Feverish Physicians

Posted on December 27, 2005
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Tensions between management and the medical staff at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, have boiled over partly because the physicians are objecting to proposed restrictions in their health insurance plan.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News reports that Dr. Darrell Kirch, CEO of the medical center, says “changes in the health benefits are necessary because of the soaring cost of health care”.

In an accompanying editorial, “Out of whack, You know there’s a problem when docs gripe about health premiums”, The Patriot-News cites a recent study at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health that found that pricing – not malpractice claims or resource issues – accounts for the high cost of U.S. health care compared to other industrialized nations. The study recommended that closer attention be paid to pricing in health-care policy discussions.

So health care trends are coming full circle, and it’s about time. For decades, the medical profession, led by the American Medical Association, has been insisting on a fair and equitable return, as defined by the practitioners, with little or no countervailing power from U.S.health care consumers (all of us). Now health insurance is becoming unsustainable as defined even by Hershey Medical Center’s doctors. Thanks for the input, guys.

When are political policy makers going to start responding to data like these?

Robust Distortion

Posted on December 21, 2005
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Osama bin Laden must be pleased by many of the headlines being generated by the Bush Administration – torture, prisoners held outside the justice system, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons in Europe and now domestic wiretapping without court approval. Bin Laden, says George Friedman, head of the Stratfor private intelligence firm, has been aiming to provoke America into retalitating against terrorism in a way that contradicts our principles and alienates Muslims and others around the world. So why do we oblige him?

Vice President Dick Cheney wants “strong, robust executive authority”. Why can’t it be authority exercised on behalf of what separates America from arbitrary or inhumane tactics? Why, in the latest ominous example, did a student in Massachusetts have to have agents for the Department of Homeland Security visit him at his parents’ home because he checked a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s “Little Red Book” out of his university library?

It is assuredly necessary to protect America from attack. But our principles of freedom and justice under law are also under attack. We should not be compromising them under stress.

That may well be why U.S. District Judge James Robertson has resigned as one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is supposed to authorize surveillance or searches of foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage. The court can’t be sure, news reports explain, that evidence gathered surreptitously isn’t being used by the Justice Department to make the case for wiretapping. Distortion of basic U.S. principles is, indeed, a slippery slope.

Pride Doesn’t Pay

Posted on December 16, 2005
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So often in corporate public relations, pride produces a fall. The
“Newsroom” web page at the Pennsylvania American Water Co. has this heading:“We are Proven and Proud”. Yet when the company was hit by a flouride leak that affected 90,000 Pennsylvanians, it waited hours before issuing a news release asking broadcast stations to get a warning out. That was apparently the sum of the notification effort.

Though the leak proved minor, the result was anger, not only among the residents who kept using their water, but the Cumberland County emergency manager and police. Far better had the company preplanned a crisis notification system that included emergency managers, police and volunteer firemen to get an alert started promptly.

The company would then have impressed by its relational sense – whether the alert would have reached everyone or not.

Getting Hotter, Colder, Wetter…

Posted on December 7, 2005
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After the ravages of hurricanes for two years – topped by Katrina – and forecasts of more next year, the documented melting of Arctic ice and other indications, what will it take for the U.S. to consider global warming a serious possibility, something requiring a concerted response? How about a report that this year’s weather is likely to tally as the most extreme on record?

Sure, it was released during the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Montreal. But a report finding that 2005’s weather produced staggering losses, and is likely part of a truly ominous trend, isn’t to be dismissed.. We can’t be sure whether the weather is turning for the worst, but can we afford to gamble that it isn’t? It seems truly reckless to cast aside the notion that the world’s worst polluter – the United States – might team up with 141 signatories of the Kyoto Accord to try earnestly to reduce greenhouse gases.

Canada’s own climate record has been mixed, Prime Minister Paul Martin acknowledged. “But now we are investing billions in progressive, effective initiatives as we work towards our Kyoto commitments,” he told the Montreal conference. “Now we are using our resource strength as a platform for innovation – in cleaner energy, renewable energy, sustainable energy, in efficiency and conservation,” What’s so wrong about that?

Fatherly Advice

Posted on December 3, 2005
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Relative to the Two Realms post, an example of the kind of mindset that can cause trouble is given by Paul C. Nagel, the author of John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life, in an op-ed piece, “Father Knew Best,” in today’s New York Times.

Nagel notes that when President George W. Bush was asked by Bob Woodward in Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, whether he had discussed Iraq with his father, the first President Bush, the younger Bush said: “You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.”

Nagel goes on to compare the Bush filial relations with those between John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, who consulted regularly together.

The Two Realms

Posted on December 2, 2005
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The important need to distinguish between the two modes of relating to daily concerns – mythos and logos – is pointed out by Karen Armstrong in her book, The Battle for God, a History of Fundamentalism.

In the past, Armstrong writes, mythos and logos “were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence.” Myth, she notes, “was regarded as primary…not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair.” But logos was equally important. “Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.”

One is not supposed to confuse the two. That, Armstrong warns, can be very dangerous. “You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you do so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world.” Pope Urban II’s First Crusade, she observes, began as a military mission to the Middle East, “but when this military expedition became entangled with folk mythology, biblical lore, and apocalyptic fantasies, the result was catastrophic, practically, militarily, and morally.”

The need to proceed, with humility and care, on applying moral concerns to practical situations – to have one realm properly and effectively influence the other – is perhaps the key relational challenge of our time.

Speedup

Posted on December 1, 2005
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Technology has given us extraordinary reach. In gathering information, almost any subject is accessible on our desktops. But selecting, understanding and learning from this avalanche of information is a challenge. We’re experiencing the world in bits and pieces rather than wholeness, inputs rather than meaning. As information speeds up, it’s critical for us to slow down, make selections and absorb their meaning. Not an easy discipline. The late William Barrett pondered these issues in his book, “The Illusion of Technique, a Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization” (1978). “From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure,” he wrote, but added that we have the freedom to discover meaning beyond techniques. That was before the Internet. For us, the challenge to sort and learn is much more pressing.

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