Well while I’m on the topic of the future of Healthcare here’s another one for you. The CEO of the CMA, Joe Dunn, came and spoke at the UCD School of Medicine several weeks ago and he gave a great speech. And now, through the miracle of technology, that speech is available to all of you! His speech was directed towards medical students but it really has relevance to anyone who wants to get something done in politics. Its long but he’s a very engaging and entertaining speaker and the speech really gets better as it goes along so if you have the time its definitely worth watching it through. You would be hard-pressed to find a better primer on how things get done in government.
Well with finals over and done with you can expect to get a lot more posts from me in the coming weeks! And we start out today with some very exciting news. President Obama held a press conference today for what he called, “a watershed event in the long and elusive quest for health care reform.” The American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association; PhRMA; AdvaMed; America’s Health Insurance Plans, the SEIU, and the Greater New York Hospital Association and the California Hospital Association announced a new cooperative effort to drastically reduce the rate of growth of healthcare costs beginning immediately. They pledged to cut the rate of growth by 1.5%. This may not seem like a lot but this means a cut from about 7% to 5.5%, bringing us much closer to the annual rate of income growth which tends to hover around 4-5% but which has at times grown to near 6%. And that’s what really matters, that’s really our baseline here. If healthcare costs can be reduced such that their growth is equal to the rate of income growth in the US then the future of healthcare suddenly gets a lot rosier. And this commitment brings us much closer to that goal.
And this is also great news for America’s future financial security. Many people don’t realize the huge impact that rising healthcare costs have on our country’s national budget. The reasons why that is are a subject for another article but even a savings of 1.5% will mean much smaller deficits and less national debt. One Obama aid put it this way: Continue reading
Well I’ve been practicing calorie restriction on and off for some time now because of the multitude of studies that have come out over the last several years that point to eating less food as the key to healthy aging. I try to get about 1200 calories per day and its been working out pretty well for me. It’s already been demonstrated that a low-calorie diet is associated with a dramatically longer life-span (in animal testing), a stronger immune system, reduced rates of cardiovascular disease, and a multitude of other pleasant things. But this recent study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract can be found here) provides some evidence for the most exciting benefit yet as far as I’m concerned: a better memory. The entire text of a CNN article describing the study follows…
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Quotes
"We do not need to judge nearly so much as we think we do. This is the age of snap judgments. … [We need] the courage to say, ‘I don’t know. I am waiting further evidence. I must hear both sides of the question.’ It is this suspended judgment that is the supreme form of charity. Someone has said that you cannot slice cheese so fine that it doesn’t have two sides."
-Dallin H. Oaks
"It is better to debate a question without settling it, than to settle a question without debating it...The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress."
-Joseph Joubert
"The more you know, the more you realise how much you don’t know — the less you know, the more you think you know."
-David Freeman
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
