Be Careful What You Wish For

It's a pretty fair statement to say that I've had an above average familiarity with American healthcare. Worked my way through school as a pulmonary technician at a local hospital, 20+ years a dentist, abstracting hospital charts for HICFA, working for BC/BS of Maryland (CareFirst), helping to create electronic document management for another major mid-Atlantic insurer, and not least being married to Deb whose been a nurse for 20+ years. I'm no expert by any means but I certainly have some experience compared to the average person.

Like just about everyone else I'm quite concerned about our American healthcare system. It is indeed suffering, but the simplistic rhetoric that I'm hearing in this election year is even more troublesome. This is a complex problem that will require reform in many arenas if there is to be any hope in not only maintaining the best health care delivery system but also improving it. Rather than creating the mother of all blog posts I'm going to try to create a series of posts, each addressing some facet of the solution or potential pitfall.

My first comment is one of great caution allowing government, especially at a federal level, to assume the role of gatekeeper. History shows us that we should expect a system that is bureaucratic and authoritarian - two attributes you do not want when you're seeking medical treatment. Many folks rail that we are backwards because we do not have a system of National Healthcare such as England. Yet look at what we see being reported from across the pond - cancer patients threatened with treatment termination should they attempt to acquire an additional anti-cancer drug which they're willing to pay for on their own. It is a classic and expected outcome of a bureaucracy attempting to apply rules. We'd fare no better - and in fact, we already do similar enforcement in Medicare where a physician and patient may not engage in any private contract or else the doctor will be barred from participating in Medicare for two years as a penalty.

So, tenet #1: Keep the gatekeeper keys to your medical care out of the hands of the government

Adieu VJC

We've been waiting, hoping against hope that they'd change their minds, but now they've gone and done it. This week Villa Julie College became a university and with it abandoned their name in favor of the insipid "Stevenson University".

"We" is my family - which includes three VJC students/alumni - as well as lots of other students, alumni, and parents. We supported the institution obtaining university status, but this goofy idea that somehow the name was hurting them because it was feminine - what a bunch of nonsense! If ever there was a solution in search of a problem dreamt up by some high-priced consultants justifying their services, this is it! You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what attracts students to enroll at a college. Do you offer a degree in what interests me? Do you have a solid academic program that will enable me to succeed upon graduation or in my graduate studies? Are the facilities modern? And yes, how's the campus social life? The name of the place is pretty far down the list.

Villa Julie had steadily risen in recognition over the last decade, focusing on a solid education in a small setting with faculty that really cared about their students. The US News & World Report rankings had them 13th for Northern schools offering a baccalaureate. Other online ratings showed an above average opinion of the school. Reputation of graduates in the business community was also increasing thanks to the adherence to a mission statement embodied by their "design your career" motto. And they certainly did not have a problem attracting applicants.

But that's all history now. My diploma, my alumni vanity license plates, my alumni' decal, my VJC tumblers, etc., etc., - all are rendered quaint anachronisms thanks to president Manning. Time will tell just where the university is going in this rush to become something else. The only thing I can do is shake my head and wonder why the school was so uncomfortable in its own skin, while at the same time so many of us who attended it grew to love it and were immensely proud of it- feminine name and all.

Pay to Play

Last week I caught a story about Chicago Little League running afoul of Major League Baseball for using the team names/logos for their kids. The story implied that MLB would only allow them to use the copyrighted material with appropriate fees. At first this makes me angry - for crying out loud, these young boys (and girls) will grow up to fill those stands that help pay those obscene player salaries. How can you possibly be so greedy (and short-sighted) to do this?

But then I read a little bit more - specifically an article by Jim Litke. While it still seems pretty crass I have to admit that the real villain here is probably more the uniform supplier which is trying to skate by the licensing fees for using the MLB logos. You really can not blame the league for protecting their copyright, even if it is being used for a good cause. And as Litke points out in his article, the league does support youth baseball to the tune of 30 million dollars a year.

Despite that logical reasoning it still feels ugly in your gut - sorta like when Disney sues a day-care mom for having painted Mickey Mouse in the play room without paying royalties. Yeah, they're right - but it somehow seems awfully petty.

Ernistine's Revenge

If you're more of a baby boomer than a Gen XYZ you may remember the lady pictured here - "Ernestine the Operator" played by Lily Tomlin. Her short skits lampooning the monopolistic phone company of the 1970's were hilarious - in part because they resonated with viewers who had been frustrated getting decent customer service. With the breakup of ATT Ernestine got a pink slip as - theoretically - competition among the baby Bells would deliver an attitude adjustment towards customers if they had a choice.

But I'm beginning to think that Ernestine is alive and well at ATT/Cingular, and is just having a blast dissing all the cell phone customers. Case in point - about four months ago Deb's phone went on the fritz so she went in and picked out a new one. There was, as usual, a rebate that you could have if you extended the contract. And the representative actually cut out the barcode, filled out the form, and dropped it into an envelope for us to mail. So imagine our surprise in about four weeks when we get a note saying that they're sorry but no rebate because there was no barcode enclosed. How do you prove it was in there? Guess next time we need to photocopy it before sending it off.

Then the bills start coming. Aren't cell bills fun? It is positively painful to try to assess one for why your bill has jumped by $20, especially if you have 3 phones on the account like we do. After wading through comparisons I finally figured out that they had increased the "family plan" base rate - a facet of extending our contract that the saleswoman conveniently omitted. But then looking further there's also a "multi-media" charge for this new phone - again, a feature not asked for (Deb is not about to be sending & receiving pictures with her friends). So Monday I'll be at the ATT store dealing with the latest incarnation of Ernestine. I'd switch companies but somehow it always seems that right as we're near the end of the contract somebody's phone gives out - and besides, would it really be any better over at Verizon? Nahhh....

If That's True, Why Bother?

So I'm reading the Examiner today and see the story about the annual crack down on drivers not wearing seat belts. Knowing me you might assume that this blog will be a commentary on how a law that was sold to voters as a "you'll only get a ticket if you're stopped for some other infraction" has morphed into what it's become today - but you'd be wrong! No, what has my ire is the opening line of the article, "In Maryland, 52 percent of drivers killed at night last year failed to wear sear belts."

This is supposed to be a compelling statistic that makes the case for wearing a seat belt - that nearly just as many people wearing their seatbelt are killed as those who blithely disregard the law? Forgive me, but in the words of Dick Cheney, "So?"

Does anyone read these articles? I know we're not talking about an article for a peer reviewed journal but my rant today is that the article is really nothing but a press release and probably should have been paid for as advertising (wait - maybe it was....). The article then goes on to state that seat belts could have saved an estimated 180 lives, but then I'm wondering if we could also say that 170 lives could have been saved if people didn't wear them.

What's missing here of course is information on the percentage of people that routinely wear seatbelts. If the article had stated something along the lines of "while it's estimated that only 10% of drivers fail to buckle up they accounted for over half of the nighttime fatalities last year", then you have compelling statistics for buckling up. So while pouring resources into this enforcement campaign is not a great ROI in my opinion, what troubles me more is the lack of critical writing (which probably comes about from a lack of critical thinking).

For the record:

• I wear my seatbelt religiously
• I make all human passengers wear their seatbelt

The Real Climate Crisis

We went to see Ben Stein's movie Expelled over the weekend. The film is basically a documentary that explores how academic circles have reacted to the idea of Intelligent Design (ID). For those who are not familiar with it ID basically says that certain features of the universe and life are better explained by an intelligent agent than an undirected process. If you consider the ever unfolding complexity of cells and the second law of thermodynamics (things naturally become more chaotic in the absence of an external force) it certainly seems a rational hypothesis that something intelligent (God, Zeus, Martians) had a hand in setting up life.

It is natural and appropriate that educators and academia guard against bogus science that has a religious agenda. But Expelled exposes that scientists who desire to explore the validity of ID are meeting a firestorm of PC that is costing them credibility and in some cases their jobs. It seems that ID is being viewed as an attempt to bring Creationism into the classroom. While an instructor with a creationist agenda could possibly use ID to promote it, that should not be reason to brand anyone researching the topic as a religious zealot to be ostracized. In short, scientists should be able to explore the theory and publish their findings for peer review in an environment that is free of reprisal. That is the heart of science - making observations and determining how well a theory predicts them.

Of course ID is not the only arena that is suffering from this stifling of scientific discussion. Our current study of global climate changes is a critical point in case. Climate science, like cell biology, is an incredibly complex field in which our understanding is far from perfect.

If you get the chance I'd recommend that you see Expelled. We need to have an open academic climate where scientists can present their findings for review so that, through debate and review, we can hopefully arrive at the best decision. PC has no value in science.

Saturn Refined

For some time now, perhaps a decade or more, the Internet/PC revolution has been doing some amazing things for amateur astronomers like myself. One of the biggest advances has been in the ability to take a video image of a planet and then refine that into a picture of surprising quality. The rational is that the video is grabbing images at the rate of about 30 per second, so over the period of a couple of minutes you've taken thousands of images. Of these, some are taken during moments of split-second steady seeing, those sort of moments that the observer is trained to take a mental snapshot to record those fleeting details. From there running the images through a software program allows you to align the images and retain only the most clear, stacking them into a final result that certainly seems greater than the sum of its parts!

At this point I am pretty much a hack, having purchased a simple B&W surveillance camera and aligning it behind the eyepiece of my venerable 6" Criterion reflector telescope. What has been really motivating is the results (above) from the new release of the software RegiStax. I have not been out to take images in a couple of years, partly because the results were "OK" but hardly special, and partly because it does involve some effort to get everything out and set up. The image above (a single frame on the left, final result on the right) comes from an AVI I created back in November 2003 when Saturn's rings were pretty open (they're closing up now). I never even came close to approaching this sort of detail in any of my conventional (film) astrophotography off and on over thirty years. Not only is the result very pleasing - readily showing the rings' shadow play and the gap between the A ring and B ring - but to think that it's data that's five years old! How cool is that - simply keeping the data on CD or DVD disks will allow me later to tease out images, even when my days of lugging around telescope, video camera, and tracking mount are behind me.

OK, so now I am psyched - I've got to get my 10" scope on that tracking mount so I can get some more shots this summer!