Health

�There were two men in one city: the one rich, and the other poor�.. � (II Samuel 12:1-12) Thus begins the story of King David�s punishment for robbing a simple man of his life and of his one beloved wife. I have had the incredible fortune of being taught the Bible in the City of David, probably a stone throw away from where he perpetrated a sin that haunts his people to this very day. I was taught the Bible not as a divine text, but as a political, historical and philosophical manuscript written by ancient sages, and David�s story was not about the perils of philandering. It was about the disastrous results of social injustice. The story is not a Socialist manifesto. The Bible in its entirety accepts the fact that there are rich men and poor men and David was not admonished for not redistributing his riches equally amongst the poor. The line of decency is crossed when the rich and powerful wantonly decide to take away the poor man�s �one little ewe lamb� , not to love and cherish as t...

Like most home buyers, I toured the house with my family, checking closet space and bathtubs and finally descended into the basement to see if it has any potential. It was a very large and dark basement mostly unfinished, but the scene in front of us was breathtaking. Thousands of glass jars and bottles of every conceivable shape and color, sparkling clean and neatly stacked in groups by size and shape, some in small pyramids, on a myriad of shelves, small tables and wooden crates. There were no labels on any of them and there were no tops. The ex-Marine Sergeant who built the house in the fifties and lived there ever since, must have spent a lot of time cleaning, processing, sorting and arranging glass containers for what seemed like an awful lot of years. Why did he do that? What did he see in those glass mazes he built in his basement? I never found out. We bought the house almost eight years ago, and had a �guy� come by and remove everything that was not nailed to the walls before ...

Dr. Gawande has a new article in the New Yorker suggesting that hospital chains may very well be the solution to our health care problems. Dr. Gawande has a very engaging writing style and in addition to writing for the New Yorker, he writes books and delivers memorable speeches and he is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women�s hospital in Boston. In recent years, Dr. Gawande�s writings have become the cornerstone of health care policy and none more so than his 2009 New Yorker article explaining the inexplicable health care cost explosion and the variability of medical expenditures across the nation. As the New Yorker itself proudly noted , President Obama himself had a most fortuitous epiphany after reading the New Yorker article, and summarily decided that �This is what we�ve got to fix.� In �The Cost Conundrum� Gawande explored the differences in expenditures for Medicare beneficiaries in two Texas towns whose names became synonymous with our health care issues, the expensive McAlle...