Our medical system.

An essay in the New York Times:

Not long ago, fed up with what he perceived as a loss of professional autonomy, Dr. Bhupinder Singh, 42, a general internist in New York, sold his practice and went to work part time at a hospital in Queens.

“I’d write a prescription,” he told me, “and then insurance companies would put restrictions on almost every medication. I’d get a call: ‘Drug not covered. Write a different prescription or get preauthorization.’ If I ordered an M.R.I., I’d have to explain to a clerk why I wanted to do the test. I felt handcuffed. It was a big, big headache.”

The problem with the American system of medicine, in my opinion, is precisely that the concept that medical insurance should "cover" anything and everything but the most extreme maladies.  No other major economic element of our society is organized like that.  Everywhere else, it's a matter of "what can you afford."  The only reason why health care is any different is that we're unreasonably emotional about it.  Emphasis on "unreasonably."

You are entitled to the health care you can afford, just like you're entitled to the house you can afford, the car you can afford, the vacation you can afford, the clothes you can afford.  Life isn't fair.  Some people live in shacks, some live in mansions.  You don't make things better by taking people out of their shacks and giving them mansions, despite that meaningful life lesson provided by "The Beverly Hillbillies."

An economic system which utterly divorces price information from the consumer.  Today, in medicine, for a patient, money is no object--all that's important is getting the pill, the treatment, the operation.  Yes, it's hard to ask someone who's in pain "can you afford this?"  But our failure to take that necessary step dooms the entire medical system to certain failure.  The surprise is not that the health care system is in crisis, the surprise is that it's working at all.

Many, I'm sure, will be troubled by the harsh, cold, uncaring tone of what I'm saying.  How can I possibly be opposed to ensuring that everyone has the best possible health care?

Easy.  The same way I'm opposed to everyone owning mansions that they did nothing to earn.

Sixty bloody, dirty, corrupt, wasteful, lost years of the Soviet Union and world communism should have proved to the world that you can't repeal or override the fundamental laws of economics.  But I'm afraid that will be a lesson that humanity is doomed to learn and re-learn for a long, long, long time.

How did all of those 1960's housing projects turn out, anyway?

Watts Up With That has a very interesting post discussing the trend lines for the various computer models.

Guess what?  They're all trending downward right now, not upward.  Even the most questionable one, NASA scientist James Hansen''s GISS model.

Look for yourself:

Image credit: Basil Copeland

Considering that "the science is settled" there does seem to be quite a lot of valid questions around the very foundations of the theory of unstoppable, "anthropogenic" global warming.

That's as in the Red Green show.

Obama drops the Truthy Possum version of the Great Seal of the United Statesl.

. . . it was the kind that has a big old eagle on it and some Latin (Vero possumus, which translates very loosely to "Yes we can"). It's also a seal that combined elements of Richard Nixon's White House police uniforms and George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished." And it went over about as well.

He's an idiot to use it in the first place.  That's something you'd expect from Colbert's presidential campaign, not one from a major political party.

No link, because it's a story from a news organization which shall not be named. Go to your favorite search engine and type in "sports bra Germany" and see what you come up with.

I like Dogpile, personally.  Snookums goes with Goodsearch.

Look for the Reuters stories . . .

Update:  Aw, crap.  I named the news organization which shall not be named up there in this post's title.  So, sue me.

Oh, joy, simian-blogging.  With added SEX APPEAL!!!

Scienceblog:

Duke University researchers, using sophisticated machinery to analyze hundreds of chemical components in a ringtailed lemur's distinctive scent, have found that individual males are not only advertising their fitness for fatherhood, but also a bit about their family tree as well.

Much more on the horniness of the male ringtailed lemur at the above link.

Smells like . . . teen spirit.

Have you heard the new "research" claiming that people should carb up with a big breakfast?

"Most weight loss studies have determined that a very low carbohydrate diet is not a good method to reduce weight," said lead author Daniela Jakubowicz, MD, of the Hospital de Clinicas, Caracas, Venzezuela. "It exacerbates the craving for carbohydrates and slows metabolism. As a result, after a short period of weight loss, there is a quick return to obesity."

(Misspelling of Venezuela in original.)

Dr. Jakubowicz should probably go review the basic biochemistry of carbohydrate metabolism, with special emphasis on insulin response.  Almost every single statement he (she?) makes in that quote is in contradiction to basic biochemistry.

Sheesh.

It's getting harder and harder to believe ANYTHING that comes out in a "scientific study" any more.

I found a new blog today, via Fark.

Sod Abroad, which notes as reason #2 of why everyone hates a tourist:

2: Luggage

A lot of foreign travel involves cities. Even if you think you’re going to a bit of exotic countryside you’re bound to end up flying into an airport on the fringes of some major conurbation and then getting a train or taxi through the city centre to your destination. Let’s hope it is a taxi, because that’s just an annoying car like so many others and unlikely to give rise to too much smouldering resentment. If you’re on a train or an underground system of sort you’ll be dragging assorted pieces of bulky luggage around with you, scuffing the shins of pedestrians with your suitcase, obliviously crushing the newspapers of  tube travellers with your rucksack, or tripping absolutely everybody up with one of those spectacularly annoying trolley-bag affairs. You may think that you’re having enough trouble struggling from airport to hotel or train terminus, but the people you’re inadvertently barging into are on their way to or from work, and were probably in a fairly bad mood before you clattered into them with your skis.

My lovely wife Snookums will, I hope, recognize in the above the origins of my long-standing disgust with dragging luggage through various modes of public transportation, or worse, on foot through a busy urban center.

I like taxis.  Private cars are better.

In an article titled "Yanks thump Sox" and subtitled "Prime rate to remain stable, Bernanke says," Gene Weingarten writes at Washingtonpost.com:

But nowadays, things have changed. "Scoop" is gone. Young reporters are all named "P. Laurence Butterfield Jr." and they arrive at their first newspaper job fresh-faced and competent, straight from New Haven, Conn., with their high-faluting Princeton educations. They don't need copyeditors.

This is a true fact: I'm writing this column the very week after dozens of copy editors left my newspaper through an early retirement buyout, and I have noticed no difference at all whatsoever in the quality, accuracy or readability of the product.

Emphasis and minor editing of the quote are mine.  Sadly, ironic humor is lost on a large segment of the American population.

The piece is brilliant ironic comedy (a fact that, regretfully to me anyway, is given away in the last paragraph. 

Still, Well Done, Mr. Weingarten.

Everybody else, go and read it, and play Weingarten's game for a lazy summer afternoon's diversion.

Courtesy of our friend Bill from California, a sad news note.  Unfortunately, he sent me an article written by a news organization which shall not be named, so I had to go to the Search Engine That Rules The World, and found this from the UK's Independent:

Seven times the chimp's fans have asked the local Chamber of Commerce, which runs the tourist attraction, to give Cheeta a marble star in that legendary two-and-a-half-mile pavement. Seven times, the Chamber's admissions committee has waded through the carefully-typed application, only to give it the proverbial raspberry.

The most recent rejection came yesterday, when 2009's "walk of famers" were formally unveiled. The 25 new recruits included several bona fide global megastars – Tim Burton, Cameron Diaz, Robert Downey Jr, Ralph Fiennes, Shakira, The Village People, "Sir" Ben Kingsley – and a selection of relative nobodies, including one Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds, and even a local radio jock by the name of Bill Handel.

The Independent's article is much more fun to read than the one from the news organization which shall not be named, anyway.

So says Science Daily:

The complex skill of future planning is commonly believed to be exclusive to humans, and has not yet been convincingly established in any living primate species other than our own. In humans, planning for future needs relies heavily on two mental capacities: self-control or the suppression of immediate drives in favor of delayed rewards; and mental time travel or the detached mental experience of a past or future event.

All right, I added the part about news organizations,  but you get my meaning, I think . . .