Eric H. Doss's Posterous Site
I'm a writer, editor and project manager at a large international publishing company. I'm also a bit of a geek and a triathlete, although the fried chicken and sweet tea is battling me on that one.
My Google Profile
I'm a writer, editor and project manager at a large international publishing company. I'm also a bit of a geek and a triathlete, although the fried chicken and sweet tea is battling me on that one.
My Google Profile
A new Harvard study has uncovered another disturbing reality of America’s broken health care system: Trauma patients without insurance are almost twice as likely to die in the emergency room. Researchers were unable to determine why, but hospitals’ eagerness to transfer the uninsured could be to blame. —PZS
AP via MSNBC:
Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.
The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable.
November 11th
Abortion and health reform
- Posted by:
- Economist.com
- Categories:
- Health care
ANDREW SULLIVAN, William Saletan and Conor Friedersdorf all make the case that the vulnerability of health reform to abortion denial-of-service attacks is predictable, because getting the government more involved in paying for health care inevitably means people will have to cope with other people's opinions about what should be paid for. This is certainly true in the purely factual sense that when government starts subsidising or regulating an industry, it creates an avenue through which people could impose their moral or ideological views on others, if they were so inclined and could get the votes. But whether or not people should do so, or whether it's inevitable that they will do so, are different questions. There is actually a rather clear distinction between government regulating the health-insurance market by, say, establishing medical effectiveness research bodies that penalise expensive or ineffective care, and government regulating the health-insurance market on the basis of some citizens' religious convictions.
Mr Friedersdorf, responding to Ann Friedman's post expressing anger at the Stupak anti-abortion amendment, writes:
The bigger role the federal government takes in funding health care, the more you’re going to see politicians interfering in matters that would otherwise be left to doctors and patients, and the more controversial these battles are going to become among the public. This seems obvious to me, but I never see progressive writers worrying about it.
It seems to me that if Mr Friedersdorf is looking for an example of a progressive worrying about politicians interfering in matters that would otherwise be left to doctors and patients, he might look to...Ann Friedman's post expressing anger at the Stupak anti-abortion amendment. More broadly, you'd think that the civil-libertarian position would be that the government shouldn't use its expanding power over the health-insurance market to decide what procedures can or can't be covered on a religious or moral basis. When defenders of civil liberties argue that national security agencies should not be able to monitor people's phone calls without a warrant, we don't respond "Hey, you voted to fund the CIA, what did you expect?" We need government to do a lot things in society, and we also need restrictions on the way such government power is exercised.
There's a very cogent and balanced point at the end of Mr Friedersdorf's post:
The counterargument, of course, is that some folks would object on moral grounds to vaccines, or birth control, or Viagra, or medicine that was tested on animals. Should they be able to veto federal spending?
No. They shouldn't.
Lisa Wade shows us the shape of things to come:
This makes the triumph of marriage equality look fairly inevitable, but also frustratingly far off.
Today’s idea: Detroit’s “massive failure” makes possible a radical transformation of the blighted city, an article says, including shrinking it down to its urban core and turning much of the place over to crops. And an ineffective government is actually a plus.
F. Costantini for The New York Times Fords into plowshares? No, this is an old Chrysler lot.
Cities | Could Detroit pull a reverse Joni Mitchell — unpave its parking lots to put up a metro-agrarian paradise? That’s a glib yet hopeful way to think about the urban experiments envisioned or under way in the city, as described by Aaron M. Renn in an article in New Geography.
Renn says the sheer size of Detroit — a largely vacant urban prairie bigger than Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco combined — makes it a prime test case for the “shrinking cities” movement. And so an American Institute of Architects study imagines Detroit reduced into a metro core surrounded by green belts, “urban villages” and banked land.
Already, Urban Farming, an international outfit that has made Detroit its headquarters, is said to boast some 500 small plots under cultivation to supply free food to the city’s poor. “It wouldn’t surprise me, frankly, if Detroit produces more food inside its borders today than any other traditional American city,” Renn writes.
Even raccoon- and pheasant-hunting is not unheard of within the protein-poor city’s limits. Yes, a retired truck driver reportedly shoots raccoons and sells them as food, at $12 per carcass to feed a family of four.
Such is Detroit today. But in a nightmare town where a house can cost less than the TV you put inside, loftier dreams can also be dreamt — especially, Renn says, when government doesn’t get in the way: “In Detroit, the incapacity of the government is actually an advantage in many cases. There’s not much chance a strong city government could really turn the place around, but it could stop the grass roots revival in its tracks.” [New Geography; background: The Week]
More Recommended Reading:
- Can Pakistan Keep Its Nukes Safe? – Seymour Hersh, New Yorker
- Why ‘79 (Thatcher, Deng, Iran) Mattered More than ‘89 (Berlin Wall) – Niall Ferguson, Newsweek
- Together at Last: Al Gore and Costco (Where S.U.V. Families Stock Up) – Debra J. Saunders, Weekly Standard
- National Brain Drains Are Good for the World … – M. Clemens, D. McKenzie, Foreign Policy
- … But Can Remittances Survive the Downturn?– Dilip Ratha, Foreign Affairs
- Dark Side of Productivity Surge: Those Still Employed Work Harder – Peter Coy, Business Week
- My Big Fat Chick Lit Novel: Fully Rounded Heroines for Fully Rounded Women – Amelia Hill, Guardian
- Should Insurance Cover Faith Healing? – Weird Things
- Turning Vending Food Into Gourmet Dishes – Emilie Baltz, Core 77
- Pea-and-Potato McPatties, Tuna-Pie Turnovers and Other Odd McDonald’s Menu Items Around the World — Dark Roasted Blend
