The Algebra of Health Care

Obama's wish list for Health Care governance was an exercise in good algebra and, quite frankly, a relief.

THIS IS WHAT I VOTED FOR.

Like the vast majority of Americans, I want health care to provide a universal safety net of care for every citizen. Schools cannot remedy children's poor health care or no health care care at all. Obama's plan as outlined will remove one of the key poverty related handicaps many students face. And that's a key to reducing family stress and personal insecurity in so many lives.

But something that critics fail to realize is that for such a plan to work, we cannot afford to cherry pick elements that are politically popular and dispose of the rest. Obama's plan recognizes the importance of algebraic planning.

Preventative medicine can balance the cost of reactionary and remedial treatment. That saves money.

Regulating insurance to eliminate health care caps and refusing service due to existing conditions yields a surprising by-product. That is that malpractice lawsuit awards will be reduced in scope because the victim of unanticipated circumstances will not need to worry about proper life-long care to the degree that they do today. The regulation will help balance the drivers of expensive settlements.

And critics (including MSM pundits whose shows are financed by drug companies) have been trashing the public option of a government insurance plan as a leftist concoction. This back-handed slander of the political left thinly veils the agenda in play.

The public option is first and foremost a government program. But so is the post office and FedEx makes a tidy profit nonetheless.

But aside from the non-profit nature of the exercise, there is gold in the details. The public option will for the first time establish a baseline set of standards for consumer protections. And that is key. This will eliminate the fine print gotchas that so dictates our current frustrations with health care. That alone eliminates needless bureaucracy and delayed payments as well as reduces the care-givers paperwork.

The whole is better than the parts as far as I can tell. Thinking parents will support this with enthusiasm. Healthier kids and peers mean fewer headaches for parents and fewer head-cases in schools.

Is Using Antibacterial Products Good For Healthy Kids?

A few weeks ago Scientific American ran this article that should cause some debate about these products.

Traditionally, people washed bacteria from their bodies and homes using soap and hot water, alcohol, chlorine bleach or hydrogen peroxide. These substances act nonspecifically, meaning they wipe out almost every type of microbe in sight—fungi, bacteria and some viruses—rather than singling out a particular variety.

Soap works by loosening and lifting dirt, oil and microbes from surfaces so they can be easily rinsed away with water, whereas general cleaners such as alcohol inflict sweeping damage to cells by demolishing key structures, then evaporate. "They do their job and are quickly dissipated into the environment," explains microbiologist Stuart Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine.

Unlike these traditional cleaners, antibacterial products leave surface residues, creating conditions that may foster the development of resistant bacteria, Levy notes. For example, after spraying and wiping an antibacterial cleaner over a kitchen counter, active chemicals linger behind and continue to kill bacteria, but not necessarily all of them.

When a bacterial population is placed under a stressor—such as an antibacterial chemical—a small subpopulation armed with special defense mechanisms can develop. These lineages survive and reproduce as their weaker relatives perish. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is the governing maxim here, as antibacterial chemicals select for bacteria that endure their presence.

Something Krugman Forgot to Mention

Paul Krugman explains children's health issues to opponents in A Socialist Plot.

And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.

Here's what I mean: The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of the Bush Council of Economic Advisers, contrasts the position of liberals, who he says believe in equality of outcomes, with that of conservatives, who he says believe that the goal of policy should be "to give everyone the same shot and not be surprised or concerned when outcomes differ wildly."

But a child who doesn't receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn't receive an adequate education, doesn't have the same shot - he or she doesn't have the same chances in life as children who get both these things.

And insurance is crucial to receiving adequate health care. President Bush may think that lacking insurance is no problem - "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room" - but the reality is that the nine million children in America who don't have health insurance often have unmet medical or dental needs, don't have a regular place for medical care, and frequently have to delay care because of cost.

Now, the public understands the importance of health insurance, even if Mr. Bush doesn't. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an amazing 94 percent of the public regards the fact that many children in America lack health insurance as either a "serious" or a "very serious" problem.

So how can conservatives defend the indefensible, and oppose giving children the health care they need? By trying the old welfare queen in her Cadillac strategy (albeit without the racial innuendo that made it so effective when Reagan used it). That is, to divert public sympathy from people who really need help, they're trying to change the subject to the supposedly undeserving recipients of government aid. Hence the emphasis on the evils of "middle-class welfare."

Proponents of an expansion of children's health care have, as they should, responded to this strategy with facts and figures. Congressional Budget Office estimates show that S-chip expansion would, in fact, primarily benefit those who need it most: the great majority of children receiving coverage under an expanded program would otherwise have been uninsured.

But the more fundamental response should be, so what?

A sublime by-product of insuring every child might also be that healthier students cost less to educate. Today schools absorb enormous costs for special needs that are more rightfully health issues and not education issues per se.

Failing Schools and Failing Health

About a week ago, maybe more, I was catching up with my Board of Education handouts and was browsing through a Connecticut School Health Survey (CSHS). This is put out (and I use the term loosely) by the Department of Education and the Department of Public Health.

On the cover letter, it offered a couple of people to call "if you have any questions". I did. Identifying myself as a school board member with questions I called both Dr. Mhoura Newsom-Stewart (860.567.0863) and Mrs. Cherl Resha (860.807.2108) over a week ago and never received a call back.

Funny how adults getting paid by public funds have so little accountability yet children are held to task 24 by 7. Oh well, I'm going to guess they're working their fingers to the bone.

Anyway, my question pertained to the responses they received from the survey. Five plus percent of schools reported that 26 to 75 percent of their attending students had no health insurance. Even the majority of schools who reported otherwise still reported that as much as 50 percent of their populations might not be covered. And there are more devils to be discussed in these details - unattended mental health issues, poor dental health, and so on.

Nowhere in the survey do the people administering it ever consider mapping the findings to the failing schools issue even though the results read like child-labor sweatshop health conditions of third-world children.

I'm not going to even bother going into a rant about this. But it seems to me teachers who are being accused in these failing schools should demand a recount of extenuating circumstances. Furthermore, the Rell administration needs to belly up to the health clinics with getting these kids on the Husky plan.

Improve Your Memory

I just ran across a great website that is dedicated to biosingularity.

This blog article is of most importance today because schools are becoming increasingly required to provide healthy food alternatives. The article celebrates apple juice as an important nutrient for everyone to begin enjoying. Here's the evidence;

Research shows benefits of apple juice on neurotransmitter affecting memory

For those who think that apple juice is a kid’s drink, think again. Apples and apple juice may be among the best foods that baby boomers and senior citizens could add to their diet, according to new research that demonstrates how apple products can help boost brain function similar to medication.

Animal research from the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) indicates that apple juice consumption may actually increase the production in the brain of the essential neurotransmitter acetylcholine, resulting in improved memory. Neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine are chemicals released from nerve cells that transmit messages to other nerve cells. Such communication between nerve cells is vital for good health, not just in the brain, but throughout the body.

“We anticipate that the day may come when foods like apples, apple juice and other apple products are recommended along with the most popular Alzheimer’s medications,” says Thomas Shea, Ph.D., director of the UML Center for Cellular Neurobiology and Neurodegeneration Research.

Can You Spare A Dime?

An opinion piece [more fact than opinion] in today's New York Times is a wake-up call to everyone working in the Private sector and needs to be a wake-up call to everyone working on tax dollars. Income is dropping for the under-65 years of age working population.

To me there's no mystery involved. The tax myth that giving tax breaks to corporations and the rich will somehow enrich us all is empirically false. Taxes continue to rise, government has ballooned, and parents and children are taking the hardest hits.

Downward Mobility from the New York Times Opinion section.

If you’re still harboring the notion that the economy is “good,” prepare to be disabused.

Even the best number from yesterday’s Census Bureau report for 2005 is bad news for most Americans. It shows that median income rose 1.1 percent last year, to $46,326, the first increase since it peaked in 1999. But the entire increase is attributable to the 23 million households headed by someone over age 65. So the gain is likely from investment income and Social Security, not wages and salaries.

For the other 91 million households, the median dropped, by half a percent, or $275. Incomes for the under-65 crowd were hurt by a decline in wages and salaries among full-time working men for the second year in a row, and among full-time working women for the third straight year. In all, median income for the under-65 group was $2,000 lower in 2005 than in 2001, when the last recession bottomed out.

Despite the Bush-era expansion, the number of Americans living in poverty in 2005 — 37 million — was the same as in 2004. This is the first time the number has not risen since 2000. But the share of the population now in poverty — 12.6 percent — is still higher than at the trough of the last recession, when it was 11.7 percent. And among the poor, 43 percent were living below half the poverty line in 2005 — $7,800 for a family of three. That’s the highest percentage of people in “deep poverty” since the government started keeping track of those numbers in 1975.

As for the uninsured, their ranks grew in 2005 by 1.3 million people, to a record 46.6 million, or 15.9 percent. That’s also worse than the recession year 2001, reflecting the rising costs of health coverage and a dearth of initiatives to help families and companies cope with the burden. For the first time since 1998, the percentage of uninsured children increased in 2005.

Junk Food and Junk Legislation

Washington passed some good legislation recently. They're trying to improve the quality of food served in schools as well as ensure that children are fed to begin with (subsidized breakfasts and so on).

But troubling issues persist, Senator Harkin's legislation makes sense.

Lawmakers try to expel junk food from schools
Friday, April 7, 2006; Posted: 10:02 a.m. EDT (14:02 GMT)

Lawmakers blame high-fat, high-sugar snacks that compete with nutritious meals in schools.

"Junk food sales in schools are out of control," Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, said Thursday. "It undercuts our investment in school meal programs and steers kids toward a future of obesity and diet-related disease."

Harkin and a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill to have the Agriculture Department set new nutritional standards for all food sold in schools. The goal is to restrict junk food sales in schools.

The department sets standards for breakfasts and lunches in federal school meal programs, which reimburse public and nonprofit private schools for giving free or reduced-price meals to kids. Those meals must follow federal dietary guidelines, which call for more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and less calories, fat, added sugars and sodium.

But the standards don't apply to a la carte lines in cafeterias, vending machines or school stores. The Agriculture Department has tried to restrict junk food before, but a 1983 federal court ruling, in a lawsuit by the National Soft Drink Association, said the limits could only apply to cafeterias during meals, not for the entire day throughout campus.

The last paragraph is critical. In CT, the Rell administration has passed legislation encouraging schools to eliminate or severely restrict vending machine sales, school charity and non-profit sales, and so on.

I wish the Democrats had said no to this. Instead, School Boards across the State of CT are now at the mercy of the OPWGIABUCs (Orwellian-dispositioned people with good intentions and bad unintended consequences). So today we have Corporations pitting their special interest money against this legislation and, quite frankly, I'm on the vendor's side.

I happen to favor something else (and, yes, it's too late so this is just spitting into the wind, but...). I would like to see the Democratic leadership offer a bill that eliminates Rell's proposal in favor of a bill that taxes healthier food less in grocery stores and offers tax breaks to the creation of smaller grocery stores (moms and pops) who carry high volumes of healthier food vs big boxes that carry everything under the sun. Here, rather than creating a class of nutritional criminals who need an occasional candy bar or soda, we allow people to choose healthy, less expensive meals (WELLness) OR to exercise their God-given right to be as fat, unhealthy, or happy eating whatever they damned-well choose.

A second-part of the legislation must require soft-drink vendors to offer healthy alternatives on school premises. Nutritionalists can create guidelines for a boutique class of beverage that is healthy, lower-in sugar, and so on. Coke and Pepsi and whoever can all get this done. The soft-drink machines must offer low-fat chocolate milks and drinks as well as (say) green tea and low-sugared juices, and so on.

A third leg of the legislation can require vending machines to dispense a minimum of one or a set limit of drinks per day per student id card. Student id cards could work just like NY's subway cards, add a magnetic stripe that the student uses as a cash card. The students load the card with a few dollars worth of purchasing power and the machines regulate usage. This gives parents a record of eating habits for their child and gets the school out of the nutritional cop business.

Teachers and administrators are adults and citizens, nobody has the right to tell them what to eat. Nor should parents of fundraisers wind up having to flee school grounds to sell brownies. This kind of regulation is absurd at face value.

On a final note, personal health is becoming a science that's increasingly able to map every individual's body to a health profile unique to the individual. Access to this level of health care is increasingly based on wealth but nonetheless, legislation that attempts to broadly enforce nutrition regiments ON EVERYBODY NO MATTER WHAT are doomed to fail and leave a wake of nasty, ugly lawsuits in tow. Jody Rell's feel-good election year grandstanding will slam this State hard in the coming years, truthi but unwholesome.

I would urge all school boards in CT to conform to the minimum required to stay out of the line of fire. The biologic needs of children are all different. For example, I've been repeatedly lectured that fruit juices are unhealthy because they are high in sugars and so on. I have two healthy, athletic boys who grew up on 2% milk, fruit juice and balanced diets - I have yet to see anything detrimental about their ingestion of fruit juices. While nutritional studies may find overweight people have problems with these items, is it really the State's right to prevent my healthy teenagers from drinking something I have no problem with and they have no problem with?

The Good Hypothesis- The blessing of children for moms

This morning's NPR Morning Edition ran this intriguingstory about the credible but yet unproven hypothesis that baby cells linger in the mom and persist to heal the female body in times of need. Fascinating stuff...

Babies' Cells Linger, May Protect Mothers by Robert Krulwich

If fetal cells really are helping moms, I wonder if women who have babies (and abortions and miscarriages) tend to live longer than women who do not conceive. After all, the Conceivers have an extra gang (the more conceptions, the bigger the gang) of helpful cells inside.

Maybe there's some measurable consequence. And if the Good Hypothesis turns out to be true and every child leaves a posse of good soldiers in their mothers, then no matter how crummy we are to our moms, we are, willingly or unwillingly, still doing something nice for her -- on the inside.

Barack Obama talks about raising daughters

In this overlooked address to the National Women's Law Center, we are reminded about some unspoken issues that go hand in hand with education. Here's a couple of brief quotes. Click the title for the original text.

The social contract between Americans and their government - the bargain that says if you're willing to work hard for your country then your country will make it easier for you to get ahead and raise a family - was made for a time when most women stayed home with the kids and most workers stayed with one company for their entire lives.

But even though this time is long past - even though the vast majority of women with children today are working, including single mothers - we still have social policies designed around the old model of the male breadwinner.

And so women still earn 76% of what men do. They receive less in health benefits, less in pensions, less in Social Security. They receive little help for the rising cost of child care. They make up 71% of all Medicaid beneficiaries, and a full two-thirds of all the Americans who lost their health care this year. When women go on maternity leave, America is the only country in the industrialized world to let them go unpaid. When their children become sick and are sent home from school, many mothers are forced to choose between caring for their child and keeping their job.

In short, when it comes to making your way in a twenty-first century economy, our daughters still do not have the same opportunities as our sons.

The Administration's answer to this would only exacerbate the problem for women. The idea here is to give everyone one big refund on their government - divvy it up into some tax breaks, hand them out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own unemployment insurance, education, and so forth.

But for the single mom who's already making less than her male counterpart - the mom who had to go without a paycheck for three months when her daughter was born, who's now facing skyrocketing child care costs and an employer who doesn't provide health care coverage for part-time work - for this mom, getting a few hundred bucks off the next tax bill won't solve the problem, will it?

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it - Social Darwinism, every man and woman for him or herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford - tough luck. It allows us to say to the women who lose their jobs when they have to care for a sick child - life isn't fair. It let's us say to the child born into poverty - pull yourself up by your bootstraps

But there is a problem. It won't work. It ignores our history. Our economic dominance has depended on individual initiative and belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity

And so if we're serious about this opportunity, if we truly value families and don't think it's right to penalize parenting, then we need to start acting like it. We need to update the social contract in this country to include the realities faced by working women.