Voting, How simple it should be!

It has been a very interesting week listening to talk radio.  The Supreme Court will not hear the 7 cases about same sex marriage, which I will definitely not try to touch, and there is a lot of talk about voting rights.  I was listening to Hannity on 890 am on my way to lunch.  There was talk about not allowing states to change their voting requirements this close to election.  I decided to pull up some additional information and by chance picked on The Christian Science Monitor link on our class home page.  An interesting topic stared me in the face, "College students: New Hampshire is trying to stop us from voting."  I thought to my self, this sounds interesting, this really sounds like a political argument he said she said debate of sorts.  Reading through the article New Hampshire is trying to change voter registration.  The article states that college students who are not from New Hampshire to prove residency will either have to get a New Hampshire driver's license or register their car.  

I find the title to this article interesting and fallacious.  New Hampshire is not trying to prevent college students from voting.  New Hampshire is requiring you to be registered to vote.  You can either vote where you are going to college or you can vote in your hometown.  You do however need to make wherever you are voting your legal domicile.  I found a few items that were helpful for me in trying to look at this article from many different angles.  USA.gov states, "To be eligible to vote, you must be a U.S. citizen. In most states, you must be 18 years old to vote, but some states do allow 17 years old to vote. States also have their own residency requirements to vote. For additional information about state-specific requirements and voter eligibility, contact your state election office."  In here it tells me States have their own residency requirements to vote.  I pulled up New Hampshire’s voting registrations requirements at sos.nh.gov.  These voter registration questions and answers tells us who can register to vote in New Hampshire along with their definition of domiciled. New Hampshire’s government website tells us that, "you can only register in the town or ward in which you are domiciled. Your domicile is that place, more than any other, where you sleep most nights of the year, or to which you intend to return after a temporary absence."  They also give examples of temporary absence specific to this article as, "teachers and students."  Meaning that if you are a student in New Hampshire with no intention of staying in New Hampshire and you have not legally changed your domicile, then you should not be voting in New Hampshire.  To me this makes cogent sense, you want to vote in a place where you will be living.  I am not living in New York why should I vote in the state of New York etc. You vote in your domicile because you want a say over what goes on in your neighborhood/ state.  I find it ridiculous that students who have no intention of living in a state are going to schools in that state just to vote, but then will not be there to live by the laws of the people who are elected.  With the majority of the states allowing absentee voting they will still have an opportunity to vote in a place they are domiciled. 

New Hampshire is not trying to prevent students from voting.  New Hampshire is asking those who will be domiciling in that state to register to vote, like USA.gov says by the rules of the state.  New Hampshire does not want people to vote in New Hampshire if they are only temporarily residing in New Hampshire.  

Rubuttal- The Bundled Care Payment Initiative does not work

I agree with what was stated last week; the United States is in great need of health care reform. However we were told that the Bundled Care Payment Initiative is not better than the current fee for service program that we currently have. I will show you why the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement initiative is better for us than the current fee for service system.

Let me ask you some questions. How many of you have had so many medical bills from one hospital visit; that you never knew who, or how much you were paying? How many of you have received a bill, months after you thought you had already paid everything off for that same hospital visit? How many of you, have found on your credit report a collection account from a care provider collecting on a bill that you thought you had paid for that hospital stay? The Bundled Care Payment Initiative solves all of these questions; I will show you how later in this rebuttal.

How many of you feel that the Dr. and hospitals should be paid based on the quality of service provided not based on the quantity of service? This means that they are paid based on how well they do at fixing your problems, rather than by the amount of problems they say you have and give you medications for. Let me give you an example. I recently made an acquaintance by the name of Kelly. Kelly was diagnosed a few years back with high cholesterol. The Dr. said take this pill, Kelly said, " Is there anything else I can do besides take a pill?" The Dr. told him no he needed to take the pill. Kelly went away determined to prove the Dr. wrong. Kelly changed his diet and began to exercise. After six months Kelly returned to the Dr. The Dr. told him his high cholesterol was back to normal, the pill must have worked. Kelly told the Dr. he never took the pill he just changed his habits. This is an example of quality of care that I believe we are currently receiving. Instead of helping us to fix and prevent the problem we are given drugs so the problem does not get worse. The Bundled Care Payment Initiative also helps with this.

Last class it was quoted that "we cannot sustain the current fee-for-service system." If we cannot sustain the current fee-for-service option why would we opt to stay with this program rather than changing to a program that is better for us all?

"The Current fee-for-service payments drive up health care costs and reward quantity over quality, and they encourage wasteful use, especially of high-cost items and services. They do nothing to align financial incentives between different providers. As a result, patients receive care that they do not need and may not want, and health care providers may not be on the same page about what type of care the patient should receive." The current fee-for-service payment incentivizes healthcare providers to over-diagnose and over-treat patients.

The Center forAmerican Progress is a DC-based liberal think tank created and led by President and Chief Executive Officer John D. Podesta, the head of Barack Obama's presidential transition team talks about Bundled Care Payment Initiative options.

Bundled Care Payment Initiative "Instead of paying separately for each individual service, the insurer would pay a set amount for the inpatient hospital services and physician services, as well as the post-acute care services. Because the insurer would pay a fixed amount to health care providers to treat the patient following his fall, all providers would have an incentive to coordinate care that the patient actually needs. And because the providers’ reimbursement amounts would depend in part on meeting quality and patient experience measures, the entire team of providers would be focused on improving quality." There are the answers to the first group of questions. Instead of you having to juggle all of the bills that are sent to you, you only have to juggle one. No bills would be missed, no collection accounts on your credit, and you will know whether or not you paid that one bill. To answer the other question about paying for quality vs. quantity, this program allows for related readmissions for 30 days after hospital discharge are included in the bundled payment amount. This would require the Dr. to make sure they are diagnosing correctly and resolving the issues the first time rather than a patient having to pay for every visit back to the hospital.

In the last class it was stressed that the Bundled Care Payment Initiative has been very unsuccessful. It was stated that only 18 sites are currently participating. It is true there are only 18 sites currently participating, but what we need to know that phase 1 of this system only began in 2013. There is a lot that is involved in changing billing in procedures in the health care system, just over a year is hardly enough time to criticize the amount of participants.

The Bundled Care Payment Initiative is a good program to solve today’s problems. It may not be perfect but it is a start at benefitting every patient rather than benefitting the hospitals and doctors. This program will cut costs by eliminating over-diagnosing by doctors. Patients will not be turned away from being re-admitted as was stated. Each patient will receive high levels of care that will eliminate many re-admissions. Re-admissions will be eliminated because all doctors involved coordinated the care that was given the first time and a correct diagnosis was given.

Antibacterial Soap

I was doing some online shopping recently and my wife asked me to order some hand soap, so that is exactly what I did. Searching on Google then on Amazon.com, I thought I was buying something she would like, white tea and ginger moisturizing hand soap.

The soap had no sooner arrive than the debate began. “Why did you order non antibacterial soap?” I said, “Soap is soap all soap works the same.” She then told me cold and flu season was coming up and it was important to have antibacterial soap. To me, that was a challenge. I had to Google it! Needing a recent article this is what I found, “It’s Probably Best to Avoid Antibacterial Soaps.” The fallacy about antibacterial soaps is that it leads people to believe regular soaps do not clean your hands properly. The truth “is that there’s no evidence they are (antibacterial soaps) any better at keeping people from getting sick than regular old soap, according to the Food and Drug Administration.” I believe that the reality of the term antimicrobial is that it is a great marketing advertisement. The marketing advertisement does its job and gets us as consumers to pay more for a product that has no benefit for us. The reasoning we use to purchase the soaps is also fallacious. We rely on thoughts that we reason in our minds that if we use this soap it will keep us clean and reduce the risk of getting sick or passing on germs to others. The reality of this is that chemicals inside of antimicrobial items,triclosan and triclocarban, may carry unnecessary risks. Some say there are reasons to believe that long-term use of these products contribute to resistance to antibiotics. Other FDA concerns are that these ingredients may also be linked with unanticipated hormonal effects. We believe that large companies have our best interest in mind, when it is really about the dollar? We need educate ourselves about everything that we choose for our lives and hopefully we can make better decisions that will better ourselves.

States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth

I have been hearing on the radio, as I have been listening to the Sean Hannity Show on NewsTalk 890 KDXU, discussions about raising minimum wage. The first thoughts that came to my mind were: who ends up paying for this minimum wage increase, we do as the consumers, and maybe the increase in minimum wage will help to boost the economy, because my thought process is the individuals the wage increase will help are those who spend the majority of what they have to support themselves.

I started to look up what has happened with those states that had already increased minimum wage and what has it done for their economy. I came across an article title that read, "States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth." I had to read this article, in my mind I was thinking how is it possible that all of the states that have increased their minimum wage experience faster job growth than those who have not?

The article then went on to state, "The average change in employment for those states over the first five months of the year as compared with the last five of 2013 is .99 percent, while the average for all remaining states is .68 percent." What the author did was find the average increase of all of the states that had increased their minimum wage (0.99) and also find the average increase of all the states that had not increased their minimum wage (0.68). When I got to this point of the reading I felt that I had been had. The title is fallacious, "States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth." Just because some of the states that increased their minimum wages had above average increases, the author was trying to lump in all of the states that increased their minimum wages make all who read the title believe that it is better for each state to increase their minimum wage. I am not saying either to increase or not to increase, but to fallaciously credit the positive growth of a few states to all states to me is a blatant lie. this article is abusing statistics and is fallacious.  If I were to interpret the statistics I would say there have been some states that increased their income, but they were not the top states but did include the worst state with the worst neg growth.  In my opinion in order to be able to say "the states that increased their minimum wages are experiencing faster job growth," all of the states would have to be experiencing faster job growth then all the others.  According to the article nine of the states were above the midpoint in change of employment but 4 were not. To make the fallacy worse the state with the least amount of change in employment, which was actually a decrease in employment, happened to be one of the states that had increased their minimum wage (New Jersey -0.56). The state with the highest level of change in employment was California with 2.95% increase, which at the time had not increased their minimum wage but since these results have come out California has increased their minimum wage. The article does go on to even state, " This doesn’t mean that increasing the minimum wage necessarily creates more jobs. “While this kind of simple exercise can’t establish causality, it does provide evidence against theoretical negative employment effects of minimum-wage increases.” The article itself admits that an increase in minimum wage doesn't necessarily create more jobs. In conclusion this is not a post on whether or not the minimum wage should increase, it is however a post on being careful about the titles you read and make sure you read the article and use sound reasoning to what is being said.




http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/07/03/3456393/minimum-wage-state-increase-employment/