Big Picture Health

How is a candidate for high office like a box of soap?

 Below I’ve posted the text of a speech that I gave last Friday, at my local Toastmasters club. People of various political persuasions responded positively, which I found heartening:                                                                         

The speech:   Sunday I attended a political fundraiser in Winter Park, Florida. I joined a group of about two dozen people, in an immaculate, airy lakeside home full of colorful modern paintings and ceramics. We were all waiting for the candidate whose campaign we were supporting to show up but he was seriously stuck on I-4, the interstate nearby.

Fortunately, he had a surrogate present to speak for him. A surrogate means a well known endorser like another politician or a celebrity. Last Sunday, the surrogate for our candidate, Kendrick Meek, was Senator Bill Nelson.  He’s a staunch advocate for veterans and children,

Bill Nelson gave us a sweeping overview of today’s political climate.

Here, I will summarize Senator Nelson’s talk for you. His concerns ought to be issues for all thoughtful Americans. His worries about the way candidates sell themselves mirror my own.  I hope, that after today, they will be issues for you as well. I’ll concentrate on three issues he highlighted:

1. 1.      Candidates attempting to buy high political office.
2. 2.      Sources people rely upon nowadays for information.
3. 3.      The need for civil discourse in America.

OK #1—Attempts to buy high office: We’ve been seeing a flood of advertising paid for by wealthy businessmen running for high offices in Florida. They present themselves as the right people to create jobs just because they have a business background.  Republican Rick Scott is spending millions in the governor’s race. Jeff Greene is spending massively in the Democratic Senate race.

They tell voters that because they made fortunes in business they can create jobs. But this isn’t necessarily the case.

Jeff Greene got rich using credit default swaps that are widely blamed for the housing crisis and are now strictly controlled. In effect, Greene made high stakes bets that the housing market would collapse. When it did, and thousands lost their homes, Greene profited. His wealth didn’t involve creating goods or offering services that employ people on any scale.

Scott has been involved in lots of businesses, from doughnut shops to hospitals. But his record is cloudy. When a firm he led, Columbia/HCA, was accused of Medicare fraud, its Board of Directors forced Scott out.

Senator Nelson decried this trend of rich people with no public service record trying to buy high office. He described these candidates as “selling themselves like a box of soap.”

As voters, we need to watch these ads with a healthy dose of skepticism. We need to understand that just because a businessman made a fortune doesn’t mean he is a solid leader or created jobs. It’s just not that simple.

            This leads me to #2, the sources of information people use these days as compared to earlier times. People used to read newspapers and watch ABC, NBC and CBS. They took in news produced by professional journalists. Certain standards for objectivity and fairness prevailed, not perfectly. But standards did exist and created restraints

Today, Americans surf the web, read blogs and watch polarized cable TV stations. Lots of news is created by bloggers who say whatever they want about anyone. Exaggerations, half truths and downright lies then reverberate in the world of cable. 

Pick your news sources carefully. Be open minded. Consider viewpoints that make you uncomfortable. Conservatives, liberals, moderates. We actually do all have good ideas to offer but we have to work together to make any kind of progress.

Lastly, I’ll address issue #3. The need for civil discourse in America.

Bill Nelson, a Democrat, spoke warmly of Florida’s other Senator, Mel Martinez, who is a Republican. Senator Nelson said, “Mel and I disagree about a lot of things. But when it comes to fighting for what Florida needs, we work together.” Nelson described a recent morning when he stopped by at Mel Martinez’s house after a jog and sat with his Senate colleague on Martinez’s front porch.

I’ve heard and a read a great deal lately about what a battleground the US Senate has become. Maybe you’ve heard that too.   Have you?

Hearing Bill Nelson speak warmly of his colleague Mel Martinez and Mel’s wife Kitty restored my faith in our national leaders a bit. It served as a reminder to me that no matter how well read I am, I never have the whole story. No human being ever does.

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Finally Kendrick Meek arrived. Senator Nelson sat down and Kendrick Meek took the floor.

“Well, it’s almost the first day of school,” he said. Then he spoke, with some pride, of how he had fought to improve our schools when he was in Florida state government. He had led the fight for limits on class sizes in Tallahassee against massive opposition. But he mustered massive public support to keep class sizes at manageable levels and he—and our kids–won.

Kendrick Meek was born and raised in Dade County. He started volunteering, working a lot with elderly people, as a teenager. 

In his twenties, he worked for five years as a state trooper. Then he went into state government and eventually ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives. He’s been reelected there easily because he’s served South Florida well. 

Unlike his Wall Street billionaire opponent Jeff Greene who has never lived for any length of time in Florida, Kendrick Meek understands our state. He understands and concentrates on the issues that matter to ordinary citizens and working families.

Kendrick Meek’s wife Leslie, whom I have had the pleasure to meet, also works, as an administrative judge. They have two teenage children.

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Today is the last day for early voting. In fact, you can vote right after this meeting. Just go around the corner to the WPPL, if you live in Orange County.

Election Day arrives on August 24^th.  Be exceptional by participating in a thoughtful way.

Be exceptional. Read diverse, credible sources of information about the important choices we face. Make careful decisions.

Then go vote.

In Manhattan in 2008, I saw a billboard that featured a huge photo of a young person’s face.  The billboard had this message, five words to live by:  

   “When you vote, you talk.”

 The end

Have you read about the fact that 2010 is shaping up as the hottest year ever? Well, it is.  With summer’s heat on full blast, it’s a great time to plan some light meals for yourself and/or your family. If you develop the habit of eating meatless meals regularly, you’ll be protecting the health of many important things:

Your wallet:  Means based around plant proteins, like beans, can cost much less than meat meals.

Your waistline: Plant-based meals tend to be low in fat. And the fat they do include is the good kind rather than that streaky white stuff that makes steak juicy and gives us heart attacks.

Our country: If all of us ate better and were leaner the cost of our healthcare would nosedive.

Our planet: Industrial type agriculture also generates great amounts of truly toxic wastes in the form of excrement. Big problem: The Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t regulate chicken-, pig- and cow wastes. They are just dumped in nature to devastating effect.

A professor at the Johns Hopkins’ School of Public Health, Bob Lawrence, reports that poultry farming poses a dire threat to the Chesapeake Bay. This is just one example of a huge, growing problem.

Maybe someday the EPA will have some say in the matter but in the meantime each of us can do our part by cutting back on meat and poultry meals.   

Industrial animal agriculture also adds to global warming; I’ll say more on that in a future post. .

Plant based meals can be so delicious. Try some recipes at the bean-makers’ websites. Progresso and Goya have great ones. One of my faves at one of those sites (I forget which one)  is Tuscan White Bean Soup.

Bon appétit! Smaklig måltid! Ibuen provecho!   And have a happy,  healthy summer.

I realize life is too short to worry all of the time, and I do escape in novels, movies, friendships and family time, but it’s really hard for me to put aside my concerns about the environment for long. This past month with the oil gushing continually into the Gulf, and all the uncertainty about midterm elections, has been a doozie for worrying.

Cleaning as an antidote to worry

Cleaning things and organizing also work for me as a worry defuser. So I decided recently to really grapple with  old piles and boxes of papers that have been lurking in my office.  Yesterday, digging through one heap dating back to 2008, I found an article by Howard Frumkin et al  in the American Journal of Public Health that made me feel a little bit better. It included this information: “”Most Americans believe that climate change is already having [deleterious] effects and a large and increasing plurality indicates that they worry about it ‘a great deal.’ However, only 1 in 5 report understanding climate change very well.”

Following up, I found a 2009 Gallup survey on Americans’ perceptions and concerns about climate change.  It showed that the numbers who worry a great deal about climate change had actually dipped overall, largely on account of a decline among Republicans.

 The issue has become ridiculously, tragically politicized. The findings in the Gallup survey only underscore for me thecrying need for more  effective public information about the real, present threats to human and planetary health due to our fossil fuel addiction. It’s a big job; I hope to play a bigger part in doing it once I finish my Masters in Public Health.

In the meantime, I am chipping away with some of my freelance writing and also just talking about it. I try not to swamp my friends with talk of green issues but I don’t avoid them either.

Bicycling cheers me up and cools Earth down

Please — if you have a decent understanding of the issues involved, do your part to spread the word that we each have a part to play in controlling climate change. Hopping on your bike instead of driving is a great way to contribute.  I’m going to go take mine out to go pick up a library book on the subject of saving the planet. It’s called the Green Metropolis.  Brian Schwartz, a Hopkins professor in the Environmental Health department recommended it.

Imagine my surprise and delight the other day when I picked up a free booklet in Publix and found it chock full of authoritatve science reporting about the perils of global warming. It also included sound advice about ways that individuals could behave differently to reduce their own and their families’ carbon footprints. Publix surely takes first place as  Florida’s favorite supermarket; the company has a great deal of influence here.

Flabbergasted — that’s what I was. Publix is known to be a big supporter of the Republican party. I NEVER imagined I would find this kind of solid science being promulgated right there between the bakery and floral departments.

The Experts Talk about “Climate Chaos”

By the way, when my public health professors talk about climate change and the devastation that it is going to create for all living things if we continue to behave as we currently do, they generally eschew the phrase “global warming.” Too mild. Not nearly encompassing enough.

No, the professors at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health often refer to “climate chaos.”    We see it day after day and week after week in the newspaper but it’s never called climate chaos.  We see extreme and deadly floods in Tennessee this spring. In 1993, entire towns, such as Valmeyer, illinois, were covered by flood waters. The list goes on and on.

In the only 15 years that I’ve livedin Florida I’ve observed that what used to be the normal pattern of afternoon showers in the spring and summer is shot to pieces. Intead of those predictable PM rains we have days and days of rain that break records interspersed with long periods of droughts that fuel wildfires.  Most meteorologists don’t understand that these weather diasters aren’t just exciting material for the evening news. They fail time and again to report on the extreme and aberrant weather as part of a bigger picture.  In fact, neither does the prestiege press when it covers these storms and their sequalae.

Anyway, it gave me great hope to see Publix talking sense about this issue. And I’ll always take hope over despair, even though despair often strikes me as the more sensible option.

The midterm elections are coming up fast. Accordingly I want to use this post to encourage readers to become involved: Work hard for and donate generously to candidates who will protect the health of our planet, of  which we are all a part, and for the health of our citizenry.

The BP oil spill occurred not far from where I live in Florida. It has greatly occupied my thoughts lately. No matter how far away the spill is from your own home I hope you to will pay attention to this ecological catastrophe and take action to prevent future such occurrences.  I am generally a fan of President Obama’s but we cannot afford more offshore oil drilling and more possible oil spills in delicate and already abused marine habitats. One marine scientist quoted this week in the New York Times warned that the Gulf of Mexico has shown a great ability to rebound after these tragedies. He also stated that we just don’t know how many insults are too many for ocean ecosystems and when we will fatally overwhelm them.

I don’t think we want to find out.

Support public health and conservation minded candidates with work and dollars. Contact Organiizing for America (www.barackobama.com). And spread the word to neighbors, friends and relatives.

The new healthcare bill does more than expand acess to decent medical care, which most of the industrialized world views as a basic human right;  it will also address the gnawing problem of income inequality in our country. It will start to stem the erosion of the middle class, a profoundly destructive trend that began in the Reagan years.

When Barack Obama gave his galvanizing speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004,  he said, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America.” He went on, “There’s not a Black America and a White America, a Latino America and an Asian America.” But you know what? Obama pointedly did not say that there’s not a rich America and a poor America….because there are these two Americas and the gulf between them has been widening for decades, as our solid middle has been crumbling.  

But finally, after far too many years, Barack Obama is doing something about that dangerous dichotomy with this bill. This bill is the single biggest piece of legislation aimed at reducing poverty and increasing social and economic justice. Read more about it at the NY Times.

Happily I can report still being enrolled at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, having nearly finished a required course which I THOUGHT might actually prove to be the end of my formal public health studies. The course was called Fundamentals of Epidemiology (or “FunEpi” for short in the department’s parlance, although I certainly couldn’t call it “fun”).

Students at Hopkins must pass this introduction to epidemiology within 12 months of starting the Masters of Public Health program or they get the boot. It was REALLY hard for me and it took over my life from August through December.

The term “epidemiology” may not sound familiar to you. But if you’ve been following the health care reform debate, you have been reading about epidemiological issues a lot.

Epidemiology is the science that describes the health problems  of populations in numbers. It also describes the value of interventions designed to improve the health of populations numerically. Epidemiologist employ statistics to gauge the health of large groups of people, using things like the infant mortality rate or the number of preventable deaths before a certain age (say 65). Epidemiologists also measure how well (or poorly) various attempts to make people healthier are working. They can give health care systems meaningful “report cards” and provide data to allow people to compare one sort of system against another.

The whole sorry mammogram debate that took place recently was really an epidemiological discussion run amok, ruined by the angry partisan battling that so muddies the waters surrounding many important issues.

Well the point of this post was to briefly tell you what I have been doing (studying, cramming and obsessing about epi). I also wanted to introduce epidemiology as an important science among the sciences which President Obama has promised to restore to a fitting role in public discourse.

My two classes for this coming term sound interesting (environmental health and adolescent health issues) but I hope they won’t be so demanding that I cannot pay more attention to this blog. Before they begin late this month, I will attend a brief (one-week) Winter Institute to be held by Hopkins on January 11 through 15 at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C.. There I will take two short courses on the intersection of science and politics.

I know that political activism has added enormously to my happiness. And now scientists have confirmed something that we activists have long realized—that great and real happiness comes with making a difference in the lives of others, through politics. Here’s the short take on this research, from the New York Times. The full story ran in the Boston Globe.

Today seemed like the right day to post this research since it was just about one year ago that Obama won. Still today, the ecstatic feelings of Election Night 2008 defy capture by words. On Election Night, partying like crazy with my campaign friends at the Maitland Civic Center, screaming and pounding the floor as he took states like Florida and Pennsylvania, I felt as though I had helped to save our country from the brink. All of us felt like we’d managed to snatch America back as it careened faster and faster towards a towering cliff, fueled by the duplicity, divisiveness, greed and willful shortsightedness of Bush and company.

Yes  November 4, 2008 represented a peak of happiness for me on a par with the day I got married and the days I brought my two tiny babies home form Lenox Hill Hospital. In terms of work, helping Obama win far exceeded any joy I have ever felt over a personal accomplishment – the day my first article ran in a big name magazine, my first book was published, or I was sworn into the US Foreign Service.

If you’re looking for a sense of purpose, for wonderful new friends, for excitement, engagement, intellectual expansion, for happiness–get involved! Try Organizing for America.

We elected one amazing president last year. He managed to remain respectful of his Republican opponents and open to their good ideas, at the same time that he made perfectly clear that he’d had enough of the nonsense aimed at killing his heath initiative. He managed to continue to smile and joke and keep his equilibrium at the same time that he let the rabble rousers know that he wasn’t going to bend on key principles under the barrage nor be broken.

If you didn’t watch the speech, watch it now.

And while the president spoke for most of an hour, here is another short speech on insurance reform, by yours truly, that will take less than two minutes of your time. Mine covers similar ground as President Obama’s did.

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For the historical record

Since the video of my letter may not remain available for long, I am also going to print the text of my comments here:

My family has faced some serious health problems– including cardiovascular illness, cancer and mental illnesses.

But we’ve been all right because we’ve always had decent insurance.

I’ve thought about how it would feel if we had no coverage, like millions of other Americans.

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America faces an insurance crisis. It’s a crisis for financial reasons. Princeton’s Peter Singer says each American family spends about $15,000 yearly on medical costs. Businesses finance much of it so we don’t sense it directly. These costs cut into our wages and batter our economy.

Countries with national plans have lower costs and better health outcomes. They have lower infant mortality and fewer deaths due to preventable causes in people under 75.

We’ll all be better off financially when reform brings down overblown insurance costs.

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Insurance reform is a moral crisis too. America is affluent. It’s not right that some people lack decent care.

We provide older Americans with insurance through Medicare, a program that everyone values.

With insurance reform, all Americans will have decent, affordable care. It’s only right.

The End

In a few hours, President Obama will again tell Congress and the American people that health insurance reform simply cannot wait and why it cannot wait. I hope that our leaders and citizens will all listen, without having hardened their minds and hearts in advance.

This is no new batlle

Harry Truman was the first President to try to bring decent affordable coverage to all Americans.  After hard fought battles, American society has come to accept the notion that elderly people and children all deserve coverage. We see this clearly since we do have Medicare for older citizens and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for younger ones. Now it’s time to close the gap and make sure that everyone has decent affordable coverage.

Decades ago, conservative opponents of Medicare heatedly threw around the same epithets they are hurling today (“Socialism!”). Now Medicare is a sacred and the opponents of today’s health insurance reform agenda defy lawmakers to touch it.

We elected Obama to bring us forward

I hope everyone watching President Obama tonight will remember why he won so big in November:  Because people wanted change. More p[prosperity, more equably distributed….better education for a better equipped work force… a fairer and saner America.

Good health is the beginning of lots of good things

All these things depend to a great degree on America becoming healthier, in part through insurance reform. Only a healthier America will be poised to take advantage of education reform, energy reform and political reform. Just as an individual cannot be expected to progress and do great things when he is being dragged down by ill health, neither can a society.

And when I say healthier I mean fiscally healthier too. Our businesses need to see a cap put on skyrocketing insurance costs. Only then will they be able ot use the money they are now wasting to hire new workers and raise wages.

Read about prevention here too—that’s a big next frontier

Today I also want to alert you to a post that discusses prevention in important terms that are seldom heard. It’s by Dr. Erika Schwartz, whose bio is below the link.

Full Story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-erika-schwartz/true-prevention-is-the-so_b_252135.html

Here’s her bio:

Dr. Erika Schwartz, who began her medical career as director of a trauma center that handled thousands of patients on a weekly basis, serves as Cinergy Health’s Medical Director. Her responsibilities center on providing the company guidance on health care issues, ranging from the efficacy of emerging medical procedures to so-called non-traditional treatment methods as well as serving as the company’s liaison with consumers. Dr. Schwartz engages the public in a dialog on ways they can optimize relationships with their own health care professionals.

She received her MD from the State University of New York Downstate College of Medicine Her internship was performed in Internal Medicine at Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn, NY, the second-largest county hospital in the U.S. and main affiliate of Downstate College of Medicine. She completed her training in Internal Medicine and Critical Care at that institution.