Since I may not have time Saturday to post them, here is my list of most interesting links of the week, a day early.
Another Service Decline: From Citizen to Patient: Benedict Carey in the NYT explains
how dehumanization and loss of identity is hurting relationships in
medical facilities and therefore reducing the quality of
care. "The point is that when they talk about quality of health
care,
patients mean something entirely different than experts do," said Dr.
Drew Altman. In an institution like a hospital, "the territories of the
self are
violated," [Dr. Erving Goffman] wrote. "The boundary that the
individual places between
his being and the environment is invaded and the embodiments of the
self profaned." This is the second in a series of NYT articles on
challenges in the health care system.
An Exemplary Animal Rights Site:Humanefood.ca
has been compiled by a coalition of organizations concerned with farm
animal welfare. They're using carefully-placed, non-sensational TV
spots to draw people to the website (you can view them on the site).
The site itself isn't begging for money or stirring outrage. It's
communicating useful, objective facts and telling you (in the You Can
Help section) precisely what you can do to help -- and not just by
writing letters to politicians and the media, but by changing your
purchasing decisions and working with local grocery stores, restaurants
and farms.
The LifeStraw: Gizmag describes a new invention
with no moving parts and using no electricity that could save tens of
millions of lives per year, the lives of people who now die from
preventable water-borne diseases that are caused by overcrowding and
lack of sufficient money and infrastructure to treat water properly.
Reintroducing Wilderness in the US: National Geographic describes
a controversial 'rewilding' plan to create "ecological history parks"
where the descendants of ice age creatures would be introduced into the
plains states where human populations are declining. Good idea or bad?
Thanks to Lavonne at BornFamous for the link.
Natural Clothing for the UK: By Nature offers organic, environment-friendly clothing, gifts, housewares, cosmetics and foods for caring British and European consumers.
Google Desktop 2 and Google Talk: If anyone doesn't know already, Google Desktop 2
offers a side bar with news and other handy stuff (not yet very useful
to me, though it's open source so additional content may change that)
and a Search Bar that shows results as you type each letter, and allows
you to open those results without even using your browser to display
them. Google Talk offers a
stripped-down competitor for Skype, and for IM, and proposes that
competitors match their IM tools to Google's to eliminate all the
separate and incompatible IM products out there.
Utah Cops Go Nuts: Attendees at a recent outdoor concert
in Utah, which had all the necessary permits, were assaulted by land
and air by a small army of power-crazed and brutal police authorities.
The cops injured dozens, terrorized the concert-goers and caused
thousands of dollars in damage, in addition to violating just about
every law imaginable. Screen capture from one attendee's video is shown
above. Must be a red state.
TV Sports Without Announcers: As a consequence of the brutal CBC lockout, the management of the CBC has been trying out
sports event coverage without commentators, describing it as "the
stadium experience at home". I used to get this experience on the
'feed' channels on the old Big Ugly Dish satellites, and it was
wonderful. CBC viewers apparently agree. Now if we could only get this
for gymnastics, diving and figure skating, and rid the world of the
scourge of 'colour commentators' entirely.
Malcolm Gladwell's latest article in the New Yorker explains why it is that:
The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US is unpaid medical bills
The death rate for Americans without health insurance is 25% higher than for those that have it
Americans spend 2.5 times what the rest of the Western world pays per capita for health care
The US has one of the lowest doctor/patient ratios in the West
Americans visit doctors and get admitted to hospital less often than people in most countries in the West
Americans are among the least satisfied with their health care system
US life expectancy is significantly lower than the average
of Western nations, while childhood immunization rates are lower and
infant mortality is higher
Americans spend over three times as much per capita on healthcare paperwork and administration as Canadians
Despite the high cost, the US is almost alone in the West
in not having universal health care, and 45 million Americans have no
health insurance at all
There is overwhelming evidence that people with no, or inadequate,
health coverage are sicker, that this illness translates into poor
physical appearance (bad teeth especially) and low self-esteem, and
therefore these people have great difficulty getting decent-paying jobs
and hence don't qualify for health insurance. The perfect vicious cycle.
The reason for this, says Gladwell, is the perpetuation of a neocon
myth in the US that isn't accepted anywhere else in the Western world.
That myth is called "Moral Hazard" and it says that having insurance changes the behaviour of the insured.
If you have generous health insurance, Moral Hazard says you're going
to go to the doctor and the hospital more often, sometimes
unnecessarily, just because it's free. The evidence is all to the
contrary, but the myth prevails in the US nevertheless. What's more,
there is evidence that in the few areas where people actually do avail
themselves of health care services that aren't absolutely, critically
needed (like dental checkups), the preventative value of these services
exceeds their cost, so such 'abuses' actually save the health care
system money.
In some areas of insurance, Moral Hazard actually has some validity.
For example, the S&L failures in the 1980s were caused to some
degree by reckless lending due to generous FDIC government guarantees.
The assurance of bailouts if loans failed actually encouraged some
S&L's to lend irresponsibly. But this simply doesn't apply in the
health industry. Most people don't frivolously use medical services
just because they're available free. And users of Medicare, the only
aspect of the US health care system based on the social insurance model
(which equalizes financial risk between the healthy and the sick) --
the model used in every other Western nation -- are consistently vastly
happier with their plan than Americans with private health insurance.
Bush's new Health Savings Accounts, nevertheless, presupposes Moral
Hazard is the principal reason the US health system is in crisis, and
its effect will be simply to reduce the use of the health system by the
country's sickest people. Instead of the social insurance model it uses
the discredited actuarial model (like car insurance, where cost is
related to the perceived risk of making claims). So many Americans with
expensive medical conditions cannot get insurance at all. Stanford
economist Victor Fuchs says "this reduces the social redistributive
element of insurance" and that Health Savings Accounts are hence the antithesis of universal health care.
Rather than technical arguments, Gladwell says, Americans should be asking themselves these questions:
Do you think redistribution of risk (so that the healthy subsidize the sick) is a good idea?
Is it fair that those genetically predisposed to illness
and tooth ailments, or whose poverty complicates diseases like asthma
and diabetes, or who are unlucky enough to be in serious accidents,
should bear a greater proportion of health care costs than those who
aren't?
That's not to say that there aren't people who abuse the system. But to
punish 45 million Americans (at least) because of a mythological belief
that people are naturally inclined to abuse anything they can get for
free is not only cruel and inhumane, it's ideologically obsessive,
wrong-headed and irrational. But then that's the very definition of the
Bush administration and their cronies. Tragic, and disgraceful.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
