Posts from — July 2007

In her post on the cardboard being found in Chinese street food, Echidne of the Snakes references Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler.

As a Pratchett reader I would point out that is sounds more like Disembowel-Meself-Honourably Dibhala, a distant relative, and no relation to CMOT Dibbler – the store.

Oh, as long as we’re talking about unsavory things, you could drop by Facing South and read Chris Kromm’s piece on the recent spate of Big Time Political Scandals in the South.

The police in Suffolk County, New York are still idiots. I knew they were idiots when I lived there, but they haven’t gotten any smarter in the intervening years.

CNN reports: Teens charged in alleged plot to kill students

Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer said the journal described shooting students and setting off homemade explosions.

Police said a search warrant was issued for the 15-year-old’s computer, where it was discovered that he’d made numerous attempts and inquires on the Internet to obtain weapons, including an Uzi and five pounds of black powder explosive.

Point one, look in a book, black powder is a flammable material, not an “explosive.” You still need to be an adult to buy it, but it’s for sale at any gun shop upstate due to re-enactors and the black powder hunting season. The fact that they were looking into black powder, instead of the more common smokeless gunpowder, also readily available to adults in the state for reloading, shows their lack of knowledge.

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Steve Bates notes the passing of Lady Bird Johnson with a Ben Sargent cartoon, and cartoonist Duane Powell remembers Doug Marlette.

Yes, it’s Friday the 13^th again. The 13^th falls on a Friday more than any other day of the week, so get over it. It’s only valid in in English and Portuguese speaking countries, so go visit a Spanish-speaking neighborhood for the day.

If you want to blame someone, it’s the calendar of Pope Gregory XIII that created this imbalance.

Being Annoying

Go Away!

[Editor: I was using Sox as a model for different camera modes and he was not happy because the flash kept going off, even when I thought it wouldn’t.]

Friday Ark

Via Andante of Collective Sigh in comments, go and read Adam Thompson’s piece on the Healthy Wisconsin plan just passed by the state Senate.

“Tastes great and less filling,” as in everyone’s covered and the government and businesses save money as compared to the current system. This is what a “single payer system” can do for all of us. Also note that it is a “fee-for-services” system, i.e. you pick your own doctor, and you and your doctor decide what care you need.

Now all we need is a “12-Step Program” to help Congress overcome its addiction to insurance company and Big Pharma campaign contributions. We have to have 61 “sober” Senators to get anything meaningful done, and that will not be easy.

Because LIEberman [Likud CT] and his stooge Levin [Idiot MI] have promised them that this time the Shrubbery won’t pull the ball away, the 97 adults present in the US Senate voted to condemn Iran for unsupported allegation of possible acts that might be taking place, and began running down the field to kick that football.

Lurch at Main and Central in his post, Iran Delenda Est!, notes the similarity between these actions and the Third Punic War [You do remember Latin II, right? Vets do tend to collect wars.]. He links to Ian Welsh’s post at the Agonist, The March to War With Iran.

So far the “evidence” against Iran wouldn’t be acceptable on The People’s Court [Judge Wapner always wanted receipts] much less the UN Security Council, and a lot of it is obviously faked.

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Kevin at Lean Left asks Does That Make Gordon Gecko[sic] Linux or Windows?

Markets create incentives for insurance companies to behave atrociously. The simplest way for an insurance company to become profitable is to never pay out any claims. Thus, insurance companies go to great lengths to not enroll people who can be expected to have high medical costs down the line and to find reasons to deny people the benefits for which they have paid their premiums.

First of all this attitude applies to all forms of insurance, not simply medical insurance, just ask homeowners affected by recent hurricanes. The insurance companies only want to cover people who will never file a claim, and they will do almost anything to avoid paying out.

The reality is when states started requiring automobile insurance, they had to create an auto insurance company to handle people that insurance companies refused to cover. Florida has had to do the same thing with homeowners’ insurance, create a state insurance company to cover people the insurance companies refuse to cover. The Federal government operates a life insurance company for the military, because the insurance companies don’t want to sell insurance to the military.

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Reuters reports that a new study confirms what should have been obvious: Bills pile up when uninsured get Medicare

BOSTON – Americans who previously had no health insurance rack up some expensive medical bills once they are old enough to be covered by Medicare, researchers said on Wednesday.

The reason: uninsured people put off the care they need, which makes it more expensive to treat them once Medicare is available to pay, Michael McWilliams of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston found.

And those people continue costing more for the first eight years they are in the program, McWilliams and colleagues reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

If you don’t have insurance, you will only seek medical assistance for life threatening problems – you can’t afford to do anything else. Healthcare costs could be significantly reduced if people had access to help before problems become emergencies.

Another point is that something has to be done to provide access to a doctor other than 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. Even with excellent insurance coverage my Mother has ended up in the emergency room on weekends, because there was no other way of getting a needed prescription. These visits cost thousands of dollars and wouldn’t have been necessary if there was another system in place, like a walk-in clinic.

First off I’ll leave the links up top, because this is probably going to get long.

Thers of Whiskey Fire responds to a Crooked Timber post, The Heavy Burden of Level-Headedness which responds to a Christopher Caldwell criticism of Michael Moore and the movie SiCKO.

Then R. Neal at Facing South reports in SiCKO: What now? Answer: HR676?, of the efforts of John Conyers to expand Medicare coverage to everyone in HR 676 that he introduced in the 109^th Congress.

Thers is wrong in assuming that people know about the American healthcare system. What they know is the system that directly affects them and those they love. There is no American healthcare system.

Medicare and the military Tricare are the only systems that work in the same way all over the U.S. There is a different system in every state for Medicaid, and every other program varies widely not simply from state to state, but often within a state, i.e. different coverage in rural areas than urban areas.

This lack of standards or standardization is the source of a great deal of waste in the system and drives the costs up unnecessarily.

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The defense has filed a Libby motion in the penalty phase of the BALCO steroids case. Everyone in the legal field knew this was coming.

Pope Benedict is The Decider on who is a Christian and what is a Christian church. I seem to remember a few wars on this issue…okay, so the Swiss root on my family tree fought as mercenaries in the wars over this, and the Dutch and Palatine German roots transplanted themselves to the Mohawk Valley of what is now New York because of it. I guess we don’t have enough religious hard-feelings at the moment.

BBC reports: Iraq fears Turkey troop build-up

Iraq says Turkey has 140,000 soldiers along its border, prompting fears of an incursion against Kurdish guerrillas.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari an ethnic Kurd himself, said his government was against any breach of Iraqi sovereignty.

He called for talks with Ankara to solve the issue.

Turkey accuses Kurdish separatists of staging attacks from inside Iraq. It has often warned Baghdad that it is prepared to take military action.

If the PKK weren’t enough, Turkey is also under pressure to respond to the recent bombing that killed more than 100 people in Amirli, a Turkman village. The Turks have shown great concern over the fate of their ethnic cousins, the Turkmeni, in Iraq. There are elections looming, so I wouldn’t put too much faith in slow, patient diplomacy.

The BBC reports on a study in Britain that found that Librarians ‘suffer most stress’

Fighting fires may sound taxing, chasing criminals demanding, but a new study says that working in a library is the most stressful job of all.

Librarians are the most unhappy with their workplace, often finding their job repetitive and unchallenging, according to psychologist Saqib Saddiq.

He will tell the British Psychological Society that one in three workers suffer from poor psychological health.

The study surveyed nearly 300 people drawn from five occupations.

They were firefighters, police officers, train operators, teachers and librarians and were intended to cover the spectrum, with the librarians first-thought to be the least stressful occupation.

If they gave librarians guns and axes, I’m sure their stress level would be reduced.

CNet reports: Electronic records not helping outpatient medicine

Electronic records hold the potential to improve medical care by flagging problems such as drugs that shouldn’t be combined, but a study by Stanford and Harvard medical school researchers has concluded that so far they haven’t improved the quality of outpatient health care.

The researchers studied a database of 1.8 billion doctor visits in 2003 and 2004 and examined performance on 17 indicators of quality. The results were mediocre, according to Stanford.

“In essence, we found little difference in the quality of care being provided by physicians with electronic health record systems, compared to those without these systems,” Dr. Randall Stafford, a Stanford associate professor of medicine and senior author of the research, said in a statement. The research is scheduled for publication Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

I’ve done some work for doctors, and an amazing number of them have a “real thing” about computers. You point out how much of the equipment they use and tests they run involve computers, and they still won’t budge.

Typing your notes in a computer is not computerized medical record keeping. Garbage in – garbage out. The computerized drug database at the local KMart has stopped three prescriptions that my Mother was given by doctors. The drugs would either react badly with something else she was taking, or she was allergic to them based on an earlier incident. This is what electronic systems are designed to do, cut down on the problems.

When people talk about how electronic record keeping is going to save money, they need a reality check – they can’t do a thing until they are used as designed and that requires changing the attitudes of health professionals.