Healthcare System Thoughts: Reform

I recently saw someone make a half-headed comment about Democrats "ramming" legislation through congress for healthcare reform that "most Americans don't want" and Independents and Republicans are against.

I commented, only half jesting, asking if she had seen the recent bit on Colbert (or was it Jon Stewart?) where they did a news bit on Hawaii's healthcare.

For the most part she stayed out of the back and forth, probably because she doesn't really have a full idea of what she was whining about. She only clarified that if people were against it then it shouldn't be rammed through Congress.

Which, of course, is bullshit.

Primarily because Congress isn't looking out for the people; they're looking out for the popular vote, money, and politics, THEN their constituents. And I usually think most of the people bitching about whatever issue is on the front page of a newsmag probably do not know what a constituent is.

The bit on the "fake" news program brought up that Hawaii has had, for nearly 40 years, a law that mandates employers to provide health insurance for employees who work 20 hours or more four days a week. This means that just about every person in Hawaii is insured. There are wonderful statistics for the state showing that overall their health is among the best in the country. Of course here are problems to nitpick; employer fraud is on the rise, and some have decided to skirt the law by hiring more people to work fewer hours. It happens, of course. Apparently if something isn't one hundred percent effective then it's a failure in the minds of morons. At the same time, the numbers speak for themselves; the NY Times has an article that states that the health insurance premiums in the state tie North Dakota's for being the lowest and medicare costs per beneficiary are the lowest in the country. Hawaii has the highest incidence of breast cancer in the country, yet the lowest number of deaths.

This, of course, didn't stop someone in the Facebook thread, apparently from Hawaii, from being offended at the comment that they have a "socialized" healthcare systems (her tricorder must be missing a 'sarcasm' setting). Quick tidbit...when Republican spin doctors are spinning the ideas they oppose in oversimplified terms for an ignorant population, they like using words like "socialized" in this case to mean that the government is in control of the healthcare instead of the people; I was using the term tongue in cheek, but the fact remains that your state government is mandating health insurance coverage by proxy through the employers. When the government mandates and agent through proxy, it's still government meddling.

But in this case it seems to be helping.

A quick Google on the topic of "Hawaii healthcare" pops up several articles, most of the recent ones about a failed children's health insurance coverage system and many bouncy heads pointing to it as a failure. "See! They repealed it in seven months! We told you government healthcare can't work!"

Actually reading the information seems to show that there are kids who aren't covered with insurance. To help with that there was an initiative meant to cover the population of kids in need. What happened was that a number of people with  insurance already dropped their kids and moved them to the new system, so the money allotted couldn't handle the influx.

The actual "unworkable" system has been in place for decades for employed citizens.

On another note, I asked a friend and expat living in Australia what the health insurance system is like. He said that, like most of the modern world, it's socialized, and he'd be afraid to return to the States with the nightmare that is our insurance bureaucracy. The thing to remember, he said, is that your insurance companies are for-profit. They aren't there to help you. They have shareholders to please.

Which is true. It's against the law, last I knew, for a company to act in a way contrary to the interests of the shareholders, or the shareholders can sue. Good luck navigating this information, though...apparently big names like Blue Cross Blue Shield are fractured into a number of for-profit and non-profit sub companies in relationships so convoluted that the only thing more confusing is dealing with them as a customer.

I quickly grew tired of the crap spewing from talking heads and ended my contributions with a summary; I don't care. Any changes made not won't have a significant effect until I'm dead. Why?

Simple. Because part of the reason Hawaii is most likely doing well is because they've had it for decades. If you have state-run or federal-mandated health systems, it's going to have a large budget swell the first few decades because we're a population of gluttonous pigs. We're smokers. We're sedentary. We recognize more McDonaldland characters than we do names of astronauts or federal judges. More people can name more sports teams than ingredients in a soft drink or average calories at their favorite restaurant for their favorite meals (for those that actually provide nutrient information). So if you want to help with health issues, there's going to be a tail effect...the youth will need to grow up with better habits and lifestyles. As they become more prevalent, you'll see health effects slink up the charts, but the initial funding will be going towards those of us that have pissed away our lives in front of the television eating fast food and generally making unhealthy choices.

Offensive for some, but once we, the current generation or two, die off, then you'll see effects of a healthier lifestyled generation.

Of course at the point where we put a strain on the budget there will be a large outcry from the morons bemoaning the reform, and steps will be taken to eradicate it. People want it both ways. We want businesses to sell boatloads of frankenfoods...shakes...burgers...sodium-laden but yummy chain restaurant glop...while people just magically stay fit and healthy.

On the other hand, people living longer and healthier means that we'll have a greater population living longer and the health effects that just come from aging, a whole new ball of wax to debate and whine over.

My take? Like I said, I don't care anymore. I can't make a change. What I say doesn't matter. Any change for the better is going to take time and I'll be dead before I could reap any benefits from it (which I truly think is what insurance companies want). I also don't understand the endless debate we have in this "wonderful country" over healthcare when people literally go bankrupt because they have an illness. There's people WITH insurance that go bankrupt because of an illness. That's simply ridiculous, and the only reason I can think of that this is allowed to go on is because the asses actually being vocal about the debate are healthy or already have excellent insurance coverage, so they couldn't really give a damn about other people without voices in the matter, people who actually suffer the ramifications of these debates and political manoeuvrings, suffering because the talking heads that are supposed to be representing the interests of the constituency are more interested in the money from lobbyists.

Sad, isn't it?

Teen Marriage

I had written about my daughter's friend, Sara. She is the pregnant teen that is going to get married ("sometime")...I wrote more about it here. Read that to get a better idea of the person I'm referring to.

My household of course has people on Facebook. If you're unfamiliar with Facebook then you must not have been using the Internet for more than a month...I'm not saying you need an account on Facebook or actively use it, since I've found it to be useful only in that I've found people I lost track of years ago thanks to Facebook, only to lose them again in a deluge of worthless invites to play some farming game or joining a mafia group and spammed with happy messages that filled time I'll never get back. But I digress.

The point is that Sara has a Facebook account and apparently has her status updates posted online that members of this household see. She recently postponed (cancelled?) her wedding plans. Her mother, also apparently online with Facebook, said that the wedding was being postponed indefinitely (I got this all second-hand, so I'm paraphrasing). They got into some argument and called it off.

That was a few days ago. I asked yesterday whatever became of their canceled wedding plans, wondering what could possibly have caused Mr. and Mrs. All-You-Need-Is-Love to call off their plans.

"Oh, they're getting married now. They think near Valentine's day."
"Huh?"
"Yeah. They made up and they're going to get married again."

Quick time for slow thinkers...if your idea of resolving an argument with your fiance' is to threaten to call off your wedding for a reason short of finding him or her hammering another person in a clear act of infidelity or discovering that he or she will be out of the country or in jail for a stretch of time, and perhaps a few other extenuating circumstances that lead you to a revelation that this person is not the person you thought they were at a deep and fundamental level, you're probably about as emotionally mature as a ten year old and should not be getting married in the first place.

Threatening to call off the marriage because of a spat is pretty much the equivalent to the playground "I won't be your friend anymore!" ploy.

I shudder to think how common this type of idiocy is in our society. It makes me more depressed than I already am having to face the holiday stress.

H1N1 Flu Vaccine Nonsense

I work in a place with a large population of people who have the opportunity-for free-to get the H1N1 flu shot. I was saddened and downright appalled at the amount of ignorance and sheer stupidity being spread about getting the shot.

Like the stupid email scams that keep showing up every few months in my inbox as forwards, these rumors and mistruths are still being spread by the legions of ignorati. The CDC recommends that 80% of our population get vaccinated from the flu. A whopping 40% actually do. (citation)

"The flu shot can make me sick!"
No, the flu shot is a dead virus. It stimulates an immune reaction from the body, but it's dead. It won't make you sick.

"There's mercury in the shot! It'll poison you! It causes Autism!"
No, that ingredient was removed decades ago. And yet autism rates continued to climb. There no mercury in the shot.

The definition of Autism has been expanded so more people are now being diagnosed with Autism (you have any idea how recently Aspergers, part of the spectrum of Autism, was officially made a disorder? Not long ago at all...1992!

Not that a little thing like facts will ever shut some idiot with a platform from decrying the same bull@#$ over and over, the same lies and distortions that will end up killing people. If people actually looked into the background on that flake they might not be so ready to believe what she's spouting.

Worse, there's a concept of herd immunity. Basically there are some people that can't get the shot because of allergy or health reasons. So they rely on you not getting the disease to keep them healthy. People in the US buying the anti-vax rhetoric end up acting as carriers to spread the disease to others.

And it's silly to think that there are children who could die from this simply because you can't be bothered to get a simple shot.

Anyway there are plenty of intelligent skeptics that are rallying to debunk the crap that anti-vaccination nuts are spreading.

http://www.immunizenc.com/FluFactsMyths.htm

http://richarddawkins.net/article,4465,An-Open-Letter-to-Bill-Maher-on-Vaccinations,Michael-Shermer

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2116

http://www.antivaxxers.com/

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=444

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=851

Check those links out. No doubt there's always going to be reasons that the fringe will feel justified in perpetuating their anti-science theories, no matter what they're told, but if you're an otherwise reasonable person sitting on the fence after hearing some nonsense about how the shot will end up killing mankind, read those links. They should address your questions nicely. There's no reason to stand by and let others end up suffering because you couldn't be bothered to do something relatively simple.

Obama and Expectations on His Administration

Here are a few random thoughts I've had recently regarding our current President and some of the reactions I've been hearing recently...mostly on TV. Which is surprising given how little TV I really watch nowadays. Anyway, what I'm about to say may actually be a bit of a pot-stirring thing. It's controversial. It's opinionated. And I very well remember what a fraternity brother we named Gomer told me: it's pointless to discuss religion or politics with anyone, because you're never going to change minds. Well, I've already broken the rule about religion, so why not go for broke?

So when I had some random thoughts relating to the current administration, I figured, why not?

I've read and heard quite a bit of the bubbling criticism against Obama and his administration's proposals lately. There's quite a bit I don't think that the American people take into account when they're venting.

First, Obama often acts as a figurehead in these situations. It's easy to pin the blame on the President...he is, after all, the President. But do you remember that there are three branches to government? It was put in place to act as checks and balances. Granted, they don't seem to work very well much of the time, but the point is that there isn't a lot the President can do without oversight, ideally by Congress. Things we can blame on the President: his plans, his initiatives, and things he says and does in public to present himself to the people in a certain light. Things we can't blame: anything that has to be vetted by Congress, and does.

Second, the government is supposed to be for the people. It's an interesting system we have here in that we have a nation of people who like to believe they're part of a democracy and most are too ignorant to realize we're not.

No, not because the government keeps us down.

It's because the founding fathers, both to keep power with wealthy landowners and to belay fears that common people were too stupid to govern themselves, set us up with a representative republic. A democracy means you can vote legislation and have a say in the law. A representative republic means we have people sent in to do it for us by proxy, hopefully in our best interest.

If you want something changed, it means getting people in power that have your interest at heart. Good luck with that, though. Most of our representatives spend more time raising money and campaigning than actually doing their jobs.

Third, the expectations put on Obama were huge. Bush (and his contemporary Congress) sent the nation into a war that cost several times what it would have cost to end hunger and housing debts for our population. After the country got fed up with his BS...let's face it, regime changes occur when everyone finally gets tired of the current BS from the current administration...they handed a shovel over to Obama and told him to fix it, ignoring the fact that it isn't just this one guy that can "fix" everything. Congress needs to get their collective heads out of that tunnel called the rectum and get on track to fix things.

Fourth, health care. After my surgery,...oh hell, before my surgery...it didn't take a genius to figure out that health care isn't in the best of shape. One of the few things I HAVE been lucky with is holding a job with decent health coverage...and it was still and major PITA to keep things straight. You'd have to be a bloody moron not to see how the insurance companies and hospitals play games with each other and that in turn ends up pinching doctors and patients in the middle.

Now we have people, usually conservative Republicans, decrying how this would ruin everything to have government-backed healthcare.

It's interesting to me in that the few areas in the US that try managed healthcare seem to fail, while I don't hear much about Canadians running across the border for our healthcare and Britain has a fairly successful national healthcare system. The brilliant scientist Stephen Hawking credits their healthcare system for saving his life.

I have read stories about Americans getting decent healthcare by flying to India, China, Europe...as well as jumping the border to Canada for prescriptions.

Others point out that insurance companies can't compete against a government business. I don't understand why the post office is failing while I have packages delivered by UPS and FedEx. NASA is now having the space race outsourced to private companies seeking the X-Prize. And burglars and muggers have always competed with the IRS.

I really think that a lot of the anger slowly snaking through media reports at Obama is a combination of "I told you so's" and expectations that were set too high. We're in a deep deep pit as a country. It's taking time to re-emerge. In the meantime, we have Americans too busy blaming someone for their own problems.

Now, to be sure, we had lots of help getting into troubles. We had a lot of companies that should have known better encouraging us to get into trouble. We have a lot of companies that continue to keep us in trouble. And I'm no exception to being put into thumbscrews; watching bills and trying to keep them paid on time is slowly increasing my body pains and aches and there are times where I just sit and wonder how I got myself into such a mess and whether there's any light at the end of the tunnel. But at the same time, we collectively helped dig this pit.

• We sat passively by and allowed ourselves to be screwed.
• We obsessively followed football and NASCAR stats instead of Congressional debates.
• We voted for the pretty, the well spoken, the superficial that knew what strings to pluck when they wanted a congressional seat. And that was just the tiny percentage that voted for their representatives.
• We had huge turnouts follow the circus of the stars for voting. Er, the Presidential elections. We all rally around to get "our guy" in. There are two branches we have some kind of say in who gets a seat...one guy that gets his face on TV the most isn't the one with the most influence, people. And yet this is the election that slightly more than usual (and the usual is nearly zilch turnout, as far as I can tell).
• Our population is more concerned with who's voted out of the Big Brother house than whether or not their representative knows what the hell they're voting on.
• We elected...twice, supposedly...a President that was a failure in business so many times over and funded by his father and by foreign oil interests, a cokehead and one-time heavy drinker, a man who declared we were doing God's will when we attacked Iraq, a man with little regard for law, for the constitution...we reelected him. And this man also coincidentally took about a 1/3 of his presidency as vacation time. And he become that rally point for fundamentalists across the country. How did that happen!?
  

Obama is an intelligent man. He may be the geekiest president we've had since Thomas Jefferson. The thing we may have going for us is not only the ability to properly pronounce the word "nuclear" (why didn't that scare other people when the guy that controlled our nukes couldn't properly pronounce the word?), but also that he understands one of the most potent ways to be an effective leader: surround yourself with smart people and listen to them.

Some of the most successful people in business and power have followed that formula. While I doubt that Obama can save the country economically within his term, I am hopeful that he can at least turn the boat a little in the right direction. In the meantime...we're in for one bumpy ride.

Excuse me. I have to go forage for bologna. I think it's the only thing we have in the pantry right now. Except for some cat food...nah...bologna.

Chilling Effects in Teaching and Offending the Religious

I couldn't help but be intrigued when I stumbled across another site listing a student as a litigious douchebag. So I started looking around to find out what the hubub was.

Apparently a high school teacher was found guilty in a federal lawsuit of violating the first amendment by saying that Creationism was "religious, superstitious nonsense" during a lecture and thus offending a former Advanced Placement European History student by the name of Chad Farnan.

The news story can be found here.

Predictably this is causing a class A crapstorm, where Christians claim they are under attack in America (despite being the majority) and secular humanists yelling that this is simply rediculous to have such an idiotic lawsuit in the first place. PZ Myers, respected professor and biologist, had an interesting point in that Creationism as a movement is quick to point out that Creationism is a "scientific theory" (it isn't) that is separate from religion (it isn't) so it should be allowed in classrooms, but with this lawsuit finding in favor of Farnan, how can dismissing Creationism as superstitious nonsense offend someone's religious rights?

What perpetually amazes me is we still have people with some form of sense shut off when they decide to become teachers in schools today. This guy was expressing a personal opinion and due to some twerp getting offended gets...this being America...sued. Because of course appealing to a sky wizard to intervene, as is consistent with his beliefs, simply doesn't have any effect. Somehow the law of man must intervene to make an example of him.

Teachers are expected to shut off any sense of self when teaching lest they become the target of some pissed parents or lawsuit when some form of personality offends one of the kids or their overprotective, or in some cases plain ignorant, parents.

Express an opinion contrary to a student's belief? May get sued.

Maybe you are contrary to a student belief. Openly gay? Better watch your opinions being expressed. But you should tread lightly when breaking Suzy and Billy's liplock in the hallway between classes because it may be because you're not the same persuasion.

Just being a different gender carries dangers. Male teachers seeing a thirteen year old exposing her thong have to find a female teacher to address the issue or risk sexual harrasment...for enforcing a (GASP!) dress code!

Don't get overly friendly with students. Don't interact with them outside classes unless you must. Keep doors open. Don't touch them either.

Try explaining why Creationism isn't science in class. It's pretty simple...it doesn't fit the scientific method. It cannot. It does not. Here the application of actually explaining the issue in a class where it has legitimate reason to be taught may offend someone...and cause a royal crapstorm because it offended someone in the class.

I'm amazed there are still people with some form of crazy optimism that they can make a difference in teaching. There's simply too many drawbacks for me to see a positive benefit to doing it; this is just a rant about offending some nutters to feel bad about something you may or imply while going about the course of teaching while suffering from the condition of being human. Teachers are expected to be teachers, counselors, substitute parents, moral pillars, all while be accountable for the utter lack of ambition and getting the blame for parental failures in actually raising their kids while not having the tools for holding the students themselves accountable for their behavior. Oh, and teachers are expected not to have lives, opinions, or personalities of their own.