Affordable Health Care?

In the WSJ's Opinion Journal, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney explains his plan to make health care more affordable. Using a combination of punishing the freeloaders*, removing things like in vitro treatments** from being required benefits and redirecting money that previously subsidized hospitals for providing 'free' care to the uninsured to subidies to insure the poor, it looks like the state is moving to a system that provides not only more health care, but cheaper too.

I'll continue thinking about the subject, but I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one.

If you read the comments page, you'll see that many of the comments were strongly negative without really explaining why. Is it just because conservatives have a knee-jerk reaction to words 'universal health care', are pessimistic, or did they really try to evaluate the article?

* I just read a facinating article on the freeloader problem...but I don't know where. I'll try to find it, but the gist is that 2/3 of students, given a chance to play a game where they are either in a group that punishes freeloaders or one that doesn't, choose to be in the non-punishing group. However, by the end of the experiment, almost all had moved to the punishing group (which was doing much better) and, by the end, the threat of punishment was sufficient to make sure no one was cheating.
** A highly expensive treatment with a shaky success rate for something that is luxury, not a necessity (I realize that adoptions are expensive too, and I have sympathy for people who want children and can't have them...but they aren't going to die from not having kids and why should we all pay just so they can be parents?)

Air America's Inanity

The guest on The Majority Report, shortly before 9pm (I'm paraphrasing slightly):

"Do you know how much money is wasted in the buerocracy in health care? We need a single-payer system. It could even be an insurance company. But we need to streamline the whole thing."

About a minute later:

"People need more choices. We need to streamline the choices."

Contradiction much?

Bilingual Education

I am interested in education and how we, as a country, can do better. One of the tricky problems is how to handle children who do not understand English, but are in a school system (and country) where English is the primary language.

Do you teach children in their original language without any English instruction? Do you teach them in their original language while trying to teach English ASAP? Do you do true bilingual education* where they are taught in both languages, perhaps one in the morning and the other in the afternoon (and, perhaps, right alongside native English speakers)? Do you teach them in English with a translator helping them? Do you teach only in English and hope that, through immersion, they pick it up and then can catch up?

Each of these has its own pros and cons. But I won't go through them right now as the possibilities are not as relevent as the actualities.

The most common primary language for students in the US who do not speak English is Spanish. In many areas, these children are put in 'bilingual classes' where the philosopy is to teach them in Spanish while teaching them English so that they do not fall behind in areas such as math and science while they are learning a second language. These programs are usually dismal failures. The number of students graduating from these programs into English mainstream is abysmally low nor do the students do better or even comperable to their English-speaking counterparts in other subjects. Now, this is not a matter of moral judgment on whether English or Spanish is better; it's a question of which language will open the most opportunities in this country...clearly English.

Is it just that it is hard to learn a second language, especially after leaving behind everything and everyone a child has ever known?

No.

Children with primary languages that are neither English or Spanish generally do not have the benefit of a teacher who speaks their language. They are certainly not put into classrooms with other children who speak their language with a teacher who teaches in their language. It's a numbers problem: there simply aren't enough teachers of these minority languages to match up with the relatively few speakers per school district. So what happens to these kids? Do they languish even more than their Spanish-speaking counterparts.

No.

They do much, much better. While no one would argue that dumping a child into a classroom where they speak an unintelligible language is ideal, these kids make larger strides.

While this seems a clear indictment on the system (that seems to be not so much a bilingual education system as a garunteed job for people not otherwise qualified to be in front of a classroom), it could be argued that Spanish-speaking immigrants come from more disadvantaged backgrounds than children from other locales (though one wonders why even children refugees who fled the murderous regimes of their homelands are less disadvantaged than those whose parents were looking for economic opportunities).

But now, I have further information. Information from someone with close knowledge of the NYC Special Ed programs.

According to her, non-mainstreamed deaf and hard of hearing** children from Spanish-speaking countries cannot be placed in bilingual classrooms for the simple reason that there aren't any teachers that are both bilingual and qualified to teach deaf children. These kids are given translators (called 'para-professionals') to help them cope with the English, while they still have access to a teacher specially trained to teach deaf and hard of hearing students.

An amazing thing happens:

Hearing impared children who have Spanish as their first language learn English faster than their hearing counterparts.

There is something very wrong with our bilingual education system.



*For more discussion on this and other linguistic topics, I strongly recomend Language Matters by Donna Jo Napoli.
**Depending on the degree of hearing loss and when the loss occured, many hearing impared children do have some access to language. In the case of children from Spanish-speaking countries, being hearing impared does not change the fact that their first language is Spanish.

3 Thoughts

This weekend I shared a motel room with my mother as we were visiting my brother at college. Surprisingly (she's quite liberal), when she turned on the tv, she put on Fox News. I wasn't paying much attention (I was reading), but a particular tagline, promising exciting news, caught my attention.

A woman announced that they would have the Prime Minister of Pakistan in an exclusive interview and she would find out if he secretly knew where bin Laden was.

First thought: If he did know, he wouldn't admit it (and that statement proves that Fox News anchors can make moronically inane statements to try to get viewers as well as any other news program or radio station).

Second thought: I recognize that I know nothing about the Prime Minister of Pakistan and where he really, in his heart of hearts, stands on terrorism. Doesn't matter. He couldn't possibly know where bin Laden was. Al Qaeda and bin Laden would never risk telling him as they know he has contact with the US and thus he, or his staff, could be compromised (from their perspective, of course).

Third thought (while he was speaking): On the subject of whether capturing bin Laden was a necessary act to provide safety in the War on Terror or was it a purely symbolic gesture, he gave the clearest response I have heard to date.

He said that capturing bin Laden was an obviously symbolic gesture. It would likely dishearten a fair number of terrorists as well as removing him from a position of being able to mastermind any future attacks and, in those ways, make us somewhat safer. However, we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that capturing bin Laden would end our problems with terrorism. Even ignoring the fact that his capture or death could turn him into a martyr that could inspire as well as dishearten his followers, he is not running the show right now. He isn't a vital part of any of the current attack; he is already disconnected from the scene, moving him from a hideout to a jail would have no impact on the abilities of terrorists com organize and carry out attacks.

A Sister's View on United 93

A few days ago, on the Rush Limbaugh show, a woman called in. She was Debra Burlingame, the sister of Chic Burlingame, the pilot of 9/11 Flight 77, the one that crashed into the Pentagon.

She stated, flat out, that she would not go to see the movie United 93. She has been informed that the scenes where the terrorists kill the pilots are going to be graphic. She doesn't think she can handle seeing a representation of what happened to her brother.

However...

She is extremely pleased that this movie is being made. She wants us all to remember the heroism of Flight 93 and says that knowing of their heroism made her loss easier to bear.

She doesn't think it is too soon...

France Has Greater Productivity Than We Do?

I'm watching CNBC to tape a short segment my father is going to be in. Before they got to dad, they had a section on the new information that "France, with its 31-hour workweek and 6 weeks of vacation is more productive than the US."

They had 2, apparently intelligent people, giving commentary on what this means. But neither of them explained it well.

One pointed out that "Well, people who would be low productivity workers don't ever even get jobs in France, so it looks higher. But, do keep in mind that the country, as a whole, does not benefit from this high productivity because, overall, there is less work being done."

The other said, "We can learn something from France. While we have a better system overall, we can see that working a few fewer hours or taking a little more vacation can make us more productive."

They both miss the point a little bit. Productivity is measured on a per-hour basis.

Let's say John and Pierre are equally good workers. They both are most productive earlier in the day with diminishing returns as the day goes on. So what would that would look like?

hour 1 100 Units
hour 2 99 Units
hour 3 97 Units
hour 4 94 Units
hour 5 90 Units
hour 6 85 Units
hour 7 79 Units
hour 8 72 Units
hour 9 65 Units
hour 10 55 Units

So, if John works a 10-hour day, his productivity is 83.6 units/hour. If Pierre works a 6 hour day, his productivity is 91.167 units/hour, making him more productive.

But, each day John makes 836 units. Pierre only makes 565.




And that's if they are equally good workers. Even if John is a better worker, it may look like he is less productive, because of this trick of statistics.

Air America's Inanities

Inanity #1

Al Franken's guest today was giving a laundry list of "strategic errors" the US had made during the War in Iraq. One of the listed ones was "keeping the UN out of Iraq".

Excuse me?

I distinctly remember that, after major combat operations with Saddam's government ended, the US immediately asked the UN to come in. I also remember that the UN was resistant at coming in until the terrorism died down.

Maybe that was a "strategic error" but you can hardly blame the US for it...

...unless you work for Air(head) America.



Inanity #2

On Saturday evening, I caught about 5 minutes of the show on Air America (I think it was a guest host in for Laura Flanders). He reported that, in the next hour, he was going to have a guest. He said that this guest was going to explain why immigration reform was NOT going to have an effect on discrimination against African Americans.

Excuse me?

Who said it would? Why on earth would anyone think that immigration (or the reform thereof) would have anything to do with a group of American citizens?

Crochet vs. Other Crafts

There's this commercial on CreateTV where the Old House guys are promoting a bunch of the other shows. The last line is something about how one of the guys is learning a lot from a quilting show. He's holding what a blanket...but it definitely isn't quilted.

It is a crocheted afghan.

It's just a commercial. Why is this completely driving me crazy?

Too Soon for United 93?

GayPatriot noticed that in some theaters reported that their patrons thought it was "too soon" for United 93 (the movie whose tagline is "September 11, 2001. Four planes were hijacked. Three of them reached their target. This is the story of the fourth.")

As I commented on his site:

As a New Yorker whose father had a monthly meeting that was supposed be held in the WTC that morning and whose stepfather saw the towers collapse from his office window, my feeling is that it is not too soon.

I understand, of course, that others will disagree. As is their right.

But some people thought Schindler’s List was too soon. And movie theatres ONLY heard from the people who thought it was too soon, not the many who thought it was time or past time.

The director seemed to be very concerned about whether it was too soon, so what did he do? He went to the families of the victims. They didn't feel it was too soon, they wanted this story told. And many of us have been hungering for this.

We are a society that talk about movie characters as if they are real people, feel the tv characters we invite into our homes each week are our friends and talk about movie stars as if we actually know them. We expect pop culture to talk about the things we care about (and to tell us what to care about).

4 1/2 years after the fact...it is time for us to take advantage of the movie medium to see some real American heroes.

I need to stop watching the Discovery Channel

Here's stuff that I learned this week:

Did you know that, as bad as Katrina was, the only case of a removal of an entire island by a hurricane was the 1893 disappearance of Hog Island, previously located just off of Long Island, NY? New York actually has quite a bad history of hurricanes. And, because of the nature of things such as the wind tunnels of NYC, the easily floodable subway system, the speed with which hurricanes can change directions to move up the coast and the difficulty (if not impossibility) of evacuating the island of Manhattan, NYC is second on the AIR list of "the top ten worst places for an extreme hurricane to strike"? (Miami is 1st and New Orleans is 5th.)

Volcanos are bad. Pompeii and Herculaneum were both completely devestated in one day by Mount Vesuvius...and a 'supervolcano' may have helped kill off the dinosaurs. There have been no eruptions of supervolcanos in any of human history, but they are fairly common in geologic time. And based on the evidence of past eruptions, the supervolcano that is under Yellowstone National Park has erupted about once every 700,000 years, give or take ~100,000, and the last eruption was 640,000 years ago. If it erupts again, vocanic ash would cover the entire United States, in many places being heavy enough to collapse roofs. It could also have devastating effects on the rest of the world as the ash in the air could block the sun enough to send temperatures plummeting us into the next ice age.

We all know the devastations of tsunamis now, right? Wrong. Even stronger than tsunamis cause directly by undersea earthquakes are ones caused by massive landslides (themselves usually caused by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions) dropping into the oceans. And while scientists don't think one is likely, certainly not in the short- or medium-term, the place they consider to be most unstable would send a wave across the Atlantic to the East Coast of the US, completly devastating everything for slightly over 12 miles inland (which includes all the coastal cities from NYC in the north to Miami in the south).

And tonight they had something called "Perfect Disaster: MegaFlood" about what could happen in London if conditions are 'just right' (or 'just wrong').

The Discovery Channel is good for stuff like "Mythbusters" which tests urban legends and "I Shouldn't Be Alive" which is an inspirational show about people fighting to survive against improbable odds. But I really need to stop watching the other shows.

United 93

I saw a trailer today for United 93. The true story of the 9/11 plane that came down without being used as a weapon, thanks to the incredible bravery of the passengers.

Watching the trailer, a particular line gave me chills:

The Pilot, watching his information screen said, "Two planes just hit the World Trade Center. What happened? We just left Newark 20 minutes ago, and it was beautiful out."

That line perfectly captures my own thoughts of that day (I said almost the identical sentence to my mother when she first told me why I should turn on the news) and captures the confusion of us all on that day. Until that day, we were children. Terrorism was a word seldom used and was something that happened in other places to other people. That was the day that, while the world changed only slightly, our understanding of the world changed completely.


They also had a "making of" featurette of this movie where someone made the point that these were a random group of people, not heros, tossed together by fate.

These weren't people who chose the noble professions where people deliberately put themselves in harms way to protect the rest of us. They weren't firefighters, police officers, soldiers....they were us. And when a twist of fate asked them to be heros, they stood up and said yes.

Texas police look in bars for signs of drunkenness

Read the article.

Did read it?

Read it first.

Okay?

One of the problems with this situation is a matter of definitions.

There are public places and private places and places that are in between. Bars are only semi-public places.

We've defined 'drunk driving' at a relatively low Blood Alcohol Level because we have determined that to be the level at which driving (something that requires excellent reflexes, concentration and ability in order not to endanger others) is impaired. And we base that level of impairment at that level because of the danger to others. Walking is a less demanding activity, so the kind of 'drunkenness' you mean when you are talking about 'public drunkenness' must require either a higher BAL or that, y'know, you are bothering someone.

"Drinking is fine," said agency spokeswoman Carolyn Beck. "But when people drink too much, they become dangerous to themselves and other people."

So what she really wants is to protect the public from dangerous people. Fine. That doesn't require camping out in bars to play "gotcha" with the patrons.

Holocaust

A school in Florida tried to teach the kids about the Holocaust and about tolerance. How? By forcing the kids to experience discrimination.

When I was in elementary school (1st grade, I think), we had a similar thing happen. My teacher broke us up by hair color (another broke her class up by eye color). First, my blonde classmates were sent into a corner of the room that was blocked off (on normal days it was kind of a play house). My dark-haired classmates and I were instructed to work on our creative writing books. I remember being completely bewildered but trying to do as I was told.

My teacher then, apparently, changed her mind. Writing time was over and it was now free time. And she no longer liked the brunettes, just the blondes. Now, those of us with dark hair were ushered into the corner.

I was upset...confused. I just didn't know--didn't understand--what was wrong. I, along with several others, cried, just as some of our blonde classmates had cried earlier.

Our teacher then announced it was over. She then explained that this was about the Holocaust.

Even when we were 'debriefed' I didn't understand what that day had been about. I remained upset and I learned nothing that day.

There are better ways of teaching about these issues.

In later years, I learned about the Holocaust and other forms of intolerance. Two of the most memorable lessons were ones I did on my own with the help of the books Number the Stars and Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories (did you know that a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white person 9 months before Rosa Parks did?).

You don't have to discriminate to teach discrimination.