What's Been Happening Anyway?

So, what content can you expect in the contemporary Styx?

1. Sports (my biggest hobby, see a future post for why)

2. Jewish studies across the board, mainly social sciences and the old fashioned Rabbi-Doctor topics (i.e. what all rabbis with Jewish Studies doctorates seem to do: Jewish life issues with a glaze of scholarship)

3. Politics (none of this should be new, but the age of Trump (ym"sh) has made this crucial)

4. Footnotes, in a way, for my Twitter feed

5. Medical sociology stuff. My dissertation was on end-of-life issues but I've done work since then on the anti-vax movement and disabilities

6. I'll try to publish my sermons here as well. I don't speak often, though

7. Parenting, and things my kids are into and experiencing. All of my kids are in middle school or above

Yeah, for old time readers, this sounds familiar. But I am trying to be thorough.

Megan McArdle on Health Care

Megan McArdle is an infuriating blogger at the Atlantic. The Balloon-Juice lexicon for "McMegan" is accurate:

Nickname for fact-free Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle, who predictably makes arguments that have less to do with reality and more to do with wild-ass assertions meant to lend credibility to her libertarian bona fides. A self-proclaimed “economic libertarian” whose first blog was called I Am Jane Galt. See also, “Technically true, but collectively nonsense” and “It wasn’t a statistic-it was a hypothetical.”

She's one of these people who uses all possible effort to be wrong about everything. It's stunning. In her latest column, though, I found that she was basically correct. Entitled "What Cutting Health Care Costs Looks Like" she describes how her mother was kicked out of the hospital before she had a chance to recover fully from a burst appendix.

McMegan still tries to spin the story into some libertarian squawk, but ultimately it shows a sympathy for how cruel cost-cutting can be. This naturally proves a point I made decades ago (on the State of the State, I believe) which is that while the joke goes that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, I add that a liberal is a conservative who lost his job. In this case, it's a similar indignity.

BTW, I do think the early-hospital-ejection is a major social problem in America and I think we can solve it. The first question to ask is, naturally, why hospital stays cost so much, but I am a practical man and I realize that there's no way to rebottle that efreet. I suggest a facility called a Recovery Clinic (RC) which would be like a 'nursing home' in the sense that it is a residence with 24/7 nursing care, but would allow the full recovery that the hospitals have overcharged out of their purview.