Random Thoughts

“Clinton’s reputation suffered when an American helicopter was shot down in Somalia, and eighteen soldiers were killed, but it was undiminished when he stood by during the Rwandan genocide in which eight hundred thousand people died.”

“Bass’s general rule is that every time a President sends troops to save lives overseas he risks political disaster; if he stays out, even in the face of calamity, there is little downside.”

“Hearing that someone is a great diagnostician is sort of like hearing that someone is really funny; it is not evident in every encounter.”

“Diseases rare enough to merit special-case-study attention in The New England Journal of Medicine are, at Elmhurst, relatively common.”
Me: you now have my attention.

“A neurologist friend of mine…said, in confessing the difficulty of teaching, 
“Sometimes it feels like Sartre’s ‘No Exit’: you find yourself saying the same things over and over again; you have to remind yourself that it’s a new group of students, that they’re not just the same people renewing their ignorance to torture you.”

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21652316/Journal%20Articles/New%20Yorker%20articles/Every%20Disease%20on%20Earth.pdf

“For the first time, the federal government will release the prices that hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures. Until now, these charges have been closely held by facilities that see a competitive advantage in shielding their fees from competitors. What the numbers reveal is a health-care system with tremendous, seemingly random variation in the costs of services.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/08/one-hospital-charges-8000-another-38000/

real data here:
http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Medicare-Provider-Charge-Data/index.html

Awesome quote I ran across today, from Descartes of all people:

“Good sense is the most evenly shared thing in the world, for each of us thinks he is so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in all other respects are not in the habit of wanting more than they have.”

“These things would be expensive. But they’re not more expensive than having fellow citizens permanently drop out of the labor force, which costs us in three ways: first, because they are not producing anything, which makes all of us a little bit poorer; second, because they may well end up finding their way onto government benefits, such as Social Security Disability; and third, because those folks are our friends and family, and seeing them suffer makes us suffer too.”

“Right now, it is hard to imagine a Republican lawmaker proposing halving the state and local tax deduction to finance wage subsidies aimed at the boosting household incomes and employment levels at the bottom of the labor market. Congressional Republicans, most of whom represent monolithically Republican districts, have resisted far less ambitious proposals to improve the lives of middle-income wage-earners, blithely unaware that they’re setting themselves up for political pain ahead. But if there is going to be a Republican revival, it is going to be built around fighting unemployment.”

One important number: “Given that the average state spent $27,536 per inmate in 2008, these numbers look fairly modest.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/346661/case-serious-employment-programs