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Ben Morrish

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US Healthcare Reform vote: A Healthy Outcome But Not A Healthy Majority

Posted Sunday, November 08, 2009 (54 minutes ago.) Viewed 1 times.

In yesterday's historic vote in the House Of Representatives backed a healthcare bill, moving the US one step closer to a reformed healthcare system. This is great news, and brings the US closer to a fairer, better regulated and more accessible healthcare system.

However, the vote was close....extremely close in fact. The bill needed 218 votes to get a majority.... it got 220. 3 few votes and it would have failed.

This is a concern, as it means almost half of the Representatives think the current US healthcare system is better than the proposed reformed version.

Let's have a quick look at the current system:

Despite the vast amounts of money spent on healthcare in the US, its healthcare under-performs massively.... many countries that spend half the amount the US does have healthcare systems that significantly outperform that of the US.

The World Health Organization rated the US healthcare system 1st in expenditure, but only 37th in performance. This clearly indicates that right now, the US people - taxpayers and insurance payers - are getting ripped off.

A recent Harvard study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, indicated that approximately 44,800 people in the US die every year due to lack of health insurance cover. That's a LOT of people killed by the system's failure to ensure everyone is covered.

The National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine points out that the US is the "only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure universal coverage". For a country that has long lead the world in so many areas, this is surely an embarassing state of affairs.

Let's think again about the 44,800 people who die EVERY year due to lack of health insurance cover. That's a lot of people. It's 10 times more deaths every year than there were during the entire course of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Republicans have a significantly higher proportion of people who claim to be "pro Life", yet just one Republican representative voted in favour of the reforms that could save a lot of these 44,800 lives every year.

One Republican representative, Candice Miller, said "We are going to have a complete government takeover of our healthcare system faster than you can say 'this is making me sick'".

This statement, in my opinion, encapsulates a lot of the irrationality shown by many opponents of healthcare reform (as does the now legendary quote about Stephen Hawking and the NHS).

Government takeover of the healthcare system is presented as a bad thing. But think about it.... if it isn't controlled by the government, it is controlled by non-elected private (self) interests... by companies whose first goal is to make money.

Non-profit companies are widespread in terms of hospitals, but not in the health insurance market. Small wonder that Americans are currently paying over the odds for a sup-par healthcare system!

The government is elected by the people, so why on Earth shouldn't the people, through their elected government, have control of their healthcare system?
How is leaving that control largely in the hands of private, profit-driven companies preferable?

I'm very glad the House of Representatives backed the bill. The proposed reforms may not be perfect, but they can't be much further away from perfect than the current system, which is frankly terrible - supremely expensive but massively underperforming.

The proposed changes would bring the US system a step closer to the systems in countries who spend less on healthcare but get better performance and have much wider access to healthcare.

More "socialised" healthcare systems work, and work better and more efficiently than the current mess of conflicting private interests in the US system (there's evidence from numerous countries demonstrating this), yet "socialised" is a dirty word to many in the US.

For the sake of the American people, I hope the healthcare reforms get through the Senate and can start making a difference and saving lives as soon as possible.

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The Twittering: Social Networking Evolved

Posted Tuesday, October 06, 2009 (32 days 17 hours ago.) Viewed 63 times.

My history of social networking is fairly uneventful, I've never really got into it in a big way, but I've enjoyed dabbling with it.

I signed up to MySpace years ago, and soon got bored of it. Then I joined Facebook. Which would be brilliant if it wasn't so saturated with spammy apps.

The "biggest thing" at the moment seems to be Twitter, which oddly is also the smallest thing in terms of what it does - just short messages, of no more than 140 characters (although they can include hyperlinks). That's about it really. You can post to Twitter from your computer, or even from your phone (via SMS, or via mobile Internet).

You can view the latest messages posted by the entire Twitter community if you want (although you can choose for your own messages not to show in this bit), or you can view the recent messages from the people you've chosen to follow.

These can be your real life friends if you want, but it seems that most people use it to follow celebrities so that they can regularly receive important updates about the minutiae of their celebrity lives.

Some celebrities provide genuinely interesting updates about what they are up to, while others seem to have PR people running their Twitter accounts for them, which can make them a bit boring to follow.

Stephen Fry is one of the most popular people you can follow, and he treats his virtual stalkers with a near-constant stream of updates, wherever in the world he might happen to be. He is also known for interacting with his followers more than most.

On one occasion, he posted messages to Twitter (an act known as "tweeting", with the messages themselves being referred to as "tweets") from inside a lift he happened to get stuck in - he even posted pictures of himself and the other unfortunates during their incarceration:

In a way, it was as if all of us who Follow him where in there with him. Although not literally of course as 750,000+ people in a lift together for several hours would no doubt be somewhat unpleasant, even with Mr Fry present to provide his well-loved witty banter.

If you haven't already, come out and play with the Twitterers!

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iHate The Use Of The Lower Case "i" As A Prefix For Everything

Posted Sunday, October 04, 2009 (34 days 22 hours ago.) Viewed 2,372 times.

Today, the iPhone is probably the most talked about gadget in the world.

I regularly see news about iPhones show up on my iGoogle page.

If I wanted to, I could read about iPhones on iGoogle on an iMac.

Or perhaps I could watch "I, Claudius" on an iPlayer widget in my iGoogle on an iMac!

In the days before the "i" prefix was attached to seemingly everything, we were plagued by the "e" prefix, which at least stood for something - electronic.

We had e-mail, e-books and e-business. That's fine - these were all electronic versions of existing things, and having to say "electronic mail" every time would become annoying pretty quickly.

So the "e" prefix was helpful, for two reasons - it told us that we were talking about an electronic version of something, and it saved us having to pronounce 75% of the syllables in "electronic" every time.

The "i" prefix has no such redeeming features. Apple, who are one of the companies most responsible for its current ubiquity, originally stated it stood for Internet. Of course, since "Internet" is a proper noun it starts with a capital letter, so using the lowercase "i" prefix is a minor crime against grammar.

The more generous amongst you may be willing to overlook that, but even then, its standing for "Internet" doesn't really make sense. Apple originally introduced the prefix in the names of the iMac and iBook.

Sure, both of these could be used to access the Internet, but neither was noticeably more Internet-related than other desktop computers or laptops. In fact the iBook was the "cheapo" part of the Apple laptop range - using the Internet would be more fluid on the much more powerful (and much more descriptively named) Power Book series than on the supposed "Internet Book" range.

Seemingly encouraged by the success of these iProducts Apple went a bit iCrazy, and created the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iLife.

"iDon't Believe It!"

As if that wasn't iPlenty, the iLife software package consists of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and... wait for it.... iWeb. Oh, and it also includes GarageBand, which somehow missed out on getting an "i". But that is "the exception that proves the rule*".

Almost all of these applications, apart from iWeb, have little or nothing to do with the Internet.

The "i" prefixes are seemingly utterly meaningless, just a branding-executive's fetish.

The iPlague has spread outside of Apple's product line-up though, with the BBC having branded its online TV service / application "iPlayer". Google have an offering called iGoogle. There's even an iCoke website!

iCan't take it any more, iJust want branding people to start using a bit more iMagination (and no, you can't just have the "i" stand for imagination!) and get off the iPrefix bandwagon. Please?

* actually this phrase in its modern usage is nonsensical, so apologies for using it! Originally it made sense as "proves" was used in the sense of "puts to the test", and in the case of exceptions, "tested to breaking point".

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All True

US Healthcare Reform vote: A Healthy Outcome But Not A Healthy Majority

The Twittering: Social Networking Evolved

iHate The Use Of The Lower Case "i" As A Prefix For Everything

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