October 6, 2009
Ezra Klein thinks it might.
"We're America," Max Baucus likes to say. "Which means we have to write a uniquely American solution." But the health-care solution that actually seems to be emerging in Congress -- which looks like the health-care solutions proposed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton…
October 6, 2009
Some things you can't hear too many times.
By Jacob Goldstein
If there's any way out of our current health-care morass, it's this: In health care, more expensive care is often no better than less expensive care. We were reminded of this fact by a front-page story in this morning's WSJ,…
October 6, 2009
The morning papers are filled with relevant health reform stories, but two stand out. They weren't reported by journalists, but were experience-based opinion pieces offered by people on the front lines of delivering and insuring health care.
The first comes from the Washington Post, where a…
October 6, 2009
A few years ago, a friend of mine gave birth to a daughter, her second child. A few weeks into the child's life, it became apparent she was suffering from cerebral palsy. Not long after, my friend, whom I'll call Carol, bumped into her ob/gyn doctor on the street and told him about her daughter's…
October 5, 2009
I've wondered many times, including out loud in Slate, why it's not common in the U.S. to give flu vaccinations at schools, so they could efficiently be given to the population (children) whose inoculation most effectively prevents epidemics or pandemics, as well as to anyone else who wanted one.…
October 5, 2009
Never know what'll top the charts. Top post was a post I put up in January, "Pfizer takes $2.3 billion offl-label marketing fine." That post reported the news (via FiercePharma) that Pfizer had tucked away in its financial disclosure forms a $2.3 billion charge to end the federal investigation into…
October 5, 2009
Ruth may or may not have called his. But former player and Mariners announcer Mike Blowers, asked before the game for his prediction of the game, predicted a rookie player would hit a homer -- his first in the bigs -- into the second deck in left-center in his second at-bat on a 3-1 fastball. Man…
October 5, 2009
Lots of flu news out there. Here's my short list for the day:
Helen Branswell reports that WHO is unpersuaded by the unpublished paper showing seasonal flu vaccine may raise chance of getting swine flu. (Anomalies are usually anomalies.) Canada has been thrown into quite a bit of confusion by this…
October 2, 2009
Been a while, so these cover a span of reading.
I'm in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful -- a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model,…
October 2, 2009
Notables from the last 24:
Over at Gene Expression, Razib casts a skeptical eye on a study of the neuroanatomical variability of religiosity.
The brain areas identified in this and the parallel fMRI studies are not unique to processing religion [the study states], but play major roles in social…
October 1, 2009
You have to move fast these days to keep up with the flu. Or outrun it.
A quick roundup from the last 24:
From the invaluable H5N1:
Mexico: 4,000 H1N1 cases in 7 days
Spain: 31,322 cases and 6 deaths in one week
US: 15 states could run out of hospital beds
Scotland sees it Worst week yet for…
October 1, 2009
September 30, 2009
Canada: "An epidemic of confusion"
Via the Globe and Mail, Caroline Alphonso writes: Provincial flu strategies all over the map. Excerpt:Two provinces and a territory have split ranks with the rest of Canada's health authorities in their fall immunization plans, sowing…
October 1, 2009
Last week the Times ran a story by Andrew Pollack, Benefit and Doubt in Vaccine Additive, that covered some of the ground I trod in my Slate story, "To Boost or Not to Boost: The United States' swine flu vaccines will leave millions worldwide unprotected. Pollack also had the room to explore…
October 1, 2009
As Congress debates healthcare reform, we often hear that hopes for comprehensive reform -- fundamental changes, like a public plan or a radical, Netherlands-like overhaul of regulation -- simply aren't realistic. I hope to explore later why this seems so to those casting the votes. In the meantime…
September 30, 2009
But every version of reform fails to deal with the root cause the uninsurance problem: millions of employers in our "employer-based" system do not provide their workers with health insurance. Why isn't there more discussion about the free rider distortions in that state of affairs?
Instead…
September 30, 2009
Every other industrialized country has a national health care system that makes keeping track of these elementary facts possible. The US doesn't. We have a lot of electronic medical records, all right, but they are mostly devoted to billing and insurance. And there are a lot of different…
September 29, 2009
At Gene Expression, Razib casts a skeptical eye on a study of the neuroanatomical variability of religiosity.
The brain areas identified in this and the parallel fMRI studies are
not unique to processing religion [the study states], but play major roles in social
cognition. This implies that…
September 29, 2009
Updates from the flu front:
Confusion grows over the still-unreleased study
that apparently finds, contrary to other studies, that getting this
year's seasonal flu shot may raise your risk of getting swine flu. Peter Sandman, meanwhile, argues that since the swine flu seems
to have largely…
September 27, 2009
Maybe best argument yet for expanding the US rail system. I need to go here:
September 24, 2009
[Note: An update from 25 Sept 09 is at bottom]
Here's a sad mess. It seems a
potentially important finding -- that getting a seasonal flu shot might
increase risk of contracting the swine flu -- is being sat on by a
journal, with the authors forbidden from talking about it, until they
get through…
September 22, 2009
Even with that experimentation, he added, the ongoing shrinkage of newspapers is likely to create a âgiant holeâ that will not be filled for some time. He said he has a vision of communities of 10,000 people or fewer becoming rife with âcasual endemic corruption,â as newspapers are no longer able…
September 22, 2009
via wired.com
Another fine story from Wired Science.
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
September 22, 2009
Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates.
Tara Smith explains why she'll be getting her kids their (seasonal) flu vaccines. Revere does likewise
Daniel Menaker, former honcho at Random House, defends the midlist. (Where was he when my…
September 22, 2009
The swine flu triage tent at Dell's Children's Medical Center, in Austin, Texasphoto: Ralph Barerra, Austin American-Statesman
I can't keep up with the flu news. (If you want to, best single bet -- the wide net -- is Avian Flu Diary.) But as the World Health Organisation meets in Hong-Kong to…
September 22, 2009
"One in six patients 'wrongly diagnosed by NHS doctors'," shouts the Daily Mail (via EvidenceMatters. This should not surprise us: Autopsies have been finding a similar percentage of misdiagnosis among the dead for decades. Doctors will always miss some diagnoses. Progress is a matter of ever…
September 21, 2009
Hubbard Park, Montpelier, VT, 9/21/09. Via Neil Young
Posted via email from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
September 21, 2009
In the intro to his self-published (on Lulu.com) collection of blog posts, The Wreck of the Henry Clay, New Yorker contributor Caleb Crain sums up nicely the anxieties shared by at least one other writer-with-blogging-addon about blogging, and, by extension, about self-publishing books. Which I…
September 17, 2009
My latest piece for Slate examines the unsettling consequences of the United States' choice of swine flu vaccines.
The good news about these vaccines is that, to judge by the first vaccine trial results, published last week, they appear to work fast, safely â and at about a half to a quarter of…
September 17, 2009
A couple observers â one on Olbermann, one in a biz publication â think Baucus's plan is so bad, and his dead-end path so disastrous, that it could generate a response that includes either a robust public option or even (longer-term) a single-payer plan.Â
From The 5 Must-Read Takes of Health Care…
September 17, 2009
via blogs.wsj.com
This is something we need to know. Let's hope we like the answer.
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
