VA for all????

The other night NBC news called the VA medical system better than private care in the US. The vets deserve the best, but what are the rest of us getting? The US ranks lower than Europe on many health indicators, like infant mortality and life expectancy to name just two. And--here's the kicker--we're paying more for the privilege of having less, roughly $6000 per person. The VA is an excellent example of nationalized medicine. Fat chance a UK-style national health service would happen here, but we need something more than the health care maze we have today. It just doesn't work, and even most doctors think single-payer insurance is a great idea.

Hap hap haplotype

I'm not in the habit of reading this online journal, but I thought I'd give this article a whirl after reading about it in the newpaper. The upshot is that human beings were still evolving much more recently than previously thought, perhaps only 6600 years ago.. Not only that, but genetic change occurred swiftly and surely.

The evidence for this is the presence of novel chromosome mini-fragments (haplotypes) in three human populations: African, East Asian, and Northern European. The types of genes relate to metabolic function, like the sensitivity to alcohol in East Asians or skin pigmentation (Europeans) or hair morphology (Africans).

Natural selection, adaptation, survival. It's the same old, same old. But is human evolution happening today? All you need is differential survival of one or more genes. What genotypes leave more of themselves in the next generation? What genotypes tend to mate with each other? I don't think it's possible today unless among remote tribes that do not mate outside their circle.

Life is more than ABC's

I'm a volunteer tutor of a first and second grader over in Hell's Kitchen . One goes to the local public school and the other, a parochial school. The kids are trudging along in their reading and math, but I found that they are sorely lacking in the most basic geography. They only sort-of know the name of the street where they live but do not know their home addresses. What if they got lost? What would they tell the policeman?

They weren't really comfortable with the idea that they lived on an island. Even though they travelled over the bridge or tunnel to New Jersey to visit relatives, they didn't know the name of the river they were travelling over—or the GW Bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel. I'm not saying this to disrespect my little darlings, because they have brains like sponges and soak up anything spilled in their vicinity. BUT someone is not spilling basic stuff over them.
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Liberty, justice, and one-payer for all

Bravo Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in their New York Review of Books critique of what's wrong with America's free market, free enterprise, out-of-control health care system. In a word, inefficiency. Or three words, sky high costs. They have a chart showing the US inferior to Canada, France, and the UK in salient health indicators (e.g.,infant mortality, longevity). Yet US costs are almost double those of France, and much higher than each of the others. Krugman and Wells bank on a single-payer system to solve many of our health woes.

I wish the American people would take up arms against the insurance companies and Big Pharma to call for a single-payer health care system. Medicare for all: simple, effective, efficient.

Ask your grandmother how well Medicare works for her. Harry and Louise should be eligible for Medicare by now. I'd bet they've changed their minds, so maybe we should bring 'em on again.