RWJF has recently launched a new project, Care about your care, aimed at getting patients involved in the quality of their healthcare. Now, while I think this is a good initiative, and I give it my endorsement, let me say that the first thing that strikes me is that this is totally backwards. It’s simply sad that patients need to be their own advocates. This is like saying bus riders need to take action to get involved with the quality of their bus driver. Shouldn’t the …

Americans are really bad at geography.  Really, really bad.
I had a professor who used to play “the country game” in her class.  She would name a country — say, Indonesia — and we’d each have to try to guess a variety of indicators: population, largest three major religions, language, bordering countries, top three causes of death, and average per capita income.  This taught me a few things.
It taught me that Americans are very bad at geography (some of my college classmates put Cuba in Europe and India in South America), …

The United States is the only rich country to not guarantee time off (paid or unpaid!) for workers. Even countries you might not expect guarantee time off — Kazakhstan guarantees 24 calendar days off, for instance.
This is particularly poignant at this moment since several conservative politicians in the US have criticized president Obama for taking a vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. Personally, I think the president makes plenty of mistakes, as probably any human in his position would, but it would seem many who want to criticize him for …

The US teen birth rate is not good, not by any interpretation.  The CDC maintains a lot of data related to teen births in the United States, and even in the best states the rate is several times that of most rich nations. (Look here for the complete pdf of CDC data broken down state by state.) Another reliable source, UNICEF, puts the US teen birthrate at more than seven times what it is in other rich nations, and at the extreme, more than ten times what it is in …

The team gained a new member today — Melissa joined up after seeing some of our infobombs on Capitol Hill! — and we headed out to Ballard to paste up on Market St as well as 24th Ave NW.  Sadly, many of the poles in Ballard are of a sort of knobby concrete material that doesn’t accept infobombs well, but we still managed a decent saturation of infobombs on Market St on various metal poles.  This was also our first operation employing a roller for hard-to-reach spots, and I’m not …