May 2009
21 posts
Three imperatives for improving US health care -... →
“To put these figures in perspective, we estimate that the medical costs associated with clinically obese patients represent about 10 percent of the sum spent on health care premiums and that reducing obesity to the 1980 level would generate $60 billion a year in net savings.”
April 2009
36 posts
The Dubious Promise of Digital Medicine -... →
Boston Review: Malpractice | Dean Baker →
“When it comes to health care, economists ignore their own rules”
FT.com / Business education - Don’t guess,... →
“One thing you can do is what’s always been done. The second thing is you could just think about whether what you’re doing is the right thing. The third step in the hierarchy is you could take the data you have and try to analyse it. But the problem is that it’s often not the right data. The fourth rung would be an accidental experiment. The fifth would be to go out and generate the...
U.S. Soldier Who Killed Herself--After Refusing to... →
Industrial Strength Solution | Mother Jones →
“It’s only a matter of time before the story of GNT gets told and the public recognizes that for every pound of trash that ends up in municipal landfills, at least 40 more pounds are created upstream by industrial processes—and that a lot of this waste is far more dangerous to environmental and human health than our newspapers and grass clippings. At that point, the locus of concern...
Cut ties between Health Canada, drug companies,... →
Oh dear. I’d hoped we already had an independent drug regulator.
RevaHealth.com Blog: DoubleCheckMD.com Might Have... →
“Depressed when he returned home he got the distinct feeling that the cardiologist didn’t believe him. He gave me a call and he discussed his fear that maybe there was a drug combination that was causing complications. He was concerned that he was on so many powerful and rare drugs that no specialist could be aware of all complications. I immediately asked him for the list of drugs and...
Imagine someone had been managing your data, and... →
“And now I’m seeing why, on every visit, they make me re-state all my current medications and allergies: maybe they know the data in their system might not be reliable.”
ANDREW SULLIVAN: THINKING. OUT. LOUD. | More... →
Network Advertising Initiative: Opt-Out →
Opt-out of many behavioural advertising networks (i.e. where your web patterns are tracked and used to deliver targeted ads across websites) in one click.
Young Inuit men commit suicide at rate 28 times... →
Tragic. Unlike this article, I do not believe that this is an issue of healthcare resources.
The Health Care Blog: Confessions of a Physician... →
“the best uses of health IT are those that support participatory medicine, reduce costs, make care more convenient, and close the “collaboration gap” between doctors and their patients in much the same way that online banking and online airline reservation systems have done. I’m encouraging patient portals, community health data exchanges, shared clinical data collection,...
The Health Care Blog: POLICY: Breakfast of... →
“The most important thing we can do to make headway on meaningful reforms is to move toward public reporting of comprehensive pricing and performance transparency information. When purchasers – and here I mean employers and government – see the outrageous excesses that are considered common and acceptable, their astonishment will organically precipitate performance-based reimbursement”
Wachter's World : On Quality Measurement, Babies,... →
“now we have Groopman and Hartzband arguing that we should take a “time out” on quality measures, leaving it to doctors to make their own choices since only they truly know their patients. Do we really believe that the world will be a better place if we went back to every doctor deciding by him or herself what treatment to offer, when we have irrefutable data demonstrating huge gaps between...
How Jason Statham became the world's biggest... →
Let’s Talk Health Care » Blog Archive » Are We... →
The Wire Bible →
Pilot pitch and scripts from first three episodes.
RISK Mismanagement - What Led to the Financial... →
Orange Crate Art: Pullum on Strunk and White →
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go -... →
Sad.
How the Web Made Me a Better Copywriter | Cathy... →
Corruption Undercuts U.S. Hope for Afghan Police -... →
“better policing may be impossible for Afghanistan unless government officials at all levels stop cannibalizing their civil administration and police force for a quick profit”
Collaboration inside firms | Getting togetherness... →
“[B]osses often fail to take a hard-headed look at the costs of joint projects”: in the public sector, of course, they don’t look at all (because half or more of the cost is outside of their budget, and there’s no such thing as opportunity cost).
Editorial - Miles to Go on E-Health Records -... →
How Yellow Tail crushed the Australian wine... →
“Not anymore: Buyers who used to make a beeline for the Antipodean section of their local wine shops are today waltzing right past it. Depending on who’s doing the counting, exports of Australian wines to the United States fell by 15 percent to 26 percent in value last year”
Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies -... →
Oh dear.
DNA Test Outperforms Pap Smear - NYTimes.com →
ottawasun.com - Comment - Stunning facts →
Our police system is utterly broken. First politician to realize this and offer to address it gets my vote.
Europe's answer to our health care problem | Keith... →
This is a remarkably facile column. “Demographic pressures brought on by an ageing population, and more expensive technologies, are outstripping the supply of money that governments have to pay for health care.” - Show me the regression analysis, please. “the absence of competition leads to inefficiencies in our health system, a dearth of innovation and compromised care” -...
TheStar.com | Opinion | Surreal security case
→
“Parliament should not let it go at that. Whether Abdelrazik gets home any time soon, Cannon’s ministry has no end of explaining to do. The foreign affairs committee should look into whatever role Canadian officials may have played in Abdelrazik’s arrest in Sudan in 2003, his subsequent questioning and alleged torture, whether he is in fact a security risk, and how Ottawa has...
Op-Ed Contributor - How the Internet Got Its Rules... →
“Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.”
Findings - Public Policy That Makes Test Subjects... →
TheStar.com | Insight | The quiet unravelling of... →
Sadly, I completely agree. But I don’t think Facebook groups are the solution; structural change is required, and achieving structural change means first emasculating the existing, increasing authorities.
Dispelling the water-war myth. - By Jack Shafer -... →
“Countries do not go to war over water, they solve their water shortages through trade and international agreements.”
Wachter's World : The PSA Story: The Triumph of... →