Health

Today, many of us know someone who has no health insurance and we worry about what would happen if they got seriously sick. Early last year a friend was diagnosed with cancer. Fortunately he had an excellent outcome with treatment. But two months later, he lost his job and—after he and his wife struggled to keep up with the insurance payments for eight months while he searched for a new job—they finally stopped paying for insurance. The choice came down to keeping a roof over their heads or paying their COBRA bill. They know they are now playing the lottery with his health. And God forbid his wife or son gets sick. This is the dilemma too many of our families, our friends and our neighbors are facing right now. Reforming the health-care insurance market is not only a primary goal of President Barack Obama, but is also a major requirement for the economic health of the United States because it will prevent the bankruptcy of our country and its citizens.

• Read more

Conservative columnist and cable news pundit Amanda Carpenter posted a telling observation on Twitter: "It's remarkable all Palin had to do is say death panels in a Facebook statement to make the President on down start talking about them."

The Daily Show has a snarkier take: "You know a sales pitch is in trouble when it starts with 'look you've got to trust me, we're not going to kill your grandparents.'"

They're both making an important point: the debate over health reform is playing out on the right's terms. The national discourse (if you can call it that) could very well have been about the benefits of a single-payer system, but aside from a sham vote to appease progressives, single-payer is considered anathema in the media and political establishment and instead Democrats are scrambling to respond to a barrage of rightwing talking points.

• Read more

Food seems awfully complicated nowadays. Lurking in it might be mad cow disease, E. coli, botulism, Salmonella, pesticides, and God knows what else. Genetically modified meats and vegetables are gobbled up every day, but nobody really seems to understand their long-term effects. The World Trade Organization and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture are at odds over the rules governing food importation. Even SARS, we learn, may have crossed into the human population from the eating of civets, a delicacy in China, although that is still speculative - like so much else!

National boundaries, species barriers, and biotechnological borders are all crumbling when it comes to food production. Not even our stomachs, evidently, are out of reach of the forces of globalization and human ingenuity.  

Americans now routinely eat foods shipped in from other countries and climates, since this is often the cheapest way, or the only way, to get the items we want. Need a tomato in winter? No problem. Need Chilean sea bass rather than catfish? Chicken with lots of white meat? Fungi-resistant melon? No problem.  

• Read more