In the weeds: Major backbloggage!

I spent a fabulous week visiting family in beautiful and caffeinated Portland OR, so I’m a little behind. But this is what’s been rattling around my brain …

• Beth Israel Deaconess CEO Paul Levy says he’s hearing grumbling in some health care circles about how his blogging is bad for business — other people’s. Oh, and maybe his revealing of his hospital’s infection rates (zero, in January 07) is just a little too much transparency. Uh huh. Sounds like someone’s not too happy that Levy just dunked in their faces. Keep it up, Paul.
• I’m not quite certain why the Patrick administration seems to be sending signals that stripped-down health plans that don’t include prescription drugs would be somehow acceptable.

  One of the big problems with how we “buy” health insurance is that there’s no transparency in exactly what you’re getting. You send your money (more and more all the time) into a black box known as an “insurance company”, and out the other end of the box is crapped an insurance “product” which covers less and less all the time.

  Like … what’s in the box? What exactly are we paying for? And if we’re now required to buy it — indeed, that health care is now a “social good”, as our Governor correctly says —  don’t we have a right to know how much is administrative bloat, how much is executive salary, etc.? Are we really now required to fund uncontrolled, irrational and opaque private bureacracies?

  Like Paul Levy’s doing, let’s open up the box. That’s just gotta be part of the deal. The new health care law simply must not be allowed to be simply a gravy train for insurers — or even for pharmaceutical companies.

• Treading on very thin ice here, I think the discussion about whether Barack Obama is “really black” sometimes gets people to twist themselves into some pretty awkward positions. While it’s true that Obama does not share the same kind of heritage as most descendents of slaves in America, this essay by Deborah Dickerson in Salon (also heard here, on NPR’s “Here and Now”) basically says that 1. White people’s warmth to Obama wouldn’t ever be extended to an “authentic” (hypothetical) black candidate; and 2. implies strongly that an “authentic” black candidate would indeed bring “the racial turmoil and stalemate of the last generation,” and be therefore unelectable. But at least Obama doesn’t have to deal with that, and that’s good, but not really that good. Or something.

  Look, I guess this isn’t my place, but I think that’s crap. Dickerson and Joe Biden are basically taking the same position: Isn’t it just remarkable that we have an African-American candidate that’s actually got a shot, since of course, everyone knows that “authentic” African-American candidates (like Dickerson’s hypothetical “Ronald Washington from Detroit, even with the same résumé” as Obama) are marginal no-hopers by definition.

  Yeah, Obama keeps it positive. You know who else is positive? Deval Patrick. Who else? Ronald Reagan. You know who wasn’t positive enough? Howard Dean. Positive people get elected President. Negative ones generally don’t. Sure, that applies to race relations, just like everything else.

  Anyway, I’m pretty confident that Obama is capable of making his own impressions with voters, black and white, without Dickerson’s, uh, “clarifications.”

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