A few weeks ago I went to a trivia night at a local tavern, and all the teams chose their own names. One team was named the Gaza Strippers, and another Fuck the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority). I thought of that today, when after work I hung out at 1 Financial, Rachel's 'Buck, killing time because the outbound Red line was experiencing technical difficulties. I spoke at length to a woman named Cory, who is a 'Buck partner in New Hampshire. I asked her to guess how long I had been a partner, after we discussed coffees and drink recipes, and she said "At least 2 years." Try two months.

When Rachel clocked out we went to the Braintree/Ashmont platform, which was insanely crowded, and we kept each other from having bad anxiety attacks while waiting interminably for the next outbound train to JFK/UMass. When we got home we both raided the fridge I crashed on the couch. I didn't wake up until 11pm. Rachel and Jay went to some barbecue. I would have gone, but I was exhausted.

Tomorrow I'll probably go watch the fireworks at the Charles River.

On SiCKO

The guys over at the Cato Institute are a lot smarter than I am. Here's what they had to say about Michael Moore's new movie Sicko

"56 Word Review of SiCKO" by Michael Cannon

SiCKO was a very funny film, and I praise Michael Moore for starting the conversation and pointing out many horrors of the U.S. health care system.

But from a policy standpoint – and I say this more in sadness than in anger – SiCKO was so breathtaking a specimen of ignorant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush.

"Sicko" Health Care Reform

by Michael D. Tanner

Michael Tanner is director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute and coauthor of Healthy Competition: What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It (2005).

I recently saw a sneak preview of Michael Moore's new movie Sicko, and I can tell you honestly that the movie is both funny and poignant.

Some of the stories Moore tells of Americans who have been caught up in the bureaucracy of the American health system are truly heart-wrenching. The insurance company bureaucrats he exposes are cruel and capricious.

There is no doubt that Michael Moore is a skilled filmmaker and an effective propagandist, but serious advocates of health care reform would be advised against relying too heavily on his view.

Moore ignores the positive side of American health care altogether. For all its problems, the United States still provides the highest quality health care in the world.

Eighteen of the last 25 winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine either are U.S. citizens or work here. With no price controls, free-market U.S. medicine provides the incentives that lead to innovation breakthroughs in new drugs and other medical technologies.

U.S. companies have developed half of all the major new medicines introduced worldwide over the past 20 years, and Americans played a key role in 80 percent of the most important medical advances of the past 30 years, according to a survey by the president's Council of Economic Advisors.

When you are sick, the United States is the place to be.

Comparing the outcome for specific diseases like cancer or heart disease, the United States clearly outperforms the rest of the world. Take prostate cancer, for example. American men are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than men in other countries, but we're less likely to die of it.

Fewer than one in five American men with prostate cancer will die from it, while a quarter of Canadian men will, and even more ominously, 57 percent of British men and nearly half of French and German men will.

Similar results can be found for other cancers, AIDS and heart disease. When former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi needed heart surgery last year, he didn't go to France, Canada, Cuba or even an Italian hospital - he went to the Cleveland Clinic.

Moore points out that too many Americans lack health insurance, but ignores the fact that most are uninsured for only brief periods of time. Nor does he mention that nearly 10 million of the 47 million uninsured Americans are actually eligible for Medicaid, but fail to apply.

Moore highlights the stories of several Americans who were denied reimbursement for experimental treatments. Some of the results are tragic. But does he really believe national health care systems would cover such treatments?

Indeed, Moore generally overlooks the flaws of national health care systems. For instance, he downplays waiting lists in Canada, suggesting they are no more than inconveniences. He interviews apparently healthy Canadians who claim they have no problem getting care. He even follows an uninsured American who slips across the border from Detroit to visit a free Canadian clinic.

Yet somehow, Moore couldn't find any of the nearly 800,000 Canadians who are currently on the waiting list for treatment. Nor apparently did he have time to interview Canadian Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin, who wrote in a 2005 decision striking down part of Canada's universal care law that many Canadians waiting for treatment suffer chronic pain and "patients die while on the waiting list."

Similarly, in a truly funny sequence, Moore struggles to find the payment window at a British hospital. It might not have been so funny if he had talked to any of the 850,000 Britons waiting for admission to those hospitals.

Every year, shortages force Britain's National Health Service to cancel as many as 50,000 operations. Roughly 40 percent of cancer patients never get to see an oncology specialist. Delays in receiving treatment are often so long that nearly 20 percent of colon cancer cases considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the time treatment is finally offered.

The American health care system clearly needs reform. But it would be a shame if Moore's latest piece of propaganda stampedes Americans into sacrificing the quality, choice and freedom that our health care system provides today.

Went to the fed building, after that I cut through the common. On my way a gent in his fifties, apropos of nothing, started ranting to me about the homeless people who camp in the common. He digressed into a diatribe about welfare, taxes, why single mothers are whores, why everyone needs religion (i.e. Christ) and why gays are deviant and evil.

I told him "You can have a strong moral core and not be religious, and you can be 'religious' and have no moral code. I work my ass off, I got to church, I pay my taxes, I'm a registered republican, and I've been gay my entire life."

I ditched the gent near Downtown Crossing and headed to Congress st. I hung out with Jay, Daniel, Aaron and Phil for half and hour, then went to work. After work I walked to the public gardens to watch the sun set. The sky was amazing, tumultuous. On one side it was bright blues and brilliant whites, and on the other it was rolling mass of grey-blue hues highlighted by the red-shifting sun. The Boston sky reminds me of the Portland sky, reminds, me of the Palm Springs sky, reminds me of the Alaskan sky. All sky can seem the same, it's the surroundings that distinguish it. The sun reflecting gold off the forest, or the forest of buildings.

I went home and made dinner. I've been eating two Clif bars, a box of macaroni and a vitamin everyday. Also hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

I insistently relayed my daily anecdotes to Jay and Rachel's patient ears.

Nothing at all happened today

Today I accomplished very little. I surfed the net (I still refer to it in those terms, and most likely forever will), and later in the evening got completely trashed with a few friends. Sean, a guy I just met, is a member of the Coast Guard reserve and a friend of Big Joe's. Earlier I had a dream about hanging out in a bookstore/pub with Jenn, Keegan and Rebecca (from work). Keegan and I drank Maker's Mark, I teased Rebecca about her bad taste in sci-fi books, told her I was David Edding's niece, and hit on Jenn a bit. That's all I remember. A few minutes ago I watched some Henry Rollins and decided to be more dedicated in recording my life, even if it is mundane. Tomorrow I work at 2:15, but I have to head to the bank at the O'Neil federal building to grab rent monies before then.

Health Care Reform

You want to know what significantly socialized medicine would look like in this country? Look no further than the Veterans Association. VA 'beneficiaries' have so many red tape horrors stories, they are actually the source of the term. It seems to me what the average person wants in relation to universal health care is a combination of widespread availability and affordabilty, both of which can be readily provided by a system involving the creation of a national health insurance company. Instead of socially regulating hospitals, doctors and other providers (which causes a significant increase to the overall cost of health care), better to take a constitutionally mandated position.

In Article 1, section 8 of the US Constitution there reads the following:

Congress shall have power ....To establish post offices and post roads

At the time the Constitution was written in 1789, medicine was not widely considered a necessary public service, but the post was. The ability to send and receive mail was deemed so important, it was constitutionally mandated, and I believe it can be easily and rationally argued that, had cardio-thoracic surgery existed in 1789, federally mandated health care would have been included as a power of congress.
Instead of paying larger, profit driven middle men for expensive and limited coverage, every citizen should be able to pay the government health care insurance company and affordable premium, show their insurance card and receive coverage anywhere in the United States. Why do so many people make a direct correlation between employers and health benefits? Forcing employers to mandatorily provide benefits reduces either the amount they are able to pay their workers, or the number of employees they are able to hire. Yes, many insurance providers shop their plans to companies, insisting on it as a brilliant worker incentive, and it often can be, but in the process the service provided is expensive, and COBRA aside (which most workers never use) it is usually far to expensive coverage to carry without the employer's assistance.

Choice is important. In the UK, for example, the quality of health care often depends on where you live, because you generally have to see physicians in your neighborhood, even if there is a better hospital elsewhere. This has much to do with the simple fact that more qualified doctors live in more affluent areas, and therefore work at more affluent hospitals. We cannot force people to be physicians, therefore we cannot 'entitle' medicine. However, so long as such services are available, we can provide a system that allows citizens to receive care without going bankrupt.

National Guard

With all the flooding and disasters in Texas and the midwest this month, I think it would be brilliant for one or more of the state governors to call up their national guard (most of whom are in Iraq and Afghanistan) and pressure the President to return them home. If he refused, they should take it immediately to the Supreme Court (since it would be the only court with jurisdiction I believe), where they would probably win, because in a states rights vs federal, the states have the right to the National presence of the National Guard.

Why no one should be surprised

The CDC has been aware of the potential outbreak of drug resistant tuberculosis in the United States for almost a decade. The public is less informed about it because the news agencies only cover it when there is (non-African) human drama involved. The 2005 movie The Constant Gardner had mdr and xdr TB heavily featured in its plotline.