Great Advances in Medicine

Saw the doctor today at Kaiser.  (It'd been a couple years so I was overdue.)  Many changes since my last visit

• checking in by entering data at a kiosk, rather than a reception clerk at the waiting area.
• changing the format of the printout summarizing the visit.
• eliminating the weigh-in station--they upgraded the examining table/recliner with one which can register your weight.  It also raises and lowers, so your feet can be on the floor instead of dangling in the air.

I'm sort of mocking the healthcare industry here, but it's worth noting that there's a record decrease in the death rate from cancer.

Sectional Politics and Partisan Politics

A reminder: not all politics is national and partisan, or local.  Some is sectional, as this quote from Farm Policy shows:

“U.S. agriculture — and particularly southern agriculture — faces perhaps the most daunting challenge in decades to get its message before Congress and the administration, says Chip Morgan, executive vice president of the Delta Council at Stoneville, Miss.
“With the crafting of the 2012 farm bill in the hands of predominantly non-southern House and Senate Agriculture Committee members, many of them brand new to Congress, ‘our challenge is to make a concentrated effort to educate the new members about the importance of agriculture and to emphasize to them that one policy may not fit all segments of agriculture,’ he said at the annual meeting of the Mississippi Rice Council at Cleveland, Miss.”

 Southern ag doesn't believe as strongly in crop insurance, and dislikes much more strongly payment limitations.  My generalization, for what it's worth: southern crops like rice and cotton are higher in value per acre, and southern agriculture still feels the effects of the way the land was originally settled.  Used to be AAA/ASCS had an administrator from corn/hog country and an associate administrator from cotton/rice country, or vice versa.  Both sides had to be represented.