Tag: #healthcare

  • USA’s History of Vaccines

    So, the more that I read, the more that I am coming to the realization that 30% to 40% of this nation just won’t get vaccinated. I really wish this wasn’t true, because I do think that creating the Covid vaccines, manufacturing them, and get it distributed around this country, and now the world, is actually an amazing feat of humanity’s ingenuity. But still, people, for a great number of reasons, won’t get vaccinated.

    The more I think about this, I wonder, why there is this anti-vax contingent of our nation, when 70 to 80 years ago, people got vaccinated in high numbers, close to 90%? In fact, so many people got the measles vaccine in the 60’s, that the disease was virtually eradicated in America. Looking more into the history of this country, when it comes to vaccines, sadly, we have always had some of the lowest rates of inoculation. Especially at the start of the 20th century, even though in 1905 the Supreme Court upheld compulsory vaccination laws in the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. Things really didn’t change in the country until vaccine laws were enforced after World War II.

    Before I read this information today, I had created this theory in my head that all the people who lived in the world before antibiotics, and mass vaccines have passed on, so there is no collective memory of what that world was like. That we are the spoiled children of history, because we don’t know what a world without effective and predictable healthcare is like.

    And that theory is wrong.

    The fact is that Americas won’t get vaccinated unless a law is passed and they have to.

    USA! USA! USA!

  • Post Covid-19 World; Death to Snow Days

    I have to admit that Covid-19 has changed the way America works, and thinks. Remote working has changed employment and where people can live to be employed. The pandemic has ushered in a different attitude towards universal healthcare. I also think that we all now know what, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or one,” truly means in practice. And as long as we are on a Spock kick, I will also quote him by saying, “Change is the essential process of all existence.”

    In that vein, we got the new NYC school calendar for 2021-2022. As I was skimming over it, looking at the dates of holidays and in-service, I saw this little addition:

    “On ‘Snow Days’ or days when school buildings are closed due to an emergency, all students and families should plan on participating in remote learning.”

    Yup, it’s official; SNOW DAYS are DEAD! Long Live Snow Days!

    I kidded about the death of snows days this past winter, as no matter how much it snowed, there were still remote classes. But now, the death of snow days is official policy. Never again will kids watch the news in the morning to see if enough snow fell to cancel school. No more will children know the joy of missing school to play in the snow! Gone now is the last hope of a child to avoid a test, praying that God will drop a foot of snow in one night.

    We have entered a new world.

  • Totally Vaxed!

    I got my second does today! I’m all vaxed up!

    Now, if you haven’t yet, go get your shot!

  • Whomp! Debate Edition

    Though I would like to watch the Democratic debate tonight, I have to work. Also, I think I might prefer to watch Thursday night football. That is only a half knock at the debate. If this debate was presented better, then I might care more.

    I really don’t like the 10 people on stage, and I have a feeling that Joe, Bernie, and Elizabeth will get the majority of the questions. Not much doled out to the rest of the pack. No one is debating; it’s not like people up there are for or against health care. It’s really about which program do you think is better, and for that reason, I wish they would give the candidates more time just to stake out their positions. Instead, we will get sound bite TV, and though it existed before Trump, now that we live in a Trump political world, you better believe the candidates have several zingers in their back pocket, just waiting for the moment to use them.

    I can already hear someone saying that this isn’t the government we want, but through our actions, this is the government we deserve.

    I really dislike that train of thought.

    I have conservative people use this logic to defend Trump while not defending Trump; Whomp! It’s who we got so let’s make the best out of it.

    What an awful way to accept the world around you. I would want to believe that people want to make things better, and not put up with the crap we are severed.

    Ung… Hopefully something good will come out of this.

  • Another Billionaire Problem Solver?

    I have nothing personal against Howard Schultz. As far as I know, and I will give him the benefit of the doubt, is that he is a good husband and father and friend to all.

    But he is a businessman billionaire. And going into 2020, that is a huge albatross around his neck. Is he going to try and convince me that a billionaire businessman isn’t qualified to be president, so we should elect another billionaire businessman?

    That’s going to be a tough sell.

    He isn’t making his case any easier by going after Medicare for all. (The only point I will give him is that no one is addressing how to pay for it, and he is right to point that out.) But it is completely a false equivalency to compare national health care to the boarder wall.

    There is national healthcare in the world, it does work. And if he is really worried about the insurance industry going out of business, then he should look at Germany’s system of national and private healthcare.

    The boarder wall plays on some people’s hate and racism. That doesn’t work.

    But here is where he has already fumbled the ball; he is trying to defend health insurance companies over patients, because effectively, that is what he is saying. He isn’t even politically savvy enough to at least say that putting insurance companies out of business would unemployed so many people, and that isn’t fair. (That’s a good old solid Republican line…) If he is trying to run as a centrist, and trying to get middle America to vote for him, then he needs to understand that this part of the electorate is living paycheck to paycheck (government shut down just hammered that home) and their experiences with insurance companies is adversarial. People have an emotional response to insurance companies, and his first steps out of the gate shows that he doesn’t understand that.

    Don’t show up to the emotion fight with logic, because you will lose every time. You fight emotion with emotion, and logic with logic, and the best politicians know when each is called for in the argument.