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Location: Columbus, Ohio, United States

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Unposted Post 1--2005

Dulles
This is the first of my old unposted posts. Keith wants to read them, and he's the only person who reads this, so why not. Also, I read tonight in "Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man" that you should never throw away old writing until you've tried to improve it.

This was originally written on 5 November 2005 and never posted.

Dulles sucks. It is the weirdest AirPort I've ever seen, and my sample population has grown dramatically in the last few years.
The being said, I met an interesting person there, and I learned some things.
She is finishing up her Oncology residency at Columbia, and since we were both convention retarded (me from a Water trade show, her from a symposium on cancer prevention) we chose to talk rather than work.
First, an aside. We had an idea in college that would be a dramatic innovation in the world of conventions. The concept was a bullshit flag. It was a flag that you could hold up during the ubiquitous "Hey I don't really know you but part of the protocol is that we talk about your cat for two minutes before we get to the point" conversation. By holding up the flag you remove the lingering guilt that must be piling up somewhere in the upper middle class subconscious from 1000 plastic conversations. Also, it's more efficient.
Anyway, back to Dulles.
We talked about global water need and other stuff about my job and then we talked about Oncology. She mentioned a change in senior health benefits that will probably cost more than Katrina, Iraq, and any Social Security reform combined.
Check this out.
1. During Bush's Medicaid Reform package they did not allow the government to negotiate with drug companies. This means that we will have to pay top dollar for prescription drugs, or in other words that the Government failed to take advantage of one of the only competitive advantages available to an organization of its size--economies of scale. That's stupid.
2. The way that the regulation is written there is a huge incentive for Big Pharma to create and market oral cancer medication because those drugs would now be prescription drugs and be purchased top dollar.
3. Demographic shifts will lead to a massive growth in the market for these drugs.
Someone needs to sack up and have political will to piss people off and do something about healthcare.

1 Comments:

Blogger Keith W said...

um.... yea.... about keith wanting to read them...

:-)

7:43 PM  

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