Pages

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Are the world's women disappearing?



The balance between males and females is becoming increasingly skewed. An expert explains why we should be worried

Exclusive: Obama's Secret Afghan Exit Formula

by Leslie H. Gelb
June 11, 2011 | 8:17pm

Healthcare in 20 Years (In 500 Words)



Sunday, April 17, 2011

I was asked yesterday to predict the practice of medicine in 20 years. After stating that any such prediction is massively speculative, I indulged because it is massively fun.

I am persuaded by Clayton Christensen’s arguments in “The Innovator’s Prescription” that healthcare will go the way of other massively disrupted industries, wherein healthcare will follow the arc of decentralization.

Using the music industry as an example, the arc begins by requiring consumers to go to Carnegie Hall, to buying players and music in stores, to eventually using a mobile device to purchase and listen to music in the back of a taxi. Similarly, much of the publishing and retail industry have traced this arc. It is only a matter of time until healthcare does the same.

Here’s how I think it’ll be done within the next 20 years:

Most of what goes on in a doctor’s office will be carried out by Eric Topol's legions of wireless devices measuring our blood chemistries, heart function, vital signs, and many more parameters that modern medicine isn’t yet even currently aware.

All these devices will be networked with a central database and processing unit, a machine that goes bing. This machine will correlate this real-time data with the information riches of your own genetic profile. More than just you, this data will be meshed with several other informative contexts: your family’s genetic information; your friends and neighbors who share your environment; the demographics that enjoy your lifestyle. Last but not least, this machine that goes bing will be continually updated with the latest findings the medical science world. (It might have a lot to do with Archimedes Outcomes Analyzer.)

With some beeps and whirls, it will churn through data streams that would overwhelm the most cognitively capable of today’s doctors.

In twenty years, the patient with diabetes, the victim of congestive heart disease or emphysema, all will have their medicines optimized and managed (your new meds arrive in your mailbox... will we have mailboxes?) before their diseases advance to a point that today’s medical system would even notice.

And yes, just as we get our music from our pocket devices instead of needing to go the music hall, we will get today’s medical care from our personal devices without having to go to the doctor's office.

Before you jump down my throat for predicting the demise of the medical profession, hear this: I do not predict the demise of the medical profession. While I do think that the practice of medicine as we know it today will be largely irrelevant, doctors in the future will be doing fantastic things that we can’t conceive.

I’ll leave it to someone else to speculate what that’ll be. Instead, I’ll cheerfully admonish against the assumption that technological growth will leave us all milling about with nothing to do.

*Addendum: Don't take if from me- Daniel Kraft's TEDXtalk: "Medicine's Future? There's an App for That."

Debt Ceiling Fight Risks Squandering The Legacy Of America’s First And Best Bailout



In lieu of substantive commentary about banks scrambling to avoid regulatory definition as too big to fail (until they’re on the verge of failure, of course) I wanted to write about the fact that though it’s little-discussed today the United States of America was substantially forged as a result of a massive bailout.
The setting was New York City, then-capital of the then-new United States of America in the fall of 1789. The Revolutionary War had been won years ago, but the constitution was brand new. What’s more, the war had been a long one. A long one financed primarily by state governments. And one financed with a large degree of debt. That debt took two forms. To an extent, both the Continental Congress and state governments took out loans, and then used the money raised by loans to pay for things. And to an extent both the Congress and state governments found themselves paying soldiers with promissory notes. Fight now, and when we win the war we’ll pay you back. Of the course of the war years, the value of those promissory notes had often declined sharply below face value. Liquidity constrained soldiers and veterans had sold their notes for cash money to late 18th century vulture investors.
In his “report on public credit”, Alexander Hamilton proposed a kind of double bailout. First, all debts owed by state governments would be assumed by the federal government which had greater fiscal capacity to raise taxes without wrecking the economy. Second, with all the debt consolidated under federal aegis, the debt would all be paid off in full to the present owner of the paper. James Madison objected to both such bailouts. On the one hand, he felt that there was no reason citizens of less-indebted states should pay the debts of more-indebted ones. And on the other hand, he felt that though an obligation existed to fulfill Congress’ commitment to actual Revolutionary War soldiers there was no reason that hardworking people should be taxes to pay the full face value of securities owned by speculators.
Ultimately, Hamilton’s view prevailed and the debt was consolidated and paid. Yet Madison’s arguments about fairness seem unimpeachable. Here we are taxing a nation of farmers to transfer wealth to bond speculators. Why do that? But Hamilton’s argument that acting swiftly and decisively in this regard would establish the credit of the United States, give America access to capital, and ultimately boost the prosperity of the nation seems amply vindicated by history. And here were are, over 200 years later, citizens of a country with the very best credit in the world poised on the brink of an easily avoidable debt default as a side-consequence of dangerous political brinksmanship.

Alabama Passes ‘Fetal Pain’ Anti-Abortion Bill, Rejects Exceptions For Rape And Incest



The Alabama GOP marked a successful week in regressive legislation. Gov. Robert Bentley (R) signed the nation’s toughest immigration bill into law yesterday, requiring local police to detain suspected undocumented immigrants and Alabama schools to collect student citizenship information. The GOP-led state Senate then rounded out the day by passing a radical anti-abortion bill that bans anyone from performing abortion after 20 weeks — an act that would punish the doctor with “one to 10 years in prison.”
State Sen. Scott Beason (R), known previously for advising politicians to “empty the clip” to stop undocumented immigrants, ushered the bill through the Senate. Defending the extreme restriction on the basis of “fetal pain,” Beason — who received a degree in geology — definitively declared that “there’s no doubt” a fetus experiences pain at 20 weeks:
”It’s clear that a baby at 20 weeks experiences pain. There’s no doubt about that,” said Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, who pushed for the bill’s approval in the Senate.
”We’re trying to get it back to the point where once a baby feels pain, there can be no abortions,” Beason said.
Those with an actual medical degree, however, have expressed significant doubt that a fetus’ pain perception functions at 20 weeks. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, “The fetus’s higher pain pathways are not yet fully developed and functional” before the third trimester. Even a fellow Republican lawmaker in Kansas noted assertions like Beason’s are “based on false research” and “untruths.”
Unwavering in their ignorance, the Alabama Senate even used this “false research” to reject an amendment that would have allowed exceptions to the 20-week ban “to preserve a woman’s health or ‘where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.’” State Sen. Linda Coleman (D) viewed the failure as “literally a slap in the face of all women.” But Beason instructed sexual assault victims that they have plenty of time to deal with their situation earlier:
Beason in an interview replied that someone impregnated because of rape or incest still could get an abortion before reaching 20 weeks of pregnancy.”That’s five months,” Beason said. ”I don’t think it’s that complicated.”
The lack of both knowledge and compassion needed to pass this bill — however astounding — is shared by a remarkably high number of Republican lawmakers across the country. Nebraska was the first in the nation to pass a fetal pain bill, with Kansas, Florida, Arkansas, Minnesota,Oklahoma, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, and Kentucky considering similar bills. The Alabama house passed the Senate’s changes in a 70-20 vote to give the bill final legislative approval. If Bentley signs it, the 20-week ban — like the immigration bill — will take effect Sept. 1.