« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »
Just very, very busy lately. There's so much I could say about being here in Ithaca, but almost all of it will have to wait until I'm more caught up with things. In brief: I've landed in one of the most dramatically beautiful places I can imagine living. And I'm taking the donation button down. Things are still tight this month--moving wasn't cheap--but with a little frugality and some help from Freecycle + Craig's List, they're manageable. Feeling damn grateful.
Progress! I'm all set to move up to Ithaca tomorrow, and the grad school's deadline for completing that LSU course is the end of my first term at Cornell. Whew!
My not blogging has been mostly the product of social overload. With so many people around all the time, I haven't had much left in the tank for this space.
"Speaking in Cleveland this week, Bush boldly asserted:
I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it's wrong and I think it's a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress's attempt … to federalize medicine…In my judgment that would be -- it would lead to not better medicine, but worse medicine. It would lead to not more innovation, but less innovation.
Now you don’t have to have seen “Sicko” to know that if there is one area of human endeavor where private enterprise doesn’t work, it’s health care. Consider the private, profit-making, insurance industry that Bush is so determined to defend. What “innovations” has it produced? The deductible, the co-pay, and the pre-existing condition are the only ones that leap to mind...
I once tried to explain to a Norwegian woman why it was so hard for me to find health insurance. I’d had breast cancer, I told her, and she looked at me blankly. “But then you really need insurance, right?” Of course, and that’s why I couldn’t have it.
This is not because health insurance executives are meaner than other people, although I do not rule that out. It’s just that they’re running a business, the purpose of which is not to make people healthy, but to make money..." (Barbara Ehrenreich, Health Care vs. the Profit Principle)
