It has been scientifically proven by the pharmaceutical industry: giving people a small "token" or freebie bearing a logo will trigger a recurrent, subconscious, positive reinforcement. It is a tried and true trick that the pharmaceutical industry has been using for years to get doctors to preferrentially prescribe their medicines over their competitors. The chatchkes or "tokens" are usually small items of a nominal cost: pens, paper pads, pencil holders, clocks, refrigerator magnets, giant clips, etc. The studies have all shown that regardless of the value of the item, the frequency of exposure to the logo-bearing item is what determines its power of reinforcement.
To translate this into canvassing for Barack Obama, my fiancee and I decided that we would make refrigerator magnet "chip clips", bearing the inscription "Vote Nov. 4th!"...
As many of you may know, Warren Buffett is a strong Obama supporter. In addition to recently helping Obama with fund-raising events, Buffett is a very outspoken opponent of the unfair Republican tax plan that "rewards" ultra-wealthy citizens such as himself by giving them a negligible tax rate compared to hard-working, middle class employees.
This morning, John McCain, was interviewed by Meredith Vieira and when questioned about the economy, he invoked Mr. Buffett's name (along with Michael Bloomberg and Mitt Romney), saying that he would be on his list of economic advisors to form an "oversight board" who he would recruit to help solve this economic crisis. (Conspicuously, he omitted Phil Gramm's name from this list.) I found this "plan" a little sardonic because I'm fairly certain that Warren Buffett would tell Senator McCain quite the opposite of what he would want to hear: that he should shift the tax burden off of the middle class and onto the wealthy.
When I have been doing my neighborhood walks, I have found that prospective voters are very receptive to hearing about Warren Buffett's preference for Barack Obama over John McCain -- especially the challenging upper middle class voters who might just be in that $250K category and might need a fairly solvent reason to vote for someone who might raise their taxes...
Hardly anyone thinks that the United States is the world leader in health care anymore, in spite of the fact that we spend more money per capita than any other nation in the world. In almost every World Health Organization (WHO) indicator, the U.S. is lagging behind many other nations in the world. The main reasons for this is the disproportionate lack of access to affordable care is the lack of insurance coverage, and inadequate insurance coverage (which is called "underinsurance") for millions of Americans. One of the common "defenses" of the Republican government is that the lack of insurance for about 1 in 4 Americans is caused by "the market". This recent article shows the sheerly incomprehensible degree of the uninsured/underinsured crisis: MedScape article. It's important to note that although the U.S. Census Bureau reported a slight improvement for the first time in years, the numbers are deceiving - likely more "smoke and mirrors" in an election year.
As a practicing physician for a large "non-profit" Northeast Ohio Hospital System, I frequently participated in an increasingly tragic situation: Social Workers employed by my hospital would call me and tell me that I had to discharge patients from the hospital because their insurance company decided that they would no longer pay for their hospitalization.
And I was forced to do it!
On occasion the Chief Medical Officer for the hospital or the Social Work Department Supervisor would call me into their office to "discuss" the financial repercussions of not complying with the insurance companies' demands. One of our hospitals would not even accept Medicaid patients to specific units because they knew that the hospital would not be reimbursed for the patient's bill. Everyone that I have discussed this crisis with has agreed that it is has been worsening over the past eight years. So this is my first professional crisis, and my reason #1 that Eight is Enough!
