Obama's Health Insurance Reform Speech

My gut reactions to the speech:

Overall, I thought it was pretty good. He touched on a lot of issues, cleared up some lies being spread, and made efforts to reach out to Republicans, like including McCain's campaign idea into the legislation and trying to bring tort reform into the legislation. I suppose the one thing that really turned me off was this:

"Ours is not the first generation to understand the dire need for health reform. And I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last."

This comment just sounds really arrogant and in particular aggravated me. Regardless of what happens this year, we'll still need health care reform in the future. It's inevitable. Whatever changes they may make now, our health care system will still be imperfect, and everyone knows it. It might be better, but there will still be plenty of room for improvement. I sure hope he's not the last president to take on health care reform. And then he repeated this exact comment in an email to supports just minutes after the speech. Ay ay ay.

That said, overall, I think he did a very good job of trying to address as many concerns as possible and citing examples of Republicans being involved in the reform process. I'll be reading more and more post-speech analysis as it becomes available and further digesting it in the coming days.

I followed the fivethirtyeight.com live blog of the speech and enjoyed it. I really agree with Nate Silver's point about the advantage of a congressional address:

The images of Republicans clapping alongside Democrats when Obama mentions something like pre-existing conditions is the upside to doing this from the floor of the Congress, rather than another venue like the Oval Office. Note, though, that many Republicans didn't stand up and clap when Obama said "no one should go broke because they get sick."

Anyway, my favorite solution so far to the health insurance crisis is from one of the professors at UNC, Jonathan Oberlander. He wrote about an "all-payer" system in a great article in the New England Journal of Medicine on September 2. By far, it seems the most effective at actually cutting costs, and seems more politically feasible than most other drastic measures.

Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk

The story is at the NY Times. It's all observational though; no guarantees.

Kenny George

UNC-Chapel Hill played UNC-Asheville yesterday. The Tar Heels won, frankly by a bit too much. I felt pretty bad for UNC-A. 116-48? That's too brutal. I didn't see the game at all, but maybe we could have allowed them to score a little more? Put in the bench earlier?

And I also learned yesterday that UNC-A's Kenny George, their 7'7'' center (7'9" in shoes), had part of his right foot amputated due to a MRSA infection back in October. He was apparently pretty sick and was going to be in the hospital for another month. That's very sad. I wish him well. Here is a youtube clip of him playing (you can figure out which player he is).



He also had a good write-up in the NY Times last year. No company makes shoes in his size, so in high school Shaq sent him a bunch of his size 22s and they were reshaped into size 25s so George could wear them. Wow.