Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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July 18, 2010The Health Care Debate is Far From Over
Remember during the health-care debate when all the American so-called "conservatives", like Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who should have known better, were talking about the government's bill "pulling the plug on Grandma"? Well, Britain, with its National Health Service, a single-payer system which is nothing more than a big group plan, leads the world in the quality of care it provides dying people.
That's according to The Economist, hardly a screaming socialist rag, in fact much the best of the weekly news magazines. The Economist Intelligence Unit looked at factors including public awareness, access to painkillers, doctor-patient transparency, financial burden to patients and government-led national palliative care strategies. In Britain there is a well-established network of hospices as well as strong government support for end-of-life care; in the USA the financial burden on patients is impossible. There is government-funded hospice care through Medicare and Medicaid, but Grandma needs to give up curative treatment to get reimbursements for the hospice. It is the system we already have that wants to pull the plug on her.
In the "quality of death" index, Australia came in at no. 2, New Zealand no. 3, and the USA no. 9.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's ever-reliable uber-capitalist Daniel Henninger is outraged that President Obama has made a recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). After nearly 18 months in office, dozens of important Obama appointments are still gathering dust in various committees, so in this case he has made a recess appointment, and I venture to suggest that Henninger is mainly outraged by Berwick, the appointment/confirmation system in Congress being pretty dysfunctional nowadays anyway. Henninger devoted most of his column Thursday to quoting Berwick:
"A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing--control supply.
"The unaided human mind, and the acts of the individual, cannot assure excellence. Health care is a system, and its performance is a systemic property.
"Health Care is a common good--single payer, speaking and buying for the common good."
And so on, for 16 or 17 column inches, each little paragraph out of context. Obviously Henninger thinks he is helping Berwick to hang himself with his own rope. The problem is that Berwick is right about it all.
Health care is always and everywhere rationed. In the system we have now, people with enough money can go to the Mayo Clinic and stay as long as they like, soaking up all the health care they want, while people with no money can't even get their teeth cleaned. Some of us think the rationing should be done differently, but disagreeing with people like Henninger is like playing chess with a pigeon. He knocks over the pieces, craps on the board and flaps back to the flock to announce victory.
July 18, 2010The Quality of Journalism is Sometimes Strained
Nearly 40 years ago, on a streetcorner in Madison Wisconsin, an attractive young woman of my acquaintance handed me a left-wing commie pinko socialist tract. It didn't take long to read it, a summary of a recent news item. A young man was wanted by the police, who ascertained that he was holed up at his mother's house, and since he wouldn't come out, they had to wait outside for a while, which the tract described as a 'seige'. The outrage was about the bad guys (cops) beseiging a house where there were innocent people ensconced, some of them children (all of them African-Americans, as it happened). The sheet was badly written, not proofread at all, and badly printed. It did not tell us what the young man was wanted for, nor did it tell us whether anyone was hurt in the 'seige'. I began to explain to my nubile friend that she wasn't going to convert anybody with such a poor product, but she huffed, "Well, if that's the extent of your politics," and flounced away, breaking my heart.
That's what commentary was often like in the hippy era, but I am occasionally reminded of this long-ago incident by today's media. It's too bad the quality of the Wall Street Journal's newsgathering is not matched by the quality of its punditry. It is one thing to disagree with Daniel Henninger, as I can be relied upon to do, but another when the paper leaves out the facts entirely, printing pure propaganda.
Not long ago they printed articles about a Canadian gentleman who needed a hip replacement, and wanted the high-tech type of replacement developed in the last few years in Birmingham, Alabama, in which the ball of the femur is resurfaced with metal. The procedure is more expensive than the standard hip replacement, which itself is one of the most successful invasive surgical procedures ever devised. The Canadian health-care system refused to provide the high-tech procedure, so the gentleman purchased it privately. (He must have had a bucket of money, and that's the way health-care rationing works.) The WSJ hoped that this would convince us that a nationalized or "socialist" health-care system is no good. In fact, Ethne and I had looked into all this a few years ago, because Ethne needed new hips. (She was virtually crippled with arthritis, but she is now happily gardening on her hands and knees again.) We discovered that the new procedure is worthwhile for young people only: the relatively small number of younger patients who need hip replacements, because of accidents or early-onset arthritis or whatever, might need to have it done again when they get older. For people who are already getting old there is no point in the extra expense.
The Wall Street Journal neglected to tell us how old the Canadian gentleman was, or what reason the Canadian health-care system gave for turning down his request. So we learned nothing.
This weekend they were at it again. Their Senior Economics Writer, Stephen Moore, wrote a profile of Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate in Nevada running against Harry Reid for the U.S. Senate. Ms. Angle is one of those who thinks that extending unemployment benefit "only incentivizes folks that could work" to stay home and collect the benefit. Mr. Moore writes, "Not too many Republicans even in safe seats are willing to speak that truth." What truth is that? That the jobs are out there, and 10% unemployment is a myth? They should try explaining that to my son and his colleagues, a dozen or so skilled craftsmen thrown out of work last year when Wells Fargo yanked the rug out from under Kinter Construction in Des Moines.
But more to the point, Ms. Angle says she became an activist when her son was "held back" in kindergarten over 25 years ago. We are not told why the six-year-old was "held back". My brother want to kindergarten in Kenosha Wisconsin over sixty years ago, and then the local schools would not accept him in first grade because he was so young; having been born on 2 January, he fell outside their guidelines. (So my mother sent him to a parochial school for a year.) How old was Ms. Angle's boy? Maybe the local education authority in Nevada in 1983 was being heavy-handed, or just plain wrong. But if we are not told why the kid was "held back", we are not being convinced of anything.
On the other hand... Semi-retired actor Richard Dreyfuss gave a commencement address at Lehigh Valley University on Friday, the Morning Call reports, and he didn't reach the audience. "We're making ourselves stupid," he said. "We don't teach reason, clarity, logical thought--you don't think you have any power, so therefore you don't." But the kids were slipping out the door as soon as they could, during the question-and-answer session.
Maybe shoddy journalism will work just as well today as it did nearly forty years ago.
July 18, 2010Shame on DeltaEthne has been in Iowa this week, attending a jamboree of the Seed Savers Exchange. She was due back at 6:45 this evening, almost four hours ago. The aircraft was moving toward the runway in Des Moines when it was called back to the terminal; four people were kicked off so that four crew members could get on. This made the flight late to Detroit. Even so, they had a tail wind and almost made it; perhaps the reason the gate in Detroit was closed promptly was that Delta had already given away Ethne's seat on the next flight before she left Des Moines.
The first I knew something was up was when I received an email here at home from Delta about her rescheduled flight for tomorrow. Clearly they thought Ethne was just going to roll over for this shabby treatment; they didn't know our Eth. She put up a fuss, and she has a boarding pass, and she'll reach the Lehigh Valley airport just after midnight. I hope.