Universal Healthcare: A reasonable first step.

One of the most important reason jobs are being moved overseas or outsourcing to foreign countries, I believe, is not about cheap labor. A C.E.O. sitting in an office today can control and predict their labor cost in terms of wages for years into the future but the companies cost of employees health care 5 years down the road is totally unpredictable.
Health care cost has been increasing at rates far above inflation, in fact more then 3 to4 times inflation, in the private sector.
Medicare is also increasing at rates above inflation but considerable less then the private sector. Medicare's increases are at least a little more understandable given at the moment medicare deals exclusively with the elderly and disabled, who are almost by definition are more likely to require continuing health care and to deal with more acute and costly treatments and procedures.
Given the limited pool of recipients Medicare must deal with the fact the increased cost of Medicare is less then the increases in the private sector is nothing less then astonishing.
With Medicares ablility to show at least a better handle on dealing with cost increases and the removal of a profit motive. We can return Health Care coverage to what it should be, a shared risk and responsibility among a People committed to the idea that health care is a Right of all people.
This is why I believe that a "Medicare Buy-In" is a sound way to save Medicare for the approaching baby-boomer crunch and a reasonable first step to Universal Health Care

Bird Flu: A World gone of fowl

As the Bird Flu begins to spread rapaidly across the globe by way of migratory bird and scientist and medical personnel prepare for a potential mutation that will allow the virus to be passed from person to person which may or may not happen. I have heard not one word from a scientist or biologist or even an enviromentalist about what would be the enviromental impact if tw0-third or three-quarters of all birds are wiped from the planet?
Some of obvious effects would be insect and rodent control, plant pollination and dispersal of seeds. But, the obvious would probaly just be the begining of a chain reaction of effects we have yet to imagine.

The Virus of Hate.

Hate is an Infection of the Soul.
We all know people who hate. They are people from history, from our pasts. People we read about in the newspaper and see on T.V.
Hitler, The Clan, skinheads and The Gay Hating Far Right. But They are also our co-worker, our neighbors even our families and sometimes ourselves.
Those who hate carry within them a virus which they spread to all those they come in contact. Most people are able to fight off the virus and are ususally left with only a bad taste in their mouth. But like any virus the progression and effects are as unigue as the person it infects and likewise as unpredictable.
When Tony Perkins or James Dobson continully spread thir hatred of Gays calling us everything from immoral to pedophiles and say we are trying destroy the sanctity of marrage and currupt family values. When I'm sure that many more children in this country have far more to fear from a drunken father then from a gay parent. They spread the Virus of Hate to others who then carry the virus and spread it to others and of these some the virus will consume.
So when a man walks into a Gay bar with a hatchett and a handgun. Is not Perkins and Dobson and the other gay haters partially responsible by knowing spreading The Virus of Hate.