“The short answer is, ‘Yes, we can,’” says Jennifer Feenstra Schultz, assistant professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. “The harder question is how.”

While most people agree that everyone should have access to health care, the biggest barrier to universal health-care access is cost. Schultz cites two popular proposals for health care reform.

“The first is to expand the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan,” explains Schultz. “The federal government organizes this system for its employees and elected officials, and private insurers compete to provide plans that could be offered to the public. Insurers must agree to cover anyone who enrolls and to charge the same premium.”

Under this system, employers could continue to offer health insurance, low-income individuals would be provided a subsidy, and the enforcement role of government would be expanded, since insurance would be guaranteed regardless of whether payment was made by every individual.

“The second proposal is a single-payer system financed by a new income tax. Private insurance as we know it would be eliminated,” says Schultz.

Under this system, the government would control what services are covered, how physicians are paid and all other duties of insurers.

“To many, a single-payer system is attractive because competition does not necessarily lead to better health care,” Schultz says. “In competitive insurance markets, insurers try to select healthy enrollees or may limit coverage.”

Most economists believe reform must happen outside the labor market, she says, because mandated employer coverage is inefficient. In addition, health savings accounts aren’t effective for providing universal coverage because they primarily benefit the young and wealthy.

Change won’t happen overnight. To appease both parties, a system must incorporate ideas of progressive financing and minimal government intervention. States like Massachusetts and Minnesota will likely lead the way before national reform occurs. So the search continues.

Jennifer Feenstra Schultz is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics and director of the Health Care Management Program in the Labovitz School of Business and Economics Labovitz School of Business and Economics at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Her fields of research include health economics, pharmacoeconomics and health policy.

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Solid matter will never travel at the speed of light, according to University physics professor Keith Olive.
 
“The whole idea of having a limiting velocity is very counter-intuitive,” he says. “Generally, to make something go faster you give it more energy, but as you approach the speed of light what happens is that instead of the object moving faster, its effective mass increases. Its momentum increases, but not its speed.  And so the energy goes right into mass rather than into velocity. You will never get to the point where the velocity equals the speed of light or goes above it.”
 
While many science fiction stories rely on objects moving faster than the speed of light as a fundamental plot element, Olive says that’s all the concept is – fiction.
 
“On television and Star Trek, when they talk about “moving at Warp 6,” they mean a velocity at six-cubed times the speed of light, or 216 times the speed of light,” Olive says. “For science fiction it’s essential that you move faster than the speed of light because otherwise, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to cross the galaxy and a few million years to get to other galaxies.” But, he emphasized, “It’s fictional.”
 
“The only things that can move at the speed of light are particles without any mass, like light,” Olive says. “Nothing with mass could go that fast.”
 
Keith Olive is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Minnesota. His research areas include cosmology and particle physics.