Chilling on Sunday
Not doing much this weekend. Not doing much at all these days, and this weekend is no exception. After reading through my recent babbling, I noticed the posts (or at least my posts) here tend to sound a bit down, but really the treatment is actually going better than I expected. I still swim, and can blame the reduced yardage on either the radiation or my wimpiness in the face of the California winter. I’m still working, even if I’m forced to use my time a bit more efficiently now. I’m still posting, though some days I just don’t have much to say.
The journal part of this has been up for two and one half years now. Yep, we debuted this little feature on the predecessor domain in May 2001. Feel free to scroll through the roadmap and check out where we’ve been.
Lots in the morning media blitz on health care and health care costs today. This is definitely an issue that’s important to me, even if I freely admit that I have no idea what could be done to fix the problems. Good interview with the CEO of Kaiser Permanente at the S.F.Gate. Nice article on the impact of health insurance costs at the N.Y.Times also. For those of you who are wondering, if BorgHealth sounds a lot like Kaiser when the background music is blaring too loud, it’s just a coincidence. Yep, that’s the ticket. Despite any misgivings I may have about BorgHealthKaiser iteself, I do like Halvorson’s comments about the profit incentives of the pharmaceutical industry though. I’ve made this point a few times in conversation: the drug manufacturers have no real financial desire to cure disease – it’s much, much better for them in long run to have a population of drug-addicted chronically ill people out there. If a big drug company can clear $X per year off a sick person to alleviate his symptoms, why would they want to develop a cure, unless they can figure out a way to clear about 20 times X for that cure (or more if the disease hits young people)? If I remember right, Star Trek: TNG did an episode on this and depicted the drug-producing culture as fairly evil. Just another coincidence, I’m sure.
