Upstate Florida?

I'm visiting family in upstate New York, and I came across this misnomer in a bottle.

Last time I checked, New York was not known for its oranges. But maybe it's an effect of global climate change. Hmm.

I Think that I Shall Never See...

A sign as sad as this one about a tree.

Oldies But Goodies from Rosemary Sutcliff

One of my goals in life is to read everything written by Rosemary Sutcliff, so I've been reading her 1957 novel Lady in Waiting, the story of Bess Throckmorton, who secretly married Sir Walter Raleigh (to the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth I).

While I can't say it's among my favorites of Sutcliff's work, it has been fun to read, particularly to learn all the archaic English terms the author puts in her characters' mouths. Here are a few of them:

• tussy-mussy -- From the context, I thought it meant a messy ball of embroidery floss (Sutcliff: she "drew a strand of golden silk from the rainbow tussy-mussy beside her") but it appears she was using the term metaphorically. According to World Wide Words, it literally means a nosegay (or bouquet) of mixed flowers and herbs. It was common through the late 1600s, when it disappeared from common usage, possibly because it had become slang for a part of women's anatomy (imagine which one). It was revived in the 1940s and now if you Google it you'll be told it's a metal stand for a bouquet at weddings. What a great bit of verbiage to add to your vocabulary!
• Marry-come-up! -- exclamation of mild disapproval. Marry is a euphemism for Mary (a mild swear word), and come-up means come to my assistance, so it's somewhat like exclaiming "So help me God" when you're exasperated.
• in such a smother -- a state of excitation or disorder. I'm not sure if this is pronounced smuh-ther or smah-ther. Googling it tells me that it's used in an unfamiliar verse of Yankee Doodle in a way that fits with how Sutcliff used it.
• slubbercullion -- someone who is very messy, as in covered in mud after a long horse ride. I'm proud to say that this word does not exist anywhere on the Interweb. So if anyone else ever Googles it, they'll find this entry.
• henchwoman -- I found this one particularly amusing. We're all familiar with "henchmen," but I've always thought it meant something along the lines of "hoodlums who help out a bad guy." I've never heard anyone refer to the hero of a story having henchmen. But Sutcliff's main character, Bess, refers to her female servant as her henchwoman. To a contemporary reader, it's pretty jarring (I kept visualizing the poor woman wearing a black mask over her eyes like a cartoon). The Online Etymology Dictionary says the word derives from hengestman or "high-ranking servant," originally groom (as in horse groom, not bride groom). The OED goes on to say, the "sense of 'obedient or unscrupulous follower' is first recorded [in] 1839, probably based on a misunderstanding of the word as used by [Sir Walter] Scott."

I can't write a post about Lady in Waiting without mentioning its amusingly dated cover illustration. (Apologies for the marginal image. I'll post a better one when technology begins to obey me.)


Created by Al Schmidt, the painting style is rampant mid-20th century commercial art. The beauty standard applied to Bess's face has more in common with Elizabeth Taylor than Elizabethan women. And the neckline of the dress is so modest and the cut so loose, it would make the Hays Office proud.

The book inside the covers, however, is much more faithful to the time it depicts, thanks to Rosemary Sutcliff. So this is one example where I would be wrong to judge a book by its cover.

I Guess Trees Make the Difference

I've left Minnesota for the next few weeks, and as I took off on a Delta (formerly Northwest) jet this morning, we had a beautiful view of downtown Minneapolis.

Its gleaming, 50-story skyscrapers jumped up out of the flat prairie, contrasting with the one- and two-story houses of south Minneapolis, arrayed before us along the evenly spaced streets, interspersed with green treetops and blue lakes reflecting the sky.

I thought it looked pretty good.

Behind me, I heard one man say to another, "Look at that. It looks just like Las Vegas, only with trees."

Thanks to the Everyday Cheapskate

For a long time, I've been meaning to write about Mary Hunt's "Everyday Cheapskate" column, which runs daily in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. Hunt reached an over-spending crisis in her own life 27 years ago, which led her to reform. Since then her family has lived within its means, although it took them 13 years to pay off $100,000 of debt.

She's aware that the term "cheapskate" has negative connotations, but this is what she means by it (quoting the Who Are You Calling Cheapskate? page of her website). A cheapskate:

• Does not spend more money that he/she earns, no matter how desperate or tempting the situation might appear.
• Has a spirit of generosity, regularly sharing money, time, and other resources with people in need.
• Lives honestly and ethically, regardless of the temptation to do otherwise in order to get a better deal.
• Saves at least 10 percent of all income.
• Does not buy compulsively but makes intelligent and well-thought-out choices.
• Lives within a financial plan that includes a margin to allow for fun and spontaneity.

Hunt's column sometimes features suggestions from readers -- things like how to reuse dryer sheets or other Heloise-like items that I skim past -- but at other times it contains information you won't find anywhere else.

Today's column is one of those, and what finally got me to write about the Everyday Cheapskate. She explains the recent Credit CARD Act passed by Congress -- the one that will do some good stuff to protect consumers from predatory credit card companies. The Act also includes protections for college students, who have been a prime target for the purveyors of credit cards -- free pizza and other giveaways "just" for filling out an application. (And we wonder why young people graduate from college with a mountain of debt.)

Hunt points out, though, that this requirement could have the unintended consequence of wrecking the credit of students' parents instead, because it requires students to have their credit cards co-signed by their parents. Co-signing means parents will be fully responsible for their adult child's debt.

Hunt writes, "May I make a recommendation? Do not co-sign.... What's your alternative as a parent? Teach your kids the ins and outs of living a cash lifestyle. Get out the envelopes to teach the simplest of all budgeting systems."

And my favorite quote:

Don't get suckered into co-signing in an effort to help your child build credit. Students don't need big credit scores to get jobs or move into dorms. What each of them needs is a clean credit file that shows an absence of irresponsibility.

Amen to that. (I'll never forget a letter to the editor that ran in the Minnesota Daily about 15 years ago, in which the writer claimed that the most important thing a student could do while in college was build good credit. Huh? Guess that education thing wasn't so important after all.)

An earlier Everyday Cheapskate column I've been saving in the filing cabinet since October 2008 was titled "What Do You Need to Be Truly Happy?" In it, Hunt described research that shows greater wealth -- beyond basic needs -- does not result in more happiness. She went on to write,

A recent gathering of friends stirred up a thought-provoking conversation. One person suggested we have a confusion of terms. When people say they want happiness, what they're really looking for is contentment -- that feeling of satisfaction that does not go away once the carpet is a few months old, the car has lost its "newness" or the holidays are over.

He went on to suggest happiness is the result of a "happening," and when the event is over, the happiness goes away. The contentment we seek comes with satisfaction and fulfillment that are not tied to specific events but rather based upon things that do not change, such as warm family relationships, connecting to God and expressions of sincere gratitude.

Tom Vanderbilt wrote about this in his book Traffic. The things we acquire to make ourselves happy, such as a new, bigger house farther out in the surburbs, "provide...a boost to...quality of life. But gradually, the rosy glow fades." This fading is called "hedonic adaptation" by psychologists. Bigger and better becomes the new normal.

And the things that could actually make us happier -- connecting with friends and family, volunteering for a cause we believe in, making something with our own hands, even going to church if that's your thing -- generally take time away from activities that make money.

Thanks to Mary Hunt for sharing her years of experience with downsizing and conscious living. She has given the word cheapskate a new meaning.

The News of Will Shortz's Death Is Greatly Exaggerated

As part of my usual Sunday morning ritual, I was lying in bed waiting for the Puzzle, with Will Shortz and Liane Hansen, to begin on NPR.

When they came back from the news break, the announcer said, "Coming up -- we'll have words from the late author E. Lynn Harris, who died on Friday, along with Puzzlemaster Will Shortz."

That final comma -- so easy to see in print -- is not so easy to hear! Which is good news for Shortz.

Unfortunately, the news of Harris's sudden death is not exaggerated.

My Dinner with Andrae (Gonzalo)

I just finished watching one of the ultimate cult films for intellectuals -- My Dinner with Andre -- for the first time.

I've also seen all the seasons of Project Runway. (I wonder if the second cancels out the intellectual brownie points of the first?)

Remembering season 2, when Santino riffed on one of the other contestants (Andrae) going out to dinner with Tim Gunn at Red Lobster, I couldn't help making a few connections.

State Fair Art -- Waiting for 2009

The Minnesota State Fair is just about a month away, so I thought I'd run some photos I took last year at the Fair's juried art show.

I'm not sure how many state fairs have an art show any more. (Let alone high-quality crop art!)


Clever, clever, clever. Interactive, conceptual, and attractive. If you hadn't guessed, those are dollar bills rolled up and pushed into a wire grid to create the "pixels" of each letter.


I loved this two-headed sock monkey (experiencing an unfortunate meeting with a meat grinder).

In December of last year at the No Coast Craft-o-Rama, I met the artist, Rebecca Yaker, and didn't even realize she had also created the meat grinder monkeys until just now when I looked back through my State Fair photos and recognized her signature style.


There's a secret about this image. Looking at it from a distance, I thought, Oh, that's an interesting photograph, but I wasn't overly impressed. But when I got closer I realized it wasn't a photograph at all, but rather a super-realistic pencil drawing. Millions of tiny little lines. Ouch.

Looking forward to this year's show!

Camp Baucus, or Maxing Out Contributions

You can't follow the Washington saga of health insurance reform without hearing the name of Max Baucus, D-Montana, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee.

What you may not know is that five, count 'em, five of Baucus's former staff members are now lobbying on the health care issue, including two of his former chiefs of staff. The Sunlight Foundation has a nifty bubble diagram (partially shown above, see the full diagram here) depicting how Max relates to his former staff, and how they in turn relate to their many health care industry clients.

That's outrageous enough. NPR, which did a story on the Sunshine Foundation diagram, also links to a scan of a flyer distributed by Baucus's political action committee, inviting one and all to "Camp Baucus" -- "a trip for the whole family" where you get to go fly fishing, horseback riding, hiking and golfing all for $2,500 per individual (or $5,000 for other PACs).

I wonder how common sleep-away-camps are among our Senators and Representatives? Everyone knows that politicians benefit from high-buck-per-plate dinners, so I'm not sure why the idea of Camp Baucus seems worse.

But it does.

Repeat After Me: He Was in His Own House

I read the news about Henry Louis Gates' arrest Monday on the Huffington Post, and couldn't believe the apologist comments written by many people in response. My thought was, this guy was in his own house or on his own porch, and even if he (allegedly) acted affronted and accused the cop of racism, that doesn't qualify as a crime that warrants arrest -- especially in his own house! (The charges have since been dropped.)

A friend sent me a link to a post about the situation from a blog called Shapely Prose, which skewered all the apologist discussion. This is just the last paragraph (written by Kate Harding):

A 58-year-old man who’s accomplished more than most of us could hope to in three lifetimes was arrested at his own home for being angry that a police officer walked in there and treated him like a criminal. And even liberal white people respond by saying, “Hey, it happens to us, too,” and Monday morning quarterbacking this specific instance out the wazoo, instead of acknowledging that this kind of bullying — let alone brutality — by the police is fucked up, and it waaaay disproportionately hurts people of color. The people who think “He should know better than to talk back to cops” is an appropriate response here remind me of people who insist the solution to rape is self-defense courses for women. Yeah, it’s nice to know, in theory, how to defend yourself, but the real problem is rapists – and a culture that doesn’t do nearly enough to discourage them – not victims’ lack of preparation. Here, the problem is racism and a culture that willfully ignores how deeply embedded it is in our institutions, in our expectations, and in our analysis of how just this world really is, not individuals getting angry with police officers.

Thanks, Kate.

"Public Option" Works for Her

One of several letters on health care reform from today's Star Tribune:

Several TV ads warn against a public option to the health care plan wanted by President Obama.

I am on Medicare, a public government-run program, and I have never had an interference between me and any doctors. However, before Medicare, my private health insurers came between us a lot. One carrier would change a medication I had been on for years for no apparent reason. Usually the new medicine was more expensive than the previous one.

Several new meds did not work for me. Once, I spent months in pain while my doctor argued with the insurer to get me back on the correct one. Insurers also intervened over procedures my doctor thought I needed.

Judy Ryan Haaversen, Minneapolis

It just goes to show, if you have to pick the bureaucrat who's going to stand between you and your doctor, go with the government bureaucrat over the private insurance bureaucrat.

LifeLock Ads -- Curiouser and Curiouser

Last Sunday's Star Tribune business section included this full-page ad for LifeLock. In case you haven't heard of it, it's a company that guarantees it can prevent identity theft, and its CEO is known for publicly disclosing his Social Security number to prove how iron-clad the service is.

I was vaguely aware of LifeLock (I think from an ad that was in Parade magazine a while ago), and wondered if it was a legitimate product. I looked into it a bit at the time, and decided it seemed like it was basically on the up-and-up, and so I left at that.

This recent ad caught my eye, though, because its layout is almost identical to the ads done by the Universal Media Syndicate.

For instance, compare the layout above to this one for the Universal Health Card (ignore the pink boxes -- those are from me):

It has the same right-dominant image at top, photos of "real people" across the bottom with their stories marked off by a square bullet, and a call to action box about two-thirds of the way down the right side of the page, complete with Promo Code and two different phone numbers to call depending upon whether you want single and multiple coverage.

There are even similar little icons for each phone number (although the "padlock man" icon has been used by LifeLock before this ad).

So either LifeLock is imitating the successful formula of the UMS, or possibly they've actually hired UMS to produce the ads.

Looking into LifeLock a little further, I discovered they weren't quite so up-and-up as I had thought. They do offer an actual service (which costs $110 per year), but it's something you could do yourself for free.

Basically, the same 2003 law that brought us each a free credit report per year also made it possible for us to put a fraud alert on our credit reports so that no one can open a new account in our name without checking with us first. Jeez, you say, that sounds like something that should be required in the first place. But it's not, you see, because that would slow down the credit bureaus and therefore cost them money, so they didn't let it become law.

What LifeLock does is put one of those fraud alerts on your reports, and then renew the hold every three months. As security expert Bruce Schneier explained it in Wired, you do get something for your money from LifeLock, but in his opinion, it's not worth it. He writes, "LifeLock's business model is based more on the fear of identity theft than the actual risk."

But just because it's not worth the money, doesn't mean people aren't doing it, which angers the credit bureaus. According to Schneier,

This service pisses off the credit bureaus and their financial customers. The reason lenders don't routinely verify your identity before issuing you credit is that it takes time, costs money and is one more hurdle between you and another credit card. (Buy, buy, buy -- it's the American way.) So in the eyes of credit bureaus, LifeLock's customers are inferior goods; selling their data isn't as valuable. LifeLock also opts its customers out of pre-approved credit card offers, further making them less valuable in the eyes of credit bureaus.

So the credit bureaus and others sued LifeLock, claiming they are misusing the law that allowed fraud alerts. The alerts, they argue, were only meant to be used after a person's wallet had been stolen, or their house broken into. Schneier counters that by saying, "the text of the law states that anyone 'who asserts a good faith suspicion that the consumer has been or is about to become a victim of fraud or related crime' can request a fraud alert. It seems to me that includes anybody who has ever received one of those notices about their financial details being lost or stolen, which is everybody."

Despite that, the credit bureaus recently won their suit, and so I guess LifeLock's whole business model has been thrown out the window.

Which leads me to question what the point of the recent ad was. It ran weeks after the lawsuit was decided. The text does emphasize several times that the service is for people who "have a good faith suspicion that you are at risk of identity theft," so perhaps that's LifeLock's way of trying to get around the recent ruling.

If there's one upside to all of this, it's that it may make more people aware of their right to put a fraud alert on their credit reports. If you want to do it, this is how, according to the site lifelock-scam.com:

Placing your own fraud alert takes a few minutes and costs nothing. You only have to place it with one of the [credit] bureaus as by law the one you place it with must inform the other 2.

To find out just how easy it is simply ring or write to any of the following credit bureaus to request a fraud alert to be placed on your credit file:

TransUnion: 1-800-680-7289; Fraud Victim Assistance Division, P.O. Box 6790, Fullerton, CA 92834-6790

Equifax: 1-800-525-6285; P.O. Box 740241, Atlanta, GA 30374-0241

Experian: 1-888-EXPERIAN (397-3742); P.O. Box 9532, Allen, TX 75013

An ‘initial’ fraud alert is designed to be used if you feel you are at risk, so if asked for a reason you might mention the wallet or purse that you lost or the ‘post that has been going missing.’

Do it today, if only to annoy the credit bureaus!

Doctors and Nurses Speak about Health Care Change

Great program on Kerri Miller's Midmorning show today. The show brought together dozens of doctors, nurses, and medical consumers to discuss health care reform.

They discussed:

• overutilization -- the psychology of doctors being asked for tests, wanting to be liked, and also being "incentivized" to overuse tests because they get paid per procedure. Mayo Clinic doctors are salaried -- so there's not as much incentive to do tests that aren't needed.
• lack of coordination of care, so that people end up on 30 medications that make them sicker instead of better.
  
• the VA model, so often mentioned in health care reform discussions.
• the ethics and values that need to be settled in terms of costs and access. (Ethicist Peter Singer recently posited a provocative question on this topic.)
• a public option was generally thought to be needed to make the private insurance companies honest.
  
• one nurse said she doesn't like to call what we have a health care system -- it's only a business. She sees people show up in her ICU because they couldn't afford a $15 copay. They get a cardiac stent put in, but then they can't afford the blood thinners to keep their blood from clotting around the stent.

An internist named Craig Bowron made this analogy: Our health care system is like a person with a meth problem, who thinks their only problem is that meth is too expensive. But if the person got off meth, all of their financial problems would clear up.

Doctors' medical school debt was raised as part of the problem. They spend seven to 13 years in medical school and residencies, ending up with $200,000 in debt. This affects decisions about going into specialties instead of family practice, internal medicine or pediatrics.

Measuring outcomes is always bandied about as a goal for medicine, but the audience repeatedly pointed out that it's not as easy as it might sound. It can take years, in many cases, to determine if one approach works better than another. So how do you "pay for performance" in medicine?

I don't think it was just self-congratulation, but the group seemed to be in agreement that Minnesota is doing more things right than most other states, and they wish a new system would learn from Minnesota.

And that states like Minnesota, with high-quality care at a reasonable cost, should not have their Medicare or other federally based compensation cut across the board, as is currently being considered.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby

Hmmm.

Maybe it can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never let him forget he's a man, too.

Let's Not Let History Repeat Itself on Health Care

I went through some of my daughter's early childhood memorabilia yesterday, and ran across copies of the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press from the day she was born in fall of 1993. In the news that day: the deaths of Federico Fellini and River Phoenix, the opening of a new library in Roseville (now closed for renovation and expansion), the Bob Packwood scandal, and changes (or lack thereof) to our health care system.

That's right -- she was born right in the midst of the failed attempt at reform during the early Clinton years.

Flipping through the pages, I came to the editorial page, and was amused by this cartoon by Steven Sack:


Then I read today's Strib and there was Sack again, still talking about the same topic:


If Congress can't get its act together and get something passed in August, so they can reconcile in fall and finish up before the snow flies, Sack may be able to do a little Photoshop work on his 1993 cartoon and get some use out of it this time around as well.

His current cartoon is a neat summary of the argument for getting off the dime and making some kind of change, because the status quo is not working for almost anyone. I know I've already written about Wendell Potter's appearance on Bill Moyers, but I just ran across an additional quote from Potter's testimony before Congress, which I think makes a great point:

The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent, publicly-accountable health care option as a "government-run system." But what we have today, Mr. Chairman, is a Wall Street-run system that has proven itself an untrustworthy partner to its customers, to the doctors and hospitals who deliver care, and to the state and federal governments that attempt to regulate it.

Just as James Morone said we shouldn't use the term "Single Payer," but should instead call it "Medicare For All," we ought to work to relabel the current no-preexisting-conditions-and-no-coverage-except-from-employers travesty we have now as the "Wall Street-run system."

With the popularity of Wall Street at an all-time low, a label like that might have a real effect.

Have You Got a Minute for Canvassing?

When we hear our doorbell ring, if we're not expecting someone, we peer surreptitiously through the window to see if the bell ringers are holding clipboards. If they are, we don't answer the door.

When I go to the co-op around lunchtime lately, it's not uncommon to see two people in matching T-shirts, holding clipboards and roaming the city sidewalk outside the front door. They greet each person who walks near them (i.e., everyone, since they're encamped right by the door), with a friendly "Have you got a minute for the environment?" (or fill in the blank for whatever cause is on their shirts).

It's a brilliant verbal gambit, because it's hard to say no. I really wouldn't mind this attempted conversation if they actually wanted to inform me about the environment, or ask for a signature on a petition, but that's never what it's about. (I did stop to talk at least a couple of times, you see.) But it's always about asking for money.

Now that many people have caller ID and can screen out unknown callers, it seems that person-to-person fundraising has gotten more common. I knew a few people who canvassed during the summers back in college, but I never had anyone come to my door back in those days, and I'm sure I never saw anyone doing it in public spaces.

Why does it bug me so much? I think it's because I know they know that once you've met someone, even if it wasn't a self-initiated meeting, human nature makes us feel a bond of interdependence. And humans are wired for interdependence because our survival so often depended on it. After all, we aren't the biggest, the strongest, or the most well-armored, and we don't have the sharpest teeth or claws. We've got our brains and we've got each other, and that's it.

I read recently that canvassers are sometimes taught to touch the person they're talking to on the arm if they can, and that giving is much more likely from a person who has been touched. The fact that they know that and use it makes me mad.

The Village Voice ran an article about the street canvassers of Union Square, and after reading that, I realize we have it easy with our canvassers in Minnesota. According to the author, Elizabeth Dwoskin, the canvassers she talked to don't actually work for the organization they represent. They work for a professional canvassing organization, Dialog Direct, which is hired by organizations:

Although the Dialogue Direct website promises that its approach ensures "the fun stays within fundraising," about 40 percent of new canvassers quit in the first week.... Dialogue Direct expanded into eight American cities in 2003.... And nonprofits are finding that the in-your-face approach often works better than more traditional fundraising models like direct mail, telemarketing, and expensive television commercials.

"You want to access the general public, and no matter how advanced your technology, the best way to access the general public is to get people talking to people," says Dialogue Direct VP, Matt Bergin.

Right -- it's about "people talking to people" -- make that "people talking at people."

One canvasser quoted in the story said:

...every objection comes from a certain place: "Either a lack of comfort, a lack of information, or a lack of empathy." She admits that dialoguers can be annoying, but adds: "I think Martin Luther King was probably a bit annoying."

I know I don't lack empathy with these causes, and I generally don't lack much information on the topics the canvassers are flogging. I do lack comfort with their methods, so maybe that's it. If Martin Luther King had been standing on a street corner trying to raise money this way, he might have been better funded, but there wouldn't be a national holiday named for him.

The Voice article ends with an incredible verbatim verbal assault by one canvasser on a med student. The canvasser had only signed up one person for the day, and it was getting late, so he hounded this unfortunate woman halfway across Union Square, calling out her name, guilting her about how she spends her money, trying to compare his student loan debt to hers. She finally manages to get away from him, and the canvasser says to the reporter:

"Are we really that annoying that if you stop for 30 seconds, we're going to ruin your day? What's the big deal?" he asks. "Ninety percent of people say they don't have time because they have to go to work. They are so self-centered. They feel if they take 30 seconds, the whole world will come crashing down."

The answer to that is YES -- you really are so annoying that stopping for 30 seconds would ruin someone's day, especially if you're going to treat people the way he had just treated the med student. And we're not necessarily self-centered -- we're tired of being accosted constantly by people asking us for money. You don't know how much money we donate to causes of our own free will -- and you can bet that all of that money goes directly to the organization, without any of it being paid to a canvasser.

Which brings me to my final objection to canvassers -- how much of the money donated actually goes to the cause. According to the Voice article, in New York the Dialogue Direct canvassers are paid $10 an hour, plus bonuses: $50 for the day's third sign-up, $70 for the fourth, and $180 for the fifth. In other words, the more successful the canvasser, the smaller the percentage of money goes to the cause. Other canvassers are paid on commission, and it's not a small percentage of the total.

I realize all fundraising costs money, but I wonder if the organizations who employ canvassers, either directly or indirectly, realize that their potential audience is tuning them and their message out. When I hear the name Environment Minnesota, for instance, all I can think of is the canvassers at the co-op.

I doubt that's what EM had in mind when they decided on canvassing as a fundraising strategy.

Other resources:

• Discussion about whether canvassing is exploitative on the Philadelphia City Paper website.
• Strip-Mining the Grassroots by Greg Bloom on MyDD.com

James Morone on MPR's Midday

I caught most of Gary Eichten's Midday program on MPR Thursday. His guest was a political science professor named James Morone (Brown University), who's studied the political processes that led to all the health reforms in the U.S. over the last 100 years or so.

Morone was fun to listen to, and came up with one insight after another into the current situation:

• We're in an unsustainable and increasingly unstable predicament, with an additional percent of our GDP going to health care every four years, yet we have 30 million uninsured, 40 million precariously insured, and 18,000 people dying each year because of coverage problems (like Nora Longley, whom I wrote about a few days ago). Employers are beginning to drop their insurance because they can't afford it, and if enough of them do that the system we have now -- such as it is -- would collapse. "There would be an incredible crisis when well-to-do, well-jobbed people lose their health insurance."
  
• The important thing is to get something passed, because almost anything is better than nothing. Every partial plan that's been passed in the past (Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP) is very popular once it's implemented. "Get the benefits out there first, then follow with cost control." And people have to mobilize as a movement to make that happen, because the health insurance industry is a powerful lobby. Only calls, faxes, and emails from constituents can outweigh the lobbyists' money.
  
• Presidential leadership is key, and it has to be done quickly after the election or the mandate is lost. LBJ passed Medicare during a window when he could use his popularity to frighten legislators. (Don't miss the story of how LBJ maneuvered Wilbur Mills into backing Medicare.)
  
• Don't call single payer by that name -- call it Medicare For Everyone. Morone told an amusing anecdote about a University of Minnesota researcher who visited a 600-bed hospital in Canada and asked if he could take their billing department to lunch. He had a nice discussion with the three or four staff members. Then he made the same request at an equivalent-size hospital in Minneapolis, and they said, "Which ones do you want to talk to?" Because there were 125 staff members in the billing department, all chasing down payments from various insurance companies and individuals.
• But single payer will never make it through Washington as things are now, for a number of reasons that Morone explained. So passing mandatory employer coverage with an additional public option is way better than nothing, and over time might lead to single payer. The question is, "Does it move us in the right direction? From what I've seen with the bills in Congress, the answer is yes."
• Finally, Morone said that if some type of reform doesn't get passed or very firmly agreed upon before the August recess, it won't happen. When Congress comes back, they'll begin focusing on the 2010 midterm elections, and then health care reform will seem to dangerous.

I came away from the show determined to call my representative and senators, even though I know they already pretty much agree.

I have the same feeling of anxious hopefulness I had before the election last fall, as if we've reached a momentous occasion in history -- or maybe as if we're living in a house right over a fault line. Like James Morone said, doing nothing could easily lead to a total collapse of the system, in which case it might be an opportunity to build a new house from the foundation up -- if we survive the walls caving in on us in the first place.

My Own Stumble Upon List

Recent finds on the Interweb:

A new blog, whatImeanttosay.squarespace.com -- just launched this week, covering a range of interesting topics. A new daily stop for Daughter Number Three!

The Heavy Table, a Twin Cities local food and foodie site, has been turning out fun and tasty stories every day for months now. It's always worth a stop to see what restaurant or cookbook they've reviewed, but it's also full of great stories about food people like Bonnie Dehn of Dehn's herb farm and David Page, a local television producer whose show "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" runs on the Food Network.

A great article by Sharon Parker of Minneapolis Observer Quarterly called Everybody's a Beekeeper, via the tcdailyplanet.net. Beyond honeybees to the native bumblebee, Sharon fills us in on the why and how of bees in our yards and gardens. Neatest fact: Bumblebees are best for pollinating tomatoes because of their "robust vibrations, known as 'buzz pollination.' "

Health Care Thoughts, Part 2

Following up from my recent post on the national health care situation...

The July issue of the Minnesota Women's Press carried a wrenching story about a young woman's death at the hands of our de facto policy of uninsurance. Nora's Story should be read by everyone in Congress and a special highlighted copy should be slipped under Tim Pawlenty's door. What happens when you're just post-college, in jobs that offer only underinsurance or no insurance, and you develop cancer? This could be my daughter in 10 years if things don't change.

And tonight's Daily Show was dedicated to the health care issue (I'll post links to clips tomorrow when the videos go live on the Daily Show site).

Stewart provided a classic skewering of all the hysterical, anti-public-option ads and talking heads. Despite the satirical spin he put on it, though, it was pretty depressing to get a glimpse of how much disinformation is out there.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Drag Me to Health
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The sequence featured this brilliant background graphic...


...and was followed by a three-pronged standup by Canadian Samantha Bee, Brit Jon Oliver and American Wyatt Cenac, each riffing on the exaggerated horror stories they have experienced at the hands of their countries' medical systems.

Finally, the show concluded with a two-part interview with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius (part 1 here, part 2 here), which touched on many of the thorny issues involved. She was very clear about the fact that doing nothing is not an option, which I liked, and she acknowledged that part of the solution is our own behaviors, which lead to chronic conditions that drive up cost.

Americans need to accept some personal responsibility for their health, she said. To which Stewart responded, "Good luck selling that. I've been an American all my life, and we like sitting. And things that taste good."

Unconventional Mushrooms

Like many a long-time natural food co-op shopper, I became accustomed long ago to seeing the word organic used in contrast to conventional when describing various methods for growing fruits and vegetables.

I don't know who came up with conventional as a one-word descriptor for the chemical-based farming methods that became predominant in the last half of the 20th century, but I'm afraid it's here to stay, for lack of a better term (some possible alternatives... nonorganic? inorganic? You see the difficulty.)

However, I am always slightly bemused by this use of conventional because I know that for the uninitiated, the opposite of conventional is not organic, but rather unconventional.

In celebration and gentle ridicule of the way insiders speak without thinking too much about how their words are understood by outsiders, I bring you this photo gallery of unconventional mushrooms:

From craftycrafty.tv:



From ky-festivals.org (that's ky as in Kentucky -- get your mind out of the gutter! And yes, that really is a mushroom in the photo):



The cartoon-like but all-too-real psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria (via tokyomango.com):



As well as this somewhat disturbing children's mushroom tent, clearly based on Amanita muscaria:



A walking character mushroom, not quite ready for Disney World. I can almost hear the theme song... "Do you know the mushroom man, the mushroom man, the mushroom man?"



And, finally, this nirvana photo for morel hunters:

A Little Piece of the Real Wales

Last Friday was Scrabble night, and while we were playing, I discovered that one friend shared my teenaged obsession with Wales. I mentioned that I had even bought a little Welsh-English dictionary. She topped that by saying she went to Brigham Young University because they were the only school in the U.S. that taught Welsh!

Anyway, it reminded me of reading How Green Was My Valley a few years ago (another one of those classic books I avoided while young). What a great book.

I read it partly in preparation for a short visit to Wales, which included a stop at Big Pit, the National Coal Museum, located in the town of Blaenafon, southeastern Wales, close to where HGWMV is set.


If you're ever anywhere near Wales, the museum is worth going out of your way to see. The people who conduct the tours were all miners there (the mine has been closed for about 20 years), and they take you down into the mine on the same elevator that carried them to work. Before going down, you have to hand over anything electronic in your possession, since it could cause a spark and blow everyone up.


This is the winding house, which controls the elevator as it descends into the mine.

The shower and locker room building has been turned into a display area, with information on both the labor history of mining and its environmental impact.


In the showers there was this surprise -- a naked man (with strategically placed towel) painted on a mirror. The showers were added in the mid-20th century. Before that, the men went home each night caked in coal dust and the women had a bath ready for them, laboriously prepared by heating water on the stove.

I hope I get the chance to go back to Wales for a longer visit. It's so much more interesting than the romantic, fantasy-land image I had of it as a young person.

Comparing Oranges to Oranges

The Star Tribune's John Ewoldt ran a valuable, consumer-oriented column in Sunday's paper. Writing about a book called Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, he reported that orange juice sold as "not from concentrate" (NFC) is not only more expensive than other orange juice, it is actually more processed and artificial, not less.

If you're like me, you assumed that NFC meant something close to fresh squeezed, right? Wrong.

NFC juice is "often a heavily pasteurized product. In the pasteurization process, it's heated, stripped of oxygen and flavor chemicals, then put in huge storage vats for up to a year. When it's ready for packaging, flavor derived from orange essence and oils is added to make it taste fresh." Orange "flavor" doesn't have to be listed on the ingredients because it is "natural" in some sense of the word.

Where did the NFC usage come from? Well, Tropicana was using the process, which is more expensive than concentrating and reconstituting, and it needed a way to get consumers to pay more to cover its costs. So someone at the company (or at their ad agency, I suspect) came up with the phrase. And consumers (including me, occasionally) have been coughing up the bigger bucks ever since.

Clearly, if you can't do fresh squeezed, the best bet is frozen concentrate -- the cheapest price for probably the next best product.

Here's a photo I found via Google of some NFC juice ready for shipping in China:


Not quite how I pictured it, based on the packaging shown in the photo at the top of this post. How about you?

Health Care Thoughts

I have no solutions for our health care mess, but I'm sure of these two things:

• Health care costs run the risk of ruining small businesses that provide health insurance for employees.
• The cost of individual insurance not only hurts self-employed people, including farmers -- it suppresses innovation by keeping people at their day job when they have every ability to go off and create the next great business idea.

Several interesting things I've seen on health care in the last few days:

Garrison Keillor's op-ed in today's Star Tribune:

In the past two weeks, I've attended two benefit concerts to raise money for musicians to pay their medical bills, and that is just ridiculous. Why should anyone, least of all a valuable contributing member of society, have to pass the hat to pay the doctor? But there I was, watching one of America's few true-blue cowboy singers hoist himself on crutches onto the stage to since "The Old Chisholm Tail" as we put our twenties the pot to pay for his pelvis, broken when a horse threw him. A cowboy singer can only afford the $10,000 deductible health plan and that means he must sell Old Paint or become a charity case.

And my response to Garrison was, It's good the cowboy singer even had the $10,000 deductible plan, because I know of many musicians and other self-employed people who don't have anything who are approaching late middle age.

A friend posted this short clip of a Congressional hearing on Twitter. It's an exchange between Dennis Kucinich and Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian who advocates privatizing Canada's health care system:



Dr. Gratzer is part of the Manhattan Institute, a think tank advocating free enterprise solutions, funded by conservative foundations like the Koch and Walton Family Foundations and corporations like Cigna and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

I've heard or read a lot of comparisons of the Canadian vs. American systems. One op-ed from the Denver Post listed eight myths about the Canadian health care system. Its author, a Canadian clinical psychologist living it the U.S. for close to two decades, declared that the following are myths:

• Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.
• Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.
• Myth: The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.
• Myth: Canada's government decides who gets health care and when they get it.
• Myth: There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.
• Myth: Canadians are paying out of pocket to come to the U.S. for medical care.
• Myth: Canada is a socialized health care system in which the government runs hospitals and where doctors work for the government.
• Myth: There aren't enough doctors in Canada.

I also just read this interesting piece on Snopes. It's a point-by-point examination of the claims made in an email that's circulating, supposedly written by a regular Canadian citizen. The email makes claims such as "I am personally in the 55% income tax bracket" and the "Government allots [only] so many operations per year" and "Forget getting a second opinion, what you see is what you get." The Snopes response is very measured and fair minded, often pointing out that the claims made -- such as "Shirley's cousin was diagnosed with a heart blockage. Put on a waiting list. Died before he could get treatment" -- are unverifiable and so vague that anything could have caused the death [even if "Shirley's cousin" isn't a complete fabrication -- DN3].

Today's Pioneer Press included an op-ed by Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute called Obama's Right -- We Need Health Care Reform But He's Wrong about What Kind. In it, he proposes unmooring health insurance from employment. As he points out, it is unfair that employed, insured people get their care tax free while someone who pays for insurance from self-employed income has to pay taxes on her/his benefits. Instead, people would pay taxes on their benefits and both employed and self-employed people would receive either a tax deduction or a tax credit to compensate.

At first I thought this sounded more fair than the current system, but then I remembered that self-employed people are able to deduct their health costs from their taxes. While it is not equivalent to the tax break employees receive, it does cover part of the difference. What self-employed people don't have is access to affordable plans, since they aren't part of a group that spreads out the risk. So unless they can get access to care through a spouse's company (even if they have to pay for the plan), the price is outrageous or has a a very high deductible, as in the case of Garrison's friend, the cowboy singer -- or both. I heard an NPR story that told of a farm couple whose only health insurance options cost between $12,000 and $20,000 per year for the two of them, with a $2,000 deductible!

Tanner also called for removing the interstate ban on health coverage. As it stands, you can only purchase health insurance within your state, and each state has its own list of benefits that companies must cover. As with any op-ed, Tanner picked the two extremes: New Jersey, which requires coverage of in vitro fertilization and coverage of children to age 25 (and costs $5,580 a year for a healthy 25-year-old male) vs. Kentucky, which costs $960 per year (no mention of what they do or don't cover). Tanner thinks that a young guy in New Jersey should be able to buy the Kentucky plan, and a bill sponsored by Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., would do just that.

What's wrong with that? Health policy specialist Bob Laszewski writes, "In the end, the young and healthy would get much more affordable policies and the old and/or sick would be worse off." (Kind of like how privatizing Social Security would probably work for the young and financially fit, but not too well for anyone else, or how giving school vouchers would leave all the kids with the most needs in the public schools.) Laszewski writes:

So what exactly does the Shadegg bill get us?

Well it would get Mr. Mathews' insurance company trade association, the “Council for Affordable Care” a wild-west market environment to go find all of those young healthy people and sign them up for really cheap coverage.

Young and healthy people would pay a lot less and older and/or sicker people would pay a lot more if coverage were even available to them.

New Jersey is a dysfunctional health insurance market. But fixing that state, and others like it, is a lot more complicated than putting the “cherry pickers” back in charge.

No one would argue that (in a market-based system) a young person's or a healthier person's insurance shouldn't be cheaper than that of an older person or a unhealthy person -- but allowing purchases across state lines will clearly have unintended consequences that are likely to affect the sickest and poorest the most.

That's all I've got to say on the subject of health care reform for now. But if we don't make some substantial improvements in our health system in the next few years, I'm going to be one disappointed voter. The only question is who'll get the blame.

LATE ADDITION: Via BoingBoing, I just read a Bill Moyers interview with Wendell Potter, former head of communications at Cigna. This is the guy who wrote the talking points for opposing the Clinton health reforms, as well as for quashing Michael Moore's movie Sicko. You may have heard about Potter's more recent change of heart -- he testified before Congress to say that insurance companies purposely let people onto their roles despite knowing they have undeclared preexisting conditions, take their premium payments for a while, but then as soon as the person seeks treatment for the condition, the company disallows it and drops the person from the rolls.

How did someone who had worked in the industry for so long come to have such a change of heart? This is what he told Bill Moyers:

WENDELL POTTER: I went home, to visit relatives [in 2007]. And I picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued....

It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn't know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health-- booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases-- and I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just-- it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me....

Just a few weeks later though, I was back in Philadelphia and I would often fly on a corporate aircraft to go to meetings.

And I just thought that was a great way to travel. It is a great way to travel. You're sitting in a luxurious corporate jet, leather seats, very spacious. And I was served my lunch by a flight attendant who brought my lunch on a gold-rimmed plate. And she handed me gold-plated silverware to eat it with. And then I remembered the people that I had seen in Wise County. Undoubtedly, they had no idea that this went on, at the corporate levels of health insurance companies....

I was trying to process all this, and trying to figure out what I should do.... One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."

And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something."

Yes, It Is Possible to Share Letters

I have a tendency to rant about logos that are designed to share one initial capital letter among two or more words (see past posts here, here and here).

A friend pointed me to this rail road photo on Flickr, which shows that back in the day of the professional lettering artist, it was indeed possible to make shared initial letters work in a readable way.

The photo is by a Flickr user named Julia, and you can see her photo stream here. She has shot a lot of cool signs and buildings. Some of the categories on her photo stream are:

• Route 66
• Signs
• Vintage Kids (these aren't photos -- they're scans from printed materials)
  
• Cinemas
• Diners and lunch counters
• Country stores, groceries and drugstores
  
• Rural Decay
• Mid-century in print (again, not photos, but scans from printed materials)
  

Hundreds of photos on these topics. Wow. I have to go spend some time looking through Julia's photos!

Another example of the wonderful things you can find while wandering around the Interweb.

She Did What???!?

Yesterday, I caught another Huffington Post headline anomaly (see other examples here and here from my past posts).

There's nothing quite like a badly broken headline when you've been laughter deprived.

But even without the bad break, the headline writer was just asking for trouble by putting the word "kills" right next to "Michael Jackson."

Really now, can't we all agree this is one thing that can't be blamed on Nancy Pelosi?

Taxing Soda Pop?

I'm not sure if this belongs in my "part of the solution" category or not, but did anyone else hear about Michael Jacobson's idea to tax soda pop?

Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), has a history of making headline-grabbing pronouncements about nutrition. I believe he's the one who coined the term "heart attack on a plate" when describing fettuccine alfredo.

Depending on how Jacobson's tax was implemented (two possibilities he listed were 1 cent per container or 1 cent per ounce), it would raise between $1.5 billion and $16 billion. In theory -- especially at the steeper end of the tax scale -- it would begin to cut consumption. And the revenue would go to funding increased health care access (price tag for that, so far: $1.2 trillion).

Of course, any tax on consumption (i.e, a sales tax) is inherently regressive. But as Jacobson points out,

That's true as far it goes, but don't look for this argument from anti-poverty advocates. If we're using soda tax revenues to help pay for expanded health care coverage and for prevention, lower-income Americans will enjoy the biggest share of the benefit.

I'm not so sure either amount of taxation would have a big effect on consumption. Like gas prices, I think it will take a pretty big change in the price to alter people's behavior. So doubling the price would have a noticeable effect, but increasing it by a cent an ounce probably wouldn't. Although, since the proposed tax would not apply to diet sodas, some people might switch (rather than stop drinking it altogether).

CSPI's report on Liquid Candy includes a lot of stats on how much soda teens, in particular, consume. My favorite takeaway is this graph, comparing the change in milk vs. soda consumption in just 20 years:


Can you say "marketing"?

Do Not Go Directly to Jail

Star Tribune veteran writer Jean Hopfensperger had a great article in yesterday's paper, titled Troubled Teens Take Route Around Jail.

She tells us that Ramsey, Dakota and Hennepin counties are part of an experiment to divert teens who would normally be sent to juvenile detention into counseling and lifestyle change sessions instead.

It's "based on research showing that most young offenders don't need to be jailed to get them to show up in court or keep the streets safe," especially "for lower-risk offenders who enter detention because of truancy, curfew violations and fifth-degree assault."

Before entering the program, each kid is assessed on a sliding scale. From zero to nine, the kid is sent home; a score from 10 to 15 means something more stringent, but less than detention -- house arrest, day treatment or another community-based service. Those with scores 16 and over go into detention.

The counties have been using these assessments for three years, and they report no increase in court no-shows, crimes committed while awaiting hearings, or even later. The sessions described by Hopfensperger combine group discussions and motivational talks with job hunting techniques.

The story ends with a quote from Melvin Carter, a former St. Paul cop who has worked with at-risk teenagers: "We used to think that a boy who came from poverty, a broken home, had been in a gang or used a weapon -- that they were most likely to be the repeat offenders. But if you peel back the onion, the biggest single factor is whether they spent one day in jail."