apple juice

with their myfaces and their spacebooks.

the juice-ette says that perhaps I over-reached a bit with my UnitedHealth — death panels comment.

Maybe so.

I do think it’s preposterous that a private company could theoretically hold in its hands an essential life-saving vaccine and then decide whether or not they were going to offer it to people that have their “health insurance”.

just another reason, in my mind, that health care is a right, not a privilege of the rich, and that decisions such as this should be in the hands of our “by the people, of the people and for the people” government, and NOT some private corporation.

“UnitedHealth Group announced Thursday afternoon that it’s going to cover the administration of H1N1 flu vaccines for all its members, regardless of whether their health plan covers immunizations.”

(Via MinnPost.)

Sounds like there was a death panel meeting at UnitedHealth to determine whether or not people they insure should be allowed to live.

“Dr. Will Nicholson, a family physician in Maplewood, wanted to see what kind of health-insurance experiences many of his patients go though to see him. So last month he elected to drop his employer-provided health-care plan and began an experiment to search for a private insurance plan on his own.”

(Via MinnPost.)

As he says in the video, the current options aren’t working, and we need better options.

the world of education is a slow moving beast, but watching the internet devour the newspaper might provide an interesting parallel to what could happen to “education” should we ever really unleash the internet on schools

“School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.”

(Via Seth’s Blog: Education at the crossroads.)

“take the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and ‘listen to their constituents.’ An urge they should resist because their constituents don’t know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to ‘keep your government hands off my Medicare,’ which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.”

(Via New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country.)

I’m not sure if this column is funny or sad…

The link I found to this article claimed that it was the single most important thing you could read about the health care debate.

“Good thing our leaders weren’t so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill — because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.”

I don’t think it’s too bold to say that. Read this article.

(Via In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition.)