in a world where political and financial dividends demand they are paid within 3 yrs, long term preventive efforts will always lose out to more profitable treatment options offered by doctors and pharma.
how do we challenge this paradigm?
with an even more profitable financial product.
touches on medical establishment and effect of medical school hidden curriculum on medical students leading to very poor patient care.
Also references Steven Bolsin and his impact on the NHS…
Face value isn’t very valuable.
How do things affect the least powerful people in a system.
The story of Cassandra.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/wilful-blindness/2926516
Were the Murdochs ‘wilfully blind’ to the practice of phone hacking at the News of the World?
From the author of Willful Blindness…
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/too-much-competition/5436642
Studies of chickens have given way to the phrase the pecking order. Each chicken knows where it stands amongst other chickens and the head chicken, the despot, gets to eat first and has the right to peck all the other chickens. The poor chicken at the bottom though is pecked constantly but gets to peck no-one and suffers highly from stress.
But even in the chicken yard, revolutions occur as younger chicks are placed with the older ones and the despot could be toppled from the highest order at any time.
Another study on chickens shows what happens when you take the top producing hens and place them in a separate area to the average producing hens. Over time, the average hens have increased their production and are healthy and functioning. The ‘super-hens’ have all but killed each other and the ones remaining are harassed.
What lessons in life do these chicken studies have for us as we live in our ever increasing competitive world?
Geraldine completes a tight interview with Piketty to pull out the main themes of his work… capital accrues wealth faster than the waged, so tax capital (vs income) and pay a lot more attention to inequality.
Implementation of the ideas hinge on a lot of international cooperation, peace, love and mungbeans, but it remains a compelling and disruptive concept…
Check this awesome Chomsky comment:
12 Apr 2014 8:14:59am
People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.
– Noam Chomsky on Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/capital-in-the-21st-century/5362266
French economist Thomas Piketty has spent fifteen years collecting and analysing incomes reported on tax returns over the last 100 years to predict that the world is heading towards inequality rates not seen since the 19th century, unless there is global action to narrow the divide.
His book, Capital in the twenty first century, has been described by the former World Bank senior economist as “one of the watershed books in economic thinking” and The Economist magazine wrote it could change the way people think about the past two centuries of economic history.
12 Apr 2014 8:14:59am
People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.
– Noam Chomsky on Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations
12 Apr 2014 10:04:24am
It took 20years of study to conclude that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?
In case there’s anyone doesn’t know it’s an axiom – amongst the poor, who know from bitter experience going back generations.
Have you ever played Monopoly? The poor simply don’t exist, really. It’s a game between landowners, capitalists. And what happens? The capital finally concentrates in one player.
Economics 101 : ‘the rational investor will always seek to maximise profit’. Whereas the rational human being seeks to maximise humanity and love of friends and family at the expense of profit.
So in the end who gets most of which?
Which calls into question the definition of ‘profit’ which is a concept that should not be confined to money.
And calls into question the concept of ‘humanity’ which calls into question the concept of ‘civilisation’.
Clearly our civilisation is being run as though it were a business with economic rationalism the guiding force and monetary profit the great light in the sky.
All wrong. Needs rethinking. Needs philosophy. Political parties – as said somewhere I think this morning in this segment or somewhere – currently without any philosophy whatever.
At bottom what’s been lost is humanity.
You don’t run humanity as a business.
You don’t measure what profits humans in dollar terms.
We’re building a machine and populating it with robots – us. Daleks. We’re all becoming Daleks in a Dalek world.
Are the rich the only ones who can escape this and live human lives free of the economic bondage and the madness of a robot world? No. They are the ones that lost and went under first.
It is our blindness and stupid belief that they are ‘rich’, ‘succesful’, ‘powerful’, ‘safe’ etc.. etc.. that leads us to wish to emulate them, follow them, be them…
So we bend to our tasks and forsake our humanity and strive, strive, strive to become like those sorry creatures..
bloody shame, eh?
16 Apr 2014 1:59:42pm
wonderful. YES! well said
18 Apr 2014 1:52:35am
Thanks David.
You are quite right.
I’m reminded of Matthew 16:26:
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”
This dichotomy between the rich and the poor has troubled us for at LEAST two thousand years.
Time for a new economic system, one that is centred on fairness, justice and sustainability.
12 Apr 2014 10:57:48am
I see no political will on the part of those who appropriate the wealth which the bottom 90% produce to allow their gains to be redistributed through a tax on their accumulated wealth. Furthermore, history has demonstrated that as soon as politicians suggest such a tax change, they are hounded out of office through a flurry of public relations propaganda directed at workers anxious about their job security, just as Kevin Rudd was after he introduced the mining tax.
Julia Gillard had Rudd’s tax renegotiated by a Labor right-winger, Martin Ferguson, and what was agreed to by the mining capitalists was the toothless tax we still have today; but which shall be axed after the new Tory dominated Senate convenes in July.
13 Apr 2014 10:14:59am
I stress these comments come from the radio interview, not the book, which I have not yet read (or even seen in the stores!) Piketty shows that inequality increases under capitalism as the owners of capital accrue wealth at a greater rate than wage earners. This did not occur in the period 1945 – 1973 when high growth rates were experienced and inequality decreased. Piketty concludes that there is no “logical reason” why inequality should increase like it does and that what “we” need to do is find institutions on a global scale that can for example progressively tax capital to reduce this inequality gap. I have no argument with the statistics that illustrate the growth in inequality; but would suggest that rather than seeing this as a return to some mythical nineteenth century “hierarchical society” this phenomenon is in fact about 500 years old and is inherent in structure of capitalism itself. Piketty simply has had too short a time horizon for his research. If we view capital in a proper historical perspective the 25 years post WWII stand out as an anomaly not a normal to which we can easily return. The explanation for the post war social democratic consensus should then be sought in specific historical circumstances. I would suggest there are the following: 1) the massive destruction of capital in the period 1914 – 1945; 2) the strength and power of working class struggle from 1917 on that put capital on the defensive; 3) the absence of any real competitors to American capital after 1945 until European and Japanese capital rebuilt by ca. 1965; 4) the hyper exploitation of the Third World which does not even get a look in Piketty’s analysis (as far as I can determine anyway). What Piketty overlooks totally is the issue of class and the power of classes. Post 1945 the working class were strong and were able to wring a reformist economic agenda from a capital owning class and via the state, which could be granted because the specific global economic conditions were supportive of a high rate of profit that compensated or progressive taxation in the developed world. The moment that particular combination of historical circumstances came to an end, between 1965 and 1973, the capital owning class went on the offensive to restructure the game. The capitalist class are in the present conjuncture simply way more powerful than the working class and there is no neutral way to impose the kind of institutions that Piketty suggests. Politics is not the realm of dispassionate reason but of class conflict and winner takes all. Piketty’s research and stats will be useful; his proposed remedies a chimera. Without a really strong working class offensive, or the kind of destruction of capital produced by the Great Depression and 2 world wars, the rich just keep getting richer and the rest of us work to make them richer
13 Apr 2014 4:12:53pm
US ideologue economists are ‘revered’, unlike in France because they are serving to retail and legitimize cultivated triumphalist neoliberal economic rationalism (engendered via Hayek & in Friedman’s Chicago School lab) now become the only economics, the lingua franca under the global empire of conglomerated corporate capitalism. An elitist and rogue ideology, intentionally dissociated from and privileged above other social sciences. It is a purposefully designed system of exploitation for syphoning real wealth into fewer and fewer hands…..the cultivated “vampire squid” feeding the 1%. It is the functioning machine producing deliberate and massive inequality which runs the corporate empire (“the old industrial military complex”) and which occupies governments of the European “democratic” model via the paradigm of the revolving door between the various Wall Streets and Whitehouses. And globally via the architecture of the World Bank, IMF etc and a dysfunctional UN. The US CEO of this market empire has the NSA and the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Why would this emperor supreme of crypto-fascism willingly, magnanimously (considering his late 20th century history of covert and overt operations, wars of aggression, assassinations/exercises of soft power etc) hand over this power and share his wealth without a fight after all the trouble he’s gone to in securing it? Koombyeya it won’t be.
14 Apr 2014 2:45:39pm
Good on you, Thomas Piketty! Now we’re getting to the nub of things about how wealth disparities have risen! In your own way, you’re coming to the same conclusion the American philosopher and economist, Henry George, came to in his “Progress and Poverty” – that the returns to labour and capital will always be diminished if rentiers are permitted to steal our publicly-generated rents via untaxed rent-seeking.
All we need in Australia is an all-in, single rate land tax, as suggested by the Henry Tax Review, because the wealthy own the more valuable land, and it can’t flee overseas. The first country to bring in a serious land tax will be the first country to reward workers and businesses with their fair due, and to redress the problem of economic rents flowing mainly to the 1%.
15 Apr 2014 7:45:17am
“…precious few solutions, it must be said…”
Gee. Let me think…oh, how about this one? Rich folks and corporations should pay a bit more tax back to the societies upon whose security, stability, infrastructure and amenity they base their wealth.
Call me Trotsky…
18 Apr 2014 9:26:40pm
Wonderful to have such a prominent (and modest) thinker on Aunty.
Thanks Geraldine.
http://steve-leeder-better-health.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/anpha-lost-in-earthquake.html
So. The seismic monitor suggests that ANPHA, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency, established in 2011, is likely to slip into Hades through a crack in the ground as the tectonic plates of the Commission of Audit and the Hockey budget shift and grind. What a pity. ANPHA began in 2011. Let’s be clear why it was a good idea, so that when it’s gone (assuming it goes) we can mourn its passing properly.
The major afflictions of our community are conditions such as heart disease. stroke, cancer, depression, and problems of bones and joints. None of these things are as preventable as whooping cough or polio, but the decline in heart disease in Australia in the past half century is deeply encouraging. Through a combination of better treatment, less smoking and dietary change we’ve more than halved – considerably more in the case of the under 65s – death rates. These disorders have a major preventive element in them.
The risks for heart disease are fully described. They relate closely to what we eat, how much we drink, our physical activity and more. Yes, these behaviours are ultimately matters of choice: we are, as GW Bush would say, are the deciders.
But we’re not really. The shopping environment influences what we choose to buy. The advertising environment powerfully influences our purchases of alcohol. The economic environment determines where we can afford to live. Get real. These are shapers, the causes behind the causes. And we must attend to these things if prevention is to work.
Without legislation, kiss goodbye to tobacco control. Other countries label foods so that people – not just robots – can work out which are the healthiest. New York has eliminated trans fats – by legislation from all prepared food. More broadly in the US, man-made trans fat consumption fell by 600 million tonnes between 2005 and 2012 as Dow and other vegetable oil producers acceded to the expectations and legislative urging of American citizens and govenrnments that they would produce stuff that was health promoting and not damaging.
Set yourself a preventive agenda that seeks to achieve these lifestyle opportunity-promoters and you need strength including at a national level. Individuals struggle to win these battles. Groups such as the National Heart Foundation, cancer societies and others have been zealous. But the thought behind ANPHA was that it could become a counterweight to the big-time, burly avarice that drives health-destroying profiteering. No wonder the alcohol industry will declare drinks all rounds in celebration when the bulldozers demolish ANPHA! Bewdy mate, drink up!
The politics of prevention are what made ANPHA so important to our health future and so hated by those who, like the tobacco barons of yore, want free rein to push their wares no matter the health costs. Get rid of food labelling, they beseech the government! It infringes our liberty as manufacturers to sell whatever we want. Think of our civil liberties! Make health a matter of choice but diminish the capacity of the consumer to choose intelligently! Please, Mr Government, DO it!
Yes, ANPHA could support more research in prevention. From the perspective of big business research is pretty innocent stuff and usually has little commercial impact. It’s safe. But when research is translated into advocacy, that’s when trouble starts. That’s when those driven fundamentally by profit start worrying, and when the political tectonic plates start grinding in response. And advocacy is what a national agency with muscle could do.
So. When ANPHA goes that is what goes with it – the ability for an agency, with clout, to argue for changes that will help ensure a future in which it would be easier to choose to be healthy. Shame.
A model of knee bones and joint. Source: News Limited
HIP and knee replacement joints that are close to foolproof have been identified, in a breakthrough which will help tens of thousands of Australians fitted with dodgy devices.
Faulty joint replacements force 8000 Australians every year back on the operating table, butNational Joint Replacement Registry research has found four devices with lower rates of problems.
Even when novice surgeons implant these devices they have the same risk of needing revision as when an experienced surgeon uses them.
The National Joint Replacement Registry which has been tracking the performance of hip and knee replacements inserted since 1999 has for the first time reported on whether surgeon experience affects the outcome.
While it found surgeons with more than eight years experience had a lower rate of revision operations it found that with some devices surgeon experience did not matter.
The two most commonly used hip replacements – Exeter V40/Trident and Corail/Pinnacle combinations – show no difference in rates of revision regardless of the experience of the surgeon.
With knee replacements there was no difference in the revision rate when comparing surgeon experience for two commonly used LCS/MBT and Nexgen CR Flex/Nexgen combinations.
“We believe this is a very reassuring finding for the public,” Australian Orthopaedic AssociationPresident Peter Choong said.
While he said it was certain that there are many other prostheses that have similar results in the hands of inexperienced and low volume surgeons, the registry did not have sufficient numbers of procedures for these prostheses to undertake the analysis.
More than 800,000 Australians have a joint replacement and each year another 90,000 devices are inserted at a cost of around $1 billion.
But hundreds of thousands of patients have been fitted with dodgy devices that loosen, get infected, erode and have to be replaced, in a hidden medical scandal which has previously been revealed by News Corp.
The National Joint Replacement Registry’s annual report has identified more than 100 hip and knee replacements have higher than average rates of revision.
Of these eight hip and six knee prostheses have been reported for the first time.
Disturbingly 31 devices that have been identified more than once as having high revision rates are still being used by surgeons, the registry reports.
It was important to understand some devices were in the “still used” category because of a time delay in reporting, Dr Choong said.
The registry’s annual report found with hip replacements a head size of 32mm had the lowest rate of revision, while those with smaller head sizes had the highest rate of revision.
Using cement to fix hip replacements reduced revision rates in older age groups but cementless fixation worked better in those younger than age 75.
Having a device that was constructed from cross linked polyethylene also reduced the rate of revision.
With knee replacements the report found unicompartmental knee replacements had a higher rate of revision than primary total knee replacement.
Using a knee replacement constructed from cross-linked polyethylene may reduce rate revision, the report found.
The Australian Othopaedic Association says it is mindful that the better informed patients are – the better the outcome. The AOA has made attempts to make this information more accessible to patients, Dr Choong said.
###
But why does he leave private health insurers untouched?
http://www.afr.com/p/business/healthcare2-0/the_audit_missed_healthcare_costs_pDVkJjKdrNlkAWzF1vuFGP
PUBLISHED: 07 MAY 2014 02:38:00 | UPDATED: 07 MAY 2014 05:38:26
There’s a well-worn joke about a lost traveller standing at a crossroads and asking a grizzled old Irishman for directions. “To be sure,” the Irishman replies. “I wouldn’t start from here.”
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann established the National Commission of Audit to give directions on more sensible, structured and sustainable Commonwealth and federal-funded programs and services. But if the commission’s report is the starting point to a better healthcare future, like the Irishman I wouldn’t start from here either.
Overall, an unavoidable impression is that the commission, headed by then-Business Council of Australia chairman Tony Shepherd, didn’t fully grasp Australia’s complex, often economically irrational, and, above all, highly political healthcare infrastructure. Rather than do much original policy thinking, it sought largely to put its own stamp on policy debates already under way, including Medicare co-payments; widening the roles of private health insurance and health professionals other than doctors in primary care; and improving federal-state and public-private co-ordination of effort.
The commission’s narrative attempts to connect the dots between various elements of the Australian healthcare picture – public and private, federal and state, and acute, primary and preventive care. In doing so, however, it misses the reality that the Australian healthcare system is not a system at all. Instead, there’s a tangle of loose and fractious associations of providers, funders and consumers, all competing aggressively for resources and dominance, all believing they know best and those wearing white clinical coats, typified by the Australian Medical Association and Pharmacy Guild of Australia, bully anyone who opposes their agendas
In its naivete, the commission recommended that Health Minister Peter Dutton should “identify a framework that brings together all aspects of the health system – public and private, hospital and community-based – to support the organisation and delivery of healthcare in a way that tightly focuses on individuals”. Sounds easy, but the problem is Dutton, as minister, is not the supreme controller of an ordered system but herder-in-chief of a multitude of feral, rent-seeking cats, including the states and territories and their ravenous public hospitals. Dutton may have the Commonwealth’s immense political and funding leverage, but like King Canute, he cannot command the tempest of interests.
In 2008-10, former prime minister Kevin Rudd sought to do exactly what the Commission of Audit recommended, by way of his National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission. Rudd’s raising health reform expectations so high, coupled with his subsequent failure to deliver, is a major reason why he is a former prime minister. Abbott and Dutton are very mindful of his hubristic lesson.
Indeed, a political fact of life is that there is a broad national consensus that Medicare, as a universal public health insurance scheme, is reasonably fair and effective. As the overheated debate about a modest $6 co-payment on bulk-billed GP services shows, the slightest proposed adjustments to Medicare’s fabric bring outraged howls not only from healthcare ayatollahs, but from voters fearing change to a beloved institution. Even incremental Medicare reform requires considerable political courage.
Dutton, Abbott and Hockey bravely have flagged Medicare and wider health structural reform as a high priority for their government. But such structural reform must be measured and gradual, delicately balancing entrenched Australian notions of a fair go with the philosophical and economic goal of encouraging individuals to take greater personal responsibility for their own healthcare consumption and choices. As the Abbott government now knows, it is tough enough selling economically self-evident concepts, like modestly increasing pay-as-you-go in Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, in the teeth of ferocious opposition.
This is why the commission’s showstopper recommendation, that higher income earners be compelled to take out private health insurance in place of Medicare, will gather dust. Most Australians see private health insurance as complementing Medicare, not replacing it. Labor and the Greens haven’t hesitated to demonise the commission as Americanising Australian healthcare, and no sane government will go there.
There are, however, some gems in the report. Besides supporting Medicare co-payments (although proposing a ridiculously high $15 figure and inadequate protections for the less well-off), the commission’s recommendations on partially risk-rated health insurance for unhealthy voluntary behaviours such as smoking; taming the health bureaucracy beast; revamping the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme; and breaking the Pharmacy Guild’s ownership and location cartels, are timely and welcome. But on health policy generally, the report falls short. Nevertheless, and as did John Howard and Peter Costello in 1996, on budget night Abbott, Dutton, Hockey and Cormann will declare that what they announce isn’t half as bad as the commission of audit’s more radical recommendations. That’s the basic truth of this exercise: it gives political and policy cover to a new government striving to sell a difficult, inherited fiscal repair task to a bruised, wary and sceptical public.
Terry Barnes runs consultancy Cormorant Policy Advice, and wrote the Australian Centre for Health Research’s proposal to reintroduce co-payments on bulk-billed general practitioner services
Visit afr.com/healthcare2-0 for more health coverage.
The Australian Financial Review
the health sector is riddled with a fear of change trumped only by its fear of accountability
me just then en route to nate gross talk at powerhouse
Email from me to Anne-marie regarding PHI and Commission of Audit ideas…
Thanks Anne-marie… last week was so busy, but at least it was a good busy, filled as it was with so many excellent events and conversations, quite often featuring you! Glad to hear that the club delivered on expectations… maybe Steve will be up for some insurrection? Or maybe not.
[the following early morning rant is off-the-record on account of my current employment and it still being a bit rough, but am happy to explore it further with you as required J]
On the modelling question, that’s more on the economic modelling side – something we’re tooling up for with Federico Girosi and Jane Hall, but haven’t quite started on. Ian McAuley and John Menadue have been presenting solid thinking about PHI for a while and would be worthwhile speaking with, particularly if you were looking to confirm your suspicions? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who could actually back-in the COA’s assumptions, as I’ve never heard anyone credible (with the potential exception of Paul Gross – though unsure how credible he is) put forward that point of view, mainly because it is ideologically driven, rather than evidence based. Indeed, the closer I get to the PHI data, the PHI businesses and the people who run them, the more certain I am that PHI can only ever be inflationary – especially when positioned as a duplication of a public insurance scheme (as per that graph from the SMH that Jim Gillespie spoke to at the event last week), as it allows clinicians to select whichever system suits their interests best, making them the customer rather than the patient.
My back-of-envelope rationale:
PHIs market themselves as honest brokers in the health system, but in reality, benefit directly from health inflation, acting as hemi-bureaucracies which take a 13% clip of disbursements that pass through them. In Australia, this dynamic is emphasised by their mutual structure, as the lack of profit motive leads to a lack of interest in containing anyone’s costs, especially when the Minister mandates premium increases based on demonstration of increased costs!!?? The smaller PHIs have no market power, so aim to please hospitals and doctors, thus making providers the customers, rather than their patients. This all has the effect of distancing patients from value the market generates, despite the fact they are the ones who fund it. I can’t think of a more diabolical arrangement than the one we’ve got. I’m disappointed that conservatives are willing to trade this downside for the illusory benefits of choice (which don’t actually exist because the basis on which we might choose are health service have nothing to do with the quality of that service). In reality, the choice argument is just a smoke screen for queue jumping, something conservatives aren’t to keen on when it came to asylum seeker policy.
As a footnote, it’s interesting to see the behaviour of the non-mutual PHIs – Medibank and NIB. They tend to be far more innovative and disruptive towards conventional health service models, mainly in an attempt to position themselves as the customers served by doctors and hospitals, while still being funded by their members. Unfortunately, their business model still ultimately relies on cost containment AND premium growth, and so also ends up also being inflationary – the main reason the US is the situation it’s in.
Wrapping the diatribe up, ideally a health market should be singularly focused on improving the health of the population that funds it. I’d estimate the current ranking of value captured by various actors looks something like this:
Under the previous administration, it probably looked more like this:
Ultimately, all forms of private health insurance make the providers the customers while the population carries the can. Interventions which position the population as customers should be the preference. Medicare was a big, necessary but not sufficient step in that direction.
I reckon some of this can inform some interesting health market design that could support a far more advanced and efficient health system. We’ve previously discussed that we’ve got 6 years to bring this to maturity, though if things keep tracking like they have been, it could be sooner.
Let me know your thoughts?
Cheers, Paul
From: Anne-Marie Boxall [mailto:ABoxall@ahha.asn.au]
Sent: Monday, 5 May 2014 6:08 PM
To: Paul Nicolarakis (paul.nicolarakis@outlook.com)
Subject: Modelling
No, not the fashion kind (although I am sure you would be great).
A curiosity question – are you and your people able to model something along the lines of the means-tested Medicare scheme proposed by the Commission of Audit? Not sure what data you have, or what is needed to model such a proposal, but it strikes me that the idea rests heavily on the assumption that a market for health insurance would drive down health costs (hospital and primary care and therefore premiums prices). Not quite sure what evidence underpins this assumption (other than economic theory) as Fraser era experiment suggests that it would not work. Just wondering….
Hope you made it to your many subsequent events last week. Dinner at the gentleman’s club was interesting. I think they might also have an age criteria for membership there. 70 plus only.
Regards,
Am
Dr Anne-marie Boxall
Director, The Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research
Managing Editor, Australian Health Review
Australian Healthcare & Hospitals Association
the voice of public healthcare
T: 02 6162 0780 | F: 02 6162 0779
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Its not about finding businesses that profit from advertising that they make you healthy and/or long lived, its about businesses that make money from you being healthy and/or long lived.
This is how we underpin a prevention business.
Comments (7)
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Peter Houston :
26 Jul 2011 5:51:02pm
Good segment on ‘wilful blindness’ – it reminded me of Barbara Tuchman’s ‘cognitive dissonance’. How about a follow-up on the psychological profile/dimensions of wilful blindness and related phenomena? What makes it tick?
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Mulga Mumblebrain :
27 Jul 2011 4:21:06pm
‘Willful blindness’ seems to me to be a mealy-mouthed euphemism for rank untruthfulness, a sort of ‘innocent on the grounds of insanity’ defence.
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marsha :
26 Jul 2011 8:42:39pm
And you must remember that Allan Bond had Alzheimers. I wish he’d share his cure with rest of us.
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Mulga Mumblebrain :
27 Jul 2011 4:19:29pm
A relative who worked on the News Corpse switchboard in Surry Hills years ago well remembered Rupert’s habit of periodically ringing from New York to have that day’s edition of ‘The Fundament’ (known then as The Australian) read to him, from front to back. A real ‘hands-off’ proprietor! What we witnessed in the UK Parliament was, in my opinion, a tour de farce of deception, and an Oscar performance from Rupe as a demented old codger who didn’t know what was going on. Already parts of James’ testimony have been utterly refuted by former senior News Corpse functionaries. Rupe was more cagey, and possibly has set James up, along with Rebeckah and Hinton, as ‘patsies’.
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Simon Barlow :
27 Jul 2011 4:43:30pm
I thought the piece on ‘wilful blindness’ was a segue leading from the European right-wing terror story. Like Philip expressed, we all find the rising tide of xenaphobia, and anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe (and to some extend in Australia) worrying, but aren’t we kidding ourselves? The clash of cultures, so vastly different are bound to result in this reaction, and we are ‘wilfully blind’ and courting disaster if we ignore it.
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David from Leichhardt :
28 Jul 2011 7:25:03am
Regarding the story on “wilful blindness” I was interested in the notion that many of us refuse to listen to views that we do not agree with. You and your guest chastised us for “having our heads in the sand” about the panoply of of views surrounding an issue. I think that what is missing here is the role of “discernment”.
I enjoy listening to LNL and consider myself much better informed for it. I will not listen to John Laws or Alan Jones. Should I be criticized for not giving them a fair go at informing me of their points of view? I think not.
For that matter I must tell you that when Mr Abbott is being interviewed on the news I turn down the volume because I cannot bear listening to him. Does this make me “wilfully blind” to his point of view and policies? Can you be “wilfully blind” when there is, in truth, nothing there to see?
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Lyall St Kilda :
28 Jul 2011 7:48:19pm
Mr Adams listen back to your show where you interview the biographer Manning Clark. Perhaps the scales will fall from your eyes.