Breathtaking Ignorance

Check out this recent quote from George Bush when addressing the issue of access to health care:

“The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private
insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America,”
he said. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

It is truly amazing that we could have a president so flip and just plain stupid.  I was going to explain how, just in case it wasn't clear, but the fine folks over at The American Prospect  have already done that:

So. Except that emergency rooms are not conveniently located in
neighborhoods all over the country, emergency rooms are not well suited
for the provision of primary care and tend to charge rather heftily for
those services, emergency room care fails to provide the kind of
continuous care that is really needed and the real intended customers
of emergency care (people with emergencies) will have longer waiting
times than necessary if the same places are also used for primary care.

Neither are emergency rooms going to provide preventive care or
prenatal care for the poor, for example, and it is highly unlikely that
the care the poor receive in emergency rooms is timed correctly from
the point of view of best health outcomes. I suspect that people wait
until they just can't take the pain any longer before going to an ER.
This means that illnesses are more advanced and treatment less likely
to succeed than if primary care was provided in the communities of the
poor…

In sum, emergency rooms are an expensive, inappropriate and unreliable way to provide primary care for the uninsured.

Obviously, my family had to spend some time in the hospital last week, but if we did not have insurance, I doubt we would have taken Alex to the ER last Monday.  We do have insurance so we were able to go the pediatrician and discover that his pulse oxygen was at unhealthy low levels and that he needed more aggressive treatment for his pneumonia.  Surely, his two days at Wakemed were expensive, but if we didn't have insurance, we probably wouldn't have ended up in the ER later in the week with a much more advanced pneumonia requiring a longer stay and much greater expense.

Larouche!

I've come to accept that most of my students have no idea of who I am talking about when I mention any political figure before the era of George W. Bush.  Robert Bork, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole– that's okay.  But what saddens me is that they have no idea who Lyndon LaRouche
is– undoubtedly one of the more entertaining (not that he tried to be) political figures of the 1980's.  Larouche has run for president every year since 1976, but at the age of 85, he's finally decided to give it up.  Larouche is a convicted felon, totally paranoid, and completely nuts.  He recently granted a phone interview to The New Republic (apparently he feels in-person interviews are too much of a security risk).  Some highlights from the article:

After running in every presidential
election since 1976–and supporting everything from colonizing Mars, to
bringing back the gold standard, to building a giant land bridge across
the Bering Strait–LaRouche has decided not to go in for a ninth bid in
2008…

His enemies list has had a large
and distinguished membership–it's probably the only one to include
Henry Kissinger, Harry Truman, Queen Elizabeth II, Jane Fonda, and most
nineteenth-century British empiricists–but lately it's focused almost
exclusively on Al Gore, whose antiglobal warming crusade he treats with
special contempt. LaRouche, his colleagues say, is unambiguously
“pro-civilization” and regards anything that hinders growth as a threat
to life as we know it…

The prospect of darker times is a subject
LaRouche brings up a lot. In the course of an hour-long conversation,
he warns that “the worst financial crisis in modern history [is] in the
process of hitting” and “the world financial monetary system” is
“disintegrating very rapidly”; that “civilization may not be here when
we come to our senses”; and, rather cryptically, that we are
approaching a “Tower of Babel.” And, just as he has done for decades,
LaRouche maintains that he is the only one with the qualifications to
save us from an unappealing fate.

I was pleased to read that Larouche, having giving up on older generations (who actually know who he is), has focused his energies on building the Worldwide Larouche Youth Movement.  Apparently, the recruit college kids to drop-out and devote their lives to a cult-like following of Larouche.  Now, maybe some of my students will actually know something about him– I can even think of a few I wouldn't mind seeing sign up . 

How Republicans support the troops

Senator James Webb (D-VA) introduced legislation in the Senate to require that troops in Iraq get the same amount of rest time state-side that they served in Iraq before they have to be sent back for another tour.  Despite support from virtually every Democrat, seven Republicans, and every member of the Senate who has actually served in combat, the Republicans shot it down with a filibuster.  Wouldn't want to actually support the troops by letting them not spend their entire lives in Iraq.