Rabbits, Blinkity

The third world, it seems, is losing their best doctors to the United States (via NYT magazine)

So I want to offer up this suggestion: health care in this country is, as a whole, good enough. Our life spans are long, our recovery rates for all kinds of previously fatal conditions is excellent, and our technology is astounding. So let's not worry so much about making it better. Let's focus on fixing our broken system of paying, and on allowing everyone access instead.

Now, I'm not saying give up on improving medicine completely—research can potentially help people all over the world. I'm just saying, we need to take a step back, and say look, we've got it pretty damn good. Let's not worry so much about quality in the practical side of our health care system. We've got enough doctors. We've got enough hospitals.

If nothing else, don't go to the doctor unless it's really necessary. Don't go for the most expensive procedures unless it will make a significant difference. And so on. If we decrease demand, we'll need less supply, and give more negotiating power to others. Remember, in the third world, overworked doctors are performing surgery using Bosch power tools. If they're lucky.

There's been a lot of complaining about lottery winners getting food stamps. This makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose, but you've got to wonder how big of a deal this really is. So I thought I'd find out. Lottery winners over a certain amount times $200 per month food stamps times 12 months.

As it turns out, figuring out the number of lottery winners isn't easy. But according to this, there are about ten 1 million+ winners in California per year. There are similar numbers on the Oregon lottery website. So let's assume 40 "big" winners per year for each state. That's 2080 winners. Multiply it out, this is about 5 million dollars in wasted food stamps. For the whole country. Assuming every single lottery winner collects food stamps.

71.8 billion dollars in food stamps were given out last year, so the lottery winners are potentially ripping us off for a grand total of... 0.006%. Clearly, they must be stopped!

So. A lottery winner collecting food stamps may be a nasty thing to do, and perhaps states should pass regulations to prevent it. But at the same time, I'm quite sure that there are much bigger corruption concerns in the food stamp distribution business. Can we stop running our mouths about it already?

So thanks to all the backlash, the Susan G. Komen Foundation decided that defunding Planned Parenthood was a bad idea. Good for them.

But as the Feministing article points out, it's quite likely they'll just remove funding at some later date, just more quietly. And in the meantime, a donation to the Komen Foundation mostly goes to buying pink billboards and other questionable "awareness" activities, instead of, y'know, actual research and prevention.* (News flash: people in the United States are pretty damn aware. What we need, ironically enough, is a cure).

If you want to fund cancer screening, cut out the middlewoman and donate to Planned Parenthood or your favorite local screening organization directly. If you want to fund research, try the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. 36.3 million out of 41.5 million - 87% - of their funding goes toward research grants.

There are many, many sensible and efficient cancer prevention organizations in the world. Komen isn't one of them.

* Read their financials here. Out of about 409 million dollars, $75 million (18%) is burned in administration, $181 million (44%) is spent on "public health education" i.e. pink billboards, while the remainder - less than half - is used for screenings/treatment and research ($77 million/19% and $75 million/18% respectively). In other words, they spend as much on administration as they do funding research.

Let me let you in on a little secret: nothing in life is free. And that includes charitable giving. This post was inspired by this commentor, who kindly informed everybody that all the blogging in the world was worth less than giving $2000 to the Against Malaria Foundation, because $2000 dollars to the AMF will keep a child in Africa from dying from malaria. Clearly, we should spend all of our spare time working for minimum wage jobs and giving the proceeds to charity,* and forget all about silly things like "reading" and "writing."
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I don't have much more to say about this myself, but we'd all do well to listen to this:

I am so damn sick and tired of Occupy Wall Street. Every so called “progressive” I know of is riding the #OWS dick like it is going out of style. Me? I can’t stand the shit. For the most part, I see most of the protests that have been inspired by Occupy Wall Street to be strictly the work of some spoiled little (previously) rich brats who can’t handle the fact that the college education that mommy and daddy paid for did not get them the high paid cushy job that they truly believe they deserve. I would be willing to bet that almost all of those who are running around with signs about being the 99% would not give a FUCK about economic injustice if they were not directly impacted by it in the present moment. And I bet in five years, most of them will be sitting in some multinational corporation’s headquarters shaking their heads and chuckling about the days when they were “radicals”.

Yes, yes, and yes. And this is basically my problem with the whole thing, said much better than I ever could. Here's a hint for my peers: it's okay not to make so much money. You're making too much already. Get over yourselves. Yes, it's "hard" to give up your privilege; I'm certainly still not there yet. But I've definitely got better things to do than whine about it. Not to say that Occupy* is all bad; just that once again, privileged people need to be very, very careful.
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The protesters on wall street have a problem. The rest of us don't know what they want, which means they don't know either. And this means they won't get anything done. The curse of true democracy, if you will.

That this is the case was made quite clear by this NPR story, but there were signs of it before. For instance, look at this list of "one demands". There are two real demands in there:

• Ending capital punishment
• Ending American imperialism (By this, I assume they mean a large scale troop withdrawal)

But I don't think that these are really the focus of the protest. The rest are either too vague ("Ending the modern gilded age"), impossible ("Ending war"), or such that nobody can actually agree on how to accomplish ("Ending joblessness", most of the rest). The official declaration is equally problematic. It's patterned after the Declaration of Independence, including a list of grievances, most of which are clearly true. But one thing is missing. The Declaration of Independence contained this:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, .... solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States...

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