"Medical tourism" goes to the next level

Most Americans are familiar with the concept of "medical tourism" - traveling to another country to get necessary care at more affordable prices.  An article in Kaiser Health News shows how far this concept can be taken.  The patient from Mississippi traveled to Mexico, as did a surgeon from Wisconsin.  Her total knee replacement prosthesis was made in the United States.  And the entire process was paid for by her American medical insurance company.

The hospital costs of the American medical system are so high that it made financial sense for both a highly trained orthopedist from Milwaukee and a patient from Mississippi to leave the country and meet at an upscale private Mexican hospital for the surgery.

Ferguson gets her health coverage through her husband’s employer, Ashley Furniture Industries. The cost to Ashley was less than half of what a knee replacement in the United States would have been. That’s why its employees and dependents who use this option have no out-of-pocket copayments or deductibles for the procedure; in fact, they receive a $5,000 payment from the company, and all their travel costs are covered...

Parisi, a graduate of the Mayo Clinic, is one of about 40 orthopedic surgeons in the United States who have signed up with NASH to travel to Cancun on their days off to treat American patients. NASH is betting that having an American surgeon will alleviate concerns some people have about going outside the country, and persuade self-insured American employers to offer this option to their workers to save money and still provide high-quality care...

The high prices charged at American hospitals make it relatively easy to offer surgical bargains in Mexico: In the United States, knee replacement surgery costs an average of about $30,000 — sometimes double or triple that — but at Galenia, it is only $12,000, said Dr. Gabriela Flores Teón, medical director of the facility.

The standard charge for a night in the hospital is $300 at Galenia, Flores said, compared with $2,000 on average at hospitals in the United States.

The other big savings is the cost of the medical device — made by a subsidiary of the New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson — used in Ferguson’s knee replacement surgery. The very same implant she would have received at home costs $3,500 at Galenia, compared with nearly $8,000 in the United States, Flores said...

“It’s been a great experience,” she said two days after the surgery. “Even if I had to pay, I would come back here because it’s just a different level of care — they treat you like family."

Hockey drills

YouTube link.

Obscene photo

As much as possible I try to cluster all of my Trump-related postings into occasional "Trump clumps," but this publicity photo is so egregiously offensive that I felt compelled to highlight it.  The commentary is by Graeme Wood at The Atlantic:

The latest publicity photograph of the president in El Paso, Texas, knocked me into silence for a good half hour this morning while I tried to figure out the many layers of obscenity on display. The photo features a baby whose parents were killed in El Paso a few days ago. The baby survived because his parents shielded him with their bodies. In the photo, he is cradled by Melania Trump. The president is next to her; both are smiling broadly, and the president is offering a thumbs-up. The child is expressionless and wearing a cute plaid bow tie...

First there are the smiles, so chipper in the aftermath of mass murder... Then there is the thumbs-up, ... in this case to signal approval of what, exactly? The narrow survival of the infant? The heroism of the hospital staff and first responders who cared for the wounded?...

The optical demands of the job are impossible to appreciate, and we should forgive him for the occasional failure to twist his face into an appropriate expression. But sometimes—and this is one of those times—the optical demands of the office are the only demands. In the immediate bereavement of an infant’s parents, nothing is needed but respectful silence.

Plastic fibers falling from our skies

The image will be reasonably familiar to anyone who has seen a contaminated specimen through a microscope, but this is a view of rainwater from the mountains of Colorado.

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution...

“My results are purely accidental,” he said, though they are consistent with another recent study that found microplastics in the Pyrenees, suggesting plastic particles could travel with the wind for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers. Other studies have turned up microplastics in the deepest reaches of the ocean, in UK lakes and rivers and in US groundwater.

A major contributor is trash, said Sherri Mason, a microplastics researcher and sustainability coordinator at Penn State Behrend. More than 90% of plastic waste is not recycled, and as it slowly degrades it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. “Plastic fibers also break off your clothes every time you wash them,” Mason said, and plastic particles are byproducts of a variety of industrial processes.

The original publication is here (pdf).

I wonder if anyone else is reminded of Morgellons, which was prominently in the news about ten years ago and had its own research foundation.

Some interesting political maps

Additional maps and informed analysis at The New York Times, via BoingBoing.

An "up north" family portrait

Last week several members of my extended family gathered at the Boundary Waters Canoe Area to paddle and portage the chain of lakes there.  Pictured here are Doug from Florida, Dean from Wisconsin, Misha from North Carolina, and Karl from Barcelona.  I wish I could have joined them, but at my age pleasures like this have to be enjoyed vicariously.

Related: a previously-posted family portrait.

Cup stacking as a competitive sport

YouTube link.

Via Neatorama.

iBrows

I stole the title of this post from the discussion thread at the mildlyinteresting subreddit, where I encountered this photo [croppped by me for emphasis] of headphones that had been dropped in sand with high iron content.  Two comments from the thread:

"I grind metal at work and its super annoying. I have to wipe the metal off meticulously after every shift or else it starts to stain the airpod case."

Iron sand beaches are fairly common around the world. The ones I've been to have fine grain like a regular beach but it's a lot darker because of the iron mixed in. They get ridiculously hot on a sunny day - as in they will burn your feet if you stand still for more than half a second

Cannabis garden, Paris, 1910

Via, where this comment is posted:

"It was a very common ingredient in pain relieving medicines back in the day. My great grandmother would refuse to take even an aspirin, but she used tincture of cannabis for her migraines. You could buy it in many places right up until the Second World War."

How fast can YOU run in deep snow?

YouTube link

Those long legs give the moose access to underwater vegetation in a lake, but also truly remarkable speed going through deep snow. 

If you're short of time, the action really begins at about the 1:30 mark.

Apparently Florida has anti-incest billboards

Via the Cringetopia subreddit.

Word for the day: ecofascism

I encountered the word in an extremely interesting Gizmodo article about the El Paso shooter:

This weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has re-opened the festering debates over gun control, immigration, and the president’s penchant for racist hate speech. But the manifesto believed to have been authored by the suspected shooter also reveals another horrific idea edging its way toward the mainstream from the primordial sludge of racist message boards...

Included among its racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric are ideas central to the mainstream environmental movement. “[O]ur lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources,” it reads.

Where Crusius’ views violently diverge is the solution to these real issues. The manifesto suggests Americans overconsumption will never stop, so the only option is “get rid of enough people” to make the American lifestyle “more sustainable.” Horrific, disgusting, and absurd, this so-called ecofascist ideology uses legitimate environmental concerns to justify racist policies and, sometimes, mass murder...

The El Paso shooter manifesto itself echoes that of the gunman who killed 51 in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year. Brenton Tarrant, the accused shooter in that massacre, identified as an ecofascist and defined it as “ethnic autonomy for all peoples with a focus on preservation of nature and the natural order.” The El Paso manifesto is in the same vein, going further in some ways by noting that the goal of the murders was to preserve Americans’ unique position as one of the world’s biggest per-capita carbon polluters on Earth...

Deploying racialized fears of overpopulation destroying the environment, members of the Tanton network even tried to take over the Sierra Club in the late 1990s and turn it into an anti-immigrant organization. Fortunately, they were defeated. What we are facing now is the greening of hate, stage two. Old ideas, but with some new actors and manifestations. While ties exist between the Tanton network and the white nationalist movement, the lethal embrace of these ideas by violent, armed white nationalists is another order of magnitude...

But we can’t ignore how Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and the environment are taught in high schools all over the United States. They are an important part of many environmental studies curricula. There’s a deep racial undercurrent with poor people of color are presented as having too many children and destroying the environment. Unfortunately, Malthusianism has achieved the status of conventional wisdom in the U.S. It’s not surprising that white nationalists are influenced by it and deploy it for their own hateful aims.

Now, there’s also a powerful apocalyptic discourse that links climate change, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and scarcity. White nationalism is already steeped in violent apocalypticism—fears about the white race coming to an end feed the impetus to mount an Armageddon-style bloody-but-cleansing race war. The manifestos of the shooters in both New Zealand and El Paso in a sense represent a coming together of a green apocalypse and a brown fascist one. This toxic mix serves as a rationale for saving nature and the white race. ..

I don’t want to deny that there may be climate conflicts or climate-related migration. But there is a deeply problematic, apocalyptic discourse about climate and conflict and climate refugees that is quite common in liberal policy circles and even documentaries. It draws on highly racialized depictions of poor people—especially in Africa—as more prone to violence in times of resource scarcity as if they’re savages not capable of cooperation. And these narratives also simplify the migration process with the claim that climate change is going to cause scarcity, scarcity’s going to cause conflict, and that’s going to cause migration. Most climate migration researchers believe a lot of migration that is likely to occur will be within countries not across borders. But to the extent that it is across borders, why are negative images fomented of these poor people coming to get us? That’s not on the far right, that’s in some liberal foreign policy and military scenarios around climate change...

This past fall, Matthew Phelan wrote an article in the New York Review of Books on ecofascism. He talks about how sustainability discourse is becoming popular in Europe among right-wing populists, especially in Italy with the Five Star Movement. Sustainability could become a mantra of these people, but their kind of sustainability excludes. It’s sustainability for white people and for their particular nativist vision of the nation-state. So sustainability needs to be clearly delineated in terms of whose interests are being served. The same with climate policy. Green comes in many shades. We need to understand the differences between them.

And for the TL;DR reader, here's the briefer Wikipedia entry.

To me it is absolutely fascinating (and unexpected) to learn that environmentalists who trumpet scenarios of rising oceans and crippling droughts/floods are unintentionally (and unknowingly) fuelling the end-times fantasies of radical extremists.

112-year-old Minnesota fish

As reported by the Star Tribune:

Sampling in the waters of west-central Minnesota and collecting catches from anglers, Lackmann found five bigmouth buffalo fish more than 100 years old — including a 112-year-old female taken from Crystal Lake near Pelican Rapids in Otter Tail County.

Bomb radiocarbon dating verified the fish’s age, making it the oldest age-validated freshwater fish ever taken. Lackmann and his research team recently published their findings in the scientific journal Communications Biology...

“Many people think buffalo fish are carp,” said Lackmann, 28, who grew up in Moorhead and Detroit Lakes. “They aren’t.  “Calling a bigmouth buffalo fish a carp is like calling a human a lemur.”..

Lackmann’s study of nearly 400 buffalo fish yielded an abundance of fish older than 80 to 90 years.  

And a photo of the otoliths from their publication in Nature Communications Biology:

If you only listen to one video about Bernie Sanders, this should be the one

YouTube link.

Television coverage of Bernie Sanders typically focuses on his presentations to large groups of people in auditoriums; that format almost of necessity requires shouting a series of brief soundbites and standard phrases.

In this interview, Bernie sits at a table and for an hour calmly and carefully discusses major topics in depth.  He begins by noting that the Democratic "debates" shouldn't even be called that - that they are essentially reality TV shows.  At 04:30 the host asks him to explain "misconceptions about you" (re socialism in particular).  At 05:30 the topic shifts to health care, then at 11:00 to lobbyists and their power, then about 17:00 on to minimum wage, the corruption of a political system that ignores working people, student debt and college costs, then at about 32:00 gun control, at 45:00 marijuana and drugs, and finally at 55:00 climate change.

It is so refreshing to listen to this format rather than to shouting from a podium.  I know most readers of TYWKIWDBI will skip this post entirely, but I encourage everyone to at least try the first 5-10 minutes.  Turn it on while you fix a lunch or do laundry.  This video gives a better sense of the man and his mindset than anything else I have encountered.

Just try ten minutes.  Even if you don't like him. 

Addendum:  Here's one response - 

"Do you live on This Street or That Street?"

Residents of Porter's Lake, Nova Scotia might live on either one, or on The Other Street.

Via the Crappy Design subreddit, where a discussion thread includes other cities with bad or confusing street designations (Atlanta, Calgary, Grand Junction...), including this monstrosity from New York City: