• My favorite article today–because it’s in line with my own experience– the quality of one’s workout music is directly proportional to the quality of one’s workout . With scientific proof and everything! I wish it’d be legal to share workout playlists with people–I swear I’ve got a knack for them. Currently playing: Rihanna’s Please Don’t Stop the Music , via Songza , an awesome site that lets you play almost any song you can think of–if it can find it. (thanks dad!)
• On to more serious matters– Harvard docs have found over 200 proteins that appear to be important to HIV’s success , using RNA interference, a technique I blogged about in the first month of med school ! What a long time ago.
• And your daily policy reading: Ezra Klein (I wish I had time to read your whole blog, Ezra, but I couldn’t keep up) on the Commonwealth Study on amenable mortality : “in English, it assessed how effective health systems are at reaching the sick.” Again, we pay the most, we’re doing the worst, and our amenable mortality worsened while most other countries improved. (These are, of course, in scary “socialized medicine” countries. They’re not doing as bad as people would like you to believe, according to economist Paul Krugman .)
• The Executive Physician has a very fair analysis of Grady County Hospital’s problems and retail clinic unfairness . He says county hospitals need to compete for health patients, but that retail clinics shouldn’t be able to quietly sneak away from complicated patients (cherry-pick), and that governments shouldn’t allow them to, either.
• It’s the economy, stupid.
• And finally, Joe Paduda on HSAs, the rebuttal version . “One noted that they make “health care more affordable for the majority of consumers”; I think the commenter is conflating health insurance with health care. HSA plans may make insurance more affordable, but health care costs are not any cheaper under HSA plans. In fact, HSA plans’ higher out-of-pocket costs may make health care costs less affordable.”

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