Back to Baseline

Gray and foggy, with enough dew this morning to require (brief) use of windshield wipers. All parties except Emily have departed the house, and now I get to drink coffee and wake up.

I do think it's rather spectacular that I am able, while sound asleep on my feet, to make Avocado pasta salad for lunch and strawberry crepes for breakfast, all before 7am. It's not the hour, it's the fact that I function, that awes me.

It's Good to Have Options

In all the hoopla about health care, and the frothing rhetoric from the right about how Universal Healthcare=Rationing=Doooooom!, I hear a lot about wait times:

I've used these numbers before, but let's repeat them. A 2001 survey by the policy journal Health Affairs found that 38 percent of Britons and 27 percent of Canadians reported waiting four months or more for elective surgery. Among Americans, that number was only 5 percent. This, Americans will tell you, is the true measure of our system's performance. We have our problems. But at least we don't sit in some European purgatory languishing without our treatments. That's rationing.

Uh, yeah. And, under our current fabulous health coverage system, when I went to see the podiatrist to ask about getting my feet repaired (which would doubtless be elective surgery) there was a three month wait until the guy had an open slot. Rationing! We're all gonna die, and my bunions hurt!

Most elective surgery is about improvement of overall health and life; it's not emergent. Further, if you need a knee replacement (which is elective surgery), it means considerable planning (look at the way elisem planned out the various phases of her hip surgery!). That, in and of itself, takes time. Maybe even four months. And the under the current system, wait you will. Maybe you'll experience discomfort (that's medical speak for "pain"). But it will just be a wait; it won't be rationing. Because we handle our rationing the old fashioned way: by making sure that half the country can't afford to see a doctor to discover that elective surgery is an option.

I have yet to hear anyone say "you show up in a hospital with a heart that is doing something hearts aren't supposed to do, and we're going to make you wait for four months." That's not elective surgery. But the thing is, you have to feel that going to the hospital because of a scary heart is a viable option. An option that isn't going to bankrupt your family. And for a lot of people in this country, that option just isn't there.

Holy Mermaids, Iron Man!

Disney is acquiring Marvel.

Wow.