An Apple A Day

Thursday Cartoon Fun: It's A Trap Edition

Sunday Cartoon Fun: Ineptitude Edition

The Nelson Compromise (Are You Effin' Kidding Me?)

From digby:

Put another way: If you're buying insurance with help from the government, and the policy you want to buy covers abortions, you have to write two checks (or authorize two credit card transactions, etc.) for your plan. If the plan costs $1000 a month, and the insurer plans to sequester $50 to put into a pool that covers abortions, you have to make one payment of $950 and a separate payment of $50.

They Own Us

Robert Reich concludes:

From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market, and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it's just the reverse. Private insurers are exempt from competition. As a result, they are becoming ever more powerful. And it's not just their economic power that's worrying. It's also their political power, as we've learned over the last ten months. Economic and political power is a potent combination. Without some mechanism forcing private insurers to compete, we're going to end up with a national health care system that's controlled by a handful of very large corporations accountable neither to American voters nor to the market.

There Will Be A Public Option, But...

The way I understand this, the public option will only be for the currently uninsured. If this is the case, and I heard it discussed somewhere (Countdown w/ Anthony Weiner?), the public option is not an option for everyone. Instead it will be offered to those with no insurance. That means that those of us with employer-based health care will be stuck in it, with no opportunity to switch to the public option. Which also means there will be virtually NO competition. Competition was supposed to be the cost control. Now it looks like we will be forced to buy insurance, fined if we don't, and we get the same options we had before (all for-profit, money-grubbing firms like Aetna, Cigna and HealthNet) except that those companies now have some more of my taxpayer money, thanks to this stupid bill.

If I am right (comments, please), this is not health reform, and the public option is not public.

We need single payer, not this load of crap. A non-public public option is insulting.

I have a couple links in the sidebar where you can look up your senator and/or congressperson and write to them.

Bill Moyers Blames Democrats

Correctly placing blame is hard, unless you are Bill Moyers. In this clip Moyers explains to a rather stunned Maher how Democrats are as guilty a Republicans. For everything.

Anti-Vaccine? Death Wish?

I have some experience with anti-vaxxers (had a bit of trouble getting the frustrated kid vaccinated), so I am very happy to see The Bad Astronomer taking these idiots to task. Go Phil!!

I’m not shedding too many tears over the tsunami of bad press the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) is receiving right now.

I’ve written about them before, oh yes. They are the ones headed by Meryl Dorey, the woman who says vaccinations are dangerous, who says no one dies of pertussis, who says that it’s better not to vaccinate, who insinuates (at the 11:50 mark of that video) that doctors only vaccinate children because it’s profitable for them. She says that, even though on that live TV program she sat a few feet away from Toni and David McCaffery, parents who had just lost their four week old daughter to pertussis because she was too young to be vaccinated yet and the herd immunity in Sydney was too low to suppress the pertussis bacterium. This year alone, three babies in Australia, including young Dana McCaffery, have died from pertussis.

Not enough parents are vaccinating their children. And groups like the AVN spread misinformation about vaccines, spread it like a foul odor on the wind.

As I wrote a few days ago, the AVN will be investigated for their propaganda about vaccines. And now Dick Smith, an Australian businessman and founding skeptic there, has sponsored a devastating ad created by the Australian Skeptics. The ad ran in The Australian, a national newspaper, on Thursday:

The ad has picked up some press of its own; it was covered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website. The AVN claims they are not antivax, but instead are pro choice. Dick Smith disagrees:

They are actually anti-vaccination and they should put on every bit of their material that they are anti-vaccination in great big words.

The evidence is on his side.

There’s an article on the ad on ITWire, too. Word is spreading. You can help: blog about this. Tell people about this. Put it on Facebook, on Twitter.

By spreading misinformation about vaccinations the AVN is scaring parents. The herd immunity is low in part because parents are scared to vaccinate their children. The low herd immunity is killing babies. It really is just that simple.

My daughter recently found my cache of old home movies from when she was a baby. We’ve been laughing, watching her eat and play and be silly when she was just a few months old. Then I think of Toni and David McCaffery and a piece of my heart dies. Then I think of the AVN, and it screams.

Vaccines are one of the greatest triumphs of humanity; the ability to save hundreds of millions of lives through a simple inoculation. But because some people cannot accept reality, innocent human lives will be lost.

I applaud Dick Smith and the Australian skeptics, including my friends Rachael Dunlop and Richard Saunders, for undertaking this heroic effort of shining a bright light on the AVN.

Antivaxxers must be stopped.

h/t Phil Plait

TFT's Health Updated

I went to my follow-up today. The CT looks good according to the doc. My blood work looks good. So, I am fine.

There is one bit of bad news, though it does not involve my lifespan, fortunately. The drug I was on for one year is a brand new drug for my illness (it had been developed for another illness, and was deemed useful for my ailment the day I began it...so it is new and the jury is still out on some of the issues surrounding many new drugs; how long to take it, dosage, etc;) The recommendation was that I take it for a year, and I did. It is just a pill, but it does come with its side effects, like headaches, stomach upset, slow healing, and many others, mostly mild when you compare them to chemo that is injected and makes your hair fall out!

Today my doctor told me that the consensus is that I might as well continue to take it. There are some European studies still in the works, as well as others here in America. When these studies are concluded, we may know more about how long one should remain on the drug. But until then I need to go back on, just to be safe, because there is a chance of a recurrence.

I am not happy about this development. It costs a mere $20/month, but I was getting used to the extra $20/month! And now that my health insurance just doubled, I am especially bummed. I also do not like the 2 hours or so of discomfort that comes after I take the drug after dinner each night. And it makes going out a bit tough. But I think if I eat better (its hard to stay fed due to the surgery) the stomach discomfort will be less.

Anyway, I am fine, the drug is not debilitating, and I am not too bummed about it. Just bummed enough.

TFT's Health

Some of you may know that I have an ongoing health issue that requires CT scans every few months. I had one this morning. To prepare for a CT scan one has to drink 900mL of barium sulfate suspension. That's like 2 Coors Talls!

Anyway, I have to drink them an hour before the scan. Many folks get to the hospital early and drink the stuff there. I, however, choose to get it ahead of time, drink it at home, and arrive just in time for the scan. That's what I did. Oh, and you can't eat for 4 hours before the scan, so you drink the barium on an empty stomach. No problem.

My scan went fine. They put you on the table, hook an IV up so they can deliver the contrast dye, and then they have you hold your breath a few times while they do the 3 or 4 passes in and out of the doughnut (the CT machine is like a doughnut, not a cave; that's an MRI).

The whole thing takes a few minutes, and then you're done. The contrast injection makes you feel warm, and a bit like you are wetting yourself. It's a weird sensation. There is a taste also. Very wierd, but not freaky.

The bad part is when the barium decides it's time to leave your body. I'm at that stage right now. Blogging may be sporadic as a result.

I won't know the results till my oncologist gives me a call. I'm not stressing. I never do. It is what it is, and will be what it will be. So far, since the surgery a couple years ago, I am clean. I intend to stay that way.

Have a happy Thanksgiving. Be thankful. Gotta go.....

Update: (Gurgle gurgle) The other thing is I am very hungry and am craving a pastrami sky-hi from Art's. But I don't live in LA anymore. Dammit!

Implement, Implement, Implement.

TNR's got an article up I fully agree with. The editors say GO! Here we go wif a snippet:

Obama's first task, then, is to upend the mindless conventional wisdom which holds that he must never implement the agenda he campaigned on. And this will involve straightening out some of his fellow Democrats who believe that he should replicate the fiscal strategy of the early Clinton era, when the administration scaled back its more ambitious spending plans and focused instead on deficit reduction, a choice that laid the groundwork for the boom of the late 1990s. But the analogy isn't terribly apt. By the time Clinton changed tack, the economy was already well on the path to recovering from the recession- -a very different situation from the one we now face.

Health care will be expensive, but no health care would be expensiver!

Economy Linked To West Nile Virus (Yup!)

The economic crisis caused an increase in cases of West Nile virus!

It’s easy to find correlations between seemingly unrelated events; epidemiological journals are full of stuff like this which doesn’t mean a thing. For example, as ice cream consumption increases, so do drownings. But it’s not because ice cream causes drowning.

In this case, though, the cause-and-effect link is pretty clear. Delinquent mortgages in Bakersfield and the surrounding community caused people to abandon their houses, and mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus bred in their untended swimming pools. The resulting outbreak is a epidemiologists’ textbook case of the unintended consequences of economic turmoil. It’s not the first such example, and undoubtedly won’t be the last before the crisis ends.

Read it below...

Foreclosure Epidemics
West Nile Virus Tracks Housing Crisis

Subprime mortgages have ruined banks and insurance companies and brought the global economy to its knees. Now it looks like they’re also causing the spread of deadly West Nile disease.

In a weird new wrinkle in the story of the exploding mortgage crisis, the housing market in Bakersfield, Calif., was tied to a 276 percent increase in the number of West Nile virus cases, according to the November issue of the scientific journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases.

It’s easy to find correlations between seemingly unrelated events; epidemiological journals are full of stuff like this which doesn’t mean a thing. For example, as ice cream consumption increases, so do drownings. But it’s not because ice cream causes drowning.

In this case, though, the cause-and-effect link is pretty clear. Delinquent mortgages in Bakersfield and the surrounding community caused people to abandon their houses, and mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus bred in their untended swimming pools. The resulting outbreak is a epidemiologists’ textbook case of the unintended consequences of economic turmoil. It’s not the first such example, and undoubtedly won’t be the last before the crisis ends.

“We’ve had problems with West Nile in California since 2004, but in 2007 the housing market really went south and it resulted in a lot of neglected swimming pools,” said lead author William K. Reisen, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. “They’ve always had problems with homeowner neglect of pools. But all of a sudden, it went through the roof.”

There were 140 confirmed human cases of West Nile virus in the Bakersfield area in 2007, the largest outbreak in California, and the worst mosquito-born encephalitis virus outbreak in Kern County since 1952. At least two patients — one, a 96-year-old woman — died of the disease, which can also cause brain damage.

The outbreak spread to several other counties and led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to hold a news conference and release $6.2 million in emergency mosquito abatement funds.

West Nile virus outbreaks intensified in other parts of California this summer, in particular in Los Angeles. This could well be related to the swelling foreclosures in that area, Reisen said.

Insect-borne microorganisms thrive in times of economic crisis and dislocation. For example, mosquito-borne dengue fever has surged in the growing cities of Asia and Latin America in the past decade; as people move into urban areas that lack running water, they store water in tanks that are perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes like Aedes aegypti, the leading dengue vector.

Bakersfield, CA (Flickr: Alice Chaos)

Count the Kern County West Nile outbreak in that category. “What’s worrisome is that most U.S. mosquito abatement districts are funded by property taxes,” said Reisen. “As their revenue falls, it’s going to be harder to keep up with the abandoned swimming pools.”

West Nile has spread gradually across the United States since the first cases were reported in 1999 in New York City. It’s carried by several different species of mosquitoes and can infect many birds and mammals — from crows and chickens to cats and horses. In different areas of the country, the epidemic has generally slowed after the virus kills off a large enough number of the birds that carry it from place to place. Only about one in 100 people exposed to the virus become ill; about three percent of those it sickens die from this disease.

No one in Kern County had anticipated the 2007 outbreak. Winter and spring rains were light, and the Kern River, which flows through Bakersfield and sometimes leaves pools of water where mosquitoes can breed, was dry. In fact, water was so short that it changed the bird ecology of the region, resulting in an expansion of house sparrow flocks. Unlike other bird populations in the area, most of the sparrows lacked protective immunity to West Nile virus.

The county Mosquito and Vector Control District conducted an aerial survey of the town that showed an extensive number of green or neglected pools, “most of which were producing mosquitoes,” according to the article in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

“The likely reasons for neglected pools,” reported the journal, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control, “are the adjustable rate mortgage and associated housing crises in Kern County and throughout California, which have led to increased house sales and abandonments.” Kern County suffered a 300 percent increase in delinquencies in the spring quarter of 2007 compared with the same period in 2006.

As chlorine-based chemicals deteriorated in the abandoned pools, “invasive algal blooms created green swimming pools that were exploited rapidly by urban mosquitoes, thereby establishing a myriad of larval habitats within suburban neighborhoods.”

By California law, properties with swimming pools must be surrounded by six-foot-high fences, and so it has been difficult for mosquito control agents to enter foreclosed properties. “They can’t just go breaking the doors down,” said Reisen. “It’s kind of a mystery how to get access to these properties.”

The major carrier of West Nile during the 2007 outbreak was the common mosquito Culex pipiens. But by this year, Culex tarsalis, a more efficient West Nile carrier that typically colonizes rural areas, had moved into some of them.

That said, no human cases had been reported in 2008 as of Oct. 23, though the disease continued to infect mosquitoes and kill birds and horses. Kern County officials have been vigilant in spraying the abandoned pools or stocking them with larva-eating fish.

Then too, West Nile outbreaks are sporadic, and seem to depend on complex factors in the virus’ hosts. High temperatures, raising the viral load of mosquitoes, are one such factor; a die-off of the crow population, causing the virus to run out of hosts, can also play a role.

The Bakersfield story presents another such factor: the crashing of American dreams.

John McCain Will Let You Die (not on purpose!)

Over at The Edge of the American West there's a post exposing how horrible it would be to need a doctor if McCain becomes president.

I have grown sick of shadows, so I’m going to get a torch.

John McCain’s health care plan is rubbish. So says everyone. Most of the summaries I’ve seen have focused on the fact that twenty million will likely lose their employer-cushioned coverage, and that the individual market is horrible to those who have been ill, or for those who are obese.

The plan is rubbish, for all the reasons cited. But it’s rubbish for more reasons. It’s rubbish because it’s made of rubbish.

The individual market is horrible to those have been ill, but when it’s stated like that, it sounds like something only the sick or chronically ill will have to worry about.* And most of the people writing about it are either young, and eminently insurable on account of being young, or have comfortable employer-based insurance. I don’t think they get quite how much the individual market sucks for a normal person.

So let’s play pretend, because let’s be clear: this is a bad idea for everyone.

John McCain is elected, and the health care coverage of twenty million people gets dropped. Two of those people, Jack and Jill, are a couple in their fifties. Jack and Jill are in excellent health and middle class. Absolutely no chronic conditions. Great CON. Neither of them smoke. And we’ll assume that they’re also of normal weight.

Let’s play on eHealthInsurance.com. Jill is 52 and Jack is 56. For $400 a month, they can get coverage. This is not nice coverage. This is coverage that tends to have a multi-thousand dollar deductible, no prescription coverage, no doctor’s visits coverage. If they want an HMO-style plan with co-pays and prescription coverage, call it $1100. (And of course, their risk is evaluated individually.)

But let’s make it a little more realistic. Jill is overweight. Not obese, mind you. Let’s say she has a BMI of 27. This varies a bit by company, but add 25% onto her premium. Jack smokes. He’s been trying to quit, but he picked up this habit back in the 60s and it’s been hard to kick. Jack is probably now uninsurable. (Were he younger, figure another 25%)

Actually, they probably both are. In their fifties, they’re bad risks. When they had employer-based coverage, this wasn’t a big deal, because their own personal risk wasn’t evaluated. It is now.

And we’ve spotted them perfect health and perfect health histories, mind you. According to this study, the average American adult fills nine prescriptions a year. Someone in her fifties: 13. So surely it’s not insane to think that someone in her fifties might be on one or two medications.

Now, we can assume that the market will change a little bit, and that Jack and Jill might have a tax credit to play with. That isn’t going to make them younger, or a better risk. This plan is cruel to boomers.

So who in this country is this plan supposed to benefit?