Meeting with our Senator

889 days ago

Recently, my mother and I went to the Senate building to meet with our senator. We were able to talk to his aid for quite some time. Some of the things that she said were great, and others really disturbed me.

She said that Senator Micheal Bennet (D-CO) is for allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines. That is awesome. I agree and this should be an essential part of the bill. What worries me about this is, what leverage does he now have? He has already stated that he is in the tank, no matter what this bill has in it.

Can he really fight for that kind of an amendment after saying that? When he goes to Harry Reid and says, “I want insurance companies to be able to sell across state lines.” Mr. Reid would say “I already have your vote, so shut up.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like people with conviction. I actually really respect that he said that, and that he has the conviction to say it. I believe that the founding fathers set up our government as a republic and not a democracy for a reason, and we need more representatives that are willing to stand up for their principles. The problem I have with it, is that he just lost any negotiating power that he had.

She also talked about a new insurance plan that would be administered by the government but would be run by private companies. I don’t really know how I feel about that. On the one hand it is still too much government. On the other, there is a problem that needs to be fixed, and my mom who works in the industry said that there are other examples of this plan that have worked really well. OK, like I said I don’t know, but again what bargaining chips does he have?

Then she threw out some “facts” that really trouble me.

1) She said that there are 50,000 people that die every year in America because they don’t have health insurance, and that is worse than any other industrialized country in the world.

2) She said that the Infant mortality rate is higher in America than any other country with a public option or government run health care.

Well number 1 kinda threw me off and I didn’t know how to respond to it until I left. I knew that it was a lie, but I for some reason it just did not click what a dumb comment it was. How can you come up with a number like that? Are you counting people that get hit by a bus and did not have health care, or are you only counting people with long term diseases that cannot be handled in an emergency room (because those would already be covered) such as cancer or heart disease. If you are really only counting those people then it is still comparing apples to oranges, because in countries with single payer systems the people are covered but they cannot get the expensive life saving drugs and surgeries. I guess you would compare it to the number of people that die due having death panels in other countries?

I knew how to counter number 2. I said “the WHO has different ways to count infant deaths in each country”.

She said “No they don’t, I worked for the WHO and they count them all the same.”

How could I argue with that when I didn’t have the actual data in front of me? So, I just said “I know that is a disingenuous statement.”

Now I have looked it up. We know for a fact that not all nations count the infant mortality rate the same. In the United States, we use the WHO definition:

Live birth refers to the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a product of conception, irrespective of the duration of the pregnancy, which, after such separation, breathes or shows any other evidence of life – e.g. beating of the heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord or definite movement of voluntary muscles – whether or not the umbilical cord has been cut or the placenta is attached. Each product of such a birth is considered live born.

In Europe, for example, they use a different definition: [see page 122]

The infant mortality rate is defined as the number of infant deaths (days 0-364) after live birth at or after 22 completed weeks of gestation in a given year, expressed per 1000 live births in the same year.

And yet, even this definition is not standard across the European Countries: [see page 122]

Almost all countries provided data on overall infant mortality rates. However, many fewer were able to provide data on infant mortality rates by gestational age or birth weight, since infant deaths are registered in separate systems and not linked to perinatal data. These data were available for gestational age only from Flanders and Brussels in Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Austria, Poland, Finland, Sweden, the UK, and Norway.

Here is another great article about the topic, and here is an excerpt that I think sums it up pretty well:

Forty percent of all infant deaths occur in the first 24 hours of life.

In the United States, all infants who show signs of life at birth (take a breath, move voluntarily, have a heartbeat) are considered alive.

If a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a “miscarriage” and does not affect the country’s reported infant mortality rates.

The length of pregnancy considered “normal” is 37-41 weeks. In Belgium and France — in fact, in most European Union countries — any baby born before 26 weeks gestation is not considered alive and therefore does not “count” against reported infant mortality rates.

Too short to count?

In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby born who is less than 30 centimeters long is not counted as a live birth. Therefore, unlike in the U.S., such high-risk infants cannot affect Swiss infant mortality rates.

Efforts to salvage these tiny babies reflect this classification. Since 2000, 42 of the world’s 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 lbs.) were born in the United States.

The parents of these children may view socialized medicine somewhat differently than its proponents.

During this meeting I told her all about how I love freedom and I feel that this is a huge dive toward socialism. She was a history major so we talked about Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”. How he was afraid that people could not handle the kind of freedom that the other founding fathers were talking about. This made everyone in the country pull together and start proving that they could. There became an air of brotherly love. Service to others was on everyone’s mind. This became such a nice country that clergy around the world were talking about it. So, my question was “What can we do as Coloradans to PROVE that we can handle the freedom?” She said “freedom from what?” I said “freedom from a massive government take over of healthcare which takes away so many of our freedoms.” She said “that is a matter of opinion, service is good but this needs to happen.”

My mom and me also forgot about the two biggest things on our minds. I don’t know how. We forgot about this paying for abortions and illegals. Those should have been the whole theme of our being there, and we forgot.

Oh well.

All in all I think that we did part of our civic duty, and I think that more people need to get more involved.

brodie

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We Need Universal Healthcare

960 days ago

This is right! Count me in!

brodie

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People Are Starting To Care Less About Global Warming!!

983 days ago

Look at this graph of google searches for “climate” over time:

Makes you think that people are becoming less interested in the climate over time, but look at “climate change”:

Looks like interest is going up! Crazy huh? I am not a statistician or anything, so I don’t really know what any of it means, but it is quite fun to look at. Then look at what cities search for it:

Top cities for climate change
Cityclimate change
Washington100
Denver43
New York41
Reston40
Portland40
Sacramento40
Seattle39
San Francisco38
Boston36
Pleasanton 33
Minneapolis29
Los Angeles24
Miami24
Chicago23
Philadelphia23

Really shows that DC is much more interested in it than the public, by over 100% more than the next leading city!!

If I don’t know anything about what all this means then why did I make such a claim in the title? Well, one because I still say global warming and not climate change. I have a lot of opinions about that, but I digress. The real reason is because of this chart:

People are searching for global warming less and less. Does this mean they care less about it? Again, I don’t know.

brodie

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I Like Nuclear!

1013 days ago

I stumbled across a great article this morning. The Truth About Fossil Fuels and Renewable Energy (Part II)

The first reality we must square is our love of our way of life with our environmental goals. We take for granted the freedom to drive to work, fly to meetings, visit friends and family no matter how far-flung, and drive to the mountains, the beach or other weekend and vacation destinations. We want to leave our computers on standby for ease of starting up the next morning, to keep our homes warm in winter and cool in summer, and to enjoy our flat screen TVs, electric blenders, Wii devices, and so much more. Don’t look now, but what we have is exactly what 1 billion Indians and 1.3 billion Chinese and another 3 or 4 billion people across the planet want.

No joke! Well said.

Here are some hard economic facts. To replace one 1,000 MW gas-fired power plant, you’d need 500 state of the art wind turbines spread across 40,000 acres or 250 high-efficiency solar facilities taking up some 20,000 acres. Why are gas, oil and coal so much more efficient, needing just a few acres to produce all that energy? Thank Mother Nature. Think of fossil fuels as giant “batteries.” They’ve been compressed for eons by Mother Nature into compact pools, pockets, mounds, shale and bitumen (also called tar sands or oil sands.)

To try to turn something as scattered as photons in sunlight or the kinetic and capricious energy of wind requires colossal investment to concentrate that energy as efficiently as Mother Nature has already done with fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are batteries. Every time. They work. In compact form.

I think you would need more turbines and solar facilities than that, just because we do not have efficient enough batteries right now to keep the supply constant.

He did awesome on all the energy stuff, and then he has to blow it with “organic” gardening, and population control. Sorry, but the way we preserve our produce has saved millions of lives. To go organic would kill a lot of people. Look into what banning DDT did to the world.

My opinion: Build American nuclear plants, switch as much as possible to American natural gas, and use American coal for the rest. Reforest wherever possible to create carbon sinks that attract and convert these emissions, and use regenerative agricultural practices to sequester even more carbon. According to an article in Soil Science here, soil – plain old earth, dirt, terra firma – is a great carbon storage medium, and contains more carbon than all terrestrial vegetation and the atmosphere combined. For this last, we must change our agricultural practices to be more in line with organic gardening precepts but the health benefits would probably, coincidentally, save us a few hundred billion in health care costs, as well! And finally, after using more US natural gas and US/North American uranium; less but still significant US coal; continuing research and buildout in renewables like solar, wind and geothermal; and reforestation and natural sequestration; a little population control wouldn’t hurt, either.
brodie

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"Plain Crazy" Is My Take On It

1015 days ago

These kinds of ideas just upset me.

Then newspapers take it up like it is the next great idea.

Of course, there are always possible unintended consequences that might result from any of these geo-engineering ideas.

Yet, sometimes the craziest sounding ideas turn out to be brilliant; then again, sometimes they just turn out to be just crazy.

Unintended consequences is right! They didn’t mention that water vapor is a much more efficient greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. What about all the water vapor being introduced into the atmosphere?

brodie

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