Monday, March 15, 2010

LaDainian Tomlinson vs. Curtis Martin

Like many Jet fans today, I was pretty excited about the prospect of LaDainian Tomlinson wearing the Jets Green. When I first read the news last night, my thoughts immediately went to the Jets signing Curtis Martin in 1998 to replace Adrian Murrell. I started to wonder though if that was the right comparison.

Curtis Martin came to the Jets in 1998, when he was 25 years old and still in the prime of his career. Tomlinson will be 31 in June and even if he finds his second wind with the Jets, recapturing young glory is not easy for a running back. That said though, LT has said he would need to alter his game by catching more passes out of the backfield, especially on 3rd downs. If he shows a level of practicality not normally seen in a star athlete in any sport, he may be capable of providing the Jets the leadership they need. Thomas Jones was known as a leader in his years with the Jets and Curtis Martin is considered one of the best locker room presences ever, especially with his tutelage of LaMont Jordan, who coincidentally came into the NFL in the same season as LT.

Also, Curtis Martin's best rushing season came at age 31, when he led the NFL with 1,697 yards rushing. Tomlinson won't be expected to carry the kind of load Curtis Martin did that season with Shonn Greene (out of the University of Iowa) and, hopefully, Leon Washington sharing the backfield. And with a two-year contract, he is low risk with a potential for much higher reward.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see...

Sunday, March 14, 2010

T.R. Reid: Universal health care tends to cut the abortion rate

Great column by T.R. Reid in today's Washington Post. I liked this quote from a senior Roman Catholic Cardinal from the U.K. on why women have fewer abortions there than in the United States:
"If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it's needed...she's more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn't it obvious?"

An unrelated column in today's Washington Post says "Fox News: unfair, unbalanced, unchecked." Well DUH.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

A Personal Note Involving Health Care

If you read my blog post on March 2nd, I made reference to a Howard Fineman column in Newsweek about his experience with the health care system in Argentina. In the post, I mentioned that I would have a more personal note later. Well, this is later.

I'm assuming most of you reading this post are friends of mine that are seeing this in your Facebook News Feed. (If you don't know me and just stumbled across it, thank you for reading.) As many of you know, my father passed away in January while he was vacationing and visiting relatives in India. He had been hospitalized with a lung ailment in December and was in the hospital for 26 days before passing away.

What Howard Fineman shares about the cost of his experience is similar to what my family encountered. He mentions that the cost of the services he received was approximately $1,500 when converting from Argentine Pesos to US Dollars. Similarly, the cost of the services my father received, after converting from Indian Rupees to US Dollars, was roughly $8,600 to $8,900, depending on the exchange rate you use for conversion.

This seems like a sizable amount but consider the fact that this includes 26 days in one of the top hospitals in India, Poona Hospital and Research Centre, all antibiotics, medications, IV's, a ventilator in the ICU for his final six days, cable television, and a private room with a guest bed for my mom to sleep at night. The hospital also had staff to scrub, clean, and disinfect every room top-to-bottom twice each day and there were always two attending physicians on the floor and a fully staffed nurses' station around-the-clock. And this was in the standard room! The upscale/VIP/high-end floors were supposedly much nicer than this. And, unlike Howard Fineman's experience, all of the doctors and nurses spoke fluent English and those that were not native Marathi speakers spoke enough of the local language to get by.

Frankly, it is experiences like my family's and the one Howard Fineman writes about in his column as to why medical tourism is not only becoming more prevalent, some people are actually finding it cheaper even with insurance coverage that they have.

I personally know the doctor that was treating my father as they were good friends. (In fact, my father had left instructions to give his friend an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label that my dad had purchased to ease his friend's guilt if he could not save my dad's life.) The doctor lives very well, has a great practice, and often visits the United States for medical conferences at his own expense. He is not someone that is just wealthy in India but would only be middle class in the United States.

I'm not sure if the health care reform being considered by Congress will immediately rein in costs. I would imagine that goal is the provisions would lead to the lowering of costs over the years but it still begs the questions Mr. Fineman asks in his piece: where does all that extra money go?

The Truth About Support for Healthcare Reform

Thank you Joel Benenson for writing in today's Washington Post what I've been thinking for months: why do so many polls show Americans are against health care reform when they strongly support individual provisions that are in the bill? I personally think this is due to the poor job of communication done by the White House and the Democrats in Congress and an excellent job of demonization by House and Senate Republicans. The first time I really heard a clear explanation from the White House of the immediate benefits of health reform was probably in last week's Weekly Presidential Address.

Reading Benenson's piece shows that the opponents of reform are only interested in preventing the President and Democratic Party from achieving a victory. Many have said that the current legislation being discussed and debated is actually more conservative than some of the Republican alternatives proposed to the Clinton health care plan of 1993. The fact of the matter is those that vote against health care reform will have to explain to voters this November why they:
  1. Voted against banning insurance companies from denying coverage to those who are sick. (a.k.a. Denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions.)
  2. Voted against the tax credits for small businesses offering coverage. (a.k.a. The Insurance Exchanges.)
  3. Voted against helping seniors on Medicare pay less for prescription drugs. (a.k.a. The Medicare "Doughnut Hole".)
If reform gets signed into law, it will be interesting to watch opponents explain why it was necessary to vote against the entire bill knowing that these three major issues would be left unchanged if reform had not passed.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Plains, Trains & Automobiles? Ditch the cars and planes for the TRAINS!!

People that know me well have known that I am very much a railfan. As a kid growing up in Queens, I memorized the entire New York City Subway Map when I was only five years old. I would make each stop on a subway line with my toy train without ever looking at the subway map. In fact, my parents would often just send my sister and me to take out-of-town guests sightseeing, often to the astonishment of our guests that two schoolchildren would be showing them around New York City.

On one occasion when I was six years old, I even navigated five of us that went sightseeing back home when our usual train line was suspended due to a derailment. This interest even continued in high school, when some of my friends would make me sit on the train with my back to the map and quiz me on stops, transfer points, and the service hours of specific subway lines, betting that I would get one wrong (I never did; a friend once tried making up station stops with fake street names just to stump me.)

That's why trains mean a lot to me and I am happy to see rail service in this country get the political recognition that it deserves. In January, Vice President Joe Biden penned a nice column in Huffington Post about why America Needs Trains. As a daily train commuter, he spelled out quite nicely how trains are not only greener but can be more reliable and secure than airline travel.

Today's New York Times has another opinion piece about a strategy that the writer believes should have been implemented when high speed rail funding was included in the stimulus. I don't entirely agree with his disapproval of the two projects that were part of the stimulus. After all, very few people outside of the northeastern United States have commuter rail service in their locality or have even ridden on a train for that matter and the exposure of new rail construction and the initial fanfare would be a good introduction for them. However, the writer does make some good points about why the Acela service in Amtrak's Northeast Corridor would be a logical choice for an upgrade to true high speed service.

Read it and feel free to tell me what you think. ENJOY!!!

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Rope-a-dope on Health Care?

According to this article posted on Yahoo! News today, it seems the White House is willing to consider the following four Republican ideas on health care reform:
  1. Sending investigators disguised as patients to uncover fraud and waste
  2. Expanding medical malpractice reform pilot programs
  3. Increasing payments to Medicaid providers
  4. Expanding the use of health savings accounts
When added to the bills already passed by the two houses of Congress, these ideas make sense. However, it is important to note that these ideas are in addition to the reforms already passed, not in place of them. You still have to address coverage of the uninsured, ensure continued & complete coverage for the underinsured, prevent insurance companies from dropping coverage due to pre-existing conditions, and modernize health IT.

What these four ideas would help accomplish is to rein in the massive costs of health care currently in the United States, as best described by the personal experience of Newsweek's Howard Fineman in his latest column. (A more personal note about Howard Fineman's column later.)

On the surface these ideas make sense. Politically, Congressional Democrats need to go along with these ideas because they need to highlight all instances where Republicans vote against their own ideas and show the country that it is the Republicans preventing change in Washington by voting against their own ideas just because they have the endorsement of President Obama. Racist folks in the Tea Parties might like what Republicans are doing but the rest of the center-right part of the country will see it for what it really is, just another political stunt.

The Colbert Report: Thursday's Health Care Summit is like Marriage Counseling

Oh no he didn't!?! Oh yes he did! On last night's Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert compared last Thursday's Health Care Summit to a marriage counseling session for Democrats and Republicans. ENJOY!!!

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Health Care Marriage Counseling
www.colbertnation.com
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