October 2009
102 posts
CBO Analysis shows that the House Health Reform...
According to CMS:
Growth in national health expenditures (NHE) in the United States is projected to be 6.1 percent in 2008. National health spending is expected to increase from $2.2 trillion in 2007 to $2.4 trillion in 2008. Average annual NHE growth is expected to be 6.2 percent per year for 2008 through 2018.
Over the full projection period (2008-2018), average annual health spending growth...
“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or...”
– Here is New York, E. B. White, 1949 (via cdixon)
One of my favorite pieces on the incomparable NYC.
(via mokoyfman)
I wonder what the world would look like today if Apple hadn’t invented the iPhone/App Store how and when it did?
What would exist today vs what would have been delayed for years? At the pace of mobile development prior to the iPhone, how long would it have taken the mobile world to produce the world in which we live today?
The iPhone leapfrogged our world just a few years back and made...
iRobot will watch over your grandma →
iRobot has just announced that their next product will be a home robot that watches over independent older people.
I love my Roomba. It vacuums my apartment, makes cute noises, terrorizes my dog, and makes me feel like I’m living in the future.
I have high hopes for iRobot. An affordable cute little robot that can sense if grandma is in distress, can remind her to take her pills, and can...
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Get vaccinated to help your friends.
Equal rights for all races, genders, and sexual orientation. Do not litter. Don’t drink and drive. Give money to charity. Etc, etc, etc.
Why do these things? Because it’s the right thing to do as a society. The vast majority of us do these things because we care about other people. We want to help others. We don’t litter because it makes the world ugly. We don’t drink and...
Esquire Experiments With a Digital Reality -... →
rickwebb:
Tee hee. Cat’s out of the bag. Look at what we’ve been working on. Our first WSJ mention, I think.
Can’t wait to get my copy and try it out. The Barbarians are super talented.
This is why you need the H1N1 flu vaccine →
Children and adults under age 25 have accounted for 53% of hospitalizations for laboratory-confirmed H1N1 and 23.6% of related deaths since Sept. 1.
Seniors, on the other hand, have accounted for just 7% of H1N1-confirmed hospitalizations and 11.6% of deaths from the virus based on data from 27 and 28 states, respectively.
“This is really, really different than what we see with seasonal flu,”...
“I wish the same people who loudly speak out against vaccines were also just as...”
– Me.
The vast majority of vaccines are some of the greatest inventions humans have ever known. Just ask the last person to die of smallpox. Or that 13 year old healthy kid who died of H1N1 yesterday.They’d probably wish they received a vaccine. People who have little understanding of science,...
“The same forces decentralizing power and participation in media are sweeping...”
– Logic+Emotion: Bruce Nussbaum on Design, Disruption and Innovation
I agree Bruce! But for the record, we use Hello Health as our platform. We’ve surely taken inspiration from Facebook and Flickr and many others, but just brought what they do well to the socially networked delivery of...
Why I write (blog). →
Sheer egoism: Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.
Aesthetic enthusiasm: Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement.
Historical impulse: Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the...
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“What they should have been taking away all of this time — and have...”
– Rick Webb:
Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies
Who knew there were 20,000 bodies buried below... →
Not me. But super interesting that Washington Square Park was a potter’s field for 30 years. This city gets cooler and cooler every day.
“a favored public plan would probably doom today’s private insurance. Although...”
– —Samuelson (via newsweek)
That’s exactly true. Who pays for healthcare is not the real issue. The real issue is the business model of healthcare. The cost of healthcare in America depends upon:
the regular rate of increasing disease
the rate of new diseases that can be invented
the rate of...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-10-25) →
The Antlers (128)
Phoenix (63)
Wilco (38)
The Flaming Lips (28)
The xx (23)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
WatchA Place To Be In Harmony.
Everyone who lives in Williamsburg knows Anthony the Subaru-drivin’ oldies blastin’ local who sings his heart out to put a smile on faces. And now you’ll know more…
See also the story of the tall guy who expounds on life in the middle of Bedford.
Is the System Rigged? →
matthewdipaolamd:
Former insurance executive Wendell Potter tells Greg Palast, in an exclusive interview for Truthout.org, that “the system’s rigged” to kill off so-called “health cooperatives.” …Earlier today, Potter told Truthout.org that the Senator’s plan is “disingenuous or naive,” because, in most states, “the system’s rigged” to lock up all patients under one for-profit monopoly. While a...
General Motors Will Move to High-Deductible... →
This is big. The healthcare cash economy just got bigger. Patients are demand. Doctors are supply. Demand just got larger for transparent healthcare services and doctors who deliver customer service.
Think Anatomy →
For all of your anatomical needs…
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Need a hernia surgery? That'll be $2500, $5000, or...
The other night I met a really awesome general surgeon here in NYC at my regular haunt, Hotel Delmano, to discuss Hello Health and what it means to surgeons. His name is Dr. Evan Goldstein and his practice is Tribeca Surgical. Should you need a surgeon, you’d be hard pressed to find one better than Evan. He’ll give you his email and mobile number and communicate like a normal human...
Outbreak of mumps in Brooklyn
ALERT # 41: Outbreak of Mumps in Brooklyn 1) 57 confirmed or probable cases of mumps have been identified in Brooklyn since August 21, 2009.
The NYC Department of Health (and the antiquated “mental hygiene”) communicates very efficiently with all the NYC physicians. When there is something weird happening with the city’s public health, we all know about it via an email blast....
Switzerland's Healthcare System →
An overview from the Times:
Swiss private insurers are required to offer coverage to all citizens, regardless of age or medical history. And those people, in turn, are obligated to buy health insurance.
By many measures, the Swiss are healthier than Americans, and surveys indicate that Swiss people are generally happy with their system. Switzerland, moreover, provides high-quality care at costs...
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DOCTORS I MET AND LIKED →
And the price for the most inventive user...
conscientious:
… goes to 24 Fotografen. How clever to superimpose all the faces, and then when you move your mouse over a name you only get to see that person’s photo.
Lip Gloss packaged with litmus strips to detect... →
Absolutely genius.
I love when some savvy company comes along and cleverly helps solve public health problems.
“The combination of beauty product packaged together with a female protection device is both powerful and a must have in today’s world where fun and safety are so paradoxically linked.”
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“…those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new...”
– Thomas Friedman - The New Untouchables
“our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.”
(via...
Senator Compares AMA to a Prostitute! →
So the latest and greatest healthcare saga is the yearly congressional tradition— “let’s cut doctor salaries by 21% as mandated by a 1997 law!” There’s lots of posturing between congress and the AMA.
I double dog dare congress to do this. And then watch what happens to the numbers of physicians who accept Medicare.
You see…the more restrictions, regulations,...
Revealing Mac OS X's Hidden Single-Application... →
Swissmiss tweeted the other day about this capability. I do have to say, I thoroughly enjoy having no distractions from background windows on my desktop.
The numbers behind young, healthy people dying... →
via Kevin MD
Young, otherwise healthy people who contract H1N1 flu can rapidly deteriorate into a critically ill state in a manner that is eerily reminiscent of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to research published in the November 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association
Researchers from St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg observed 168 patients who contracted confirmed...
In Shift, Cancer Society Has Concerns on... →
“We don’t want people to panic,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “But I’m admitting that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated.”
If breast and prostate cancer screening really fulfilled their promise, the researchers note, cancers that once were found late, when they were...
Watch‘Green Box’ Product Promo (Pizza Box)
Sometimes all you have to do is look differently at the mundane to create something markedly better than what currently exists. Simple and genius.
“On average, the cost is between $40,000 and $50,000, of which about a third is...”
– From the Desk of David Pogue - Computerized Health Records - NYTimes.com - An Interview with Dr. David Blumenthal, Obama’s medical records czar talking about how much it would cost each doctor to purchase an electronic medical record system.
What is this? 1986?
See also. And also this.
I'm reading The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate... →
Kate Ascher could not have chosen a much drier topic for a book than water mains, parking meters, railroad classification yards, and the other doodads of city infrastructure. But in Ascher’s captivating book, The Works, the innards of New York City come alive. Wonderfully illustrated, the book combines text, maps, and other graphics to tell the story of the systems that keep...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-10-18) →
The Flaming Lips (90)
The National (71)
The xx (63)
Phoenix (56)
Bon Iver (48)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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How the anti-vaccine movement started (aka How...
Andrew Wakefield published a bogus study in the Lancet. Bogus study has been disproved over and over again. Andrew Wakefield is outed as a quack and tried for professional misconduct. Media still reporting on the bogus non-existent link between vaccines and autism. And Jenny McCarthy still runs her mouth as some sort of Playmate/Autism expert.
See this:
The decadelong vaccine-autism saga began...