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“Dr. Will Nicholson, a family physician in Maplewood, wanted to see what kind of health-insurance experiences many of his patients go though to see him. So last month he elected to drop his employer-provided health-care plan and began an experiment to search for a private insurance plan on his own.”

(Via MinnPost.)

As he says in the video, the current options aren’t working, and we need better options.

the world of education is a slow moving beast, but watching the internet devour the newspaper might provide an interesting parallel to what could happen to “education” should we ever really unleash the internet on schools

“School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.”

(Via Seth’s Blog: Education at the crossroads.)

“take the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and ‘listen to their constituents.’ An urge they should resist because their constituents don’t know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to ‘keep your government hands off my Medicare,’ which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.”

(Via New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country.)

I’m not sure if this column is funny or sad…

The link I found to this article claimed that it was the single most important thing you could read about the health care debate.

“Good thing our leaders weren’t so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill — because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.”

I don’t think it’s too bold to say that. Read this article.

(Via In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition.)

This is from the Washington Post:

“The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems. “

and this quote is especially spot-on:

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society — whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

(Via Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform.)

At this point it seems that all of these tea-baggers are digging themselves into a hole… and asking for more shovels.

“When lunch break comes at the construction site between Shanghai and Suzhou in eastern China, Xi Tong-li and his fellow laborers bolt for some nearby trees and the merciful slivers of shade they provide. It’s 95 degrees and humid — a typically oppressive summer day in southeastern China — but it’s not just mad dogs and Englishmen who go out in the midday sun.

Xi is among a vast army of workers in China — according to Beijing’s Railroad Ministry, 110,000 were laboring on a single line, the Beijing-Shanghai route, at the beginning of 2009 — who are building one of the largest infrastructure projects in history: a nationwide high-speed passenger rail network that, once completed, will be the largest, fastest, and most technologically sophisticated in the world. “

(emphasis mine)

(Via China’s amazing new bullet train.)

How’s that for a stimulus? 110,000 workers? The article goes on to say that China is spending $300 billion dollars on the project, which will take 15 years to complete.

“Go ahead, shoot me. I like the status quo on health care in the United States. I’ve got health insurance and I don’t give a damn about the 47 million suckers who don’t. Obama and Congress must be stopped. No bill! I’m better off the way things are.

I’m with that woman who wrote the president complaining about ‘socialized medicine’ and added: ‘Now keep your hands off my Medicare.’ That’s the spirit!”

(Via Newsweek.)

Perfect!