see usually huge prices for 
services, negotiated prices for those with insurance, and often write
offs for even some of this.
  Why should "uninsured" prices be 10 (or more) times the "insured"
prices? Much of the cost of medical care for the uninsured would be
removed if a rule were enacted that these prices could differ by at most,
say, 20%. Since hospitals tell us the "uninsured" price is not used oftn,
their revenue would not be much affected. However, many surprise huge
bills would be removed, and the chance of someone losing life savings due
to one injury would be mostly removed.
B. Rules about drugs were devised for a world where laymen could not easily
learn what their symptoms meant, what different substance did, and where
it must have been hard to find out what was in various concoctions, or
what they promised to cure. The world is not like that now.  I can find
what a drug does, what symptoms for many diseases are, and can find what
my snake oil really does if there are ingredient and effect dislosures.
  If laws simply removed the entire class of substances illegal to own
or ingest, but make it a serious felony to lie about what was in a substance
transferred to another, or to fail to disclose known effects, the old
snake oil behavior could be wiped out, and people could medicate themselves
much of the time.
  Physicians won't like this. People can make mistakes, or not get at
underlying problems. Many doctor visits will disapear. By the way, part and
parcel of allowing free access to substances needs to include freedom
to buy them anywhere. Physicians can and should point out the value
of a trained diagnostician dealing with your ailments. But those who
used to get herbs and mystic rituals will be able to get real medecine,
On the whole I expect medical costs to drop like a rock, 
(I remember what happened to TV repairmen when drug stores put in tube
testers. Knocked out much of that business. People wouldn't find the
failed resistor or leaky capacitor that made the tube fail sometimes,
ao they'd junk their TVs prematurely sometimes, but when a tube just
had a filament fail, customers got a cheap fix.)
 So, I recommend allowing users access to drugs and requiring disclosures.
If narcotics are included (I would) you need to remember the cost of those 
could be expected to drop a lot. (I'd have the state sell them.)
Cheap drugs won't pay for pushers to vend them, and even if there are
still addicts, the addict who can beg $1 on the street and buy a week's
worth of his fix doesn't need to rob or threaten anyone to get it, (I'd
mybe make execution use overdoses, the better to advertise that using
narcotics remains a dumb thing, whatever the cost.)
2. Inequality of income
  We see reports at various times about the amont of money certain
people have. Also those who read a bit more may recall that processes
to pay corporate executives in ways that reward their adding value,
without plundering companies, have been elusive for a long time. Also
we hear about people buying companies, loading them with debt, and
skipping out, taking lots of assets. We also read about misdeeds of
the wealthy in many cases, where it appears these have enabled them to
create huge enterprises, and bankrupt others.
  I see nothing wrong with growing an enterprise by making it efficient
and getting it to satisfy some needs or desires (yes, including cases
where it creates those desires). 
  I don't like "sharp" practices that harm folks trying to do this. Recall
that antitrust laws were passed to outlaw practices by some (remember
Standard Oil?), but what was going on should not have been so casually
allowed.
  I think some generic constraints can be considered, which do not amount
to just taking money, but would greatly reduce the plundering.
  Stop and consider that corporations as currently organized are "limited
liabilit". In other words, they allow a corporation to contract debts,
but if the corporation goes bankrupt, the personal wealth of its owners
cannot be tapped to pay those debts. (This is all the more egregious when
we consider the wealth of the individuals who caused those debts to be
contracted and caused the bankruptcy, is not touchable. Someone who buys
stock is said to be a part owner (and lotsa luck in a bankruptcy; common
stock value tends to be first to be valued at $0) but only rarely has
any control over what a company does.)
  When a bankruptcy takes place, company debts don't get paid. So it is
the rest of society that takes the hit. 
  It would be sensible that practices that stand a chance to cause companies
to go under should be regulated so the worst are made illegal.
  To prevent plundering by CEOs, I suggest (for publically traded companies)
that if CEO pay exceeds some number, for example 20 times the average pay
of a company, that this be disallowed. I'd suggest that buying companies
to break them up be limited because the value in those companies due to
employees and community investment in them is also a form of investment
a company has encouraged and which should not be disregarded. If such
an acquisition is not accompanied by a plan to keep out of bankruptcy,
where the target is apparently healthy, disallow it.
  These kinds of limits should be handled somwhat like antitrust actions in
that they should not micromanage, and should perhaps be refutable presumptions
in the sense that, e.g., you can't pay your CEO more than 20 * average pay
unless (and while) you can prove that he is actually creating more value
to the company than that. Otherwise though, you don't let individual
actions corruptly risk a company's life.

  If these ideas got adopted, there would be no Millkens, and extreme
executive pay would become rare. To be sure, someone who builds a huge
company by talent and does not insulate personal wealth (did Howard
Hughes?) could run his company as he pleases. But if he wants to be
able to insulate his personal money from company debt, then he must not
risk everyone else's wealth running the company in ways that are likely
to lose it.

  This would make folks nervous, but it's way better than schemes that 
just take big chunks of people's money, and is related to a concept of
right actions. Any proposal needs to be carefully drawn though. It must
cover limited situations, and needs to be defined so that it does not
turn into an excuse for government clerks to become Grand Pooh-Bahs of
every company. Remember too that anti-trust was not well thought out
at first, and labor unions got treated as trusts because the language used
was not carefully crafted. This must be avoided.

Still a principled scheme to reduce extremes of wealth concentration, based
on common notions of equity, is far safer and more useful, and less likely
to destroy enterprise and the wealth of all society, than some simple minded
confiscatory schemes.

3. Energy and planetary warmth
  While we seem to be heating Earth too much, I think it foolish to adopt
corrections that empower governments to regulate even what we breathe. They
have not historically been worthy of such trust.
  Rather than tax carbon dioxide emissions (and then figure where all the money
goes; just handing it to governments seems a bad idea. If the idea is to make
emissions relatively expensive, then the money should go to other sources of
energy, none of it to government.) we should find ways to make other energy
sources cheaper. There are some billions of humans who live with low energy
sources and want to have the kind of lifestyle others have who have more. 
On what basis should anyone tell them "no, you must continue to live in 
Neolithic type situations"?
  I would propose, with current technology, building lots of Thorium based
fission reactors, using molten-salt techniques. These work, have been built
before. They are safer, smaller, and don't accumulate bomb materials, unlike
Uranium based ones. What I would do is legislate measures that would specify
safety standards, and which would pre-empt all challenges by NIMBY people.
NIMBY (not in my back yard) objections have made current reactors almost
impossible to fund, and there is no reason this should be allowed. There
is lots more Thorium in Earth's crust than Uranium, and no isotope separation
is needed to use it. Use this to build lots of base level power stations and 
show that yes, you CAN generate power enough for everyone to have what they
want, without dumping junk into the air. (You also get a lot less solid
waste that needs to go into the ground, and what is there only lasts 100-200
years, not thousands, so is easier to handle than uranium wastes.
  I would also push fusion research harder than it has been, in case it can
be used. Also I read that potassium might provide higher battery energy
density than lithium. If that turns out to be so, how about some research
into doing it. That metal is far cheaper and more abundant than lithium.

  When all this is being built, earth keeps warming. We should start using
geo-engineering to lower the heat some. Emulating volcanic actions, putting
some sulfur in the stratosphere, is decently understood, cheap, and the
changes last only a few years, so that if we do too much or too little,
the changes can be quickly adjusted. Doing this implies that it must be
continued until less CO2 can be in the air, so someone must spend the 
$1 billion/year or so for potentially many years. The process of generating
much nonpolluting energy is what lets it be turned down and ultimately turned
off, but in the meanwhile the main effect of heating the earth gets
controlled. Now, this kind of thing is a first-order fix. It can be expected
that some places will be hotter, others colder, than magically removing all
the co2 emissions, but the average effect can be fixed. I would suggest that
we are better off fixing global average temperature than not doing so, and
will suggest too that unless one proposes to do something about the billions
who want better lifestyles, magically removing CO2 is a pipedream. I suppose
some might claim that, oh well, we need to kill 80-90% of humanity and the
problem will go away. Let them volunteer to step into the gas chambers first.