Can you believe this?
Ohio Town's Water At Last Runs Past a Color Line

To think that this kind of racism still occurs in our country in the twenty-first century is mind boggling.

i just came from a meeting with a conservative republican county commissioner from ABQ who helped our health coalition convene a meeting with our CEO today to air our concerns about how money is being spent for indigent care and at the profound lack of professional interpretation. the interesting thing was the alliance between this conservative republican and a bunch of social justice hippie advocates for poor and oppressed people. by the end of the meeting the commissioner was using the "we" work to mean him and us. all politics is local. this guy comes from a wealthy family with a long history in NM. he has a vision and an expectation of what a public hospital is supposed to do and how due process and public debate is supposed to happen. he saw the layers of half-truths our CEO has weaved to alter the mission from service to research and construction. man, our CEO was pissed! :> oh well.

sometimes a shared sense of integrity is worth alot more than ideological snippity hoohah.

adelante,

The Real World: Sea-Couver!

And we're off! In just a few hours, my friend Braden and I leave for Seattle, and later in the evening will meet up with 12 medical students who will have flown into Seattle, for our Sea-Couver Health Care Systems Study Tour! We've been organizing this at the AMSA office for a few months now, and it's exciting to see that it's coming together! We're going to be in Seattle until friday morning, then we're off to Vancouver for the remainder of the time. We'll be talking to policymakers, physicians, medical students, and patients on both sides of the border, and discussing health care delivery, health disparities, health care quality, medical technology, and pharmaceutical issues in both countries. And check THIS out -- on both sides of the border we're going to give a videocamera to each team of 4 medical students (3 teams total), tell them that they have two hours to creatively get peoples' perceptions of their country's health care system, and say GO! They'll have two hours to be creative and interview people on the street! I know I know you can't wait for the reportback. We'll it'll be all here, when we come back from the trip after this weekend! And we'll be showing this video footage at the AMSA national convention! Perhaps we'll even make a mini-documentary out of it :> Ok now for some sleepytime. Nite!

this is my first post to a blog! :> i learned something very interesting two days ago about the forces in healthcare driving up cost. i used to think that hospitals charged alot so that they could "maximize reimbursement" from insurance companies. it's true, but another more devious reason is to torture insurance companies who refuse to accept negotiated terms from a hospital. so it goes like this. if a patient shows up to a hospital with insurance, but their insurance company hasn't prenegotiated a discounted fee, the insurance company by law has to pay the full sticker price, just like uninsured people. this superhigh cost is used as a whip by hospitals to encourage insurance companies to set up contracts with hospitals which brings them business. not that one should feel at all bad about insurance companies facing this economic sanction... it's just another example of unregulated capitalism, titans fighting titans in the guise of democracy and freedom, with unfortunate consequences for anyone accidentally caught without insurance. i pledge allegiance to the flag for which it stands, one nation under god. ya know, maybe this is why insurance companies charge more for patients who use hospital services out of "network." they are shifting the cost once again to the individual... what a lovely game.

Boner Bowl

Directly taken from Bill Maher's blog:

This year's Super Bowl will be brought to you by competing boner pills Cealis and Levitra. We've all seen the not-too-subtle commercial where the older guy takes out the football and starts tossing it through the hole in the tire swing - laces up for her pleasure.

It's more than a little ironic that, just a week after the President uses the State of the Union Address to rail against performance-enhancing drugs, we hold a Steroid Bowl brought to you by - you guessed it - performance enhancing drugs.

It all comes back to the "what's-your-pleasure" hypocrisy in this country. If your pleasure is the slurry, cheery buzz of an apple martini, you're legal and accepted. If it's the serene, introspective buzz of a joint or, say, the warm, itchy buzz of Vicodin, then you're illegal and unaccepted. If you want to risk taking a pill to get your penis hard, "ask your doctor," but if you want to risk taking a pill to get your biceps hard, pee in this cup and turn in your locker room key.

We all have our reasons for ingesting what we ingest. We are a nation dependent upon drugs to act as an antidote to everything from our boredom and depression to our impotence and the poisoning effects of our toxic food supply. To arbitrarily single out certain drugs and certain drug users as immoral, while others skate (and profitably I might add) is a complete hypocrisy.