healthcare - Taryn . on Diigo

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Panic in Detroit -This is not your father's Oldsmobile we're rescuing

see Charlie Rose's interview with Bob Lutz.

Tags: bailout, automobile, industry, healthcare, government, labor, michigan on 2008-11-17 -All Annotations (3) -About

the debate over a Detroit bailout should begin a larger political conversation, one that sprawls beyond the Midwest and the intellectual confines of lean production techniques and workers' legacy costs. Whatever mistakes the Big Three and the UAW have made, their struggles are a pretty good indicator of why the government--not employers--should be responsible for providing health insurance and why, without broader action to fight climate change, improving fuel efficiency will be a struggle. Naturally, the Big Three should enthusiastically promote these reforms, something they haven't done in the past.
best estimate is that between 1.5 and two million jobs would be lost. The price of addressing such human misery with unemployment benefits, Medicaid, and other services would be huge, making a $25 billion loan seem like a bargain-particularly if the companies pay it back, just as Chrysler did after its bailout in the 1980s.
In normal times, with another company, that might be correct. But these are not normal times, just as GM is not any old company. Nor is the simple economic morality tale everybody repeats about the auto industry accurate. Detroit has come a long way since the days of wide lapels and disco. GM, Ford, and Chrysler are taking precisely the sorts of steps everybody says are necessary--or, at least, they were taking those steps until an unexpected trifecta of high gas prices, vanishing credit, and a deep recession hit. Rescuing the auto industry is not, as so many people suppose, a question of giving Detroit one extra shot at transformation. It's a question of giving Detroit a chance to finish a transformation that was already underway.

Editorial - So Little Time, So Much Damage - NYTimes.com

President Bush’s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others — few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

Tags: government, united_states, 2008, environment, conservation, civil_liberties, healthcare on 2008-11-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

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MAKING HEALTH CARE MORE LIKE BASEBALL - Ezra Klein

re: this Op-Ed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/opinion/24beane.html

Tags: healthcare, reform, medicine, data on 2008-10-29 -All Annotations (1) -About

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WellPoint, the WellPoint Foundation and the X PRIZE Foundation Collaborate to Advance Revolutionary Ideas to Improve Health Care

Tags: award, healthcare, innovation, collaboration, entrepreneur on 2008-10-29 -All Annotations (2) -About

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CHP/PCOR conference brings entrepreneurs, industry leaders together to discuss innovation in health care reform - CHP/PCOR

see Orszag's "Demographics, Access and Costs: A Federal Perspective on Health Care Policy and Innovation"
@13:00 Information Technology is "necessary but not sufficient [to increase efficiency]..."
@17:00 "...an affront to traditional econ 101 thinking...the default mattered more than the financial incentive...[placebo effect in medicine]...simply telling people that what they do every day is physical exercises generates results that are similar to actual exercise..."

Tags: inequity, social_change, innovation, healthcare, reform, economy, behavior, psychology, medicine, placebo, economics, information, technology, nutrition, exercise, children, video on 2008-10-29 -All Annotations (1) -About

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A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH EDWARDS - Ezra Klein

Tags: healthcare, reform, insurance, government, regulation, poverty, genetics, innovation, video on 2008-10-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Op-Ed Contributors - How to Take American Health Care From Worst to First - NYTimes.com

...watch this for physicians' responses

Tags: healthcare, reform, medicine, statistics, baseball, opinion on 2008-10-26 -All Annotations (2) -About

in list: watch for responses

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The Scan That Didn’t Scan - NYTimes.com

Tags: healthcare, science_is_a_method, technology, medicine, mri on 2008-10-15 -All Annotations (1) -About

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The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.

Tags: food, diet, meat, health, healthcare, agriculture, pollution, climate_crisis, energy, homeland_security, government, regulation, reform, technology, information, infrastructure on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (17) -About

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several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:
Add Sticky Note
- four season farmers' markets, agricultural enterprise zones, local meat-inspection corps, establish a strategic grain reserve, regionalize federal food procurement, create a federal definition of "food", benefit programs that provide incentive to support farmers' markets and CSAs
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-10-12
chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.
Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.
While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.
Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers
It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.
It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.
ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides.
Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer.
the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community.
When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.)
The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.
the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.
The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.
in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food
The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions.
First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture 2007 | Dr. J. Craig Venter

see transcript: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/venter.dimbleby07/venter.dimbleby07_index.html

take-away: we need new disruptive technologies

Tags: synthetic_biology, bioengineering, innovation, genetics, evolution, climate_crisis, fuel, healthcare, video on 2008-09-30 -All Annotations (0) -About

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We Fought Cancer…And Cancer Won. | Print Article | Newsweek.com

this is really excellent - (1) limitation of animal studies (2) structure of funding discourages great leaps (3) for-profit structure undermines research into prevention. Note opportunity for collaborative research, use of complexity paradigm

Tags: health, healthcare, laboratory, cancer, immuno, genetics, biology, brain_tumor, disease, politics on 2008-09-11 -All Annotations (3) -About

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Should Nurses Replace GPs As Frontline Providers Of Primary Care?

Tags: healthcare, nursing on 2008-09-07 -All Annotations (3) -About

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CONVENTION DISPATCH: The Rise of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party (Sirotablog)

Tags: democrat, progressive, healthcare, kennedy, obama on 2008-08-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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polls show broad consensus support for the major tenets of a progressive agenda: namely, universal government-sponsored health care, trade policy reform, a re-regulation of Wall Street, and an end to the Iraq War.
Instead of listening to corporate front groups who wrap corruption in the language of "moderation" and political "expertise," progressives point to 2006 candidates who won some of the toughest swing districts and states with full-throated populist campaigns. They make the convincing argument that in forcing the Democratic Party to be more progressive, activists are not only helping to accelerate the pace of policy change, but also helping Democrats win elections.
For all his populist rhetoric, Obama still surrounds himself not with the grassroots organizers that he brags about starting his career around, but instead with a mix of Wall Street profiteers and Ivory Tower elites like Cass Sunstein, who wrap their free market fundamentalism in the argot of academia.
Thankfully, the millions of rank-and-file citizens who comprise the Democratic Party have finally answered the age-old question: Which side are you on? And they have answered it by siding with America's progressive majority, suggesting that a progressive pressure system will indeed follow Obama into office, if he is elected. That is critical, because Obama hasn't yet decisively answered the same question - the question of which side he is on. It will be up to the newly invigorated Democratic wing of the Democratic Party to make sure he listens to the public

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Human exoskeleton suit helps paralyzed people walk - Yahoo! News

Tags: healthcare, robot, paralysis, israel, japan on 2008-08-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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New rules proposed to protect anti-abortion doctors - CNN.com

refusing to do the job you were trained and hired to do is not reasonable grounds for sanction or termination

Tags: religion, healthcare on 2008-08-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Six Killers - A Series From The New York Times - Health - News

They are the leading causes of illness and death in the United States today: heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, in that order. And they have a lot in common.

Tags: health, healthcare, disease, heart, cancer, stroke, copd, diabetes, alzheimer's on 2008-08-19 -All Annotations (0) -About