hipparchia's blog

Take a page from the Republican play book: have your candidates for office sign a pledge and then hold them to it.

The pledge? Bring back pork barrel spending. Bring home the Federal dollars to your district or state. Tax the rich to pay for it.

It's not really a true jobs guarantee program, and it would be a far far better thing if they spend the money on stuff we really need, but even bridges to nowhere provide jobs, plus they're less morally objectionable than, say, drone manufacturing. Read below the fold...

The Dartmouth Atlas is a decades-long project that has primarily documented that some dead old people are more expensive than others and that some parts of the country seem to have more expensive dead old people than do other parts of the country. Read below the fold...

because 64 seems as good a baseline as any... Read below the fold...

Or if Christmas isn't your thing, there's Hanukkah (holy cow!) or Yule or Kwanzaa or any number of other Winter Solstice observances that you may never have heard of (I hadn't).

Corrente | If you have "no place to go," come here! is an apt description of how I got here in the first place, being at the time (the 2008 primaries) a Hillary supporter surrounded by Obama Fan Club members, on the internet, at least, but I found other like-minded people here.

This was followed closely by the Financial Meltdown and there really was no one place where you could find good information - except here. And too, I was a new convert to the idea of single payer, but who was talking about that? Nobody - except Corrente.

All this has to be paid for somehow, and I knew that the US printed its own money, but beyond sort of fuzzily realizing that, how did that work? Ha! Some Correnteans not only wrote about it here, they even organized a conference.

And where else are you going to find live blogs on single payer advocacy (here! here! here!) or being a Green Party candidate (here!) or how to be a guerilla projectionist (here!)?

But life is not all politics and economics and activism, and neither is Corrente. Read below the fold...

Read below the fold...

The AMA has come out in favor of voucherizing Medicare.

AMA's Council on Medical Sacrifice Service:

The Council recommends that the AMA support transitioning Medicare to a defined contribution program that would enable beneficiaries to purchase coverage of their choice through a Medicare exchange of competing health insurance plans.

Don McCanne, of PNHP: Read below the fold...

Hey, I didn't make up that blog post title, somebody else did. It's a nice explication of how flu viruses work, and includes a salutary bit of browbeating too.

h/t to athena1 for reminding me that i don't read nsfwcorp often enough. Read below the fold...

Can I have a Halloween do-over post? Black cats are iconic, but... bats! That's a Lesser Long-nosed Bat and not only is it cute as the dickens, Read below the fold...

Read below the fold...

Okay, so part 3 will just have to wait another day or two... this popularity of Medicare Advantage is related, actually.

From the article that lambert links to:

In New York, Medicare Advantage is even more popular, particularly in New York City, where more than one-third of eligible seniors in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx are signed up.

Read below the fold...

For lambert, who asks for a takedown of this JAMA article, Potential Consequences of Reforming Medicare Into a Competitive Bidding System.

When I wrote part 1, I hadn't read the entire article, since it was behind a paywall. Lucky for you, lambert has provided a link to the article itself, so now you get to read a second blog post on this stuff! Read below the fold...

For lambert, who asks for a takedown of this JAMA article, Potential Consequences of Reforming Medicare Into a Competitive Bidding System.

The article is behind a paywall but you can buy one day's access to it for $30 if you want to read it. I'm not going to give them 2 weeks' worth of my catfood money, so rather than writing a rebuttal of that particular article, I'll happily make your eyes glaze over with lots of stuff on privatizing Medicare in general.

First, a couple of definitions... Read below the fold...

As I was reading this at PNHP's Quote of the Day, I was thinking: this could be the most important blog post ever written about health care. Sure enough, at the end, Don McCanne wrote: Howard Waitzkin's article is too important to edit it for Quote of the Day. It is presented here in its entirety. No comment necessary.

So here it is. Read below the fold...

... is apparently going to start killing Medicare as we know it in 2013.

If you have Medicare now and are reasonably prosperous and healthy, you'll get to keep your benefits, your choice of doctor and hospital and pharmacy and so forth.

But if you have the audacity to become expensively sick and very, very poor, so sick and so poor as to require not only Medicare but Medicaid too to pay for your health care, you are in danger of essentially being pushed out of Medicare and shoved into Medicaid, whether you like it or not. Read below the fold...

I started to answer lambert's question Could a watershed, an airshed, or an aquifer be considered "public property"? If so, what would that look like and how would it be managed? in a comment and it sort of snowballed...

Watershed... you mean, like the Mississippi River? Read below the fold...