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You might want to look into the stats at how many hospitals are doctor owned. This article from June was passed around a LOT in policy circles, showing how the incentives are for doctors to drive up costs:
McAllen, Texas and the high cost of health care - Atul Gawande

They're called rubber rooms. Similar things have happened with auto industry unions as well.

...how do you explain away statistics like the the 5 yr cancer survival rate? Hint: It's higher in the United States than in most European countries

Cancer survival rates != people cured of cancer. It may mean that they live a couple months longer. See here.

Socialism just works better for some things, health care being provably one of them.

Bullshit. Medical procedures that aren't covered by insurance (plastic surgery, lasik surgery, etc.) have consistently come down in price since being introduced to the market. Medical procedures that are covered by insurance have consistently gone up in price even though the technology behind them (MRIs are a great example) has gone down in price since being invented.

[Citation needed]. I'd argue that this is because, unlike nationalized systems, our doctors make a profit from ownership stakes in hospitals. This is the reason that Mayo has better outcomes, for example, than other private hospitals: they don't profit from doing more (sometimes unnecessary) tests. They make money based off of outcome, as opposed to volume. Best explanation of why our costs are so much higher than the rest of the world is here.

Also, you miss a key point: government bureaucracy is not for profit. The government has nothing to gain by denying you care--or this girl, for that matter. Private insurance companies have incentive to deny. That's the main difference between the two bureaucracies, as you put it, and it is a big one.

And those of us who are pushing for this plan would rather be pushing for a single-payer plan. Don't mistake us for saying that this compromise is the ideal solution, because it isn't, and we know that. It's just the best we can get passed. And as for the mandate, the provision of a public option negates what could be a mandate to participate in a private system, so it's a step better as far as that's concerned.

And I see you arguing that a totally free-market solution is the *angel choirs singing* ideal solution to the problem, but I don't see you arguing that single-payer solutions are less expensive than we have now. Oh, right: that's because the data doesn't support that conclusion. Bringing in the free market is another red herring. But while we're on that topic, a totally free-market healthcare solution pits money against lives. Guess which one always wins?

And to look into the future a bit, don't try to bring up lifestyle problems in the US, because Greece is fatter than we are and citizens live longer, paying about a third what we do, with a universal healthcare plan.

Adding capacity doesn't always work, the article linked below discusses 'induced traffic' in Atlanta, where each time capacity is added, people figure they can commute further (or more people figure they can commute).

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_paumgarten?printable=true

Though I did want to point out that it wasn't until almost 1900 before secret ballots were used over the entire US.

Indeed. The history of voting and ballots in the U.S. is quite interesting. Check out this article from 2008.

That's a horrible Photoshop paste job. Does that head even go with that body?

There's a wry New Yorker article about Pascal Dangin, the leading photo retoucher for the New York fashion industry. The print version of that article has before and after pictures. He's much better than whomever did that botched Ralph Lauren ad.

Dangin is much more subtle. Although he's been criticized for slimming down Madonna's arm muscles.

Ahh. Thank you but- we certainly shan't grovel for your gravel!
WE DO NOT WANT IT IT!
But, Earthing- thanks for the hint about your exoplanet (whatever that is)
Perhaps we'll look them over...

The stuff in the linked articles is nothing, read this: The Injustice Collector: Is James Joyce's grandson suppressing scholarship?

Stephen Joyce to a James Joyce scholar he disagreed with: "You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you'll never quote a Joyce text again."

But you neglect that most of the Iranian population is rural and poor. These people voted for Ahmadinejad because he actually supports them with his politics. Another thing most Westerners neglect is the fact that the opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi was Prime Minister of Iran after the Iranian Revolution and that he supported terrorist attacks on the US like the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.

I'm not a supporter of the current Iranian regime but I find it terrible how much misinformation is spread around the whole issue. Well, the hundreds of millions of dollars Washington spends for Psyops against Iran have to pay off somehow.

Not to add to what is sure to be an offtopic flamewar, but IQ tests are certainly not culturally biased. Unless, of course, you think logic, math, and spatial recognition are culturally biased.

Spatial cognition has been shown to be culturally variable; check out the work of Stephen Levinson on language and spatial cognition. It is possible to design spatial reasoning tests that are culturally biased in that regard; e.g., the Queensland Test was designed to raise the score of Australian Aborigines relative to Australian Whites.

In fact, there's just nothing culturally neutral about getting somebody to sit down to answer an intelligence test. Read the New Yorker's article on the controversy about the Pirahã and ask yourself, in the end: how would you administer an IQ test to this tribe, and would the results be more indicative of their "intelligence" or of their cultural differences to us?

To paraphrase William Labov: if you want to figure out how intelligent somebody is, you have to enter the appropriate social relationship with that person. IQ tests simply fail this; they presuppose that everybody is a well-mannered urban European middle-class authority-fearing white-coat-deferring sit-downer, who is just delighted to sit down and perform decontextualized, pointless intellectual exercise on command.

Well, here in Virginia we occasionally execute those whom the evidence exonerates, because "they had their day in court, and their lawyer didn't get the evidence in on time." Just to show we're tough on crime, or something.

I'm thinking of Roger Keith Coleman.

The evidence didn't exonerate him until well after he was executed. Or at least that's what the wiki article you linked to says.
The case in Texas was closer to what you describe - the arson investigators were proven to be a bunch of witchdoctors, but the new evidence was ignored before his execution. Thus proving that all the safety checks in the system don't amount to a hill of beans, despite Scalia's infantile logic.

Last year I wrote that Intellectual Ventures is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of our flawed patent system. Itâ(TM)s a firm that literally does nothing useful, its only business is the acquisition and licensing of patents. Not only does it have no intention of commercializing the technologies it âoeinvents,â its business model is based on minimizing the amount of research performed per patent obtained. In Malcolm Gladwellâ(TM)s brilliant (if inadvertent) exposé of IV, he describes how IV hires smart people to participate in brainstorming sessions and then has patent lawyers immediately file patent applications for every idea that comes up during the discussion, without bothering to actually implement any of them, or even devoting much effort to verifying that they actually work. IV then approaches firms that are doing the hard work of implementing âoetheirâ ideas and demands a cut of their profits.

Myhrvoldâ(TM)s firm illustrates in a way that no law review article could the extent to which the patent system punishes firms that actually produce useful products. Firms whose business models involve actual innovation have to show restraint in exploiting their patent portfolios. If they donâ(TM)t, thereâ(TM)s a high probability that some of their adversaries will countersue and both firms will be dragged into a legal quagmire. But if litigation is your only business, then youâ(TM)re not vulnerable to retaliatory infringement lawsuits, so you can exploit your patent portfolio much more aggressively. Many small âoepatent trollâ firms have exploited this flaw in the past, but Myhrvold is the first person to recognize that it can be exploited in a systematic, large-scale fashion.

Until recently, one of the few points Myhrvold could make in his own favor is that he hadnâ(TM)t started suing firms that declined to license his patent portfolio. I say âoeuntil recentlyâ because weâ(TM)re now learning that the lawsuits have started. IV has begun selling off chunks of its patent portfolio to people like Raymond Niro with well-deserved reputations for being âoepatent trolls.â Threatening to sell patents to a third party who will sue you is more subtle than threatening to sue you directly, but the threat is just as potent. Myhrvoldâ(TM)s âoesales pitchâ to prospective licensees just got a lot more convincing.

The fundamental question we should be asking about this business strategy is how it benefits anyone other than Myhrvold and the patent bar. Remember that the standard policy argument for patents is that they incentivize beneficial research and development. Yet IVâ(TM)s business model is based on the opposite premise: produce no innovative products, spend minimal amounts on research and development, and make a profit by compelling firms that are producing products and investing in R&D to pay up. Not only does this enrich Myhrvold at everyone elseâ(TM)s expense, but it also reduces the incentive to innovate, because anyone who produces an innovative product is forced to share his profits with Intellectual Ventures. Patents are supposed to make innovation more profitable. Myhrvold is using the patent system in a way that does just the opposite. In thinking about how to reform the patent system, a good yardstick would be to look for policy changes that would tend to put Myhrvold and his firm out of business.

In this gushing article Malcom Gladwell implies that this sort of patent trollism is some great innovation on it's own.
Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft, is one of the major investors in Intellectual Ventures, says, âoeI can give you fifty examples of ideas theyâ(TM)ve had where, if you take just one of them, youâ(TM)d have a startup company right there.â

You're joking, but it's slowly coming to light that Texas almost definitely executed an innocent man in 2004.

At the time of his execution, numerous petitions containing exonerating evidence had been filed, and were ignored.

With any luck, this case will have far-reaching implications. At the very least, the judges and governor need to be put on trial for negligent homicide.

Actually the Great Depression occurred in large part because in the 1920s the Secretary of the Treasury was the de facto head of the Frederal Reserve. As such he, along with the administrations in the 1920s, were interested in a loose money policy which set up the great fall in 1929. The Bank Act of 1935 gave the fed its own Chairman and a revised charter. It also neutered the powers of the branches to just day-to-day operations.

I think the history of recessions in the 20th century speaks for itself. Most recently we were on the brink of global financial collapse, but economic indicators have signaled we've already pulled out of the recession. That's less than a year long.

The Fed did in fact contribute to the latest recession, but it wasn't about money supply. It was about keeping the interest rates incredibly low, a problem compounded by the Republican Administration's refusal to enact stricter regulation. This is a GREAT article explaining the details: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/01/081201fa_fact_cassidy

I seriously cannot understand your position. Nearly every developed country in the world has a central bank. It's absolutely vital to have a body independent from the shenanigans and partisan politics that take place in Congress. Monetary policy and its effects are well understood and much more predictable than the effects of fiscal policy.

If not the Federal Reserve then who do you want in charge of monetary policy?

There are some other things I have to take issue with. First of all, the Fed doesn't print money. That's the National Treasury's job. The Federal Reserve simply buys government bonds for a small price, or sells them, creating an increase or decrease in interest rates.

Furthermore, your accusation's of the Fed's true purpose and corruption are amusing. The Office of Inspector General is charged with auditing The Federal Reserve, and Congress can directly force The Federal Reserve to release its records after 5 years if the Fed tries to withhold them.

In addition, I will quote another website: "The general impression one gets is that the Federal Reserve System is owned by international bankers who get all the Federal Reserve income. This is just not true.

The Federal Reserve System is headed by the Board of Governors which is a government agency (look it up:http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/ind⦠) There is no structure for private ownership at this level. The Governors are appointed by the president and confirmed by congress and are forbid my law from having a financial stake in any bank. All the B-of-G employees are considered government employees.

The Fed branches, however, can be considered highly regulated member-owned corporations. (look it up: http://www.hoovers.com/free/search/simpl⦠) By law, all member banks must buy shares into their local branch. Only domestic banks can be members. They vote for 6 of their 9 board members (the other 3 are appointed by the BofG). Each bank gets one vote so J.P. Morgan has as many votes as the First National Bank of Pocatella, ID.

For sheer political influence, large banks, corporations, and foreign interests are better off lobbying congress."

As for the national debt, if you take a look at this chart: http://traxel.com/deficit/deficit-percentage-50-years.png it's self-evident when the greatest increases of our national debt were incurred. Generally during the Reagen and Bush I administration, as well as the Bush II administration.

Keep in mind our approximation of the federal deficit today adds the cost of the war, which Bush Jr. kept "off the books".

I think it's also self-evident that the Democratic Clinton administration was the first one to experience a surplus since '69.

Really, any argument for the fiscal sanity of Republicans can be easily ignored.

I've read the background. It literally shows that they would get into fights, with their 12 year old daughter, because she'd go on the computer after being told she couldn't...time after time after time. They REFUSED to be parents and simply stood back as she did whatever the fuck she wanted.

Can you show where you found that information? That's not what I've read concerning it. What I've read is, she was supervised online, except for the day the messages started coming, and that in fact, the parents had been monitoring her use (even reading the "boy's" profile and messages) up to that point.

Reference Article

I've read lots of blog comments claiming she was unsupervised/running wild, etc., but I haven't read anything from a reputable source to that affect.

Here's a hint:

a) The girl was Clinically Depressed b) Her PARENTS should have been observing what she was doing a bit more closely.

Every indication we have at this point is that the parents were observing what Meier was doing closely, other than the day that she died, when she stayed on the computer when her parents told her to get off (because they couldn't be there, apparently).

"Friend Game" -- 1/21/2008

Would I nominate them for Parents of the Year? Probably not. They could've been more understanding to what she was going through at the time, or taken it more seriously. But at the same time, these don't appear to be parents who simply let the computer babysit their child.

but I've actually read up on this case.

First, the mythical message where she told her to kill herself or that "the world would be a better place without her" has never been found (even if it was found that she said the world would be a better place without her, how the hell can you call stating an opinion a crime? Good god, I'm terrified of the kind of politicians you vote for with views like that...) - on anyone's myspace account or server. Secondly, the girl killed herself after having an argument with her mother about her spending too much time online and her swearing .

Lori Drew being mean to the girl had nothing to do with her committing suicide. It was her crappy relationship with her parents that resulted in her suicide and her parents, like most Americans these days, wanted a scapegoat to avoid taking the blame for being crappy parents.

Since you've read up on the case, could you point to anything that indicates a poor relationship with her parents? I haven't been able to find anything that indicates anything other than a fairly typical teenage dynamic with the parents. In fact, most of what I've read has given me the impression that her parents did monitor her Internet use, and even exerted some control over her MySpace account.

New Yorker article

Actually, she had been seeing a psychiatrist for 5 years, and had been taking various medications, none of which (because of her age) could be given to her without consent of her parents (and some of which are actually controlled substances). All of this means that the parents had to have taken an active role in her treatment. Here's a good article on the whole thing.

I understand that some people are just contrarian by nature, and want to blame the parents when everyone else wants to blame Drew, and I'm certainly not saying that the parents did everything right, but this does not appear to be a neglected child, in the sense that her parents saw that she was troubled and did nothing.

Oh, fuck you. Obama's policies, if he can get undemocratic senate to pass them, would obviously benefit the common man. That his approval rating is falling is a refection of the skill of the satanic Republican provocateurs and not of any rational problem with his approach.

hes a fascist.

I mean the guy runs internment camps in 35*c heat. He goes out of his way to fuck with brown people becuase he doesnt like them. Hes one of those people who should be strung up.

I would encourage you to read the new yorker article on him although i guess it is no longer available online? must be new... http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/07/william-finnegan-on-sheriff-joe-arpaio.html

The article actually has alot of background on the politics between this county and the sheriffs office. I believe he has some problem with the mayors wife? but i may be thinking of one of the many other people that this nazi has problems with.

He would be more of a joke if it weren't for his habit of abusing his powers, as this New Yorker article indicates. It's behind a pay-wall at the moment, but the upshot is that, at least in the greater Phoenix area, there is liberty and justice for the wealthy, and Sheriff Joe for everyone else.

"believes in making prison as demeaning and painful affair as possible no matter what the offense."

Wait... you mean he took away their salt and nudy magazines?! Oh the horror!!

For all the great descriptive words being thrown about, I see no links with any evidence of anything wrong with this guy.

"Fuck you Joe. I hope you burn in hell you d-bag. (*waves bye to his karma*)"

I know nothing about Joe, but after reading this article I wished I lived in Arizona:
"In 1993, vowing that no troublemakers would be released on his watch because of overcrowding, he created the Tent City jail. His popularity grew. He banned cigarettes from his jails. Skin magazines. Movies. Coffee. Salt and pepper. He put inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms and created chain gangs. Later, he decreed that all his inmates must wear pink underwear, socks, and flip-flops. Tells about the thousands of lawsuits and legal claims of abuse filed against Arpaioâ(TM)s department."

There's a great expose on Sheriff Joe in a recent New Yorker that argues quite the opposite; his obsession with his own self-aggrandizement has eclipsed attacks on real crime in favor of a sensational (and indulgently predatory) approach to law enforcement.

The New Yorker recently published an excellent profile of Joe Arpaio. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall, but here is the abstract: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/07/20/090720fa_fact_finnegan

There's a neat article in The New Yorker, about teaching self-control that discusses the marshmallow experiment in considerable detail. What I thought was interesting was that the original experiment was just to see how children dealt with self-control issues, but the psychologist realized, half a dozen years later, in talking to his children (who were part of the experiment) that the kids who had done well in the original experiment were doing much better in school than the kids who hadn't done well, and from that realization he managed to come up with a whole different group of observations and experiments. He ended up showing that there's evidence if you teach children how to distract themselves to increase their sense of self-control, you give them lifelong benefits in terms of decision-making, and those benefits show up in better grades, better jobs, and better health.

An article on the same subject from the New Yorker.

The IQ scores are almost always skewed. It's not how "smart" you are, but how educated you are. For example, I've known poor farmers who were not well educated, but through what they have been educated in, it's apparent that they are smart.

Malcom Gladwell wrote an article that may be relevant here.

Make that the Unicorn tapestries

Repatently,
KT

the phantom itch

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

same neurological basis as a phantom limb, but far more rare (blessedly so)

it is probably one of the greatest definitions of hell on earth. the itch that never, ever goes away:

M. was willing to consider such possibilities. Her life had been a mess, after all. But the antidepressant medications often prescribed for O.C.D. made no difference. And she didn't actually feel a compulsion to pull out her hair. She simply felt itchy, on the area of her scalp that was left numb from the shingles. Although she could sometimes distract herself from it--by watching television or talking with a friend--the itch did not fluctuate with her mood or level of stress. The only thing that came close to offering relief was to scratch.
"Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any," Montaigne wrote. "But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels." For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, "this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid." She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.'s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night--and all the way into her brain.

...

The second theory seemed less likely. If the nerves to her scalp were dead, how would you explain the relief she got from scratching, or from the local anesthetic? Indeed, how could you explain the itch in the first place? An itch without nerve endings didn't make sense. The neurosurgeons stuck with the first theory; they offered to cut the main sensory nerve to the front of M.'s scalp and abolish the itching permanently. Oaklander, however, thought that the second theory was the right one--that this was a brain problem, not a nerve problem--and that cutting the nerve would do more harm than good. She argued with the neurosurgeons, and she advised M. not to let them do any cutting.
"But I was desperate," M. told me. She let them operate on her, slicing the supraorbital nerve above the right eye. When she woke up, a whole section of her forehead was numb--and the itching was gone. A few weeks later, however, it came back, in an even wider expanse than before. The doctors tried pain medications, more psychiatric medications, more local anesthetic. But the only thing that kept M. from tearing her skin and skull open again, the doctors found, was to put a foam football helmet on her head and bind her wrists to the bedrails at night.
She spent the next two years committed to a locked medical ward in a rehabilitation hospital--because, although she was not mentally ill, she was considered a danger to herself. Eventually, the staff worked out a solution that did not require binding her to the bedrails. Along with the football helmet, she had to wear white mitts that were secured around her wrists by surgical tape. "Every bedtime, it looked like they were dressing me up for Halloween--me and the guy next to me," she told me.
"The guy next to you?" I asked. He had had shingles on his neck, she explain

Toward the end of a long and witty demolition job on the Kindle 2, Nicholson Baker describes the pleasure of reading kindling and much else on his iPod Touch. Going back from that to the Kindle 2 "was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks". Baker's article is as informative as you'd expect from the poet of the card catalogue and miscellaneous lumber; it discusses Sony products too.

(Me, I don't own any of these devices. I read books, which long outgrew available shelving and are now stacked on the floor.)

There was a good article in the New Yorker which brings one up to date with the genesis and current state of the kindle, and e-books in general. The author orders one and then proceeds to write an article about his experience. He compares it to paper books, discusses amazons choice of a non free and closed format, and generally reviews it quite well. Having an ad blocker and hating all that is spamazon has kept me out of the loop with these new e-book readers so it was a nice intro to the current scene.

The article is available online at the following link: Kindle and the Future of Reading

Finally, the emphasis in the word "psychopath" on an internal sickness was at odds with liberal mid-century social thought, which tended to look for external causes of social deviancy; "sociopath," coined in 1930 by the psychologist G. E. Partridge, became the preferred term. In 1958, the American Psychiatric Association used the term "sociopathic personality" to describe the disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the 1968 edition, the condition was renamed "general antisocial personality disorder."

The whole article is worth reading if you want to understand this research in particular and the subject in general.

why's my head tingling?

Are you sure it's not itching?

There was an article about this very thing. Indian immigrant basketball coach pressed on ever turn over.
The outcome? He's much less talented team won -- again and again -- while simultaneously pissing off the opposing coaches.

As for why this tactic isn't used at the elite levels here's one theory.

Some of the tactics used by this researcher remind me of the full court press in basketball. The rules of basketball allow a full court press, yet to do so never crosses the mind of most players. Playing one side of the court at a time is convention. The full court press is extremely effective, yet if you use it, the other team will no doubt call your win "cheap".

Still, when you are the underdog, and must win at all costs, the press is your only option. I sympathize with those who use it (and recognize that it isn't easy to pull off either).

Full court presses are not considered "cheap". They just aren't used all the time because they are only effective under rare circumstances -- either when the offensive team is under a time crunch to move the ball across half court or score, or when weak ball handlers can be trapped and forced into a low-percentage pass.

Otherwise, trying to guard the entire court is not as effective as concentrating your defense in the half where the other team can score points. A full court press is hard because it is basically a man-to-man defence over the entire court, giving the offense plenty of room to maneuver and making it that much harder to double team or switch defensive assignments.

I think the full court press reference is "how david beat goliath". Basically, some guy who had never seen basketball had to coach for a league of 12 year old girls. The full tactic wasn't just full court press, it was 4 full quarters of full court press, at a level of play where no other team had the endurance necessary to sustain it. "How david beat goliath" is actually a pretty good analogy, as it came from a coach who was unfamiliar with social norms, felt that his job was to win at all costs, and received a lot of negative feedback for making the game not fun for other teams.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell

It questions the idea of information wanting to be free

What they need is to have the US and it's pawns to stop threatening to invade, and stop sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the CIA for undercover operations fomenting another coup in that country. As long as they are being verbally and covertly threatened by the hyperpower that has just invaded the country next door -- the same country that invited Saddam to invade them in the 80s -- the hardliners will continue to rule Iran.

One simple rule that imperial powers tend to forget is that people are nearly always divided against their own government but nearly always united against a foreign invader.

How to get modded "Flamebait" on Slashdot: suggest that things like coups or terrorism don't just happen in a vacuum.

What they need is to have the US and it's pawns to stop threatening to invade, and stop sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the CIA for undercover operations fomenting another coup in that country. As long as they are being verbally and covertly threatened by the hyperpower that has just invaded the country next door -- the same country that invited Saddam to invade them in the 80s -- the hardliners will continue to rule Iran.

One simple rule that imperial powers tend to forget is that people are nearly always divided against their own government but nearly always united against a foreign invader.

on the contrary, it is NOT conspiracy theory.

My girlfriend works at Children's Memorial in Chicago, and she repeatedly has to deal with doctors who ask for kickbacks (cash, items, trips) to do simple tasks associated with research grants. of course the grants can't pay so the docs help as little as possible.

also, this:
Basically, it spells out that overuse of medicine and doctors' drive to make as much money as possible really is at the root cause of our mess of a healthcare system:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande
it's a bit of a read but but I found it fascinating enough to get through.

Please, before you label something a conspiracy theory, please look into the idea that the article's author may know a little more about the subject and did do some digging. On the other hand, it IS slashdot so I can understand the skepticism regarding the legitimacy of the article.

Why didn't you link directly to the article? It is a stunning revelation indeed.

Oops, replied to wrong post above.

Here's the article. It's a great read.

Here's the article. It's a great read.

Bad news: your 15% figure is out of date. We're now spending 17% of our GDP on health care, and if the trend of the 2000s continues, we'll be at 30% by 2020.

Unfortunately, the Republicans will oppose any type of health care legislation, because the truth is that they don't think anything's wrong. Most won't admit it, or will make the wholly unsubstantiated claim that malpractice insurance is the only thing wrong with our system. This is despite the fact that all estimates put tort at least than 0.5% of our health spending. Of course, while the effects of 'defensive medicine' are tougher to estimate, there's fortunately empirical proof showing that it makes no difference. Texas has the strictest malpractice tort limits in the country (you can get at most $250k, even in cases of gross negligence causing permanent disability or death), causing malpractice claims to plummet, yet their health spending increases have continued to outpace the rest of the country in the six years since it was passed. So much, in fact, that Texas now spends more than any other state for decidedly mediocre results. Essentially, it's a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole.

There was a great article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago wherein a reporter visited McAllen, Texas, home of the largest health care spending in the world. What he found was a perfect example of what we see across the country: when doctors treat their practice as a revenue generator, costs go way up, and quality actually suffers. The doctors think that they're doing their best for their patients, but they subconsciously make more referrals when it brings in money. It's long, but it's definitely worth the read.

First I'll say that violence is 100% uncalled for, but I wouldn't doubt if the U.S. government is using the private but publicly funded "Endowment for Democracy" to interfere with Iran's election to help bring about the regime change the neo-cons have been gunning for, for a decade now. Imagine if it was found out that Chinese agents were interfering with our governance wouldn't that piss you off?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Endowment_for_Democracy

http://www.iefd.org/articles/trojan_horse.php

I can't prove this is happening of course but it would very consistent with previous covert U.S. interventions in other countries like Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, etc. My gut feeling is, is that is awfully perfectly timed and heavily pushed by the MSM to be a 100% spontaneous uprising. Again I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that there is more going on here than we are been told about.

What scares me is that an increasingly hawkish foreign policy will probably get almost no domestic opposition in the U.S. as neo-con Republicans are already behind it, and many naive "liberal" do gooder type won't question ANYTHING done by Obama (who I voted for BTW, mistake). Now more than ever it's time for Ron Paul authentic conservatives and lefty activists like myself to share notes IMO as the "center" gets increasingly imperialistic and bloodthirsty.

Go ahead and flame me and mod me down, I've got karma to burn, shrug

Economics 101 assumes that the two sides of the bargain are on relatively equal footing. If one side of the bargain has an unfair advantage, then economics 101 no longer applies. That is why there are laws against insider trading in the US.

That's also why econ 101 doesn't apply to health insurance. Even if you get rid of things like pre-existing condition limits, the consumer will never be able to adequately judge which health insurance provider is best for them any more than they were able to judge the relative risks/rewards of an ARM vs. a fixed rate mortgage. The market is just to complicated and specialized for even a well educated consumer to make a decision, so they are forced to rely on a possibly unscrupulous insurance broker, or maybe just throw a dart at a board to choose the "best" health care plan for them. Adding more insurance providers would only make a difficult situation even worse, while minimizing the one benefit that the big insurance providers have: economies of scale.

this article from this month's New Yorker looks at the city with the most expensive health care in the US (almost double the national average). It looks at quality of care, success rates and a variety of other factors, yet the only place where McAllen, TX is above average is in cost. So it asks where all that extra money goes. Interestingly, while it's not really accurate to say that competition is the cause of the increased costs, it is fair to say that capitalism is.

The article is very definitely worth reading. It brings up several key issues that I have not heard addressed in the health care debate previously. It doesn't propose a solution to the funding issue (single payer, public option, or stick with private insurers), but it does propose some simple fixes that will go a long way to reducing health care expenses regardless of which system we end up with. There's no single magic bullet that will fix the health care crsis in America, but the smarter care suggested by the article will do a lot more than just adding more doctors or insurers.

This happened to me in Yosemite, too, minus the loss of bowel control. When I was perhaps 14, my family got stuck driving out of the park in the dark on a moonless night. My dad stopped, and I got out of the car for some reason. Until that day, I had thought that the movie sets with a sky saturated with stars was fake and purposely overexaggerated. I lived in a semi-rural community with a hunting range, and I thought I knew the sky. I had seen the moon through a telescope. I knew constellations. That day, I discovered I was wrong, and it is honestly in the top 20 memories on my entire life.

I've driven out to the Vegas desert, back to Yosemite, and driven the cliffs of Big Sur at night to try to see the sky like I did that day and show it to my husband, too. The moon and other light pollution has thwarted me. Next week, I got to the Oregon coast, Mt Hood, and Mt St Helens, and I'm still hoping to get that view again. memories on my entire life.

In my quest for perfect darkness, I've learned that the Milky Way was once not only bright enough that it could be identified with the naked eye, but that it cast a shadow on the ground. There are few places you can go to have that experience. You'd have to go as far as Peru now, deep into the mountains. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen has a long article touching upon light pollution and its affects on the night sky.

Pollution in general turns the atmosphere into a hazy soup that scatters, reflects, and blocks the light of the stars. The lights in our urban and suburban night-time environments only make that haze visible because of the light reflected from it, making it harder to see dim objects in the sky. There is a scale to measure the 'darkness' of a viewing location, called the 'Bortle Dark-Sky Scale', which allows you to evaluate the 'darkness' your viewing location. Using this scale, the night-time sky in Galileo's time would achieve a ranking of '1', the darkest sky possible. If that were the case, it would have been possible to read a book or a newspaper with ease by the light of the full Moon.
The 'World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness' has some nice pix of worldwide light pollution.
An article in 'The New Yorker' magazine from August, 2007, discusses light pollution and John Bortle.

In un-related news the New Yorker seems to be having financial problems as fewer and fewer people read the garbage they publish.

Have you actually read any of the articles lately? Skipping the fiction and the poetry, the nonfiction articles are some of the most interesting and insightful reporting available. The articles by Oliver Sachs alone are worth the subscription. Some random selections are at http://www.newyorker.com/