Results tagged “healthcare”

In the Seattle Times story about mayoral candidate Michael McGinn, "McGinn: 'He's the guy who's against the tunnel,'" state representative Judy Clibborn, chairwoman of the state House Transportation Committee, tries to pull the "done deal" card: "Since we're so far down the line and this was a decision that took so long to make, we're not going to change just because one person doesn't like it." Judy, Judy, Judy...70 percent of Seattle voters rejected a tunnel in 2007. We're not statisticians, but we think that's more than one person. (Check out tunnelfacts.com for all the reasons why people haven't warmed up to the deep-bore option.) But maybe we're looking at this the wrong way--if the state has a few billion sitting around to spend strictly because of process inertia, Governor Gregoire is obviously misleading us about all those cuts to healthcare we need to make that will kill people.

Many of Washington's 29 tribes don't have money for disease screenings, specialty care, mental health services, substance abuse treatment or dentists. Many triage their funds by invoking a "life or limb" standard, paying for specialty care only in dire emergencies. "If the leg don't have to come off, and if their eye don't have to come out, they won't get referred out," said Joseph, the Colville council member.

Traffic was snarled on Aurora for about two hours this morning, as police closed lanes to try to talk down a man threatening to jump from the Aurora Bridge. The P-I says he is in his mid-30s, fell 150 feet into a parking lot, and survived the fall. He was alive when taken to the hospital--probably Harborview, we imagine. This local blogger saw the traffic jam and wondered how hard it would be to justify increasing mental health coverage, given the cost of the stalled commute. But we seem more likely to build a fence instead.

There are five weeks until Election Day, and five issues in our state's gubernatorial race (six if you count Eastern Washington's concerns). Each week we'll be taking an award-winning look at where the candidates stand.

TALK ABOUT YOUR HEALTH: Founder of Bastyr University and chief science officer for Metagenetics, Jeffrey Bland, Ph.D., thinks we should be focusing on "biochemical individuality derived from genetic and environmental differences." Seems practical enough. He'll be speaking on the matter tonight and, if you're interested in the ongoing debate about how to fix our healthcare system, you should check out his talk, entitled Healthcare Reform 2008: Creating a True Health Care System.

This post is brought to you by, we believe, Seattlest's lone Hillary supporter or, as we like to refer to ourself, Hillpporter.

Down here in the Seattlest newsroom, we rarely find time to pay attention to the upper echelons of the American chattering classes, what with their myopic focus on the Washington (as they relish in referring to us as, in the rare event they mention us at all). But this morning, as the astounding news of Obama's four-peat trouncing of Clinton over the weekend percolated through the commentariat, we noticed an increasingly shrill response from Clinton-supporters like Paul Krugman.

Now that all votes are in, all caucuses adjourned, CNN declaring it all for Obama, here's how the day fared for our Seattlest contributors:

It's been quite a debacle, but last year, Oregon gained on Washington in the diversity column by announcing, come the New Year, same sex couples could enjoy full domestic partnerships. Starting today, gay folks in Oregon get access to 500 rights, like making health care decisions, suing for wrongful death, being buried next to their partner, accessing their partner's death certificate, and obtaining "personal effects from their deceased partner's body."

The oddest thing about watching last night's Iowa caucus coverage along with the Sonics game is that we had one TV tuned to TNT, and one TV tuned to CNN--and Chuck Norris was on the latter one.

In an oh-so-scientific survey, a "national emerging health care discount service" we'll decline to name (take that, PR flacks!) discovered that the most caffeinated city in the country out of 20 is ... Chicago!

On Saturday, Frank Hughes of the Tacoma News-Tribune reported that local real estate developer Dave Sabey had offered to buy the Sonics from Clay Bennett and make them the centerpiece of a development he's planning south of Boeing Field.

Well, so much for the ol' "jury of your peers" principle, because we're pretty sure if any skiers, snowboarders, or general outdoor sports people were on the jury at this trial, they would not have awarded Kenny Salvini $31 million because he crashed off a jump at Snoqualmie. That's the amount of the original award from the jury, yet somehow the judge decided that $17 million was the amount relevant to Salvini's role in the whole situation, and adjusted the final amount down to $14 million. Is that how ski resorts will operate? A skier or snowboarder signs a waiver when they buy a ticket that they accept the risks, but then when something happens they get to only accept half of the risks? What if Salvini had hit a tree instead, would the lawyers have argued that the trees weren't thinned enough, and so Salvini didn't have a fighting chance? Or, in the words of an acquaintance of ours who is a snowboarding instructor:

Yeah, it's horrible that the guy got hurt, but did the ski area make him hit the jump? It's a bunch of BS in my opinion. If you decide to huck yourself off something, own up to the fact that you might get hurt. I've seen numerous poorly shaped jumps and said I'm passing on this one. It's more about riding with in your own abilities and judging for yourself whether something looks doable or not.

Last Friday we were lunching outside Von's, and a stream of conventioneers was passing by. Some of them stopped at Von's and we couldn't help but notice that a number of them tripped on the single step on the way in. They'd alert the ones behind them, and they'd take a ridiculously large step through the door. When Von's filled up and they started filtering back out, they tripped on the way out. We didn't remember ever tripping on that step, so we asked this one guy what the convention was, and he told us it was the National Association of Elementary School Principals. We don't normally laugh at people tripping over things in real life, but when elementary school principals do it, it's very, very funny. (The conference's theme was "Soaring to New Heights.")

WOMEN & MONEY: Personal finance expert and author, Suze Orman talks about the complicated and dysfunctional relationship that women have with money in her book, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny.

The 2007 Washington Legislative session begins today, and Governor Gregoire wants to spend big. Her argument, we have a $1.9 billion surplus, and we should spend that money on education, health care, and other gross poor people things.

Oh, the Discovery Institute minions must be wriggling with glee over this one. Apparently bowing to pressure from the Bush administration, Grand Canyon rangers are no longer allowed to tell park visitors how old our most famous chasm is. In order to avoid "offending religious fundamentalists" who seem to think that Noah might have parked his ark there. Seriously, could there be a better time to easily ignore that man, when everything that comes out of his mouth has a 99% chance of being dead wrong? Dear National Park Service: grow a pair, pronto.

--Mount Rainier will remain washed away until some time in the spring.

We swooned and applauded along with the crowd during Barack Obama's half-hour speech last night. Even though we couldn't name one piece of legislation he has proposed or any of his accomplishments, it really didn't matter.

Last week we caught a free showing of the Brazilian documentary Favela Rising, courtesy of Scion's marketing machine. With the promise of free cocktails beforehand, we trundled down to the Harvard Exit about a half hour in advance of the show. Upon making our way upstairs to the top floor, we felt a bit like we'd crashed someone's party where we quickly realized we knew no one there. The atmosphere was more "Yo check out my friend's DJ premiere" than "Indie movie screening", but we tried to settle in. Sadly, we were not wearing a mesh hat slanted like Mike Cameron, or our best "trying too hard" clothes.

.

two years ago for serving the best, er, institutional food in the country.

Monday, loafiing around at home, we noticed a Seattle submission on Overheard in the Office:

He Prefers to Be Called Richard
Guy: I am full.
Girl: Full of what?
Guy: Full of Dick's.

539 Queen Anne Avenue North

-How many more "kid stumbles on human remains" stories is it going to take to get the whole area declared a cemetery? Is it just us or have there been a ton of these lately?

We posted yesterday on the push to unionize Starbucks cafes in Manhattan and a few emails and a few suspicious late night phone calls to Seattlest’s home phone from “private number” and we’re ready to give you the other side of the story. Actually we looked for this stuff before we posted yesterday, but couldn’t find any response from Starbucks on the issue of unions or critiques of their health care packages. Don’t acknowledge nuthin, won’t be nuthin.

The workers of a third New York Starbucks unionized recently, continuing what has to be an uncomfortable trend for our caffienated giant. The employees of the Union Square Starbucks store are joining two other Manhattan locations in The Starbucks Workers Union (aka IWW, aka IU-660) chiefly because of concerns regarding the low number of hours available to part-time employees.

What a bunch of lard asses the rest of the county is, right? Did you travel for the holidays and have to sit next to that fat guy for four hours on the airplane, the whole time thinking "the fattest man on the face of the Earth has to be sitting in 21B", but then when you finally landed and got inside the airport there were blubbery people like him (or bigger!) everywhere? And did you fall to the ground and scream, "nooooooo" when you saw the Chantiko all over their lips or the chunks of greasy sausage and cigarette butts caught in their neck rolls? And when they came to assist you did they say, "Look at him - I think he needs a couple pizzas or something. The poor thing hasn't eaten. Quick, someone bring a couch and a television!" They couldn't even bend over to help you up because they were so fat and their arteries were so hard and packed with solids!

Seattlest read the book "Zodiac" by sci-fi author Neil Stephenson recently. The story is a sort of eco-thriller about an activist/scientist/environmentalist- type who goes around finding and plugging little pipes that drain toxic materials into the bay in Boston. Intrigue ensues and it's a decent book which you should read. That's fiction, though, right? Well, we bring it up because it was reported today that Swedish Medical Center has been discharging sewage into Lake Union since 1998.