-I am now a member of Change.org’s Universal Healthcare blogging team, which means I’ll be doing all of my reform, politics, and policy posting over there. Change.org has done a great job of recruiting authoritative voices from all aspects of health care, all of them advocating for progressive reform. It’s one of the blogs I’ve kept in my RSS reader, and linked to every now and then. I will include brief excerpts of my Change.org posts here, but for the most part I’m done talking about reform on this site. You can read my first post, though it will be familiar material.

-I am also done talking about myself on this blog, more or less. I’ve run out of hilarious stories about my illness. I want to focus instead more on helping other people navigate their illnesses. To that end, I’m going to try to post at least one “How to…” post a week (tagged as “how2″), giving advice and ideas for getting by. See, for example, my last post: “How to… Learn to Fly!”

-I’m going to continue posting chapters of the draft of League of Mortals. I suspect nobody is reading it, but that somebody will appreciate it, sooner or later.

Ian Pearl has muscular dystrophy; naturally, his insurers describe him as a “dog” and a “trainwreck”. They cancelled insurance policies in an entire community, so they could get him off the books. One of the most morally problematic aspects of employer-based insurance is that a chronically ill patient with serious medical needs not only costs his co-workers money, but possibly the ability to get access to health care at all. If what were at stake was, say, my ability to get treatment versus a co-worker’s ability to get asthma meds for her kid, that would be a pretty easy decision. What’s really at stake is both my and my co-workers’ needs for health care, versus the demands of our insurer’s shareholders for ever-growing profits. The way the rules are set up, we can’t win.

Stephanie Tatel’s son has leukemia, which means he can’t be vaccinated and is highly vulnerable to infectious disease. The fact that some people choose not to vaccinate their children means she can’t put her kid into day care. Tatel’s piece echoes a point I made earlier in the week: people who refuse to get vaccines aren’t just endangering themselves, but also putting at risk the most vulnerable people in society.

Trish Torrey has a good post titled “Patients – the Invisible Stakeholders“. At a conference on health care, she asked about patient representation; she was told, “We are all patients.” Which is, of course, bullshit. If you need a reminder why, re-read this post of mine.

Finally, Austin Frakt takes a look at who exactly health reform would help most. It turns out a lot of chronically ill people end up falling through the cracks in our health care system, in part because of overly narrow Medicaid eligibility requirements. In Texas, for example, a family of four earning $3,000 a year would be ineligible for Medicaid – if my math is correct. The post is a little wonky and a bit dense, but points to an important problem. And before you think, “but those a sick poor people”, ask what came first: illness or poverty? My guess is illness played a big role in putting them into their present circumstances.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to the subsequent show in full, but what I did listen to didn’t report back on those calls. If you’re a regular listener and you know whether they talked about it, drop me a comment and let me know where I can find that segment.

And if you happen to know that they didn’t talk about the calls, why not send Matt or Kairol an email asking them to make it part of tonight’s show? You can do that right after you’ve made your own calls.

You might have seen on the news the large demonstration this weekend in DC. I planned to attend as a counter-demonstrator, but wound up watching it from my couch on C-SPAN. This was probably for the better – whatever they were protesting against down there, it was just a bit too slippery to argue against.

For a report on the confusion, try this Slate article. If you just want to laugh at crazy signs, try these Washington Independent posts: here, here, here, and here. The sign above, taken from one of the galleries, is easily my favorite. You can probably make out Obama and McCain’s portraits, but what you might not be able to see clearly is the two red and blue blobs in the center of the poster. The one on the left is the Democratic Party’s donkey logo copulating with the Republican Party’s elephant logo; the one of the right has the roles reversed. Someone put some work into that sign, is all I’m saying.

But what difference does it all make? Probably none. I’m glad the demonstration wasn’t focused on health care reform, but it might have been more effective that way. Instead, the message was totally scattered – anti-health-care, anti-Socialism, pro-Ayn-Rand, anti-TARP, pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro-Fox-News, and so on. The only real unifying theme that I could see was, “we don’t like Obama”. I don’t see the President or Congress organizing the nation’s affairs around that message – nor should they.

Along similar lines, Matt Yglesias picks up on reports estimating maybe 30,000 people showed up, and argues it doesn’t mean much. I would add to that the fact that this was heavily promoted on Fox News for weeks (if not months – I wouldn’t know, as I’m not really a viewer). For comparison sake, I joined a couple of anti-Iraq War demonstrations in 2002 and 2003 that had easily twice as many protestors, but were not publicized by any mainstream media outlet prior to the event. And look how that turned out: we went to war anyway.

It’s easy for me to pick on the wild incoherence of the Tea Party protests, because part of the reason thosee anti-war protests were ineffective was that they were also wildly incoherent. I went to the first one fairly naive, only to find Cynthia McKinney, Al Sharpton, and Ramsey Clark on the docket. When some guy I’d never heard of took the mic to lead a “Free Mumia” chant, my friends and I took off to march around the White House. Most of the other protestors had the same idea at about the same time.

After the second protest and more of the same craziness, I never again participated in an A.N.S.W.E.R. event – and I think that organization did a great disservice to the anti-war movement by introducing so much distraction and controversy. Ordinary folks – like me – who were against the war wound up crowded out of the public eye by fringe groups and conspiracy theorists. It was impossible for members of Congress to point to popular opposition to the war, without looking like they also wished to free Mumia.

Point being that demonstrations work better when they keep to a single message: Pass civil rights for black Americans. End the war in Vietnam. Stop gun violence. This weekend’s demonstrations were a might muddle, so don’t expect them to matter much in the grand scheme of things.

From Slate, “The Fix is In” – about how a quasi-official panel of doctors called the RUC establishes prices for medical care. This is a good overview of the basic mechanism beneath the health care market.

That article has a link to an old New Yorker article by the incomparable Atul Gawande, “Piecework“, which explains that mechanism and the logic behind it in more depth.

On a slightly different note, the Washington Post answers “8 Questions About Health Care Reform” – a helpful summary of what’s going on in Washington.

Finally, Wired has a lengthy but excellent article on medical research: “Placebos Are Getting Stronger. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.”

In the meantime, I let slip by this blog’s birthday; my first post was on August 28th, 2008. I only signed up for a year of hosting at the time, because I wasn’t sure whether I would have enough interest in this to make it worthwhile. A year later, I’m confident enough to buy another year of hosting, at least.

A big part of what has kept me interested is the contacts I’ve made – through comments, other bloggers, and in setting up PFAM. I really appreciate the sense of community and connection I’ve developed with docs, wonks, nurses, and especially other patients. So thanks for that.