Billionaires for WealthCare Take to the Streets

There's a powerful constituency in the US that is "mad as hell" about the possibility of health care reform: Billionaires.

Actually, Billionaires for WealthCare is a bit of performance art that makes a powerful point about who stands to benefit most from keeping the status quo in the American health care (lack of a) system.

In this video, enthusiastic Billionaires for WealthCare join in with anti-reform marchers. Watch a "Kumbaya moment" where tea party protesters discover that "hey, we're for the same thing!"

Popping the Cork on BeauSoleil

Photo: the Daily Advertiser

TEAM BeauSoleil celebrated the competition their Solar Decathlon entry Thursday evening with an exhuberent "Bon Voyage" party.

The all-solar home, designed and constructed by ULL students, will now be on its way to Washington, DC where it will be installed on the National Mall along with 19 other university teams for public display and judging.

Set-up begins October 1st, homes are open to the public starting October 9th, and the event culminates with the awards ceremony on October 16th.

Lafayette's Daily Advertiser posted this photo essay and write-up.

The New Social Entrepreneurs: Neighborhood Business-Owners

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Neighborhood businesses are the heart and soul of livable communities.

Larry Thomas, a second-generation independent pharmacist in Laurel, Mississippi, epitomizes the ethic that fosters cultural enrichment.

Although big box corporate pharmacies have muscled themselves into the mainstream lately with shelves stocked supermarket-style full of merchandise, owner-operated shops like Thomas Pharmacy offer to their community something that the Walgreens of the world cannot - the owner. Walk in the store and you'll more often than not find Larry Thomas himself behind the pharmacy counter dispensing prescriptions (and community wisdom) to some of the same people and their descendants that his father first served over a half century ago.

The Thomas Pharmacies of the world have an investment in their respective communities that goes far beyond economics. There is a recognizable face associated with transactions - on both sides of the pharmacy counter.

With a neighborhood business, a trip to the pharmacy is not just about getting a prescription filled. Locally owned businesses serve as community meeting places where you can actually have a real, nuanced conversation with your neighbors. It's a place where information critical to the enrichment of "community" is passed directly from people to people with a patina of humanity that cannot be found in a strip-mall world.

The new Thomas Pharmacy, scheduled open in early 2010, will offer a children's play area for waiting families and a pizza/sandwich restaurant in addition to Larry's own personally compounded hair and beauty care products.

Local owner-operators like Larry Thomas, with the mindset of "social entrepreneur," contribute far more to the community than tax dollars.

J.C. Killingsworth Freedom Corner Event Today

If you're on this part of the globe - Hattiesburg, MS to be exact - come on out at 1pm today to the Unveiling Ceremony of the site for Freedom Corner, a newly organized civil rights memorial dedicated to the memory of "Hattiesburg's Martin Luther King" J.C. Killingsworth.

The event will take place at the intersection of Martin Luther King Avenue and Ashford (newly renamed J.C. Killingsworth) Drive.

And stay tuned for the design unveiling in early October by your favorite Architect.

BeauSoleil: Bon Voyage

Health Care, Not Sick Care

Best-selling author and physician Dr. Andrew Weil spends an hour with Diane Rehm explaining how the American health care system could be more appropriately tagged "sickness care," and he offers suggestions on how the system can be changed to promote a holistic approach to health and healing at considerably less cost.

His new book - Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future - Dr. Weil makes the case for a greater awareness of wellness in the way we approach health care.


Click on Dr. Weil's website for a more comprehensive look at holistic medicine and wellness through the mind/body/spirit connection.

And Michael Pollan recently penned an insightful op-ed piece - Big Food vs. Big Insurance - about how the way we grow and eat food in the US impacts health care costs.

An Excerpt:

"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care."

Sustainable Health Care, Part 1 - The Way We Eat

This week's newspaper column - first in a two-part series on sustainable health care reform.

The national debate on health care reform is raging. On the left, the buzz is about universal coverage and pubic options; on the right - tort reform and the free market. Everyone is concerned about the increasingly high price tag.

You may be asking, “What does sustainability have to do with health care?”

Surprisingly, sustainable practices – or more to the point, the lack of sustainable practices - have a great deal to do with how much Americans pay for health care. Regardless of where you fall in the political spectrum, or whether you are fully insured or not at all, unsustainable practices jack up the price you pay.

Consider the issue of what we eat and how we grow our food.

Perhaps the most costly contributor to what we pay for health care is America’s obesity epidemic. Americans are getting fatter and fatter each passing year. Diabetes, heart disease, respiratory ailments and other expensive-to-treat maladies are exacerbated and sometimes completely brought on by obesity.

Juvenile diabetes is on the rise as kids take in almost a third of their calories from sugary soft drinks. The sweetener of choice – high fructose corn syrup – is cheap because government subsidies over the past half century have encouraged farmers to abandon sustainable practices of rotating crops and livestock and move to single-crop farming. That strategy has been good for production yields, but bad for the diversity of local farming and the availability of locally grown produce.

Crop rotation has been used for millennia as a sustainable practice to self-fertilize and to keep pests away naturally. Without that cultivated diversity, farmers now use more fertilizer and more insecticide to produce the food we eat. Thankfully, farmers cannot spray with DDT any more - a chemical proven to have extreme adverse side effects – but the jury is still out on the long-term effects of currently-used chemicals when it comes to contracting various types of cancer.

When you think about sustainability, think “natural. One of the keys to good health is eating a diverse selection of fresh fruits and vegetables. Processed foods contain extra chemicals for the sake of shelf life and preservation of natural coloration, but some of the nutritional value in processed foods is lost in the process of, well, being processed.

At some point, we began using hydrogenated oils to extend expiration dates of various packaged foods – good news for retailers, but turns out too much hydrogenated oil in the diet leads to heart disease and resulting high-cost treatments.

It’s simple: Americans are eating too many empty calories from processed sugars and fats and we’re paying a high price to treat the consequences. If we do not change the way we eat, Americans will continue to pay “too much” for health care no matter how we change system.

Obama's Health Care Plan

Many people from across the political spectrum are asking "What's in Obama's health care plan?"

Certain factions (seemingly motivated by fear of change or a visceral hatred for President Obama) have mis-characterized the Administration's health care plan so loudly that honest information-seekers are genuinely confused.

You can read the full plan at Whitehouse.gov; here are the bullet highlights.

If You Have Health Insurance

• Ends discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.
• Limits premium discrimination based on gender and age.
• Prevents insurance companies from dropping coverage when people are sick and need it most.
• Caps out-of pocket expenses so people don’t go broke when they get sick.
• Eliminates extra charges for preventive care like mammograms, flu shots and diabetes tests to improve health and save money.
• Protects Medicare for seniors.
• Eliminates the "donut-hole" gap in coverage for prescription drugs.

If You Don't Have Insurance

• Creates a new insurance marketplace – the Exchange – that allows people without insurance and small businesses to compare plans and buy insurance at competitive prices.
• Provides new tax credits to help people buy insurance.
• Provides small businesses tax credits and affordable options for covering employees.
• Offers a public health insurance option to provide the uninsured and those who can’t find affordable coverage with a real choice.
• Immediately offers new, low-cost coverage through a national "high risk" pool to protect people with preexisting conditions from financial ruin until the new Exchange is created.

For All Americans

• Won’t add a dime to the deficit and is paid for upfront.
• Requires additional cuts if savings are not realized.
• Implements a number of delivery system reforms that begin to rein in health care costs and align incentives for hospitals, physicians, and others to improve quality.
• Creates an independent commission of doctors and medical experts to identify waste, fraud and abuse in the health care system.
• Orders immediate medical malpractice reform projects that could help doctors focus on putting their patients first, not on practicing defensive medicine.
• Requires large employers to cover their employees and individuals who can afford it to buy insurance so everyone shares in the responsibility of reform.

LEED Rating System: Panacea or Smoke Screen?

New LEED Silver university dormitories

Over the past few years, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system by the USGBC (US Green Building Council) has become the most recognized public symbol of green building in the US.

Since its inception in 1993, the USGBC has contributed monumentally to public awareness of green building issues, and the LEED rating system is a good-faith attempt to certify the level of sustainability in a building, but LEED - as is - has some fatal flaws. Did you know that a building can be awarded a LEED Silver Certification while using more energy than the average building or without addressing any of the local climatic conditions? A building in Alaska would not be disqualified for being a carbon copy of a building in Florida - as long as the credits add up.

Problem is, LEED is a checklist, and a clever designer can find enough check marks to gain a certification without really making a fundamental change in the way buildings are designed. (A contractor representative of a local LEED Silver project recently came by my sustainability class and presented the building. The visit got them a point on the checklist necessary to make Silver. Great! But does it make the building any greener? Turns out, the building in question looks conspicuously just like the last conventional energy-hog-of-a-building designed by that architect.)

LEED is a rating system, and no substitute for a thorough understanding of the "principles" of Sustainability. LEED should reflect sustainability, not the other way around.

Here's a good article from New York Times about LEED rating shortfalls.

Transformative Ideas of Van Jones

Image: YouTube still

Want to know the real reason Van Jones was targeted by the noise machine?

Watch this speech he delivered in Philadelphia a couple of years ago explaining the philosophy of lifting people out of poverty by matching up America's fastest growing economic sector - the green economy - with those who need jobs most.

Powerful ideas draw powerful enemies. Pick it up at the 22:40 mark if you want to skip over a rather lengthy intro.

UPDATE: Arianna Huffington's take - Thank You, Glenn Beck.