Science, Technology & Health: August 2009 Archives
Canada's former top doctor is ripping Canada's socialized health care system.
Bill O'Reilly: Dr. Day what is the biggest problem with your health care system?Dr. Brian Day: Well, the biggest problem is access. By access we have, in the Canadian system the first line of defense for a sick patient is the family doctor. And, in a population of 33 million Canadians 5 million Canadians do not have a family doctor.
Bill O'Reilly: Is it because the doctors don't get paid as well as doctors get paid as well in the United States? We have 30% more doctors per 100,000. Is it because they are not getting paid as well?
Dr. Brian Day: No, we rank 26 out of 28 in the developed countries as far as doctors to population. It's part of the mechanism of rationing that has to happen when you promise to deliver everything and don't have enough resources.
Bill O'Reilly: Is that a major problem rationing in Canada? Are people suffering because they cannot get in to see a doctor?
Dr. Brian Day: Oh yes. We have over a million people waiting for surgery and probably another million waiting to see their specialist before they get to wait for the surgery.
Bill O'Reilly: Obama says if we pass this trillion dollar bill over 10 years that costs will go down in the United States. You're saying that in Canada they have skyrocketed. So, I'm just saying, this is what we're hearing we don't know. Does it seem plausible to you that if Obamacare gets passed our costs are going to come down?
Dr. Brian Day: I don't think so.
(HT: Jim Hoft.)
Here's a nifty animated population distribution chart that illustrates why our health care system is going to come crashing down in the coming decades. In short: the present elderly cohort belongs to the "baby bust" that preceded the "baby boom" generation. There are fewer old people per capita now than there were a couple of decades ago, but a couple of decades from now there will be hugely more.
It looks like all those hours spent playing video games have finally paid off: the USAF is training more UAV pilots than real pilots.
There was once a great Far Side cartoon that had ‘hopeful parents’ imagining a newspaper full of Help Wanted ads for skilled video game players. Well, it looks like Gary Larson might have been more prescient than he imagined. The US Air Force has just revealed that, this year, it will train more ‘pilots’ to remotely operate unmanned aircraft than pilots to fly fighters and bombers. ...Lt. Gen. David Deptula revealed at the briefing on July 23 that high- and medium-altitude UAV overseas combat missions have increased more than 600 percent during the past six years. At present, the Air Force has 35 Predator and Reaper UAVs over Iraq and Afghanistan, each of which is a combat mission that keeps an aircraft aloft 24 hours a day.
That, of course, is what has so enamored the military to UAVs – they permit long missions, over huge areas, without being limited by the needs of human cargo. Instead, there’s always fresh crew available to pursue a mission relentlessly. The Air Force has a thousand personnel flying these missions, and none of them is at risk of anything greater than RSI. At the moment, the Air Force uses one pilot per Predator but, by 2013, they believe each one will be able to fly three or four simultaneously.
I think the F-35 is the last fighter the USAF will procure that carries a sack of meat around with it. The advantages to going unmanned are just too great to ignore.
- Save weight by ditching all the life support systems, ejection seat, visual readouts, etc.
- Lower cost by drastically reducing survivability.
- More aggressive rules of engagement because no USAF pilots are at risk.
- Better morale for troops because they get to live in the United States with their families instead of being deployed. Plus all the cost savings associated with this.
(HT: RB.)
As I wrote earlier, health care "reform" is dead.
WASHINGTON – Bowing to Republican pressure and an uneasy public, President Barack Obama's administration signaled Sunday it is ready to abandon the idea of giving Americans the option of government-run insurance as part of a new health care system.Facing mounting opposition to the overhaul, administration officials left open the chance for a compromise with Republicans that would include health insurance cooperatives instead of a government-run plan. Such a concession probably would enrage Obama's liberal supporters but could deliver a much-needed victory on a top domestic priority opposed by GOP lawmakers.
The holy grail is portable insurance that isn't tied to a job. If the "co-ops" achieve that without burdensome government involvement that might actually be a win!
I haven't posted much about health care reform in the past several days because I think it's dead. As soon as the bills were pushed back past the August recess I became almost certain that no bill would get passed until after the 2010 elections. At this point, people are so angry that even a stripped-down version of the bill will be politically unfeasible.
I think this is all to the good. America has the best health care system in the world, and we shouldn't mess with success. Until some other country demonstrates a better system, I think we should pretty much stand pat.
Here are five futuristic interfaces from SIGGRAPH. My favorite by far is the Augmented Reality Toys.
I'm a huge fan of augmented reality technology, and the idea of tying the VR to items rather than locations will be extremely powerful.
(HT: RC.)
New research indicates that the spleen may not be a useless "vestigial" organ after all.
Scientists have discovered that the spleen, long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs and known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body’s defense system than anyone suspected.Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis.
Wait a minute... we don't know everything yet?
That researchers are only now discovering a major feature of a rather large organ they have been studying for at least 2,000 years demonstrates yet again that there is nothing so foreign as the place we call home.“Often, if you come across something in the body that seems like a big deal, you think, ‘Why didn’t anybody check this before?’ ” Dr. Nahrendorf said. “But the more you learn, the more you realize that we’re just scratching on the surface of life. We don’t know the whole story about anything.”
But if there's one thing we know without a shadow of a doubt it's that our magnificent bodies are the product of evolution.
Researchers cite other cases in which organs were presumed to be so dispensable that they could be removed “prophylactically” — often with unfortunate outcomes. In recent years, for example, many older women undergoing hysterectomies have been advised to have their healthy ovaries removed at the same time, the rationale being: if you are past your childbearing years, why hang on to reproductive organs that might turn cancerous and kill you? Yet follow-up surveys have shown that women who underwent elective ovariectomy had a heightened risk of dying during a given study period, were more susceptible to heart disease and lung cancer and were twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease compared with women who had kept their ovaries. “Evolution has an edge on us,” Dr. Nahrendorf said. “I would be very careful about saying, ‘You don’t need this organ, get rid of it.’ ”
Yes, our Creator -- the blind, random process of evolution -- has got us all beat.
(HT: Instapundit.)
This article is a couple of years old, but it's the best explanation I've seen yet of the evidence that reducing lead exposure reduces crime.
Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.
What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.
Bonus question: what does this say about morality and free will?
