Better Late Than....

Well, so far two people have remarked on the fact that I didn't post my regular Monday blog entry yesterday. It's great, really, to know that you're out there reading! And, some of you, even commenting--though I do wish more of you would do that.

I could say that I was just preparing you for the fact that next week, the blog post will appear on Tuesday, not Monday. (On Monday I'll be returning to Madison after a glorious Fourth of visiting my sister and watching fireworks in DC.) But the truth is, I was just too busy yesterday to get to the blog. In addition to spending most of the morning working out at the gym and then having brunch with Jed and our friend Jim, I was doing a bunch of desk work, picking up copies of th Facing Fear manuscript and delivering them to people who've agreed to write blurbs for the cover, meeting with the book designer to talk about interior and cover designs, and then spending several hours looking at fearful images on various web sites for potential use on the cover. I discovered, in that search, an amazing collection of Arthur Rackham illustrations for Wagner's Ring cycle. None at all appropriate for the cover, but if you're a Rackham afficianado, or just curious, go to the Wikimedia site and search for Rackham.

In the past week, I've run across a couple of articles that provoked me to file them away to share with you. One is an interesting piece in the June 23 issue of The New Yorker addressing the question of whether a computer can ever actually have an intelligent conversation with a person. Two things in the article ("Hello, Hal" by John Seabrook) struck me as especially pertinent to my situation. First, I discovered that there's actually a scientific explanation-- complete with a name, the Lombard effect--for why I find it tiring to talk against loud background noise. We humans unconsciously raise our voices to compensate for ambient sound. Of course, I'm often aware that I won't be heard against, say, the passing bus or truck, or (at a recent party) a salsa band, and I just shut up. (At the party, I whispered a response into a friend's ear when he asked, in the middle of a lively piece, how I was. "I can't talk," I said. Which he already knew.) But often, I'm not even aware that I'm trying to compete. I just know that talking is tiring.

The other salient point in that article really irritated me. After some comments about how dissatisfied many customers are with the speech recognition programs that many companies use ontheir customer service lines in place of touch-tone menus, Seabrook refers to Leopard, Apple's new operating system which responds to voice commands. This, he point out, "is wonderful for people with handicaps and disabilities...." Which I'm sure it is. But I wish he'd been as sensitive to the needs of people who have trouble speaking when he was writing about those speech recognition programs. Last fall, when I needed to call some company (I think it was Northwest Airlines) that offered only this option, the friendly computer could not understand a word I said, and I was so frustrated I came close to crying. Eventually, the computer got frustrated, too, and turned me over to a real person, who also had trouble understanding me. Even though my voice has gotten a lot stronger, I still quail at the thought of conducting business on the phone. Recently, I had to call both a credit card company about a questionable charge, and the UWHealth business office about an invoice question, in the same day-- and when I was able to successfully complete both calls, I felt like I'd accomplished an amazing feat. Two amazing feats, in fact.

On a more positive note, here's some interesting information from a post that appeared recently in the Topeka (KS) Capital-Journal blog (http://blogs.cjonline.com/index.php?entry=7452). The blogger, Bill Roy, a retired physician and former member of Congress, was reporting on a talk by the senior vp and chief medical officer of a Kansas medical center to an audience of retired physicians. The vp, Dr. Kent Palmberg, said he thought eventually the U.S. would "end up with something like Medicare for all." And then he added, "I'm not sure that's all bad. They pay promptly, predictably and adequately, with a minimum of paperwork. That beats costly fighting with scores of insurance companies, plus caring for the many uninsured."

Dr. Roy notes that this attitude is growing among physicians. He writes that "a 2007 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine...found that 59 percent of physicians in the U.S. support 'government legislation to establish national health insurance,' up 10 percent in five years." Last December, the American College of Physicians endorsed single-payer as "one pathway" to universal coverage. And Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, says, "There's only one choice for universal health care at a cost we can afford, and that's single payer, Medicare for all."

Please tell this to your Senators and Representatives, and to both Presidential candidates, too! And to every Harry and Louise you meet.

See you next Tuesday. And have a brilliant Fourth....