Posts Tagged ‘Health Care’
No, It’s not Elitist to Think the Tea-Baggers Are Idiots
From Alternet:
A post over at the Seminal is taking “liberal elitism” to task for not taking the Tea Party people seriously, and that that will lead to the election of Sarah Palin and other such ilk.
To quote our vice president, malarkey.
While I have long argued that there is too much elitism on the left for my tastes, there’s a wide gulf between holding your nose in the air for no good reason and dumbing yourself down in order to appeal to the lowest common idiotic denominator. Suck is the case with the Tea Party group and their leaders like Palin.
Far from the liberals in the ’70s who were clearly not responsive enough to the middle class, leading to the rise of Nixon and resentment politics, today’s left has gone to great…
The Real Deficit Hawks: Where’s the Outrage Over the Defense Budget?
David Sirota writes on Salon:
Let’s say you’re a congressperson or “tea party” leader looking to champion deficit reduction — a cause 38 percent of Americans tell pollsters they support. And let’s say you’re deciding whether to back two pieces of imminent legislation.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the first bill’s spending provisions cost $100 billion annually and its tax and budget-cutting provisions recoup $111 billion annually, thus reducing total federal expenditures by $11 billion each year. The second bill proposes $636 billion in annual spending and recoups nothing. Over 10 years, the first bill would spend $1 trillion and recover $1.11 trillion — a fantastic return on taxpayer investment. Meanwhile, the second bill puts us on a path to spend $6.3 trillion in the same time.
Save $110 billion, or…
Darpa: Freeze Soldiers to Save Injured Brains
From Wired:
The Pentagon’s mad science division has a new way to deal with the 70,000+ troops diagnosed with traumatic brain injury: freeze ‘em.
Darpa, the military’s far-out research arm, is looking for research projects that would create a “therapeutic hypothermia device” to prevent traumatic brain injuries from causing permanent molecular damage to the brain. The idea is based on successful studies that used cortical cooling to treat survivors of strokes and cardiac arrest. According to Darpa’s solicitation, cooling down the brain after trauma can offer “dramatic neuroprotection” that will prevent long-term harm to cognition and motor skills.
So far, Darpa-funded studies suggest that traumatic brain injuries are caused by repeated exposure to blasts, specifically the “supersonic wave” of highly-pressurized air they emit. Within a fraction of a second after impact, brain cells, tissues and blood vessels are stretched,…
Get Raped, Lose Your Health Insurance
CNN’s Anderson Cooper talks to a woman who was dropped by her health insurance company after suffering an attack in which she was drugged and raped. It’s because she now needs therapy and antiretroviral medicine (as a precaution to prevent any possible HIV infection), and insurance companies don’t like paying for those.
EyeWriter Source Code Released To The Public
This technology is pretty incredible. via wooster collective
The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
Members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), OpenFrameworks, the Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group communities have teamed-up with a legendary LA graffiti writer, publisher and activist, named Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE. Tony was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, a disease which has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. This international team is working together to create a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes. The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art.
This week the team behind the EyeWriter project released all the Source code, free software, DIY instructions, and eye tags by Tempt1 to the public at eyewriter.org
GOP Gone Wild: Unruly Republicans Silence Women Lawmakers With Screams, Shouts, And Delay Tactics
From Think Progress:
This morning, the House began consideration of the rule for debate of the House health care bill. As the Democratic Women’s Caucus took to the microphone on the House floor to offer their arguments for how the bill would benefit women, House Republicans — led by Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) — repeatedly talked over, screamed, and shouted objections. “I object, I object, I object, I object, I object,” Price interjected as Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) tried to hold the floor.
In an effort to delay and derail the proceedings, the Republicans continually talked over the Democratic women for half an hour. They sought to prevent the debate by calling for unnecessary “parliamentary inquiries” and requests for “expanding the debate” by an hour.
[Read more at Think Progress]
…
Fat People Fight For The Right To Be … Fat!
Perhaps it was inevitable that during the era of the politically correct presidency that one group after another would claim that they have “rights” that should be legally protected. Now it’s fat people, who are throwing their weight around in the great healthcare debate of 2009, as reported by Susan Saulny in the New York Times:
Marilyn Wann is an author and weight diversity speaker in Northern California who has a message for anyone making judgments about her health based on her large physique. “The only thing anyone can accurately diagnose by looking at a fat person is their own level of stereotype and prejudice about fat,” said Ms. Wann, a 43-year-old San Franciscan whose motto in life is also the title of her book: FAT!SO? : Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size.
Hers has been an oft-repeated message this summer and fall by members of the “fat pride” community, given that the nation is in the midst of a debate about health care. That debate has, sometimes awkwardly, focused its attention on the growing population of overweight and obese Americans with unambiguous overtones: fat people should lose weight, for the good of us all…
House Passes Health Care Reform Bill
Michael Mcauliff writes in the New York Daily News:
The biggest overhaul of America’s medical system since Medicare passed with a tight vote in the House of Representatives Saturday night. The bill passed with a vote of 220 to 215, with only one single Republican — Joseph Cao from Louisana — choose “Yea.”
The health reform bill included a controversial amendment to restrict coverage of abortion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to bring up the abortion amendment after a deal with conservative Democrats collapsed and they threatened to sink the whole bill.
The move enraged liberals, but most agreed to stay onboard and President Obama traveled to the House to make a personal appeal and seal the deal.
Pelosi hailed the progress as delivering on the promise of Obama’s election. “President Obama’s leadership gives…
Health Insurers Must Cover Prayer Under Democrats’ Bill
The L.A. Times reports on an overlooked development in the Democrats’ health care bill:
Inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy…A little-noticed provision in the health care overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine.
Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science Church official, said prayer treatment was an effective alternative to conventional health care. But critics say the measure could have a broader effect, conferring new status and medical legitimacy on practices that lie outside the realm of science.
The spiritual healing provision was introduced in the House by…
Swine & Dandy: What if we did as much to prevent rape as we do to prevent H1N1?
Science and Politics by Meg Stone:
I spent most of this past spring and summer rolling my eyes every time I heard a news story about the swine flu. Almost every day local reporters got hysterical about 5 or 10 or 20 confirmed cases. Entire schools closed in response to a handful of kids with fevers, and as if there were no war in Afghanistan, no economic crisis, and no other epidemics claiming ten times as many lives, newscasters talked about H1N1 (the proper name for swine flu) for hours.
I have a degree in public health and my work focuses on preventing rape and other acts of violence and supporting survivors in healing from abuse. When I see all the attention swine flu is getting, I’m jealous. Other than intermittent news stories…
Your Medical Records Are Stored Online and Sold in the Open Market
Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
When patients visit a physician or hospital, they know that anyone involved in providing their health care can lawfully see their medical records. But unknown to patients, an increasing number of outside vendors that manage electronic health records also have access to that data, and are reselling the information as a commodity.
The revelation comes in a recent New York Times article about how so-called “scrubbed” patient data isn’t as anonymous as people think. The piece focuses primarily on how anonymized data can be cross-bred with other publicly available databases, such as voting records, which subverts the anonymity. Buried near the end of the article is the news that medical data is collected, anonymized and sold, not by insurance agencies and health care providers, but by…
On the Quiet, the US is Legalising Marijuana
From The Times:
You know things are shifting in America when Fortune magazine, the bible for business journalism, runs a cover story titled “Is pot already legal?”. You also know it when Barack Obama’s Department of Justice publishes a long-expected memo signalling that the federal government will no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries if they are legal under state law. That happened formally this month.
It was not, moreover, a symbolic gesture. Marijuana for medical reasons — to tackle chemotherapy-induced nausea or Aids-related wasting or glaucoma, among other conditions — is now legal in 13 states, including the biggest, California. Next year, 13 more states are planning referendums or new laws following suit. Last week a California legislative committee held the first hearings not simply on whether medical marijuana should remain legal,…
Senators Who Could And/Or Will Screw Up Health Care Reform
From The Huffington Post:
The public option: it (sort of) lives (maybe)! Or so says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who boldly announced in yesterday’s anxiously-anticipated press conference that the bill would contain something public option-esque. Since then, it has quickly become the fast-moving subject du jour.
Naturally, it’s worth pointing out that Reid didn’t manage to get behind the so-called “robust,” chipotle-flavored public option that progressives favor. Nor is it the Chuck Schumer, “cool-ranch” version of the public option.
Instead, we get the “opt-out” public option, in which various states could choose to bail on the program after a year, if their public servants so desired. Political mavens are fascinated by the “opt-out” possibilities, because it flips the “Waterloo” script and dares Republicans at the state level to risk their political…
