With the US election less than two weeks away you may already have made up your mind about the candidate that will get your vote. (And you arevoting, right?)
If you have a chronic illness like diabetes, one important consideration is how the future president might impact health care in the US. If you're like me, you've probably got a lot of questions about this. To help you make up your mind about this, here's some assigned reading! Today's Wall Street Journal talks about A Blizzard of Numbers and how these are obscuring the details of the health plans for the two major candidates. Their main point is that some experts have produced the numbers for each health plan option, but these are estimates, not exact figures. The WSJ article also refers to an article from yesterday's New York Times On Health Plans, the Numbers Fly that calls these figures "the roughest of estimates".
The US Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, two highly conservative business lobbying groups, have both stated that they believe McCain's health plan to be deeply flawed (my emphasis and likely to increase the number of the uninsured, not lower it.
Finally the National Federation of Independent Business has a nice side-by-side comparison of where McCain and Obama stand on health care.
Remember, your vote does count. If you need more information about voting where you live use this handy site provided by Google.
Update: The New England Journal of medicine published a somewhat related (short) article Three "Inconvenient" Truths about Healthcare. The summary is that our current approach to healthcare needs to be changed for the reasons covered in the article.
Update 2: The Wall Street Journal has an editorial page article on health care choices between the two candidates. According to this, Mr. Obama "would impose new nationwide rules on insurance companies to prohibit "cherry picking," where companies sometimes reject applicants on the basis of pre-existing conditions" while Mr. McCain "believes such regulations are one reason health coverage is so expensive".
My take is that many of us with chronic illnesses would be served extremely badly if we were excluded for coverage of our 'pre-existing' conditions.
Discovery Health is looking for teens and young adults (maybe you?) to share with others what it's like to live with type 1 diabetes.
They'd like you to record a one-minute video that's a message to the next President. Tell them a little about your story and let them know how you'd like diabetes care to be improved. This is a great chance to really inform them as they take office.
If you want to get involved, please work quickly. According to the video entries are due by October 24th, though their web site says November 1st.
Everyone will get a chance to vote for their top three choices and then they'll use that to pick the winners. I'll update this blog post as I learn more.
The New York Times has a really useful tool that lets you watch and read the recent Republican presidential debate. This was brought to my attention thanks to a recent blog post by Jon Udell.
There are two tabs, the Video Transcript which comes up by default, and the Transcript Analyzer.
In the first tab you can watch the debate and see a scrolling text transcript at the same time. Or you can scroll down through the text and click on a section to get taken to that part of the debate. That alone is pretty cool.
But the Transcript Analyzer is even more useful. You can see the number of words spoken by each candidate, the moderator, and by the You Tube videos. And if you click on a name in the list on the left, you'll see where in the overall debate they actually spoke. Those sections are highlighted in dark blue. By moving your mouse over any section, you'll see the text.
You can also enter a word in the Search box at the top of the page. And if the word appears in the text you'll a little black mark showing its location and a word count for each of the speakers. I tried the word health and found that it was mentioned a grand total of five times in the entire debate. That's pretty shocking to me.
The NYT also has an election guide section where you can see a lot of information about the various candidates and a summary of where they stand on various issues, including health care.
Personally I think health care is going to be very important in the near future for the United States and I'll be watching closely to see what the various candidates say about it.
All of us - insurance companies, legislators, health care providers, and health care users - need to figure out a way to ensure more of the population is covered for at least basic health care. Otherwise I think we're going to see some really big cost problems in the next decade or so.
And guess who'll be footing the bill unless we can figure out a compromise? The American taxpayer. Which would be you and me.
I was back at home in Ireland last week for a few days. Traveling overseas during Thanksgiving is fairly easy and it's a good time to see Ireland. The weather is generally nicer than the Northeastern US, and in Ireland everyone is getting ready for Christmas.
This time I was able to borrow some family slides and I've started scanning them in. I thought I'd share a two of me as a child. I'm surprised how well they've held up despite the lack of special attention to them.
For now I'm going to try and scan them in using a printer/scanner combo we have at home. I did find a company called ScanCafe that will scan slides for $0.24 per slide. But it takes 4-6 weeks and the photos are sent overseas for processing. Let me know if you have any experience with these folks.
Our presidential candidates
Even though the US presidential election is almost a year away, things are starting to heat up over here. Mostly because of the early primaries and caucus races in January (yes, that's only about 5 weeks away).
Have any of looked at what our candidates are saying about healthcare? Does any of this sound like they've even thought about chronic illnesses and how to take care of these? Do let me know what you're thinking about the current field.
Right now I'm favoring Mike Huckabee slightly for two reasons. First he knows about Type 2 diabetes personally and has worked hard to overcome it. Secondly this recent advert of his really gave me a good laugh. And any candidate who can take shots at himself is worth considering to some extent.
I've previously used Jott to blog here. And I use it all the time to send e-mail reminders to myself.
It's a great service where you call a toll-free number, leave a voice message and they transcribe it for you and send it wherever you say you want it to go.
Well now you can use Jott the Vote to send messages to a presidential candidate. I think this is a wonderful idea. Now if you've just collected your prescriptions and are sick of healthcare costs, you can call your favorite candidate and give them an earful.
Thanks Jott for making it really easy to get a message to our future president - whichever one of the seventeen candidates that turns out to be!
Oh, and if Jott should get your message slightly wrong, be sure to let the folks at Misjott know!
The Diabetes Technology Blog is focused on using technology to live life to the full with diabetes. I review new diabetes technology including: blood glucose monitors; continuous glucose monitors; blood sugar meters; diabetes software and living with diabetes.
About Me
Name: Bernard Farrell
Location: Massachusetts, United States
I was born in Ireland and now live in the US.
I have had Type 1 diabetes for over 36 years. I struggle with my blood sugar, the same as most people with diabetes.
I wear a Cozmo 1800 insulin pump and a Dexcom SEVEN Plus CGM to track my blood glucose levels.
I'm blessed by God, and every day brings the possibility of a cure.
