California – On The 8 Spot

April 14, 2009

rePost:Great News:GMANews.TV – Roxas proposes mandatory health coverage for all Filipinos – Nation – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA

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This is the reason why politicians especially elected officials need to have websites so people can interact with them , they can get input and explain their sides etc etc. hope I can find a copy of this online. Over all without seeing the plan , mandatory health coverage for all is a win, the question is were do we get the money (magbawas muna ng mga mistress and mga politicians) , and is their a more efficient way to administer it than that envisioned in the bill/plan.

Roxas proposes mandatory health coverage for all Filipinos
04/14/2009 | 01:55 PM
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MANILA, Philippines – A bill seeking mandatory health coverage for all Filipinos on state expense has been filed in the Senate.
Senator Manuel Roxas II proposes in Senate Bill 3154 that the government must pay for mandatory entitlement of every Filipino to healthcare benefits under the state’s health insurance program.
He said the immediate and automatic inclusion to Philippine Health Insurance coverage and membership is mandated by Republic Act 7875 (National Health Insurance Act of 1995).
The mandatory universal healthcare coverage shall be funded by the national government through premium payments to the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PHIC), which shall be included in the annual General Appropriations Act, he added.
“The health of every Filipino is important. It is the responsibility of the government to ensure that our citizens are healthy,” Roxas said.
He said that 48.4 percent of the total P181 billion expenditures for health in 2005 came from individual families’ pockets, and that only 28.7 percent came from government resources.
He said the social health insurance, on the other hand, account for only 11 percent and health expenditure from other sources, such as private health insurance or community-based financing represent only 11.9 percent.
He said that since 26.9 percent of Filipino families are below the poverty threshold, “it is unimaginable how Filipinos who are everyday grappling with the hardships of economic realities, will be able to afford a decent healthcare service for themselves and their families.”
Roxas is also the author of the Cheaper Medicines Act. – Amita O. Legaspi, GMANews.TV
via GMANews.TV – Roxas proposes mandatory health coverage for all Filipinos – Nation – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA.

March 22, 2009

Best Read::Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: More present than the present

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Read the whole thing, this is but half of it (but of course the good parts here)

Take the following passage from a series of lectures he gave, in California, in May of 1999 (collected in the book The Vital Illusion), in which he limns our era:

Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social.
Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.
Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present.
Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real.
Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex …
Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event.

If a clearer depiction of realtime exists, I have not come upon it in my inchworm meanderings.
The fact that Baudrillard could so clearly describe the twitterification phenomenon ten years before it became a phenomenon reveals that the phrase “new media,” when used to describe the exchange of digital messages over the Internet, is a coinage of the fabulist. What we see today is not discontinuity but continuity. Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them. <Emphasis Mine>
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: More present than the present.

March 3, 2009

Right To Live-Wedding Ring Freakonomics

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We must revise our views and accept they way people want to live. This is especially true for cases that does not entail an adverse effect against any thing but our sensibilities. We must not deny people the right to find their happiness if it does not directly affect our happiness in any meaningful way. Part of me hated making Sean Penn win the Best Actor award at the 81’st Academy Awards for political reasons (Mickey Rourke was really that good!), and I feared that it may be the reason the Slumdog Would lose the Best Picture awards, TGFT. But prop * was California’s black eye and till they find a way to redeem themselves they would always feel shamed with what they weren’t able to prevent!

My Wedding Ring
By Ian Ayres
With great joy, I decided to put my wedding ring back on my finger this past weekend.
I had stopped wearing my ring because I was slightly embarrassed to live in a state where people like my sister couldn’t marry the people they love.
But I have no reason now to be embarrassed on this score, because on Friday the Connecticut Supreme Court struck down the statutory exclusion. You can read Justice Palmer’s opinion here. (Disclosure: An amicus brief was filed in the case on behalf of me and other Connecticut law professors, and my spouse, Jennifer Gerarda Brown, was the co-author of another amicus brief.)
My Wedding Ring – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.