birdog1960

my mistake. it was in the atlantic, not the new yorker. i saw branch on a newshour interview. yesterday night, they had a rebuttal from an ncaa spokesman (ex prez of u nevada reno) he was unimpressive in his arguments. the tide seems against the ncaa.

taylor branch, in the "new yorker" and his new book argues that the ncaa is exploitative and that amateurism in sports is an arbitrary concept developed to benefit the universities and tv networks. espn comments here. what's your opinion?

they have been fun to watch. after the last 10 years, that's enough for me. if they make the playoffs, and they certainly could, all the better.

john oates comments on the festival. couldn't agree more. people need to come check this out just once...then they'll be back again and again.

sorry, i wasn't gonna volunteer any info cuz i was a little disappointed. i think randolph kind of phoned it in. he may have sensed that the festival is more suited to gillian welch than earth, wind and fire (which he riffed on in addition to little feat). that said, he did have the crowd going at times. i thought his riffs were somewhat repetitive and not very imaginative but it must have been an off night. i could certainly see the technical ability. there was an amazing tribute to jimmie rodgers and the carter family at the end of the festival with an all star band including darrell scott, langhorne slim (who made a brave attempt at yodelling) robinella, michelle malone, john oates (from hall and oates who said it was the best weekend of music he'd ever experienced), several nashville session musician (drums, bass and pedal steel) several remaining family members of the carters and a couple female vocalist including one who won female bluegrass vocalist of the year. darrell scott said they were gonna play real country music, before urban cowboy and they did. did everything from "the circle is unbroken" to " in the jailhouse now", most with a more modern touch. it was outstanding. that one show was worth the price of admission. missed at least 2 bands watching the bills in a downtown bristol bar but obviously that was well worth it too!

oh, i'm going! it's just that i thought i was listening to angels last night. we're seeing them again tonight, outside stage before robert randolph. someone told me his playing is an adaptation to music traditionally played in his church. i hope it's as spritual as last night.

if there's a more impressive band than red molly the rest of the festival i'll be very surprised. they're in charlotte and durham next week. well worth your time if you live around there. acapella "may i suggest" had half the women in the paramount theater crying last night.

surprised on a football board nobody mentioned "Brian's Song" but it had a redeeming element. "The Joneses" was a pretty depressing description of American suburbia.

he didn't address the fuel efficiency angle in the movie and i hadn't thought about it much and that's a hopeful aspect. but do we really have the technology to decrease home energy consumption 90%? i looked into geothermal recently and while efficient it's nor that efficient. he did address the alternative sources being explored, for instance shale oil but said it was prohibitively expensive and no other technology was close to being developed enough to replace even a significant fraction of fossil fuels. what bothered me was his very plausible contention that the oil holding countries have a great incentive to overestimate reserves and historically have. that models of US reserves done 30 yedars ago were almost spot on for when we reached peak and when production would drop off a cliff. finally, his contention that every war since vietnam was really about oil. i didn't realize that sudan was about oil, for instance. it all fit together pretty nicely but of course that doesn't make it correct. i agree. i think he knows quite a lot but not near as much as he thinks. but that's a pretty common flaw, even on PPP!

"winter bones" while a great movie, was extremely depressing.

while this guy is possibly a paranoid schizophrenic, that doesn't necessarily make him wrong. he was compelling being interviewed in "collapse" a documentary on his theories on peak oil and it's eventual result of global collapse. happened on to it on netflix. i'm not usually into apocalyptic prophecies but this guy seemed just crazy and informed enough to potentially be right. anybody see it or have any opinions on ruppert?

i'm now thinking her intellect is on par with the former fugee, wyclef jean.

closer to pamela anderson or that beauty contestant who rambled gibberish for 3 minutes in response to a straightforward question.

she's an irresistible target. you just know there's less than meets the eye and more than meets the eye all at the same time. she's like W with less intellect (and that's saying a lot) but more street moxie. and she's such a great (awful) caricature of the religious right. we just can't help it. like flies to dogs$%t.

look at this power poll may be a bit optimistic but hey, i'll take it!

it's often the ones you least expect....except nuns. turns out the idea that cervical cancer is sexually transmitted came from the observation that the incidence of this cancer in nuns is essentially zero. probably can forgo the shot in girls planning on joining a convent.

i see many uninsured patients and make no distinction about who to see based on insurance. we actually discount fees for the uninsured so that there isn't a penalty for them to pay more because they have no one to negotiate on their behalf (and they are generally good payers). we have payment plans and do require a good faith effort to pay but the definition of good faith is case by case. very few patients are told to go elsewhere for overdue bills or being in collections but there are some. 30 day collections are lower than 90% (if that's how you define prompt) so i would be very happy with the model you proposed. we would, however, still attempt to collect from the uncovered 10%. and the reason these questions aren't addressed is not buried costs. it's because it's a political graveyard. we saw it with the recent healthcare debate when in one sentence people were just saying no to socialized medicine and in the next saying "don't touch my medicare". denying care is ok with many americans as long as it's not their care that's being denied or rationed.

totally agree...see my comments on futile care. and reimbursement should be tied to outcomes rather than volumes with the caveat that a well managed death is sometimes a desirable outcome. but all of this is so arbitrary as noted with the fight over persistent vegetative states. why is it ok to deny care from the uninsured (according to some) but not ok to deny it from medicare recipients that receive on average multiple times what they paid in to the system. we have over 350000 patients on dialysis in the us at an average cost of about $70000 per year (most all paid for by medicare). most have an incurable illness. if we're not gonna help the young accident victim should we be paying for dialysis in the elderly. it's a question americans are loathe to ask. it's a question asked and answered in many countries with socialized medicine.

i discuss advance directives at least 3 visits per day when i do medicare wellness exams. initially this was a required element of this newly compensated visit but now is optional due to the furor over "death panels". i do it anyway, every time. and while they are imperfect instruments, they are much better than nothing especially when i have charted the patients wishes. we also discuss the need for a designated medical decision maker. i actually see more and more octagenarians opt for unambiguous "no intubation, no code" orders although i don't purposefully steer people this way. if they ask what i'd do (they often do) and they are very frail and infirm, i tell them that i wouldn't have heroic measures done. rob asks "how much is too much?" a valid question but there are many low hanging fruit cases to stop futile care on before we pull the plug on the young, healthy accident victims. futile care is extremely prevalent and usually obvious to all outside observers. i'm on the ethics committee for my hospital and we're confronted with these cases frequently. i find it incredible that some on the right scream and shout about witholding care based on ability to pay while at other times we hear the yelling for continuing care forever on near hopeless cases (eg schiavo). i wonder if some of the same people make both arguments simultaneously. btw, my motive in mentioning advance directives had much more to do with the possibility of valuing a faceless, uninsured, unknown persons life less than your own than it did with introducing the instrument.

do you have an advanced directive explicitly stating your desire for no heroic measures?....rhetorical question, don't really want to know.

i'd bet your estimate is extremly low although the data doesn't come quickly to hand. we have 49 million uninsured. a pretty small percentage have to get critically ill to blow your guess out of the water. how many belljars of coins ones and 5's equates to the cost of 1 ICU day? while admirable, this is largely symbolic.

um,no. these cases happen. the hospitals/providers usually absorb the costs which are usually subsidized by the gov't in the form of medicaid. for a single such case your may well be talking the entire operating budget of a large church or a small charitable organization.

how bout this: the guy did have private insurance but his maximum benefit of $500K is exceeded in 6 months and he's still on a ventilator. he has savings of a few thousand (enough for about 6 hours in the ICU). should the tube be pulled and he be left to die? if not, who should pay?

ever wonder if a situation might come to pass where the crap throwing monkey was you? would you feel the same then? except that it is somebody's decision...usually the attending physician and/or hospital. you're right in that society in the form of the courts rarely gives guidance in such situations and are very unlikely to ever give a mandate to withold care in the instance of a young otherwise healthy accident victim. the default decision of society,therefore, at least now, is to provide the care..don't see that changing regardless of the teabagger selfish, amoral rhetoric.

you're right ...it is a yes/no question. with paul's answer and stated beliefs, you either mandate all individuals buying insurance or let a critically ill, uninsured patient die. since he wouldn't agree to mandating insurance his answer has to be to withold care. awesome!