I poked around Washington Friday, talking with friends on the Hill who confirmed the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging healthcare bill. You know why, of course. They don’t want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better healthcare at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, ‘unfair’ is anything that undermines their profits. So they’re pulling out all the stops — pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called moderate Republicans who say they’re in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they’ve been doing for years. A third is to bind the public plan to the same rules that […]
A natural bleach produced by the body appears to play a key role in marshalling the immune system to fight off infection and heal wounds. US scientists, working on zebrafish, which have similar genes to humans, found a burst of hydrogen peroxide is released following a tissue injury. This seems to be the signal for white blood cells to converge at the site of damage and begin the healing process. The Nature study may help explain conditions such as asthma. Asthma, obstruction in the lungs and some inflammatory gut diseases have all been linked to high levels of white blood cells. Although zebrafish would at first appear to have nothing in common with humans, they do have similar genes and are widely used to investigate biological processes. The researchers, from Harvard Medical School, inserted into the fish a gene that glows in the presence of hydrogen peroxide. They discovered that when the tail fins of these fish were injured, a burst of hydrogen peroxide was released from the wound and into the surrounding tissue. Teams of white blood cells appeared to respond to this chemical signal, arriving at the site of the […]
RIYADH — King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has urged U.S. President Barack Obama to impose a solution on the festering Arab-Israeli conflict if necessary, a Saudi newspaper said on Sunday. Saudi Arabia and other Arab states want Obama to get tough with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has balked at Palestinian statehood and defied U.S. calls to halt the expansion of Jewish settlements. King Abdullah told Obama during his visit to Riyadh last week that Arab patience was wearing thin and that a solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict would be the ‘magic key’ to all issues in the region, al-Hayat said, quoting what it called informed sources. ‘We want from you a serious participation to solve the Palestinian issue and impose the solution if necessary,’ the Saudi monarch told Obama, according to the paper, which is owned by a nephew of the monarch. It did not elaborate. Saudi Arabia was the driving force behind an Arab peace initiative first put forward by Arab states in 2002 offering Israel recognition in return for withdrawal from Arab land occupied in 1967 and a Palestinian state. Israel has reacted coolly to the offer, renewed in 2007, saying […]
When President Obama convened a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, N.M., last month, he wanted to talk about credit card reform. But many in the crowd had a different agenda. ‘So many people go bankrupt using their credit cards to pay for health care,’ the first questioner said to applause. ‘Why have they taken single-payer off the plate?’ The ‘single-payer’ activists had struck again. As Obama and congressional Democrats work to hammer out landmark health-care legislation, they face increasingly noisy protests from those on the left who complain that a national program like those in Europe has been excluded from the debate. The White House and Democratic leaders have made clear there is no chance that Congress will adopt a single-payer approach — named for the idea that a single government-backed insurance plan would pay for all Americans’ medical costs — because it is too radical a change. That has not dissuaded single-payer activists, who have spent months hounding Democratic lawmakers and organizing demonstrations, including one that resulted in 13 arrests at a Senate hearing last month. The offensive continues this weekend with plans to swamp a series of ‘house parties’ on health care hosted by […]
Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science. High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world. In the study, the UCL team found that complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people. Using computer simulations of social learning, they showed that high and low-skilled groups could coexist over long periods of time and that the degree of skill they maintained depended on local population density or the degree of migration between them. Using genetic estimates of population size in the past, the team went on to show that density was similar in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Middle-East when modern behaviour first appeared in each of these regions. The paper also points to evidence that population density would have dropped for […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
