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• Cool Infographics – Cool Infographics – 16 Infographic Resumes, A Visual Trend
  A really awesome collection of resumes for designers – presented as information graphics.
  (tags: infographics design)

Congratulations to our friends at the Council of Rural Initiatives on the launch of their new web site, developed by Irish Rose Consulting. This was a short-timeframe project, so we made use of Wordpress with a pre-developed template. We’re happy to be able to support the efforts of this new organization working for rural Wisconsin.

 

Our local newspaper editor was kind enough to consider a submission from me. The following article appeared in the November 25, 2009 edition of the Dunn County News.

Health-care reform is the hot topic in the United States these days. I’ve been encouraged by the number of people discussing the issue while I’m out and about, at the store, the pizza joint, the post office.

Sadly, too much of our focus has been on the small number of screaming matches that have erupted in various forums. I believe people resort to shouting and name-calling because there’s a serious lack of knowledge surrounding health-care in the United States and around the world.

Why reform, why now? The U.S. spends approximately $7,300 per person per year on health care. In comparison, Norway, the #2 highest spender on health care, spends approximately $4,800.

We spend 53% more per year on health care than any other nation in the world. The industrialized nations of the world spend, on average, $2,964 per person per year. Of the 30 member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), only 5 spend more than half of what we spend on health care.

Viewed another way, we spend 16% of our total gross domestic product on health care. From 1990 to 2004 our health care spending increased by 123%, while personal income increased by only 32% and our gross domestic product increased only 104%. Spending on health care has been increasing at an average rate of 9.9% per year, 2.5 percentage points faster than our GDP, which means we’re constantly increasing the portion of our spending on health care, which requires us to spend less on other necessities.

What do we get for our spending? We hear a constant refrain that the United States has the best health-care system in the world. A quick look at some basic stats shows that’s not the case.

The United States has a life expectancy of 78.1 years, placing us #23 within the 30 nations of the OECD. In Japan and Norway, the leaders within the OECD, citizens live roughly four years longer. Of course, a number of factors influence life expectancy at birth, not just health care.

For that reason, a common comparison of health-care systems is infant mortality, because proper pre-natal care is one of the largest determinants of infant health. The United States has an infant mortality rate of 6.7 deaths per 1,000 live births. Eight nations of the OECD have infant mortality rates less than half ours. If we could cut our infant mortality rate in half we would save the lives of 14,000 infants every year.

Another common comparison is mortality rates from treatable diseases such as cancer. Opponents of health care reform will often, rightly, point out that cancer patients in the United States have a higher chance of surviving cancer than patients in countries such as Canada or the United Kingdom. Those opponents however cherry-pick their countries, attempting to ignore the fact that the United States ranks 7th in the OECD in cancer mortality rates – again, while spending far more than any other nation in the world. For breast cancer we rank 11th, and for lung cancer a dismal 20th.

So do I mean to disparage our hospitals and doctors and nurses with these statistics? Not at all. We do indeed have some of the best medicine in the world, if you can access it.

What’s broken is the way that we provide access to and pay for health care. If you have money or a good insurance plan, the doors of American hospitals are open to you. But in this time of recession, where 7.4 million people have lost their jobs, more and more people are faced with either losing their insurance or having to find the thousands of dollars needed to cover their own insurance.

Around 46 million people in this country don’t currently have insurance, many of them prohibited from purchasing it due to pre-existing conditions. A recent study found that 45,000 people per year die due to lack of access to medical care because they don’t have insurance. The uninsured lack access to basic preventive health care and treatment for chronic conditions.

We often hear that government is inefficient while the marketplace makes private industry more efficient. However, the government Medicare system includes costs of about 3% for administrative overhead, i.e. paperwork. Private insurance companies, on the other hand, spend 20-30% of our health care dollars on administrative overhead.

Part of the insurance company’s overhead is a system of assessing claims and choosing which to deny. A recent study of California insurance companies found 20-30% of all claims are denied. This is the rationing we hear so much fear-mongering about in a government plan.

We need to understand that this rationing is going on now, in the private system. However, in a for-profit system like ours, rationing is done not to ensure that everyone is cared for, but to inflate the profits of private insurance companies.

It’s clear to me that there are financial and logistical reasons for our government to be more involved in the provision of health care. However, I think the far greater argument is the moral argument.

We read nearly every week in the pages of this newspaper letters touting that “We are a Christian nation.” I believe we are far greater than that. We are a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a nation of all faiths. And all major faiths have as their most basic tenet that we should care for our fellow man.

We have too often, especially these past few years, fallen short of these expressed ideals. But the greatness of this nation is in our never-ending striving for the better. The American dream supposes that we can all improve our station in life, our quality of life.

I believe our government should reflect our values. We currently provide basic education, fire and police protection, national defense, all through our government. Every industrialized nation in the world provides basic health care for every citizen, and all of them do it at far less cost than us, many of them with much greater effectiveness.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We can look to nations like Germany and Switzerland who use private, non-profit insurance companies and private hospitals to ensure basic care for everyone. Now is the time. Please, take the time to become informed, then contact your elected representatives and make your views known.

For good information on the issue, check out the web sites of the Kaiser Family Foundation and Consumer Reports.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a rural issues forum held here in Menomonie by the Center for Rural Affairs. CFRA staff are barnstorming the upper midwest to hear about the issues facing rural areas. Heidi Clausen, a reporter for The Country Today newspaper wrote a nice article summarizing the event, including a few choice quotes from yours truly.

Since our time living in Ireland, I’ve been using a great online service called ConnectMe Anywhere. This service allows you to purchase phone numbers in dozens of countries and forward them to your own phone. Using this, I was able to provide a U.S. phone number that rang my mobile phone in Ireland, and since we’ve moved back I’ve been able to keep an Irish phone number that rings here in the U.S. Their rates are incredibly reasonable, and their web site makes it very easy to set up a list of phone numbers to be rung.

I recently learned that one of our Irish numbers was ringing straight through to a strange voicemail system rather than our cell phones. I emailed ConnectMe Anywhere’s support department mid-day last Friday. I was pleasantly surprised to have the problem resolved in less than 24 hours, and I was delighted to get that information in the following email:

I have had an engineer look at the problem and it appears when they were doing some testing with Irish numbers on the system and your numbers where pointed to one of our developers by error.  This has now been rectified and are back pointing at your account.  My sincerest apologies and I have added 20 Euros of free credit to your account.  Just to let you know that the technician responsible will be made to wear a dunce cap for 2 weeks and get no mint cookies with his tea.  Again our apologies for the inconvenience and please let me know if you require any further help or have any questions.

That reply, by the way, was from the great, fabulous and good-looking Belinda (ahem, she told me to say that…). While I’d been perfectly happy with the service to this point, this kind of quick and humorous response from their support folks has made me a committed customer. Kudos to Belinda and the entire team at ConnectMe Anywhere!

I recently attended the Midwest Rural Assembly in Sioux Falls, SD. I wrote a short guest post on the Wisconsin Rural Partners web site describing the conference.

It’s been quite a long summer, but we’ve survived and Kathleen has returned home from her long sojourn in Detroit. We decided a short break was in order before the fall semester starts, so we booked a last-minute deal to Washington, DC. Kathleen did her master’s degree at Gallaudet in DC, and I’ve worked there a lot, but we’d never been there together, so this trip was a good chance to share stories and favorite places.

We flew AirTran airlines out of Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, an airline neither of us had flown before. We fortunately had lightly-sold flights, so they were hawking business-class upgrades for a very cheap price. To get our vacation off to a good start we splurged and flew business class. Nice! On arrival in DC, one step outside of the terminal reminded us why Congress recesses for the month of August. We were greeted by the oppressive heat and humidity for which DC is famous, and which we’d have to survive for the next 4 days.

We arrived in DC on Thursday afternoon and took the Metro to our hotel – which turned out to be the same Holiday Inn I’d stayed at when I traveled to DC with the Wisconsin Rural Leadership Program. It was well-located, just a half-dozen blocks from the White House and close to DuPont Circle, the area where Kathleen lived when she was in DC. After a brief rest (our flight left MSP at 6:00 AM!), we headed out to explore the neighborhood around DuPont Circle. After some time in Kramer Books & Afterwords (my first DC bookstore experienced on a trip while in college), we headed to Union Station and across the street to the Dubliner for dinner and some pints while enjoying live Irish music. It was an evening of lots of memories of our times in Irish pubs for trad sessions, so we both ended the night feeling homesick for Ireland.

Friday morning we headed out to the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building. In all my trips to DC, I’d never managed to spend any time in this building. It was a visit that was long overdue – as Kathleen said, “I’ve found my happy place at the Library of Congress.” The building is simply amazing, to say nothing of the wonderful exhibits on display, including a great exhibit on the development of the Constitution. Also on display was Thomas Jefferson’s original library, which formed the basis for the Library of Congress after the original collection was burned in the War of 1812. As a collector and lover of books, I’m always intrigued to see what books other people read. Looking at Jefferson’s library it was clear that he was an amazing man of many diverse interests.

After too-short a time at the Library of Congress (for the record, all our stops on the trip were too short!), we headed to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. We had booked tickets for 1:15, and we not quite ready to leave when they closed the museum at 5:20. The museum’s exhibits are beautifully designed, and provide probably the most densely-packed collection of information either of us had seen in a museum. It’s an incredibly powerful place to visit. A special exhibition on Nazi propaganda left us both feeling like the propaganda on display wasn’t so much distant history as recent – sadly, fear and anger are still useful tools in selling bad ideas.

Next we headed for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, a long wander past the Washington Monument, World War II Memorial and Lincoln Memorial on the Mall. While making the trip down the Mall, we saw a number of tours passing by on Segways, which gave us an idea for something else to do. Arriving at the FDR Memorial just a couple of hours before sunset, we nearly had the place to ourselves. The Memorial is covered with sayings from Roosevelt that are so timely even today, as we seem to be fighting many of the same fights he did (health care, social safety net, war).

With a rainbow leading the way, we headed to the Jefferson Memorial, long a favorite of both Kathleen and I. We wandered a bit there, then scurried across the river just ahead of the incoming rain storm. We hailed a cab and headed to the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, a funky area that was a hangout of Kathleen’s in her DC days. We spent a bit of time in the local voodoo store, hit a book store, then went to Meskerem for Ethiopian food. It was my first experience with traditional Ethiopian food, served on a communal plate with bread and no utensils. The food and experience was just amazing.

Saturday morning we headed to Georgetown, an area I’d only visited once before. We wandered some of the shops, explored Georgetown University’s campus, and had a light breakfast overlooking the C & O Canal. We caught the shuttle back to DuPont Circle and spent some time exploring the area between DuPont and the White House (including a stop at the famous Mayflower Hotel for a soda). We made it back to our hotel early enough for a quick rest before heading out for a long evening. We met my old friend Naveed and went out for El Salvadoran food at another of Kathleen’s old haunts, El Tamarindo. The evening began with a pitcher of margaritas, and away we went! After a great dinner we wandered up the street further into Adams-Morgan until we found a bar with an empty outdoor table where we had some more refreshments while catching up with Naveed.

Sunday morning, like the good church-goers we are, we got up and headed to Washington National Cathedral just in time to catch a service. This was one spot in DC that neither Kathleen nor I had visited. It’s truly a beautiful building, and I was surprised to learn that the Cathedral had only been completed in 1990. We stayed for most of the service, which was full of all the pomp that you’d expect in an Episcopal Cathedral. We took some time to wander the Cathedral grounds and gardens before catching a cab to our next destination, the Politics & Prose bookstore.

We had seen Politics & Prose mentioned in one of the local free papers. It caught my eye because they had author readings nearly every day, and most of them were authors I’d be interested in meeting. It’s easily one of the best bookstores we’ve ever visited. In fact, on walking out of there with several signed books, I told Kathleen we probably couldn’t afford to live in the same town as this bookstore.

Late afternoon on Sunday we headed to the Capital Segway store for our very own Segway tour of DC. Though the Sunday tours were slightly more expensive than the Monday tours, I had opted to book for Sunday evening thinking that the streets would be less crowded and it would be a little easier to maneuver. That decision really paid off when we got to the store and learned that we were the only two people booked on our tour. So, after a few minutes tutorial in the store, our guide Aaron took us across the street to the park where we could practice for a few minutes before setting off on our tour. The Segway really is an amazing piece of hardware. After only a very few minutes’ practice it really does become quite easy to drive. You simply lean forward or backward to go forward or backward, and tilt the handlebars to turn. Once you get used to it, it really seems that if you think about moving forward, you do. I’ve included a couple of videos of us here, but be sure to check out Capital Segway’s YouTube account to get the full effect.

Den Practicing on the Segway

Kathleen Practicing on the Segway

Kathleen Buzzing the Capitol on the Segway

So, feeling like veteran riders already, we headed out on our 2-hour tour which would run a big loop around the White House, Washington Monument, most of the Smithsonian, the U.S. Capitol building, Supreme Court and Library of Congress. We had of course already covered a lot of that ground, but it was a whole lot easier on a Segway! I know there was a lot of hype when the Segway came out that they would change our cities. Having now ridden one, I think if they can get the price down on them they truly will revolutionize our cities. They’re a perfect way to move around a crowded city like DC, and a whole lot of fun! We’ll definitely take future opportunities to ride.

Monday was our last day in the city, but we had a late flight, so we had some time to cram a bit more into the trip. We headed for the National Museum of the American Indian. This was another new stop for both Kathleen and I, as the museum hasn’t been around DC all that long. It’s a really beautiful sandstone building surrounded by flora native to the DC area prior to white settlement. The interior of the building is equally beautiful. We had time to only dip our toes into the museum’s exhibits, but were very impressed with the graphic and instructional design of the entire museum. We’ll definitely be back for another visit. We topped off our visit with lunch in the museum’s Mitsitam Cafe, which serves indigenous foods from 5 different regions of the Americas.

Finally, for our last running stop on this trip, we hit the World Bank’s InfoShop bookstore, the perfect capstone to what was really a truly geeky getaway. Once again we found ourselves coveting far more books than we were able to buy (even though we’d found a 30% off coupon in one of the local papers!). At this point though we were having to consider the weight of our checked luggage for our return flight. We finally had to leave for the airport, but with a renewed sense of possibilities for future work in the third world.

We had a truly great trip to DC. It was a nice break from everyday life, which has been kind of overwhelming this summer. But more than that, it was a chance to get a peek at lives we’d lived separately in this city in the past, and a chance to get a peek at possible future lives. Not too bad for a last-minute getaway.

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I just sent the following to the Obama White House:

Dear President Obama,

I’d like to offer a perhaps radical suggestion for remaking the health-care town hall discussions. The town hall meetings you’ve held thus far are a start. But they’ve not substantially moved the debate, and I suspect in their current form they’re unlikely to. Perhaps it’s time for some new thinking?

Schedule some more town hall discussions. Give away tickets through the White House as you have been. But hold 20-30 seats open, front-and-center. Upon arrival for the town hall, you’ll no doubt be greeted by angry protesters. Stop your motorcade and greet the protesters, especially those opposed to your plans. Using a bullhorn if necessary, tell the protesters that you want to have a frank and open discussion about health care with them. Explain to them that you have 30 seats in the front row of the hall for those among them who are willing to put down the signs and have an honest debate. Welcome them to the debate, show the country that you believe in openness.

Once in the hall, focus on a discussion with these people. Ask them for their fears, ask them why they’re angry. Confront them with the basic facts of health care in this country and ask them for solutions. Ask them what they would have you do. And explain to them why it is you’re pushing for reform. You know the facts, you know WHY this reform is so desperately needed. This debate can be won on the facts, which is why the opposition is spending most of their time shouting hatred and slurs. If they debate you on the facts you’ll win, and if they resort to shouting in your town hall I believe the American people will begin to see that there is nothing but anger on the opposite side.

Mr. President, you’ve done this! In your time as a community organizer you’ve gone into church basements to face fear and anger and you’ve responded with calm words of reason. As a college professor you’ve stood in classrooms and debated the finer points of Constitutional law with some of the brightest students in this country. You traveled this country during your campaign and you spoke to all comers, like Joe the Plumber, with honesty and respect, hearing their side and explaining your side. Now is the time for this kind of debate, this kind of bravery.

There are no doubt many, many reasons not to take this approach. The single best reason to try it is that it CAN change the debate, it CAN move people. It is exactly the kind of administration that your supporters hoped for in supporting you. We need you to win this debate!

Dennis Deery
Menomonie, WI

A lot of people have been showing up at town hall meetings these days screaming about the inevitable ineptitude of any government-run health care system. I wonder how many of those same people spent the last eight years (or their whole lives) screaming about how our military is the best in the world? Why do people in this self-proclaimed Christian nation believe that our government power can create the best military in the world, a force for killing, while that same government power cannot possibly run a health-care system? Oh, and if government health-care is so awful, why do these patriots accept that all our military personnel are provided government-run health care through the VA system?

Hey, it’s been a lotta fun. Especially gotta admire the way you lowered the bar to the level where a mentally-troubled weasel could leap over it. Thanks so much for knowing when to go. Don’t let the door hit ya in the ass on the way out!