I just successfully signed up for the new Google Health service.
It effortlessly linked up with my account at Walgreens, where they will now update each other. Google now knows slightly more about me than most of my family members.
Thank goodness.
The science is settled. It’s more persuasive than global warming. It turns out that our parents and grandparents were right: a nightcap or a cocktail after arriving home from work is good for you.
“The healthiest people do include moderate drinking in their lifestyle,” says Eric Rimm, Sc.D., associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. You can reap alcohol’s health benefits within weeks, and the gains accumulate over time. (Stick to one drink a day, and fewer than seven a week.)
It turns out that moderate alcohol consumption raises HDL (good cholesterol) and makes blood platelets less sticky, lessening chances of blood clots and strokes. It also helps your pancreas regulate insulin levels and may dampen inflammation and suppress the immune response that can lead to painful rheumatoid arthritis.
In today’s WSJ, Vice President Dick Cheney tries to defend the Bush Administration against former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s scathing criticism of the Administration’s big spending ways. Here’s a snippet of what Cheney had to say:
On the spending side of the ledger, I can’t dispute Alan’s general notion that the federal government is too big and spends too much money–we’ve agreed on that point since we both worked in the Ford administration more than 30 years ago. President Bush feels the same way, and that’s why he has steadily reduced the annual rate of growth in non-security discretionary spending. In contrast, the last budget enacted during the Clinton/Gore administration increased that category of spending by a staggering 15%. President Bush has pressed hard to keep that spending under control–and this year’s increase will actually be lower than the rate of inflation for the third year in a row.
Oh yeah, I’m sure President Bush just forgot the veto the disastrous Medicare entitlement bill, transportation bills, energy bills and countless other big spending bills during his tenure. And now there’s even talk about Bushcare
Hillary Clinton will unveil her health care plan tomorrow …
… advisers to Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat from New York, said Saturday that she would try to avoid the perception that she was advocating a bureaucratic, big-government solution.
Nonetheless …
Aides to Mrs. Clinton said her proposal would elaborate several ideas that she has floated this year.
They said, for example, that Mrs. Clinton would amplify a comment in March when she declared, “We could require that every insurance company had to insure everybody, with no exclusion for pre-existing conditions.”
On another occasion, she vowed, “As president, I will end the practice of insurance company cherry-picking once and for all by allowing anyone who wants to join a plan to do so, and by prohibiting insurance companies from carving out benefits or charging higher rates to people with health problems.”
But at least it’s not another bureaucratic, big-government solution, right?
