Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Stories below the fold

American individualism: bad for the elderly? NYTimes notices the problems of loneliness in the elderly.

----------------------
All your records belong to us:


Fast Access to Records Helps Fight Epidemics

When medical records were maintained mainly on paper, it could take weeks to find out that an infection was becoming more common or that tainted greens had appeared on grocery shelves. But the growing prevalence of electronic medical records has had an unexpected benefit: By combing through the data now received almost continuously from hospitals and other medical facilities, some health departments are spotting and combating outbreaks with unprecedented speed.
actually, this is not true: Some physicians were "designated reporters" who would report on the number of patients who came to their office each day with fevers and symptoms suggesting of flu or other disease.

But it does mean that lots of your data (attached to your name or identifying number) can be and is being read by busybodies without your knowledge.

---------------------------------------------------------
why do college costs keep rising? Asks professor Instapundit.
answer: Because they can, and because:
 in reality a majority of college costs today are not for instruction--the number of administrators, broadly defined, often exceeds the number of faculty.
I wonder when someone will notice the same problem in medicine: With third party payments and government regulations (all of which require you to document stuff) the number of non physician employees is soaring, whereas in the 1950's, often you had a doc and his one "nurse" to run the office.

Ditto for hospitals: When I had "female surgery"at a world famous hospital in the early 1990's, I had to walk myself post op, and when the other patients found I was a doc, spent half my time answering their questions, while the nurses sat at their computers documenting the work they did.  I estimate I saw a nurse/aid/doctor ten minutes a day.
and I doubt it's much better now.

--------------------------------------------


FatherZ reports that a left wing group sends a talking point memo to the press on how to question the Catholic bishops who refuse to compromise principles for the Obamacare regulations.

he has links to the PDF and names names of who the press should call to "refute" the bishops. Best part of the post:

Not to be outdone, Gehring presses his lackeys to victimize the victim, beckoning them to ask the bishops—all of whom refuse to prostitute their principles—“Are you willing to sacrifice Catholic charities, colleges and hospitals if you don’t get your way on the contraceptive mandate?”  ["But, for Wales?"]
the "Wales" quote comes from here. but it would be a better ask the "professors" listed on the talking point memo, why they they insist their opinion on what the church should teach is what the church actually teaches, when that's not true...


CWR article on why the early church opposed contraception and abortion...


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 StrategyPage discusses the problem of zipper control in mixed gender ships, and how a "Zero tolerance" policy for really bad errors of judgement might have destroyed the career of Admiral Haley, who once ran a ship aground in his younger days...

factoid of the day: The USS Constitution is the oldest USNavy ship still commissioned, but the oldest ship still in use is the USS Enterprise, alas scheduled to be decommissioned next December.




--------------------------------------
China's "Three Seas". Belmont Club explains their long term plans.

But the Philippines didn't really pull their ships out of our territorial waters to please China: there happened to be a typhoon and the ships are ancient and were in danger of sinking. But admitting this would only make China bolder.


No comments: