I was interested in this article about the results of a survey on the prevalence of various health care myths in the general public. In addition to listing seven of the most common misconceptions, Larry Schwartz also summarized the findings on where people get their information and the likelihood of believing the misconceptions based on ethnicity, education, and profession.
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It is astonishing the number of people within the White House who seem to rush to their phones to talk with reporters and leak information. Based on these leaks, there has been no shortage of explanations for the Trump-Ryan health care debacle. Part of the blame for the failure lay in the fact that the bill was hastily thrown together in just a month or so with little or no discussion in the various committees that had roles to play and no clear vision of what its goal was other than for the Republican leadership to claim that they had “repealed and replaced” Obamacare. With health care being such a complex subject, such a slapdash effort was doomed to produce a patchwork bill full of holes.
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This Swedish comedy was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film though it did not win. It tells the story of Ove, a 59-year old man who lives in a housing complex. He is the type that we are all familiar with, someone who is grouchy and knows all the rules governing the immediate community and takes it upon himself to vigorously police the place to make sure everyone else is following the rules and upbraiding them when they do not. He is generally regarded as a pain, the one redeeming feature being that he is very handy at fixing things.
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Well, that was a surprise. I did not expect to see the Trumpcare bill crash and burn as it did yesterday when the speaker Paul Ryan pulled it from the floor of House of Representatives shortly before the scheduled vote because he did not have the votes to pass it and wanted to avoid an embarrassing defeat, although the effective defeat is being seen as equally devastating. I thought that too many factors were in favor of some version of it passing.
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Rick Perry was appointed by Donald Trump to head the Department of Energy, the department that Perry said he wanted to eliminate when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2012 but famously flamed out when he forgot it when trying to list the three government agencies that he thought should be gotten rid of. It makes sense that he would be assigned to head that particular agency as part of the Trump administration’s seeming goal of destroying the government.
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There has been high drama about the Trumpcare (aka ACHA) health bill introduced to replace Obamacare and whether it will pass both houses of Congress despite Republicans having majorities in both. Yesterday’s deadline for a vote, set for the stupid symbolic reason that it was the seventh anniversary of Obamacare’s passage, came and went without a vote and another deadline has been set for today.
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On the first day of each spring, I like to play some version of George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun because it perfectly captures the joy of emerging from winter, even when the winters have been so mild as the last two have been in Cleveland. Of course, the first official day of spring was this past Monday but I sneer at being bound by calendars. For me, the first day of spring has to feel warm, sunny, have no snow on the ground, and be late enough in the year so that even though it will snow again, that snow will quickly disappear within a day or so.
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The premise of this utterly hilarious Swedish film is right there in the title. On his 100th birthday, as the staff of the nursing home where he lives are getting a cake ready for the celebration, Allan Karlsson decides that he has had it with nursing home life. So he climbs out of the window of his room, wanders down to the local bus station, and buys a ticket for as far as the little money he has on him will take him.
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Traditional science journals get their money from ads and/or individual and library subscriptions. You cannot pay to have your paper published and thus this system avoids obvious conflicts of interest for authors and journals. The catch is that this prevents wider dissemination of the articles since the subscriptions are expensive. The costs have risen so dramatically that even libraries cannot afford to maintain the range of journals they once had. Why these costs have risen so much and the role of for-profit publishing houses in pushing up those costs is a hot topic but not the issue I want to discuss in this post. What this is about is how an effort to find a solution to the cost and low accessibility problems has had unintended consequences.
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