Author Archives: Dick

Preventive Testing

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Blue Cross sent me my new Obamacare card and “Outline of Coverage” on Saturday, more than a month after I finally got signed up and 18 days after the new policy period started. I’m glad I didn’t get sick.

The accompanying letter advised, “Please carefully review the enclosed outline of coverage…”

I did. After the shock of seeing my deductible, I went online to view the more detailed explanation. That’s where I found this:

Women have unique health care needs that change over the course of their lifetime. The Affordable Care Act has expanded women’s preventive services to be covered with no member cost share for plans with ACA-defined preventive benefits beginning August 1, 2012 and upon renewal.

I understand why ACA would mandate free Rh(D) Incompatibility and other Screenings for Pregnant Females.

I understand why ACA would mandate free Cervical Cancer Screening for females only just as I understand why ACA would mandate free Prostate Cancer Screening for males only.

I simply do not understand why ACA would limit breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, glucose screening, Hepatitis B virus infection screening, HPV DNA testing, to females only.

It’s not as if the government doesn’t know men develop breast cancer. NIH reports that, although breast cancer is much more common in women, men can get it too. It happens most often to men between the ages of 60 and 70. But there is no preventive male Breast Cancer Screening in the ACA list.

NIH reports that Chlamydial urethritis affects men. But there is no preventive male Chlamydia Screening in the ACA list.

An NIH report recommends the glucose challenge test screening for prediabetes and undiagnosed diabetes because diabetes prevention and care are limited by lack of screening. But there is no preventive male Glucose Screening in the ACA list.

CDC reports that gay and bisexual men are at increased risk for Hepatitis A, B and C. But there is no preventive male Hepatitis B virus infection screening in the ACA list.

CDC reports that most men who get HPV (of any type) never develop any symptoms or health problems but they can still transmit it to their partners. But there is no preventive male HPV DNA testing in the ACA list.

“If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance.”

I did like my health insurance. It did offer free breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, glucose screening, Hepatitis B virus infection screening, and HPV testing. To everyone covered. It covered my cataract surgery with no waiting period for the cataracts to “mature.” And so on.

Now I have sticker shock: The new policies cover less and cost more.

I'm from the Government

Once upon a time, that wasn’t a joke.

 

Figures Don’t Lie

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Right? Right?

Except Carroll Wright’s entire quote is “Figures do not lie but liars figure.” Carroll D. Wright was United States Commissioner of Labor, addressing Congress at the time; he probably drew on earlier but unattributed versions of the saying.

In the story, Stagnant Wages Imperil Financial Security, the PBS Newshour and Bloomberg News collaborate to paint a deliberate picture of pernicious inflation eating away at our income (true) and that we need to increase the minimum wage to combat it (not true). See, there may be plenty of reasons to increase wages as well as plenty of reasons not to. This story doesn’t tell any of them.

“I would go to neither outlet for facts,” Rufus said when he sent me the original link, “but this is all the way over the top propaganda (or monumentally stupid.)”

PBS Graphic of CPI v. Adjusted WagesAt the core of the story is this animated graphic that they say shows wages aren’t keeping up with prices.

Figures don’t lie but liars do figure.

I had trusted Bloomberg News. Co-founded by former-NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Matthew Winkler, it delivers what we thought was accurate financial news to subscribers. Mr. Winkler was a writer for the Wall Street Journal. Pretty good creds for a finance reporter. They wanted to undercut the competing Dow Jones News Services.

That’s why it disturbs me that Bloomberg’s Roben Farzad would use data he has to know he manipulated to illustrate the PBS story. See, the problem with Mr. Farzad’s chart is that he adjusted the wages data for inflation and then compared the result to inflation. Apples versus oranges. Lies versus truth.

PBS corrected itself. Sort of. “A few of you who visited the NewsHour website last night commented on a graphic we created for yesterday’s show. It was meant to explain the relationship between stagnating wages and inflation. What we should have said is that one reason wages adjusted for inflation have been so flat for so long is that rising consumer prices are eating up a good deal of the gains.” They even offered a chance to view a “selection” of those responses and a corrected graphic but there was no link to the corrected graphic and the main body of the story still uses the wrong one.

Figures don’t lie but liars do figure.

Here’s the chart they should have used:

Published Figures of Minimum Wage Income v. Federal Poverty Level

Huh. Here we can see that published figures of minimum wage income for one person and the annual federal poverty levels for a family or household of one tell the opposite story. Minimum wage income has grown slightly above the alleged market prices in the Federal Poverty Level. The unadjusted data from each year doesn’t lie.

Unfortunately, the real data doesn’t tell the story PBS and Mr. Farzad wanted to tell, does it?

We’re left with two conclusions. Either (a) PBS and Mr. Farzad are too stupid or too uneducated to do simple arithmetic or (b) PBS and Mr. Farzad lied to us to push an agenda. This is very, very bad. The first indicts our schools since every editor and reporter has been graduated from somewhere. The latter indicts the media.

Bottom line? Rufus was right.

 

Why?

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Today’s Internoodle meme is “What books, teams, films, TV, music, food do you like?”

My friend Enola “Fanny” Guay asked, “What surprised you?” She wanted to know, “What makes you laugh and cry?”

I’m an engineer by training and inclination so I write a lot of lists. I write a weekly newspaper column about the arts and entertainment in North Puffin so I write a lot more lists. I don’t really like lists.

Fanny Guay wants a list.

The Five Ws give us the formula for reporting a story, researching a claim, or investigating a crime. According to the principle of the Five Ws, a story is incomplete if it doesn’t answer these questions:

Whodunnit?
What happened?
When did (or will) it happen?
Where did it happen?
Why did it happen?

Smoking GunThe first four are data gathering as is the meme. “What list of stuff do you want to share?”

The Why question always sounds more interesting although my cop buddy, South Puffin’s police chief Brockley Mann, says detectives don’t really care about motive. They need evidence.

Half of me agrees. The reporter in me knows the facts have to come first but motive drives my fiction/opinion writing. As Mark Twain told us, “First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure.”

If I know what books, films, teams, music, and food you like, I can always make up the lies to match.

For the record:
My favorite book is generally the one I’m reading right now. I prefer turning the pages and the feel of a printed book, but I do have Kindle apps on tablet, iPod, and laptop because they simplify travel. I never want to be without a good book in hand and one in the wings.

I’m fairly well-schooled in English and American lit for an engineer but today you’re likely to find a detective story by Robert B. Parker or James Lee Burke on the nightstand. I like regional writers, too, so I just finished Vermonter Chris Bohjalian’s newest novel and would like it if Key West’s Tom Corcoran wrote another.

My first jobs were in movie theaters so I don’t go to all that many now (I was an usher at the old Warner in my hometown and a manager at the Criterion in Times Square when Nicholas and Alexandra premiered; I even survived 13 weeks of Love Story in traffic-snarled Fort Lee). I do like movies with character and story and have gone to three in the last year or so. The marvelous Les Mis. Gravity in 3D with backdrops so real that astronauts called them “true-to-life.” Hubble 3D in IMAX at the space center.

I don’t watch sports although I grew with the Phillies and the Iggles, the Birds and the Colts on the radio. A high school buddy pitched for the Mets so I watched them until I realized that he lost when I watched and won when I didn’t. I still like to drive race cars.

I like most music but claim that the only two forms I don’t like are blue and grass; in fact, I’m not keen on heavy metal but I book an eclectic outdoor concert series every summer that generally includes blues, country, folk, gospel, jazz, opera, pop, rock-n-roll, and, yes, bluegrass.

I like food. Bait isn’t food.