Health

Alaskans for Single Payer

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Bonnie Nelson in Alaska sent my post and her comment about the Atul Gawande article in the New Yorker around to a number of activists saying she agreed with my take. (I had written that while we at Tikkun are fully in favor of single payer, Gawande “makes a very strong case that it is not ultimately who pays (private or public insurance) that matters: it’s whether the delivery of health services is coordinated for the good of the patient, and with accountability. It’s actually about putting the care back into healthcare”). Jim Sykes responded to Bonnie that he disagreed, and gave me permission to quote him. Jim was the founder of the Alaska Green Party and has done very well as both a candidate for Governor and US seats.

Politics & Society

Is it a Good News Day?

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Has to be, when hundreds of thousands are protesting the suspicious Iranian election result.
And when Pelosi is still having trouble getting a majority to vote for war. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House will try to muscle through a $106 billion war funding bill today, hoping to quell a rebellion among liberal Democrats against further support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…. Today’s vote is expected to be close. Democratic leaders need as many as 18 of the 51 Democrats who opposed the war funding in May to reverse themselves. The legislation has twice been pulled from consideration for lack of votes.”

Gender and Sexuality

The Pink Gang

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I love this story in the San Francisco paper about a group of women in a remote and poor part of India who are standing up for justice. They take on abusive husbands and corrupt public officials, wielding a big stick. Checking on the web, the first story I found about them was one from two years ago on a reproductive health site that discussed the use of increasingly cheap and easy-to-use American sex determination kits. These kits make it much easier for parents to abort girl babies and try again for a son, a choice arising in part from the dowry system that makes a girl more expensive than a boy, as well as other reasons. It’s a calculated choice for many people in an unreasonable situation (and I might have known American business was making it worse).

Islam

Repressive Islamic rule loses its lustre

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Irfan Yusuf writes today at altmuslim:
Iranian Muslim youth aren’t the only ones disillusioned with theocratic politics. Many young Muslims in the West like myself, once attracted to political Islam, have now become disillusioned by it. At the same time, we feel disenchanted with Western attempts to manipulate it, then demonise it when it suits. Aziz Poonawalla is monitoring the Iranian twitterers and can give you access to them:
The regime is afraid. That’s why they disabled text messaging on election day; why twitter and facebook are blocked; why the internet is being censored; why journalists are being expelled.

Health

Stress

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My eye was caught in the paper yesterday by the happiness of this young woman graduating. I was curious about her relationship with the older woman. Turns out she is a Ugandan who lost both parents to AIDS and was adopted by an affluent US family at age 12. She says she finds it hard to see her friends leave food on their plates because she recalls so well going out to the garden every day with her mother in Uganda to see what there was left to eat, and sometimes finding nothing. Her personal journey and struggle is an extraordinary story of our current world.

Politics & Society

Comment on the Walk we Dream of

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Something’s going wrong with our comments, so that at least two people who have left long comments found them cut off. So If you are leaving a comment, please copy it before you hit save comment, and then if it doesn’t save please email me the comment, at dave@tikkun.org. We will get it fixed as soon as we understand what the problem is. Here’s a comment from Nichola Torbett to my last post:
Thanks, Dave for this post, which is as thoughtful as you always are. There were a couple things I wanted to respond to.

Politics & Society

The Walk we Dream of at Tikkun

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A world of caring and sharing. In which we are healed and the earth is healed. We would turn this commercial civilization into a biophilic civilization. (Biophilic: love of all life). A spiritual civilization, where spiritual is not about what you believe so much as how you glory in life and the universe, and how you do love.

Politics & Society

CEOs who don't vote

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Carly Fiorina (at left), former head of Hewlett Packard, now running against Barbara Boxer for the US Senate, didn’t vote in 13 out of the last 18 California elections. Meg Witman, once CEO of eBay, now running to succeed Schwarzenegger, didn’t even register to vote until seven years ago and then only voted in 7 out of the next 13 elections. When he was head of Halliburton, Dick Cheney skipped 14 out of 16 state and local elections. A sad little expose in the SF Chron today. A Business Week investigation of 100 top executives in 2000 found that “precious few” of the business elite cast ballots in often-critical state and local elections dating back as far as the 1980s.

Christianity

Liberal Saints

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A nice coincidence that the Unitarian magazine UU World is featuring a church that has a series of portraits of liberal saints (such as Gandhi, at right), just at the same time that Tikkun is featuring a different one. Both sets of saints include people from other religious traditions. The Christian one in San Francisco by Mark Dukes is a much larger project and so includes a wider range. The difference is styles is striking. [brclear]

Health

More Important than Single Payer

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This article by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker is the single best thing I have read on how we should do healthcare. He makes a very strong case that it is not ultimately who pays (private or public insurance) that matters: it’s whether the delivery of health services is coordinated for the good of the patient, and with accountability. It’s actually about putting the care back into healthcare: in detail, with examples. Gawande compares the most expensive city for healthcare in the country (McAllen, Texas) with places that give equally good or better care at half or even a third the cost. The most distressing angle in the story is the degree to which doctors have identified maximizing their own income as a primary goal, and the discovery that this culture only really took off in McAllen 15 years ago.