What Conversations does is to take an identifier, be it PMID, URL, or DOI, and pull in related information about the paper such as Postgenomic posts, Connotea bookmarks, citations, and related commentary around the web. Last time I looked, it was a bare-bones proof of principle, but I’m glad to see it’s looking like a proper webapp now. Great Job, Alf!
Author Archives: Mr. Gunn
McCain and Obama on healthcare
CNN, which was hotly denying the rumors of Clinton’s concession until as late as last night, has an article up about the policy differences between the Obama and McCain. The article they link to for a critical analysis of the candidates plans is entitled, “Why McCain has the best health-care plan”. Way to be impartial, CNN. Nonetheless, it’s a good article with lots of great detailed information on exactly how the two proposed policies would work, even if the conclusion presented in the title seems a little forced.
I’ll summarize the information from the article, and you can see if you come up with my conclusions, or the conclusions of the author.
McCain
McCain’s plan would eliminate the employer-paid healthcare plans in favor of a tax credit for buying insurance. He’s not abolishing the employer-paid plans, just making the cost of the plan be considered as taxable income, and offering a credit to offset the extra taxes you’d end up paying. This is thought to lead to via the free market to employers dropping the plans entirely in favor of simply paying employees more, which they can then spend on individual or family plans. It’s also assumed that people would contribute income to an HSA, so combining the increase in income + plus the tax credit would allow people to afford high-deductible, low-premium plans and pay out of pocket for anything else. To apply a little more free-market action to the health insurance industry, he’s going to allow health insurance to be sold across state lines, so a person in Mississippi could buy insurance from a Pennsylvania insurer, subject to Pennsylvania laws. This allows healthy, young people to find cheaper plans which cover less, but would result in increases in the cost of the more comprehensive plans, as they become increasingly composed of the expensive to care for old folks. The overall idea is that insurers will have to compete to get business, and this will make insurers pressure hospitals to reduce costs.
Obama
Obama’s plan has two components: a private and a public part. The public part is essentially Medicare as we have it today, and the private part is an employer-provided healthcare plan similiar to the federal employee healthcare plan. Employers can choose whether to offer the private plan or pay a tax to fund the public plan. The plans have a wide range of benefits, more than young people need, so the deductible isn’t as low as it could be under a free market system, but it will keep the comprehensive coverage plans from spiking in cost. Supposedly employers will all drop their plans and pay the tax to fund the public program. Under this system, the individual isn’t making much choice about which plan to get, rather it’s the insurance companies that have to figure out a way to lower costs if they want to increase profits.
Fortune’s conclusions
My conclusions
Would it be too cute to say McCain’s plan would make health insurance like the airline industry, whereas Obama’s plan would make it like the public school system?
I’ve opened the friendfeed info-torrent!
I was never much for twitter, but I finally signed up for friendfeed, because it seems like everyone’s got their twitters and blogs and bookmarking fed into there, and commenting on the friendfeed works just as well. I’ve been meaning to switch from Plaxo given their somewhat shady tactics, but I did like their activity aggregation, so I made do with simply not giving them access to my contacts. However, now that Comcast has bought them, it was time to find another service, and friendfeed looked like just the thing. It was easy to hook up my various sites to my feed(a little too easy – since they only require a username), and immediately was able to find the same crowd of people from Nature Network and SciLink, due to the handy recommendation feature. Once I subscribed to Attila and Deepak, the recommendation feature brought up Neil and Pedro and JC Bradley and the whole rest of the early-adopter lot.
Hi Guys!
Webcast on genomic medicine on Wednesday, the 21st.
Steve Murphy has asked the DNA Network, of which I’m a member, to put out the word about the webcast on Wednesday. The title is “How Genomic Medicine Is Changing the Management of Breast & Ovarian Cancer” and the link is here. Tune in around 1 PM EDT to hear a panel of experts discuss such questions as:
What should a doctor and patient do when a patient tests positive?
What is the risk in taking a “wait and see” approach?
Are there alternatives to radical surgery?
What are potential tort issues in predictive genetic testing and medical uses of
genetic tests?
Uh oh! I’m about to get besieged by angry futurists!
They’ve picked up on my futurist snark. I really do like futurists, I promise.
More on America’s declining importance to the world
Lately I’ve been hearing comments about things like declining research competitiveness, bright young Indians choosing to stay in India instead of come to the U.S. to seek their fortune, and comments about how even the research that is being done in American universities is increasingly being done by foreign students. Some international talent(which presumably has scores of advisors helping with these decisions) is even choosing to be paid in euros instead of dollars. The troubling thing about this is that instead of these comments coming from the more rabble-rousing section of the web, they’re coming from intelligent, well-read people with a worldly perspective. If you were looking for the proverbial “canary in a coal mine”, wouldn’t you think these people would be about the best indicators you could find in that respect?
While I like to think that Steve’s post was particularly prescient, in fact if you were listening to the same sources he apparently has been, it’s blindingly obvious. I don’t claim to be anywhere as smart as the people I linked to above, but I don’t think you really need to be if you’re listening to the right people, and overwhelmingly they’re saying there’s a problem.
Of course, we didn’t get ourselves in this mess overnight (become a consumer economy instead of production economy, as Maitri so deftly puts it), and we won’t dig ourselves out of it overnight either. Let’s just hope that our years of neglect of the educational system turn out better than our years of neglect of the levee system.
The original post calls this ethanolomics, but I’d like to think of it as a particularly interesting branch of cladistics.
I also thought most Belgian ales were produced by spontaneous fermentation.