Health Care
drorzel | January 27, 2010This Timothy Burke post on the current political moment deserves better than to be buried in the Links Dump. He's beginning to despair because it looks like "there are many things which could happen which would improve the lives of many Americans which are not going to happen and perhaps cannot happen."
Take health care, for example. I can read and parse and think about the proposed legislation that actually exists and see it without hyperbole, as an okay if scattered series of modest initiatives. Whatever. I think I have a fairly good handle on the underlying cultural and social…
drorzel | January 26, 2010Kevin Drum checks in with the latest from the class wars:
In the middle of a rant about healthcare reform and the compromise over the Cadillac tax, one of Andrew Sullivan's readers says this:
The idea that public employees make less than those in the private sector is a myth that needs to die. Most already have cadillac plans and in most places their salaries are ahead of private workers whose taxes go pay for their income. On top of that they get much better benefits and pensions, so to let them out of a tax that private industry workers will have to pay who work at the same income level is…
drorzel | December 21, 2009Paul Krugman had a post today calling Obama the WYSIWYG President:
There's a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn't the man progressives thought they were voting for.
But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that
(a) There wasn't a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders
(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive
Now it's true that many progressives were ardent Obama…
drorzel | December 21, 2009Janet has a typically thoughtful post about tuition benefits, following on a proposal to eliminate tuition benefits for employees of the University of Illinois. Janet does a great job of rounding up the various pros and cons of the benefit and its possible elimination.
It takes no time at all for the "Tuition benefits are unfair to people without kids" argument to pop up in comments. This is, as always, pretty stupid, because the same logic leads to thinking that health insurance benefits are unfair to people who don't become catastrophically ill. Tuition benefits are basically kid insurance…
drorzel | October 13, 2009The baseball playoffs are upon us, which means that most of the sports media are consumed with baseball talk. I find this faintly annoying, as I'm not really a fan of baseball. And, really, I can't be a fan of baseball, for the same reason that I can't be a conservative Republican activist-- I don't have the mental circuitry necessary to passionately believe self-contradictory things.
For example, being a baseball fan apparently requires one to simultaneously believe that a four-and-a-half hour game three hours of which are just players standing around scratching themselves is part of the…
drorzel | September 17, 2009Theorem: The worthiness of a blog post on a political or social topic is inversely proportional to the number of times derisive nicknames are used to refer to the author's opponents.
drorzel | September 10, 2009A couple of things that I'm not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about:
1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary transformative power of technology, but it leaves me cold.
The stories of working people putting themselves through accelerated degree programs through self-study are inspiring, and all, but there's nothing really new here. There has never really been any question about whether hard-working and…
drorzel | August 19, 2009The results, however, are amusing for the rest of us:
It's nice to see somebody in a safe district taking advantage of essentially having tenure. We could use more of this.
drorzel | August 12, 2009Tobias Buckell had some heart issues a while back, and the stress of Worldcon aggravated things a bit:
By Sunday morning, I was feeling completely sapped, and not getting enough sleep. I tried to nap before the pre-Hugo ceremony, but felt like I'd hit a brick wall by the time I'd walked over. I had to duck out of the Hugo ceremony briefly to lay down. By the end of the night my pulse was racing a bit, so I went back to the hotel to sleep. When I woke up my pulse was even higher.
After checking it several times, I decided it was high enough that I would follow standing orders to check into an…
drorzel | May 18, 2008Continuing the morning's theme of "crushingly depressing stories from the New York Times," there's also a downer article about cities where there are more deaths than births:
What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively new in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, the Rust Belt of the Middle West and Appalachia.
Hospitals are closing obstetrics wards and converting them to acute care. Local governments and other social service providers are adjusting to the emergence of…
drorzel | April 10, 2006One of the standard conservatarian responses to anyone suggesting government-funded universal health care is to start talking about how universal health care will inevitably lead to faceless, heartless bureaucrats denying or delaying treatment for stupid reasons. My response to these stories is "Who's supplying your health insurance? And how do I get on that plan?"
Through my employer, I have a pretty generous health plan, administered by one of the most highly-regarded health insurance companies in the region. And this week, for the second time in two weeks, they refused to cover my…