of possible interest to readers of this LJ....

[lagilman]

States Sue Bush Over Kid Insurance
By TOM HESTER Jr., AP

EAST ORANGE, N.J. —
Several states said Monday they would challenge the Bush administration in federal court over its new rules that block the expansion of a health insurance program for children from low-income families.

Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Washington are joining in the litigation, either as plaintiffs or by filing supporting briefs.

The states object to rules issued by the Bush administration in August that make it harder for them to provide coverage to children in middle-income families by limiting the total income of families who participate.

The states accuse the administration of overstepping the federal government's authority to set income limits for participants in the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

read the rest of the article here


also, for those of us who are Winos, er, Wine Snobs...

A Hiccup in Screw Tops’ Acceptance
By ERIC ASIMOV

"...screw caps, it turns out, have their own issue. It can be summed up by this forbiddingly opaque bit of wine jargon: reduction. Please bear with me as I try to explain what that means."

Interesting stuff. And any article that opens with a quote from Grant Burges I'm going to pay attention to. The man makes good wine.

Comments

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Who and when did modern contagion theory get developed? The junta that runs the US Government is stuck in time before the likes of Pasteur and the development of modern Public Health in the USA... for that matter, thinking about it, it's stuck somewhere 250 or so years ago, before Count Rumford, who was a Tory who fled New England during the blockade of Boston (he was involved in the development of public health concerns, albeit mostly in Europe, though he endowed a chair at Harvard in physics.. he's someone that I would like to do more research into. But anyway, http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/envhist/3enlightenment.html
"Environmental History Timeline" "... 1753 -- March 26, Benjamin Thompson Count Rumford born in North Woburn, Mass. (d 21 August 1814) Thompson was a British loyalist who joined the British Army during the American Revolution and was subsequently made Count Rumford by George III. He went into exile after the revolution and worked for the Kingdom of Bavaria for much of his life. In science, he was known for early theories of thermodynamics. In public health he was known for his advocacy of public hygiene and better living conditions for the poor. For example, he campaigned (especially in Austria) for lowering the cost of living, providing inexpensive and health homes with cheap supply of heat and light, warm meals for school children and soup kitchens for the hungry. There were, he said, Òther kinds of glory than that of victory in battle.Ó( Lehrburger 1953). Rumford died in France [his second wife was Lavoissoir's [spelling... brilliant French chemist whose works get taught to school kids....]'s widow!]"

The comment about lack of belief in contagion--the existence of the US Public Health Service involves the fact that disease -spreads-, particularly among people who're impoverished, hungry, with compromised immune systems, who can't afford to pay for healthcare or sufficient medication to do more than allievate symptoms of an illness rather than take enough medication to kill it off, and who therefore are vectors for more virulent, drug-resistant, more contagious pathogens....

The Reagan rectocranial healthcare attitudes viewed AIDS essentially as "the wages of sin are death," viewing AIDS as a moral plague upon homosexuals whom they viewed as morally offensive. The fact that HIV's victims extended from babies infused with tainted blood to rape victims to old folks to monogamous heterosexuals infected by partners transfused with tainted blood or infected by infected spouses, etc., was a myth to those who claimed that only homosexuals got infected and sickened with HIV. Years later, the current regime in DC views being poor and/or lacking otherwise in healthcare, as the wages of "if you were Worthy you wouldn't be poor/sick/unemployed/in a lousy low pay no benefits job!"

The Public Health Service exists because plagues and disease don't recognize income as barriers to spreading, don't recognize economic "worthiness" as demarcation to stay in the low rent district and among people that the junta don't want in their neighborhood or locality or country or state or country (except they want the cheap labor... why isn't anyone asking Mitt Romney about the undocumented Hispanics from south of the US border who were groundskeeping at his fancy house in Belmont, Massachusetts?!) Low pay food service workers with e.g. tuberculosis keep turning up in Boston.... and the junta doesn't believe in providing healthcare for any such people... and anyone working at those low pay rates isn't likely to want to lose a paycheck by admitting to being sick, particularly not when there are no benefits and no money for diagnosis and treatment... especially not if diagnosis tosses the person out of work. Typhoid Mary is not unique, only more prominent and well-known....