This is a very informative look at the approach toward Afghanistan that is being taken by General McChrystal. He is a very disciplined man and is taking great personal sacrifice to serve our country.

I am a very big fan of the PBS program FRONTLINE which usually airs each Tuesday evening at 8 PM.  As I was researching for this past presidential election and the issues we are all facing as a country, I found FRONTLINE to be an invaluable resource.  In April 2008, they did a wonderful piece on the leading “national” health care programs in 5 wealthy and modern countries: UK, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, & Taiwan.  As the House and Senate are now focusing their efforts on putting bills forward in this direction, I thought it was appropriate to dust this piece off to revisit and educate us in how the rest of the world advanced ahead of the US in successful health programs.  Below are the necessary links, and the whole episode can be viewed for free online.

Here is the site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/

Here is the transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/script.html

Here is the introduction:

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland — deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

Reid’s first stop is the U.K., where the government-run National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes. “Every single person who’s born in the U.K. will use the NHS,” says Whittington Hospital CEO David Sloman, “and none of them will be presented a bill at any point during that time.” Often dismissed in America as “socialized medicine,” the NHS is now trying some free-market tactics like “pay-for-performance,” where doctors are paid more if they get good results controlling chronic diseases like diabetes. And now patients can choose where they go for medical procedures, forcing hospitals to compete head to head.

While such initiatives have helped reduce waiting times for elective surgeries, Times of London health editor Nigel Hawkes thinks the NHS hasn’t made enough progress. “We’re now in a world in which people are much more demanding, and I think that the NHS is not very effective at delivering in that modern, market-orientated world.”

Reid reports next from Japan, which boasts the second largest economy and the best health statistics in the world. The Japanese go to the doctor three times as often as Americans, have more than twice as many MRI scans, use more drugs, and spend more days in the hospital. Yet Japan spends about half as much on health care per capita as the United States.

One secret to Japan’s success? By law, everyone must buy health insurance — either through an employer or a community plan — and, unlike in the U.S., insurers cannot turn down a patient for a pre-existing illness, nor are they allowed to make a profit.

Reid’s journey then takes him to Germany, the country that invented the concept of a national health care system. For its 80 million people, Germany offers universal health care, including medical, dental, mental health, homeopathy and spa treatment. Professor Karl Lauterbach, a member of the German parliament, describes it as “a system where the rich pay for the poor and where the ill are covered by the healthy.” As they do in Japan, medical providers must charge standard prices. This keeps costs down, but it also means physicians in Germany earn between half and two-thirds as much as their U.S. counterparts.

In the 1990s, Taiwan researched many health care systems before settling on one where the government collects the money and pays providers. But the delivery of health care is left to the market. Every person in Taiwan has a “smart card” containing all of his or her relevant health information, and bills are paid automatically. But the Taiwanese are spending too little to sustain their health care system, according to Princeton’s Tsung-mei Cheng, who advised the Taiwanese government. “As we speak, the government is borrowing from banks to pay what there isn’t enough to pay the providers,” she told FRONTLINE.

Reid’s last stop is Switzerland, a country which, like Taiwan, set out to reform a system that did not cover all its citizens. In 1994, a national referendum approved a law called LAMal (”the sickness”), which set up a universal health care system that, among other things, restricted insurance companies from making a profit on basic medical care. The Swiss example shows health care reform is possible, even in a highly capitalist country with powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Today, Swiss politicians from the right and left enthusiastically support universal health care. “Everybody has a right to health care,” says Pascal Couchepin, the current president of Switzerland. “It is a profound need for people to be sure that if they are struck by destiny … they can have a good health system.”

Just got finished watching a fascinating NOVA program entitled, “Ghost in Your Genes” which was about epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of genetic modifiers called “epigenomes” that are instrumental in turning on and off the varied features of any given genome. The Human Genome Project of the early 90’s was monumental as it mainly purposed to identify all of the genomes or “genes” in the DNA make-up of humans. In 2000 they reported that they had found 22,000-23,000 genomes, which was surprisingly less than they had anticipated. That’s roughly the same that can be found in worms, rats, and frogs. Since it has been thought that humans are more genetically complex, it left many questions about what causes some genes to appear and others not to appear. The salient example of this question is how identical twins which have the exact same DNA structure can develop differently. The answer that has been found in the past few years is the discovery of “epigenomes” which can attach themselves to certain genes or gene sequences and turn them on or off depending on the circumstances. Moreover, they are finding that epigenomes can be influenced early in development, showing that although we inherit genes and epigenomes naturally through our parents, it is how we are nurtured that can determine which traits develop in us. That is certainly a simplification of very complex research, but nonetheless very compelling. They have now launched the Human Epigenome Project to try to identify what could be millions of epigenomes influencing genetic development. This is very exciting, and they have already benefited from this kind of research in cancer treatment.

Here is the TV Program Description
Here is the Program Manuscript
Here is the Program Preview
Here are some links and resources
Here is the Wikipedia entry for Epigenetics

I was very pleased today to find a most welcome podcast: Audition from Mars Hill Audio.  The Mars Hill Audio Journal has been a wonderful staple for segmenting literature, science, art, theology, philosophy, and culture in an audio format.  It’s much like the format of many NPR programs, with a more poignant focus from a christian/theological perspective.  Ken Myers and the group at Mars Hill Audio has done a phenomenal job of attracting world reknown scholars, authors, and professors, as well as amassing more book/resource recommendations than one could every hope to read.  The Audio Journal comes out bi-monthly and costs $30/year and $55/2 years.  It is available in tape, CD, and MP3 download.  The podcast is free to add to your iTunes podcast library, and can also be downloaded freely on their site: http://mhadigital.org.  The cast only comes out monthy and are usually around 30 minutes in length.  For you convenience, I have included link to the available casts below:

http://mhadigital.org/index.php?post_category=podcasts