The Healthcare Disaster

Today's article in the Post sums up well. I was a little surprised to see the authors don't expect much from reducing admin costs. Lots of good links. We are screwed up.

The United States is No. 1 in only one sense: the amount we shell out for health care. We have the most expensive system in the world per capita, but we lag behind many developed countries on virtually every health statistic you can name. Life expectancy at birth? We rank near the bottom of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just ahead of Cuba and way behind Japan, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada, countries whose governments (gasp!) pay for the lion's share of health care. Infant mortality in the United States is 6.8 per 1,000 births, more than twice as high as in Japan, Norway and Sweden and worse than in Poland and Hungary. We're doing a better job than most on reducing smoking rates, but our obesity epidemic is out of control, our death rate from prostate cancer is only slightly lower than the United Kingdom's, and in at least one study, American heart attack patients did no better than Swedish patients, even though the Americans got twice as many high-tech treatments.

Jottings on the Election Results

I love this quote this morning in the Times from a woman in Levittown, NJ on her fellow voters: “They had to ask themselves if they wanted a really smart young black guy, or a stodgy old white guy from the same crowd who put us in this hole."

In thinking back on the election and the longer arc of what happened, Obama grew and broadened during the campaign while McCain shrunk and narrowed.

Obama got better at debating and by the time of his final debate performances, the public became "comfortable" with him and more confidant that "yes he can". He continued to draw huge crowds and kept building a vast ground organization. He never had to change his team of advisers and organizers; they just kept getting more experienced and confident. He kept the dialog at a higher level. He ran some negative ads, but only to the issues, not to the opponents personally. He avoided responding angrily and emotionally to unfair and distorted attacks. He gained the endorsements of Powell and other moderate Republicans. Always better and broader as the too long campaign ground on. And, he was always true to his core message best captured in his great line, "We are the ones we are waiting for."

McCain retreated further and further to the fear mongering and racially charged attack mode of the far right. In fact, by the last day, he blanketed the cable channels with a Reverend Wright ad, too late to have to account for it given that he said he wouldn't do it. The Palin choice was designed to appeal primarily to the narrow Republican base, which by the end, is all who supported her sorry persona. His behavior during the debates was distinctly non-presidential with the eye-rolling, lack of eye contact, and seething, hot responses with the phony grimacing smile. He turned on the buddies he had cultivated in the press and assumed the classical Republican position of attacking the "liberal" press, which is demonstrably untrue these days. He in the end seemed mostly a small, angry, old man, certainly not the bearer of a positive, forward-leaning, inclusive vision for the future. Good riddance.

John Dean's Election Analysis of Authoritarianism

John Dean wrote the book book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches, in which he set forth the facts regarding the consequences of the Republicans' controlling government for too many years. His latest column summarizes those facts and uses them to analyze McCain and Palin. Some will think it over the top. I don't. There is too much evidence that must be faced unflinchingly.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidates, have shown themselves to be unapologetic and archetypical authoritarian conservatives. Indeed, their campaign has warmed the hearts of fellow authoritarians, who applaud them for their negativity, nastiness, and dishonest ploys and only criticize them for not offering more of the same.

The McCain/Palin campaign has assumed a typical authoritarian posture: The candidates provide no true, specific proposals to address America's needs. Rather, they simply ask voters to "trust us" and suggest that their opponents - Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden - are not "real Americans" like McCain, Palin, and the voters they are seeking to court. Accordingly, McCain and Plain have called Obama "a socialist," "a redistributionist," "a Marxist," and "a communist" - without a shred of evidence to support their name-calling, for these terms are pejorative, rather than in any manner descriptive. This is the way authoritarian leaders operate.

Cell Phones and Polls

One more day to go until the election that people around the world are watching. I have been posting lightly down the stretch. I've been almost too wired, searching for the latest info, about this election to take the time to post. However, this one regards a great little analysis form Nate Silver, a baseball sabermetrician (their term for baseball statisticians) who has been applying his statistical methods to the election polls. His conclusion regarding use of cell phones exclusively by many these day -- it's distorting the polls by around 4%. Check it out.

The polls in the Cingular-y orange color include cellphones in their samples; the polls in gray do not. The cellphone polls have Obama ahead by an average of 9.4 points; the landline-only polls, 5.1 points.