I realized then that I am pretty good at treating clinical misery with drugs and therapy, but that bringing about happiness is a stretch. Perhaps happiness is a bit like self-esteem: You have to work for both. So far as I know, you can't get an infusion of either one from a therapist.

Excommunication of Phoenix nun, & ejection of St. Joseph's Hospital, for allowing an abortion to save a mother's life; prohibitions of tubal ligations in Texas & Oregon.

Ensuring the continuation of slavery was, overwhelmingly, the chief cause of Southern states' secession and the Civil War.

"Religion was supposed to die of asphyxiation in the wake of modernity, but the opposite has proven to be the case. So the options aren't religion or no religion; the options are good religion or bad religion. I'm voting for the former, meaning a critical understanding of power in religious traditions."

ECONOMICS & UNINSURED

An individual's lack of health insurance affects everyone in the country economically, so requiring it is constitutional.  When the uninsured person goes to the ER, the hospital bill is passed on to everyone (possibly including people from other states) through higher costs.  If she becomes disabled because of lack of preventive care, her Medicaid or SSI are paid for by everyone else's taxes and contributions (and we lose her contribution to taxes if she could work). 

If our insured's eventual disability&poverty allow her to get Medicaid - & she has a long, lingering dying process in an ICU & then a vent-capable nursing facility - this could contribute $100K-$1M to everyone's bills (across state lines, since Medicaid is supported by both state & federal revenues). An ounce of insured prevention is worth many pounds of high-tech remittive or end-of-life care.  Just one reason why 'Obamacare' saves billions over the long haul.  (fs- MD,FACP- int’l,geri& palliative med; bioethics)

A TRAGIC TRAVESTY: INSURER DENIES COVERAGE FOR A 22-Y.O. WOMAN'S RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS AS A "PRE-EXISTING CONDITION"

    20 years ago I had an unforgettable patient experience that could have been true one year ago. A 22-yo woman who had just graduated college came to Washington DC to work for a non-governmental organization, with a new health insurance plan. She had been having some hand and wrist swelling which a prior provider in her home town had trivialized, without a diagnosis.
    The wrist swelling pointed to an auto-immune process, and she proved to have rheumatoid arthritis.  Her health insurance company refused to treat her RA after they obtained old records from the previous doctor which documented the joint swelling - even though he had made no diagnosis.  The insurer stuck with its "pre-existing condition denial" in spite of my letter of appeal.
     I often wonder what happened to this earnest, idealistic young woman and her family.  Did she ever receive effective treatment for RA?  Did treatment bankrupt her family? Is she still living (she would be only 42yo now)?  How could this travesty occur in America?

Frederick A. Smith, MD, FACP - General Internal, Geriatric, & Palliative Mediicne, and Bioethics, Garden City, NY

See esp. recycling options

see esepciallty "get a better deal from your cable provider" & "saving files & photos on cloud"

6-WORD MEMOIR - 2010  - suggested by Bishop Savas Zembillas - see his Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/bishopsavas.  He was inspired by Smith Magazine (no relation!) - http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/. 

Mine (fas): "Serendipity, grace, perplexity, unknowing, learning forgiveness."

'"Contamination" ... is an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal. [The Roman playwright] Terence [whose plays acquired that label to describe his conflation of Greek plays into a single Roman comedy] had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: "So many men, so many opinions" was a line of his. And it's in his comedy "The Self-Tormentor" that you'll find what may be the golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes's breezy rejoinder. It isn't meant to be an ordinance from on high; it's just the case for gossip. Then again, gossip - the fascination people have for the small doings of other people - has been a powerful force for conversation among cultures. 'The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision. 'A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't hav

While religious and secular perspectives on forgiveness are not necessarily consistent with each other, however, they agree in their attempt to address the painful fact of the pervasiveness of moral wrong in human life. They also agree on this: few of us are altogether innocent of the need for forgiveness. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fish: "The words both 'True Grit' films, & Portis's novel, share are these: 'You must pay for everything in this world. There is nothing free with the exception of God's grace.' But free can mean (1) distributed freely, given to anyone and everyone; OR (2) given only to those whom God chooses for reasons that remain mysterious. The novel says, 'You cannot earn that grace or deserve it." FS: Jesus' story of "The Prodigal/Lost Son" suggests a 3rd notion: grace is freely given to all humans, who may not recognize its presence. Human values differ from God's in judging which person or outcome is ultimately "good" or "bad." Grace is an unearned gift. But to believe it is dispensed capriciously is more a characteristic of Greco-Roman cosmology.