Let’s talk about health care

I am very glad that the US Senate has agreed to have a public discussion of a plan to provide health care coverage for the citizens of the United States. As do many of my fellow citizens, I do not agree with each and every aspect of the current bill, but I am glad to have something that achieves important goals for my country.

If the USA is to be a world leader, we must ensure that our citizens are capable of accomplishing new, important tasks—inventing, creating, reproducing—and being healthy is a critical part of it. Moreover, ending exploitive actions by health insurance entities (today’s equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt’s trusts) will help the US be more competitive, too.

Give the US a sensible health-care policy, and it will be in a better position. Let’s have the debate. Let’s figure out how to make it a good policy, regardless of political affiliation.

KAJ deserves a statue

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—who played basketball, writes books, coaches basketball, and advocates for worthy public causes—has leukemia. Although Mr. Abdul-Jabbar has known he has chronic myeloid leukemia since December of 2008, he only revealed it publicly 9 November 2009. The diagnosis has apparently been confirmed by checking for the Philadelphia chromosome abnormality.

As a long-time admirer of Mr. Abdul-Jabbar (I remember going to see him play on the UCLA freshman team when they played a game at Pasadena City College), I am saddened by the news. To be sure, it’s oddly good news for those who have or who study chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia, as the disease suddenly has a much larger public profile. As my brother Frank noted, it will probably do for this form of leukemia what Magic Johnson’s and Lou Gerhig’s inflictions did for AIDS and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, respectively.

Apparently, I’m not alone in my admiration for Mr. Abdul-Jabbar. Broderick Turner, the reporter for the Los Angeles Times who reported about Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s revelation that he has the disease, followed up that earlier story with a note about others’ expression of concerns.

Majorities and minorities

Ice cream by eye color	Yes	No
Blue	16	43
Brown	224	151

Suppose we asked a few more than 400 people whether they preferred strawberry ice cream over chocolate and, as they answered we also noted their eye color. If eye color was related to their preference, we’d see disproportionally more folks with one eye color saying “Yes.” In fact, the data might look something like those in the yellow table. Following the majority-rule concept, we’d conclude that people prefer strawberry to chocolate.

Of course, such a conclusion hides something pretty intriguing. The preference differs depending on the color of the respondents’ eyes. We might still agree that the majority prefers strawberry, but following the majority runs quite clearly counter to the interests of the minority, no? Why, we might wonder, is there this difference? Is there something to be learned from the minority?

Stupak-Pitts by gender	Yes	No
Female	16	43
Male	224	151

As far as tastes in ice cream, there’s probably not much of importance. However, the data in the table are not actually about ice cream preferences. I took those numbers from the vote by members of the US House of Representatives on the Stupak Amendment to HR 3962, the “Affordable Health Care for America Act.” Representative Bart Stupak (with Representative Joe Pitts) proposed an amendment that restricted coverage of abortions under the health care plan; insurance plans that are purchased with government subsidies may not cover abortions. That includes privately purchased health care insurance. The amendment passed with strong support from men, but not from women.

Over 70% of female representives, who may not be the minority in the population but are in the House of Representatives, voted against the Stupak-Pitts amendment (see blue table). Nearly 60% of male representatives voted in favor of it. It appears to me that those women must know something those men don’t know. More importantly, it appears to me that the majority’s decision has run counter to the expressed concern of the minority. ‘Majority rule’ is a good thing, but in our system it has to be accompanied by protection of the minority’s rights.

Now, the analogy to eye color doesn’t really fit well. One chooses neither her eye color nor gender, to be sure. However, requiring blue-eyed people to eat strawberry ice cream isn’t as much of a big deal as requiring women to live with laws restricting their access to health-care procedures.

I am sorry to report that our representative, Tom Perriello, was among the 224 men who voted to restrict insurance coverage for abortions.

Although one can find these data in a lot of places here is a source for them. In case there’s a statistically intrigued reader, the chi square of 21.94 with 1 degree of freedom is significant with a probability of 0.00000282. (I understand that the p value is not an index of the strength of the relationship.)

While I’m at it, here, please take a few minutes to see how some of the erstwhile debate about the health care legislation went.

Voting ends soon

Voting in Project 10¹⁰⁰ (i.e., “Project 10 to the 100th”), Google’s effort to promote good-doing works, ends tomorrow. Time to get over there and do the duty.

10^100th Voting

Project 10¹⁰⁰ (i.e., “Project 10 to the 100th”) is an effort by Google to promote good-doing works. I mentioned it in Dec ‘08 when I commented on a a story by Meagan Ellis of Materials World Magazine about a project by Edward Sazonov demonstrating the use of vibrations generated by passing traffic to charge a battery that would power a sensor and wireless transmitter. Project 10¹⁰⁰ received > 150,000 proposals for good-doing works, narrowed the proposals to nn, and is now soliciting public input about which ones to fund.

Last fall we launched Project 10^100, a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Your response was overwhelming. Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 (or around 10^5.2) ideas, from general investment suggestions to specific implementation proposals. As we reviewed these submissions, we started noticing lots of similar ideas related to certain broad topics, and decided that combining the best aspects of these individual proposals would produce the most innovative approaches to solving some very pressing problems.

The finalists are not as specific as I thought they would be, but they are interesting. Go to Project 10 to the 100th to learn about the projects and vote. Here’s a link for my earlier post.

Mr Deity returns

As one or two of the two or three regular readers know, I’m impressed by the Mr. Deity shorts. Well, after a delay following the second season, the third season is available. I recommend it.

Lacayo deconstructs Beck’s spins

Richard Lacayo, who writes about art and architecture over at Time, has a blog entry entitled “Glenn Beck: Crack(ed) Symbologist” in which he exposes the faulty thinking that sometimes passes as analysis in popular culture. In his entry, Mr. Lacayo explains how popular commentator Glenn Beck begins (warning: muddled metaphors ahead) spinning at something close to the speed of a very fast hard disk—say, 7200 rpm—and, like a cartoon tornado, simply lifts off from reality.

Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator and self-proclaimed “rodeo clown”, found a new hobby horse the other night — secretly “communist” and “fascist” art buried into the exterior design program of Rockefeller Center. In Beck’s rant he also managed to imply that “Rockefeller”, it’s not clear which Rockefeller he meant, was also somehow a secret communist. Or was it a fascist? Or maybe both.

2009 4-Miler

I worked the Charlottesville Women’s 4-Miler yesterday, as I have pretty much every year for a long time. The setting at Foxfield is beautiful and the weather was very nice this year. The crowd was very large (I’d like to obtain a well-documented estimate of the number of spectators) and wonderfully enthusiastic. The decorations, including the banners with the names of loved ones lost to cancer, attached to the fences along the last mile or so of the course, were familiar, but they still get to me.