Observe.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(By the way..I’m working on collecting enough versions of this song for a volume two of my infamous Puff the Magic Dragon mix cd. If you happen to have any, I’d love to receive them, haha. They make excellent–and free–all-occasion gifts..I’m especially looking for Seal, Bing Crosby, John Denver, Tom Chapin, the Kingston Trio, and Tori Amos, but I’m also happy to include *talented* lesser-knowns.) :]
Here’s a paradox.
Health care reform may be defeated this year in part because so many Americans believe the government can’t do anything right and fear that a doctor will come to resemble an IRS agent with a scalpel. Yet the part of America’s health care system that consumers like best is the government-run part.
Fifty-six to 60 percent of people in government-run Medicare rate it a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. In contrast, only 40 percent of those enrolled in private insurance rank their plans that high.
Multiple surveys back that up. For example, 68 percent of those in Medicare feel that their own interests are the priority, compared with only 48 percent of those enrolled in private insurance.
In truth, despite the deeply ingrained American conviction that government is bumbling when it is not evil, government intervention has been a step up in some areas from the private sector.
‘Socialized firefighting’ has become our preference
Until the mid-19th century, firefighting was left mostly to a mishmash of volunteer crews and private fire insurance companies. In New York City, according to accounts in The New York Times in the 1850s and 1860s, firefighting often descended into chaos, with drunkenness and looting.
So almost every country moved to what today’s health insurance lobbyists might label “socialized firefighting.” In effect, we have a single-payer system of public fire departments.
We have the same for policing. If the security guard business were as powerful as the health insurance industry, then it would be denouncing “government takeovers” and “socialized police work.”
Throughout the industrialized world, there are a handful of these areas where governments fill needs better than free markets: fire protection, police work, education, postal service, libraries, health care. The United States goes along with this international trend in every area but one: health care.
The truth is that government, for all its flaws, manages to do some things right, so that today few people doubt the wisdom of public police or firefighters. And the government has a particularly good record in medical care.
Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.
A study by the Rand Corp. concluded that compared with a national sample, Americans treated in veterans hospitals “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.” The difference was particularly in preventive medicine: Veterans were nearly 50 percent more likely to receive recommended care than Americans as a whole.
“If other health care providers followed the VA’s lead, it would be a major step toward improving the quality of care across the US health care system,” Rand reported.
As for the other big government-run health care system in the United States, Medicare spends perhaps one-sixth as much on administration as private health insurers, although the comparison is imperfect and controversial.
Weakness of private insurance is that it’s unfair
But the biggest weakness of private industry is not inefficiency but unfairness. The business model of private insurance has become, in part, to collect premiums from healthy people and reject those likely to get sick–or, if they start out healthy and then get sick, to find a way to cancel their coverage.
On my blog, foreigners regularly express bewilderment that America may reject reform and stick with a system that drives families into bankruptcy when they get sick. That’s what they expect from the Central African Republic, not the United States.
Let’s hope we don’t miss this chance. A public role in health care shouldn’t be any scarier or more repugnant than a public fire department.
[Nicholas Kristof writes for The New York Times. source]
Thanks once again to CuteOverload for steering me toward another tremendous gem for my hoard of cuteness. Haha. Here’s what they have to say about it:
“In this charming animated short for Swarovski Crystal, a classy clique of crystalline cats shows off its multifaceted personalities. Despite the cute kittens, the delightful animation, and the jazzy musical score, we might almost have overlooked this gem, but for its distinguished taste in cat names…”
“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.”
Read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its entirety for free. ;]
So said one of the pastors at my church, haha.
On the other hand, mmm. I don’t even watch American Idol, or really TV at all, for that matter, so it’s extremely unusual for me to have an opinion on this matter, or a favorite contestant, or anything, but I do. It’s a long story. The short version is this: Just about every single person I know updated their Facebook status constantly while this thing was still going on, and they all looked like this: blankety blank is voting for Kris Allen! blankety blank KRIS ALLEN OMG HE SHOULD TOTALLY WIN, VOTE FOR HIM NOW! blankety blank i voted for kris allen 400 times so far today! blankety blank A vote for Kris Allen is a vote for Jesus! You get the picture. Kris Allen = Godlike because he’s “godly,” he doesn’t wear eyeliner, he’s straight, clean-cut, and looks like the boy next door. Adam Lambert = Satanic because he wears makeup, he sings sensuously, he doesn’t look like us, and oh yeah, he’s gay. Even before he was out, he was “gay,” which, as we all know, really means stupid. In other words, he was different. I was really sick of the whole thing and I was super glad when it was over. It gets old really fast when everyone you know is doing their best to reinforce stereotypes and general small-mindedness, even when you’re not following the show.
Then my brother emailed me this video:
which is Matthew West’s response to the coronation song (Seriously, it’s called the coronation song? For real? Hahahha) No Boundaries, which of course is already overplayed. “This year’s American Idol song, No Boundaries, is the most cliche song I have ever heard. It was so cliche it didn’t even seem real. So we asked people who listen to Total Axxess to give us horribly cliche lines for Matthew West to work into the worst song ever. I am proud to say mission accomplished!”
So then, in my total AI ignorance*, I had no No Boundaries information to compare this song to. So I Youtubed it, and laughed my head off. Then I Youtubed Kris Allen, aka the-closest-thing-to-God to a large percentage of my friends, family and acquaintances, and he was nice and all, but big deal. Simon Says: boring and forgettable, and I’m inclined to agree. Then I Youtubed Adam Lambert, and wow. I was sold immediately ;] The fire, the energy, the talent, the eyeliner! Oh my goodness, I didn’t stand a chance!
*Okay, I’d seen photographs of both Kris and Adam, but that was it. And they were usually posted by my Facebook friends to support their thesis of why Adam was evil and why, if you didn’t vote for Kris, you weren’t a good Christian. Seriously.
So, anyway, I’m posting this for fun in the middle of all the Driscoll crap because I need a break from it. It’s kind of like listening to Rush Limbaugh–good for spying purposes, otherwise known as trying to understand what the heck people see in him (and utterly failing), but you get your fill within about thirty seconds and unless you want to throw up, you have to flip the station. That’s how I feel about Driscoll these days. So this is just a nice calm little interlude. I’ll be posting some of my fave Lambert videos later, so stay in your seats!
When she was in the early stages of putting together the album [Amanda Leigh], Moore’s ex-boyfriend, DJ AM (Adam Goldstein), and musician Travis Barker were seriously injured in a September plane crash that killed two crew members and two other passengers. Moore sprinted to be at his side in an Augusta, Ga. burn unit–which, Moor said, some media outlets took the wrong way.
“It kind of saddened me,” she recalled. “When everything went down it was like, ‘Oh, they’re dating again.’ I was like, in this day and age with everything that’s going on in the world, it made me sad that there was not a value to friendship, which to me is often more important than the other stuff anyway.”
–Michael Cidoni, AP. Featured in DDN LIFE, Sunday, June 7, 2009.
