Choose wisely

Can I say, after reading news coverage all fuckin' day, this Presidential race is unspeakably fucked up.

We are such fuckin' hatemongers around election time. It is disgusting. And pathetic.

Must we be such shitheads to one another, all in the name of getting power and keeping someone else away from it?

Is it not possible for us to be decent to one another and earn one another's vote, we are so enamoured of our own use of power and so disgusted by those who we disagree with?

Is it not possible for us to even imagine that we might be wrong and those who disagree with us might be right that we would not feel so driven to slander, attack, villify, and otherwise demean those we disagree with and those who represent them among our political leaders?

Is it not possible for us to grow up and stop being such little children, all in the name of protecting our own and ourselves?

Are we not capable of just being the kind of person that we are so afraid that we cannot find the strength within ourselves to just be?

It is not within the realm of possibility to just live out our highest values, to pluck the beam from our own eyes before we pluck the splinter from those of our neighbor, and to trust and appeal to our better angels rather than persistently obsess over our inner demons, our propensity to do bad in a world we want to imagine that we could or should only do good?

Is it not within us to be human, for our political leaders to be human, for those we disagree with to be human, for those we agree with to be human, and to not be so human that our vindictive and destructive tendencies constantly overwhelm our better natures and our more decent concerns?

Is it not possible for us to better?

Of course it is. Obviously. When we're not obsessing with what shitheads we and everyone is. When we're not so afraid of our darker natures, when we are not afraid of ourselves and one another that we are not always acting out that fear on one another, pretending, all the while, that we are, in fact, better than what those darker impulses might betray us to be.

Because the truth is pretty clear.

When we love ourselves and one another, when we embrace our more self-centered natures and those of people around us, we are less likely to act like the kind of children that we have been behaving as, this election season.

The more we embrace ourselves and others, the less we are likely to act like the very sociopaths that we are so afraid of being.

If we want to be better people, we must love ourselves and one another more. It is the same fact of life we have faced since the dawn of humanity. We have just proved more ingenious at deceiving ourselves and one another of what is needed to be better.

It is not being forced to do so by some God, some parent, some government, some teacher, some boss, some lover, someone else outside of ourselves.

If we want to be better, we must choose to do so. And in so choosing, we will do today as we have done since time immemorial. We will choose badly. And then we will choose better. And we will only do so with experience that tells us the difference as much as knowledge of the two.

This election has become a circus of humanity and its most foolish and cowardly instincts. That can only change with some embrace for our folly. And some willingness to become wiser.

That is our challenge this election season. Our vote is completely incidental to that much more fundamental fact of existence.

Choose to be better. Or don't. Those are the options.

Choose wisely.

And if you don't, don't despair. Just make a better choice the next time. Until you do.

Data-driven health reform

Billy Bean, Newt Gingrich, and John Kerry - quite the unlikely trio - have an excellent article on how to reform health care with data-driven for-profit and non-profit market methods that deserves the eye of anyone concerned about health care.

How to Take American Health Care from Worst to First

From that article:

"In the past decade, baseball has experienced a data-driven information revolution. Numbers-crunchers now routinely use statistics to put better teams on the field for less money. Our overpriced, underperforming health care system needs a similar revolution.

Data-driven baseball has produced surprising results. Michael Lewis writes in “Moneyball” that the Oakland A’s have won games and division titles at one-sixth the cost of the most profligate teams. This season, the New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers and New York Mets — the three teams with the highest payrolls, a combined $486 million — are watching the playoffs on television, while the Tampa Bay Rays, a franchise that uses a data-driven approach and has the second-lowest payroll in baseball at $44 million, are in the World Series (a sad reality for one of us).

Remarkably, a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures. Studies have shown that most health care is not based on clinical studies of what works best and what does not — be it a test, treatment, drug or technology. Instead, most care is based on informed opinion, personal observation or tradition.

It is no surprise then that the United States spends more than twice as much per capita on health care compared to almost every other country in the world — and with worse health quality than most industrialized nations. Health premiums for a family of four have nearly doubled since 2001. Starbucks pays more for health care than it does for coffee. Nearly 100,000 Americans are killed every year by preventable medical errors. We can do better if doctors have better access to concise, evidence-based medical information.

Look at what’s happened in baseball. For decades, executives, managers and scouts built their teams and managed games based on their personal experiences and a handful of dubious statistics. This romantic approach has been replaced with a statistics-based creed called sabermetrics.

These are not the stats we studied as children on the backs of baseball cards. Sabermetrics relies on obscure statistics like WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched), VORP (value over replacement player) or runs created — a number derived from the formula [(hits + walks) x total bases]/(at bats + walks). Franchises have used this data to answer some of the key questions in baseball: When is an attempted steal worth the risk? Whom should we draft, and in what order? Should we re-sign an aging star player and run the risk of paying for past performance rather than future results?

Similarly, a health care system that is driven by robust comparative clinical evidence will save lives and money. One success story is Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit group that evaluates medical research. Cochrane performs systematic, evidence-based reviews of medical literature. In 1992, a Cochrane review found that many women at risk of premature delivery were not getting corticosteroids, which improve the lung function of premature babies.

Based on this evidence, the use of corticosteroids tripled. The result? A nearly 10 percentage point drop in the deaths of low-birth-weight babies and millions of dollars in savings by avoiding the costs of treating complications.

Another example is Intermountain Healthcare, a nonprofit health-care system in Utah, where 80 percent of the care is based on evidence. Treatment data is collected by electronic medical records. The data is analyzed by researchers, and the best practices are then incorporated into the clinical process, resulting in far better quality care at a cost that is one-third less than the national average. (Disclosure: Intermountain Healthcare is a member of Mr. Gingrich’s organization.)

Evidence-based health care would not strip doctors of their decision-making authority nor replace their expertise. Instead, data and evidence should complement a lifetime of experience, so that doctors can deliver the best quality care at the lowest possible cost."

It's an excellent conceptualization of the challenges we face and health care and more sensible, market-driven approaches to tackling those challenges.

And it's nice to see some honest, substantive bipartisan thinking leading this conversation rather than mindless blather and empty promises that liberal and conservative partisans more regularly offer in contemporary politics.