Liberal Talk Radio

Apropos of our current podcast series on health care, The Washington Monthly currently has health care author Shannon Brownlee guest-blogging. Today she talks about how doctors are paid, and suggests we replace the current reimbursement model:
All of which is just one more reason why fee-for-service has got to go. It’s a broken payment [...]

This is what happens when you have a president who spends his days clearing brush and mountain biking. At least we know he’ll never suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, or any other disease one might get from working too hard at one’s job.

Following up on the Contrarian below, there’s a new fad sweeping the Northwest: the 100-mile diet.
It’s a noble idea that I support in theory, but as the study cited in the NYT Article makes clear, the tradeoffs are much more complicated: it turns out to be better, carbon-wise, for a Londoner to buy New [...]

Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell is struggling to get support for his Schwarzenegger-like plan. Perhaps only Nixon can go to China, after all.
A health care plan like this one (or California’s, or Massachusetts’) is going to be disruptive. So it seems like, instead of trying to sort of piss of everyone, you need [...]

Nina Planck’s op-ed in the Times is sure to piss off the four Americans who are still vegan.

Another great article from Michael Pollan. It turns out that the poor are being perfectly rational: junk food provides the best calorie/dollar ratio in the supermarket. But it’s the least nutritious in the long run. God bless the Farm Bill:
A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with [...]

Leave it to Matt Drudge to create a controversy out of a presidential-campaign practice.
Drudge has had a link up on his site for the past 24 hours declaring: John Edwards: ‘We’ll have to raise taxes’….
Drudge is referencing Edwards’ appearance on yesterday’s Meet the Press, which, by the way, Bruno and I spent some time discussing [...]

Lede of the day:
The first rule of public health is one most of us learn in kindergarten: Don’t eat poop.

The good news is you can live to, like, 160. The bad news, Julian Dibbell explains in New York Magazine, is you have to half starve yourself to get there:
My dinner guests — five successful urban professionals who for years have subsisted on a caloric intake the average sub-Saharan African would find austere . . [...]

Some citizens of the fattest country in Europe are rebelling against healthier school lunches:
Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t [...]