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"But there’s a major problem with this line of argument: It just isn’t true. The founding fathers, it turns out, passed several mandates of their own. In 1790, the very first Congress—which incidentally included 20 framers—passed a law that included a mandate: namely, a requirement that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. This law was then signed by another framer: President George Washington. That’s right, the father of our country had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandate."
"One in five Americans experienced some sort of mental illness in 2010, according to a new report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. About 5 percent of Americans have suffered from such severe mental illness that it interfered with day-to-day school, work or family."
HealthMap, a team of researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Children's Hospital Boston founded in 2006, is an established global leader in utilizing online informal sources for disease outbreak monitoring and real-time surveillance of emerging public health threats. The freely available Web site 'healthmap.org' and mobile app 'Outbreaks Near Me' deliver real-time intelligence on a broad range of emerging infectious diseases for a diverse audience including libraries, local health departments, governments, and international travelers. HealthMap brings together disparate data sources, including online news aggregators, eyewitness reports, expert-curated discussions and validated official reports, to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. Through an automated process, updating 24/7/365, the system monitors, organizes, integrates, filters, visualizes and disseminates online information about emerging diseases in nine languages, facilitating early detection of global public health threats.
"According to Dr. Fitzgerald, there is a single trait underlying both the desire to learn in the classroom and to be empathetic on the wards. She writes:
“What is kindness, as perceived by patients? Perhaps it is curiosity: ‘How are you? Who are you? How can I help you? Tell me more. Isn’t that interesting?’ And patients say, ‘He asked me a lot of questions’; ‘She really seemed to care about what was going on with me.’”
That is, the same inquisitiveness that fuels students to seek knowledge in the classroom also propels them to find out more about their patients. And seeking to find out more comes across as a display of compassion."
Increasing regulation is not the way to make sure doctors and other health professionals behave well, the dean of the University of Otago's law school, Prof Mark Henaghan, says.
Instead, too much regulation could be counter-productive, undermining the trust that should underpin the patient-health professional relationship.
In a recently published book Health Professionals and Trust: The Cure for Healthcare Law and Policy, Prof Henaghan says external regulation and surveillance may lead to compliance but such behaviour is not likely to be as enduring as a professional commitment to act in trustworthy ways.
We’ve become a nation of hypochondriacs. Every sneeze is swine flu, every headache a tumor. And at great expense, we deliver fantastically prompt, thorough and largely unnecessary care. There is tremendous financial pressure on physicians to keep patients happy. But unlike business, in medicine the customer isn’t always right. Sometimes a doctor needs to show tough love and deny patients the quick fix. A good physician needs to have the guts to stand up to people and tell them that their baby gets ear infections because they smoke cigarettes. That it’s time to admit they are alcoholics. That they need to suck it up and deal with discomfort because narcotics will just make everything worse. That what’s really wrong with them is that they are just too damned fat. Unfortunately, this type of advice rarely leads to high patient satisfaction scores.
"The latest health monitor hitting the market comes from Jawbone, a company that has made its name by designing wireless headsets for phones. Called the Jawbone Up, the wrist-worn device launches on Nov. 6 for $99. Similar to the company’s prior products, the Up looks sleek and fashionable while being functional: Up measures activity, sleep and nutrition."
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But the closest analogue we have to our own time, in terms of a willingness to call white-black and black-white, of pure ideological upside-downism, has to be the Confederacy.Southerners had already spent a generation engaged in small-scale terrorism before Fort Sumter, starting in the early 1830s. And their arguments -- still etched in places like the Confederate Monument in downtown Decatur a mile from my home -- attest to this.
What was this "covenant," and this fealty to the "original intent" of the Constitution? Nothing but a series of excuses to treat men like horses, to rape women and force them to bear the resulting children, then to treat those children as property, never mind how much they looked like master.
That's what this covenant was, and that's what this new covenant is. It is racism, it is privilege willing to kill to maintain itself. It is not a coincidence that the strongest support for Dick Armey's nonsense is among southern whites, or among western whites descended from those who committed genocide against the Indians and then romanticized it.
But if there's a chance, it would obviously be better still to keep the current debate from ending up in the same intellectual/political swamp in which the previous one drowned. That is why I was so impressed by this Steven Pearlstein column two days ago in the Washington Post.
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Nearly fifteen years ago, after the collapse of the Clinton health-reform effort, I spent a lot of time working on an Atlantic article (and subsequent book chapter) about how, exactly, the discussion of the bill had become so unmoored from reality and finally determined by slogans, stereotypes, and flat-out lies.
It's better to do that after the fact than not to do it at all. And, if I do say so, I think the article remains useful background reading for what's going on now -- including the return-guest-star role of the voluble but consistently misinformed Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey.
it's a whole lot easier to document the projection involved. That's because the dynamic of wealthy special interests supporting street thuggery against "the left" is exactly how both Mussolini and Hitler came to power.
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The corporate role in orchestrating this thuggery is not just an allegation, or an observation. It's been confirmed by the perpetrators themselves, as Greg Sargent reports:
Your obvious shock and dismay at the sheer angry ignorance of the health care teabaggers reiterates my largest problem with your rosy immigrant's view of America. You have often underestimated just how poisonously dangerous the American populist right is.
When someone's entire purpose in coming out to a town-hall forum is to chant and shout and protest and disrupt, they aren't just expressing their opinions -- they are actively shutting down democracy.
And that, folks, is a classically fascist thing to do.
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