He didn't say that the United States spends 18% of Gross National Product (GNP) on health care, twice as much as any other country in the world. The price of all our exports is jacked up 18% just to pay the workers health care. Imports are cheaper than domestic manufactured by 9 to 18%, just because of sky high US health care expenditures. One reason everything for sale in Walmarts is made in China is that health care is cheaper in China.
Insuring everyone in the country is not the health care problem, the health care problem is excessive health care spending. We ought to be cutting our health care costs in half, Obama wants to increase them by another trillion dollars. We can't afford what we have now, and Obama wants to make it more expensive.
Obama didn't talk about parasitic lawyers sucking up god awful amounts of money thru malpractice suits. That the malpractice award money goes to the lawyers, not the "injured" patients. Could he be currying favor with the trial lawyers?
He didn't talk about outrageous drug prices. The drug companies claim the money goes to research and development of new drugs. Actually it largely goes to marketing. The drug companies pay full time salesmen to call on every doctor in the country twice a month peddling drugs. Nor did he talk about allowing importation of drugs from Canada, or any other first world country.
He didn't talk about cherry picking insurance companies who give low premiums to company paid plans and charge individuals four and five times as much. He didn't talk about the unfairness of denying the self employed an income tax deduction for health insurance expenditures.
He didn't talk about wearysome FDA approval procedures for new drugs that add millions of dollars to the cost of a drug.
He didn't mention that 30% of health care costs are incurred in the last year of the patient's life. This money does little good to the patient but does lots of harm to medicare.
He didn't talk about fancy technology that does little to improve quality of care but makes a lot of money for the device makers. For instance fetal heart rate monitors, a $10,000 electronic box now universal in delivery rooms, have not improved the infant mortality rate.
Obama's health care plan is to throw another trillion dollars into the black hole. Hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, doctors, and lawyers think this is just fine.
We should attempt to cut the amount we currently spend by half rather than dumping more money into it.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The stiff in the CAT scanner
It was Friday before a three day weekend. The patient was very old and weak, nearly comatose, when we slid him into the scanner. Started her up and the scanner whirred away. When the scan was done, we slid the patient out.
Trouble started there. The patient had died while the scan was running. Being late on Friday all the doctors had left for the weekend. We couldn't find anyone to sign the death certificate. Couldn't send a body to the morgue without a death certificate. We couldn't go home leaving a dead body in the lab. What to do? Finally we rolled the gurney into the elevator and sent the deceased back up to the ward. Let the ward nurse cope.
I heard that story from our CAT scan sales guy, who had been a CAT scan tech before coming to work for us.
I always wondered about the doctor who ordered that scan. Here he has a patient at death's door, and all he does is order an expensive imaging procedure? He can't tell the patient is in a bad way by just looking at him? Or using a stethoscope?
But I'll bet the hospital billed that CAT scan and Medicare paid for it. A few thousand dollars spent that did nothing to improve or extend that poor patient's life.
Records show that 30% of all health care expenditures are incurred in the last year of the patient's life. How much of that money actually helps the patient, as opposed to just making money for the providers?
Trouble started there. The patient had died while the scan was running. Being late on Friday all the doctors had left for the weekend. We couldn't find anyone to sign the death certificate. Couldn't send a body to the morgue without a death certificate. We couldn't go home leaving a dead body in the lab. What to do? Finally we rolled the gurney into the elevator and sent the deceased back up to the ward. Let the ward nurse cope.
I heard that story from our CAT scan sales guy, who had been a CAT scan tech before coming to work for us.
I always wondered about the doctor who ordered that scan. Here he has a patient at death's door, and all he does is order an expensive imaging procedure? He can't tell the patient is in a bad way by just looking at him? Or using a stethoscope?
But I'll bet the hospital billed that CAT scan and Medicare paid for it. A few thousand dollars spent that did nothing to improve or extend that poor patient's life.
Records show that 30% of all health care expenditures are incurred in the last year of the patient's life. How much of that money actually helps the patient, as opposed to just making money for the providers?
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
New browser needs needs new firewall?
Internet service has been slowing down for some time up here. Might be roadrunner, might be those distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on gov'ment web sites, tired computer, bad karma, who knows.
So I decided to upgrade Firefox to the new version 3.5. Although the new Firefox rendered pages faster it was less effective at getting onto the web. Lots and lots of "cannot find the such-and-such server" error messages, after a lengthy wait for a reply. Try again later and I could get thru. After a few days of this, I took a look at the mozilla website. They had a tab "What to do if you cannot connect with V3.5" That sounded promising. In short, the Mozilla people claim that firewalls are the problem. Turn the firewall off they suggest. Well, not sure about that, especially as the older V3.0.11 Firefox had been working OK for a year on my Zone Alarm freeby firewall.
But, hope springs eternal, I downloaded the latest copy of Zone Alarm and it works. Not 100%, but a lot better. It reduced the "cannot find server" errors to maybe one an hour, whereas with the old Zone Alarm I was getting 10 or 15 such errors per hour.
The V3.5 Firefox is faster than previous version 3.0.11, and with an updated firewall, things are somewhat better than the older software setup.
Lesson learned. Update your firewall more often.
So I decided to upgrade Firefox to the new version 3.5. Although the new Firefox rendered pages faster it was less effective at getting onto the web. Lots and lots of "cannot find the such-and-such server" error messages, after a lengthy wait for a reply. Try again later and I could get thru. After a few days of this, I took a look at the mozilla website. They had a tab "What to do if you cannot connect with V3.5" That sounded promising. In short, the Mozilla people claim that firewalls are the problem. Turn the firewall off they suggest. Well, not sure about that, especially as the older V3.0.11 Firefox had been working OK for a year on my Zone Alarm freeby firewall.
But, hope springs eternal, I downloaded the latest copy of Zone Alarm and it works. Not 100%, but a lot better. It reduced the "cannot find server" errors to maybe one an hour, whereas with the old Zone Alarm I was getting 10 or 15 such errors per hour.
The V3.5 Firefox is faster than previous version 3.0.11, and with an updated firewall, things are somewhat better than the older software setup.
Lesson learned. Update your firewall more often.
Does California pay too much?
According to a Wall St Journal story, a suburban fire chief was making $186,000 a year. That's about twice what we pay fire chiefs around here. Then he turned in his accrued leave and sick time for a once time salary boost to $241,000. Three days later he retired. Guess what, his retirement pay was based on the $241,000. Plus, he hasn't retired really, he is serving as temporary fire chief and drawing $176,000 as a contractor AND drawing his retirement pay. By the way, he is only 51 years old.
Nice work if you can get it.
Somehow I don't feel very sorry for California's budget problems.
Nice work if you can get it.
Somehow I don't feel very sorry for California's budget problems.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Reminiscing about Apollo
Discovery channel did 40th anniversary of Moon landing stories all day. The TV talking heads marveled at the Apollo computer with "only" 64 K bytes of memory. Brings back memories that does. A PDP-11 with 64K, programmed in assembler, could do most anything. Somewhere I still have my PDP-11 programmers card. Back then programmers were supermen. Now they are mostly dweebs.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
New Hampshire Wind Power 2009
According to the Union Leader, a state permit to put up wind turbines in Coos County was approved. The developer had to file a mitigation plan for that all purpose project slowdown bird, Bicknell's Thrush. This magical bird held up the Cannon Mt land swap for years, and now appears to be hard at work slowing down another project. Bicknell's Thrush did not exist until 1998. Prior to 1998 it was considered to be a member of the Gray Cheeked Thrush family. After Bicknell's Thrush was declared a seperate species in 1998 it was declared endangered.
With a state permit in hand the developers now need to obtain federal permits. Lenthy comments attached to the article complain about the terrible esthetic damage the project will cause. Other commenters feel the project paperwork was rushed thru improperly.
No discussion of costs was furnished.
With a state permit in hand the developers now need to obtain federal permits. Lenthy comments attached to the article complain about the terrible esthetic damage the project will cause. Other commenters feel the project paperwork was rushed thru improperly.
No discussion of costs was furnished.
Energy Policy.
First off, we ought to develop oil and gas reserves in the Western
Hemisphere. The gas people have done right well at this. New
technology has found new domestic gas fields and the price of natural
gas has dropped from $12 to $3 over the last few years. Right now most
of our domestic production comes out of the Gulf of Mexico. We need
expand that, to drill off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. We need to
develop oil sands and oil shale.
Then we need to drill in the "Alaska National Wildlife Refuge" (ANWR).
The fields at Prudoe are reaching end of life. There will come a time
when the cost of maintaining the pipeline overwhelms the value of the
oil moved. At this point, the pipeline will be shut down and abandoned.
After a few years of rusting, it will be useless.
If we exploit the ANWR field now, its oil can come down thru the
pipeline. If we delay drilling in ANWR until the pipeline is gone, it
will require a new pipeline to bring the oil out. The cost of the
existing pipeline was horrendous. Doing it over will be worse.
Prior to the discovery of oil, ANWR was merely another piece of arctic
tundra. A few oil wells won't hurt anything. No one lives there.
Nuclear power is completely carbon free, for those who still believe
in global warming. It works, 20% of US electricity comes from nuclear.
80% of French electricity is nuclear. The "nuclear waste" and Yucca
Mountain arguments are irrelevant. Spent nuclear fuel rods have been
placed in ponds next to reactors for 50 years. They do just fine there,
and the volume is so small it will take a thousand years before the
ponds run out of room. One day we will recycle the "spent" fuel rods
and recover nearly as much fissionable material as the brand new rod
contained.
Nuclear power plants would be cheaper if the design were
standardized. The design costs and the huge paper work costs to get the
plant blessed as safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could be done
once, and then dozens of plants could be built with no additional design
and paperwork costs.
There is a very promising hydrogen fusion project, the Polywell
project, that with some very modest funding might yield fusion power
within 10 years. A small scale test reactor has already fused hydrogen
and produced neutrons. Scaling it up from its current size of a
basketball to a couple of yards across ought to give a practical fusion
reactor. We should fund this, the cost is tiny, and the potential
payoff is enormous. It's not a done deal, it might not work, but it is
worth putting a little money into it.
We can build super insulated houses that stay warm all winter without
a furnace. A couple have been built up here and they are comfortable.
Just make the walls 18 inches thick and provide enough south facing
windows and they stay warm using no furnace and no furnace oil.
Hemisphere. The gas people have done right well at this. New
technology has found new domestic gas fields and the price of natural
gas has dropped from $12 to $3 over the last few years. Right now most
of our domestic production comes out of the Gulf of Mexico. We need
expand that, to drill off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. We need to
develop oil sands and oil shale.
Then we need to drill in the "Alaska National Wildlife Refuge" (ANWR).
The fields at Prudoe are reaching end of life. There will come a time
when the cost of maintaining the pipeline overwhelms the value of the
oil moved. At this point, the pipeline will be shut down and abandoned.
After a few years of rusting, it will be useless.
If we exploit the ANWR field now, its oil can come down thru the
pipeline. If we delay drilling in ANWR until the pipeline is gone, it
will require a new pipeline to bring the oil out. The cost of the
existing pipeline was horrendous. Doing it over will be worse.
Prior to the discovery of oil, ANWR was merely another piece of arctic
tundra. A few oil wells won't hurt anything. No one lives there.
Nuclear power is completely carbon free, for those who still believe
in global warming. It works, 20% of US electricity comes from nuclear.
80% of French electricity is nuclear. The "nuclear waste" and Yucca
Mountain arguments are irrelevant. Spent nuclear fuel rods have been
placed in ponds next to reactors for 50 years. They do just fine there,
and the volume is so small it will take a thousand years before the
ponds run out of room. One day we will recycle the "spent" fuel rods
and recover nearly as much fissionable material as the brand new rod
contained.
Nuclear power plants would be cheaper if the design were
standardized. The design costs and the huge paper work costs to get the
plant blessed as safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could be done
once, and then dozens of plants could be built with no additional design
and paperwork costs.
There is a very promising hydrogen fusion project, the Polywell
project, that with some very modest funding might yield fusion power
within 10 years. A small scale test reactor has already fused hydrogen
and produced neutrons. Scaling it up from its current size of a
basketball to a couple of yards across ought to give a practical fusion
reactor. We should fund this, the cost is tiny, and the potential
payoff is enormous. It's not a done deal, it might not work, but it is
worth putting a little money into it.
We can build super insulated houses that stay warm all winter without
a furnace. A couple have been built up here and they are comfortable.
Just make the walls 18 inches thick and provide enough south facing
windows and they stay warm using no furnace and no furnace oil.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)