On PEI - costs are rising at over 11%. This year they will be $600 million - about the same as PEI's tax revenue. If we do nothing, in 5 years time they will be at least $1.2 billion. At that rate they will double in another 2 years.
This is not your usual health care cost problem - this is a true crisis that will be hard to kick into the future. Of course it's not just PEI but all who pay for health care that are at risk.
Back in the old days when most of us were young, it was affordable to simply treat the sick or to house the old. But soon most of us will be over 65!
What worked for a few people cannot work for lots of us.This is partly the context for my banging on about getting healthy.
No amount of rationing or gains in delivery efficiency will be able to handle the load of the aging population. We boomers are like the pig in the python!
The most important issue to handle will be the "Load".
Just a few thoughts about the who and the why of the main part of the load.
The average Islander male becomes disabled by poor health by 65. He then lives dependent on his spouse, family or on us the state for nearly another 10 years. For women, merely advance the time line by 5 years. Here is most of the "pig".
No amount of treatment or medication has done anything to reduce this load. In an ironic fact it may have made it worse, because it does not "cure" Type 2 Diabetes or heart disease (which often arises as a result of Type 2 Diabetes) it merely enables us to carry on.
So the unspoken question is what has made us so ill? Is this normal and unavoidable? If the answer is that this is not normal then there must be things that we can do to lower the risk and so the load. My quick answer is that this is not normal and there are things to be done - but this is not widely understood yet and so needs to be explored.
Understanding why so many get so ill is the pivotal issue. If we can settle on that, then we can find ways to reduce the risk.
Another part of the Load is found in those people who do not get ill in the 60's. We all have grannies and relatives who seem to go on for ever and not be ill. But even they reach a stage when it is hard for them to care for themselves. Our current "Normal" is to help them by putting them in manors. This again was affordable for us as a society when there were not that many of us who were aged 85+. But in 20 years there may well be about 12,000 at that stage.
We just don't have the money to go down that route.
So how are we to support people who are very old and who often have no family close? What is the alternative to institutions? What can we do that will work and not cost too much? How do these two issues link?
We are clever. When we put our minds to a problem like this, we can use our collective intelligence to plan for a better way.
Time to start the conversation for the pips will be squeaking in 2013/4 at the latest, we within the next mandate.
Amplify’d from www.cbc.ca
Our Sputnik moment, which no one wants to discuss, is the unsustainable nature of the Canadian health-care system.
The current federal-provincial cost-sharing agreement expires at the end of March 2014 and, with a possible election looming, no politician in any party wants to talk about the fiscal time bomb that is waiting to explode.
Today, health-care costs are rising at the rate of six per cent a year and are consuming over 40 per cent of the budgets of almost every provincial government.
As well, Canada's aging population means more demands on the expensive drugs and procedures that are extending longevity. It also means there will be proportionately fewer working-age people to pay the taxes that support health care and other government programs.
Indeed, because of that changing ratio, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, among others, is predicting slower economic growth for Canada in the years ahead.
So how is that for a Sputnik moment: An aging population and a proportionately smaller workforce to pay for what Canadians of all ages believe should be free.
But look up, the health-care Sputnik is moving this way. And it might be pretty scary, too.
« December 2010 | Main | February 2011 »
January 31, 2011
Canada's Unseen Sputnik - Healthcare Costs
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"News" is dead Long live the News
Al Jazeera is showing up the world's news organization by what it is doing and how. Here Doc Searls nails it
Amplify’d from blogs.law.harvard.edu
A few days ago, President Obama spoke about the country’s “Sputnik moment”. Well, that’s what Al Jazeera in Egypt is for cable TV. It’s a wake-up call from the future. In that future we’ll realize that TV is nothing more than a glowing rectangle with a boat-anchor business model. Time to cut that anchor and move on.
Here’s another message from the future, from one former cable TV viewer: I’d gladly pay for Al Jazeera. Even when I can also get it for free. All we need is the mechanism, and I’m glad to help with that.
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Have you sung in a choir? What piece do you love the most?
I have not sung in a choir for many years. But as a boy I too was a chorister and sung in services very day and twice on Sunday with lots of rehearsal as well. Singing in the choir was a formative part of me. I am told by Ben Roe that 65 million Americans have sung in a choir. That makes for a huge part of the nation.
So here is my question to you – what was the piece that you sung early that meant the most to you?
Mine was In the Bleak Mid Winter. Christmas was the centre of our year. And this one carol brings it all back to me. I am a boy again with all my life ahead of me – in a magical moment at a magical time that I seem to have lost forever – for we can’t go back.
But maybe in a way we can when we are with others who are at that time in their lives. So here is the Christ Church Choir singing In the Bleak Winter outside in the real snow. I hope you enjoy this. Please let me know what piece does this for you too.
If you live in Charlotte NC, Washington, New York, Boston or Toronto you can experience the Christ Church Choir yourself this March/April. Check out the site for details.
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January 30, 2011
Do you love Music? Are you an Oxford Grad? Then please have a look here.
If you live in America or Canada, and you are like me an Alumnus of Christ Church or of any college at Oxford, you can’t easily take a day trip down to Oxford to see the place or spend and evening with old friends. You can’t take your spouse or children there easily either. Oxford fades away. As I get older, I feel more cut off from this special time in my life. I feel sad that I have not been able to share this place and experience with those closest to me. As I get older I want to get that feeling again and I want to share it with people that are important to me.
If you are one of the 65 million people in America that either sing in a choir today, or have sung in a choir, you can’t easily get personal exposure to one of the great English Male Choirs. Yes of course you can hear their music or see them on video but how often can you hear them in person? Or even better, how often can you go behind the scenes and be with them as they practice? Or even better how often can you meet them and talk with them about what it is like to be a professional musician aged 9? What would it be like for you to be part of such a musical experience not only to be present for a performance but to get involved directly?
This then is the context for our tour.
We will do our best to bring your experience of Christ Church, or Oxford itself, to you so that you can have a moment when you are taken back there. When you might be able to offer a glimpse to those you love and care for of the essence of the spirit of that place.
We will do our best to bring a full choral and musical experience to those of you that love choral music. In each place we perform, we will have an open rehearsal designed to enable you to have the maximum exposure and contact behind the scenes. And of course we bring one of the world’s great choirs who will be singing some of the finest choral music ever written. Here are a few of our programs – Here - Here – Here
If you live in North Carolina, Washington DC, New York, Boston or Toronto – we are going to bring all of this to you in late March and early April.
Before we arrive Tom King, our brilliant web master, videographer and I will do our best to introduce the choir to you. We will post videos of all the participants – the boys, the men singers, organists, the place, the music, the history – we plan to bring as much of the humanity of this great body to you. As I write these words the irony of what I say leaps out. For here is a choir that is 500 years old, formed at the time of Henry VIII, using Social Media to help you find out more about us.
I have myself many stories about my own love of this kind of music. I too was a Boy Chorister – not at Christ Church I regret. But Tom was a chorister. There is something about singing in a choir that is life enhancing. So that we can tell these stories to each other and learn more about how to attend and how to help persuade your friends to join you – Tom and I have set up a FaceBook Group here as well.
Welcome to this special world that is the Christ Church Choir. Tom and I look forward to getting to know you.
6 months ago Chris Rocker from Christ Church Development and I met for coffee in Halifax. Chris had a problem. How could he link Christ Church Grads who lived in North America more closely to the House and to each other? In the UK it is easy. We get invited to spend the night and have a grand dinner. Or we can just go there and see the place. Or we can see our friends who live in the UK.
But what about those of us who live so far away from both Oxford and each other? I flew to England last year to have my 60th birthday with my close friends from my years there. It was the best evening of my life after my wedding night - no don't go there! It's hard to stay connected over here.
So we came up with this "Evil Plan" (HT Hugh McLeod) why don't we take Christ Church and Oxford to them? Take Oxford to America and to Canada?
Make it an experience. Do more and be more than just a concert.
We hope that we can offer Grads an experience that will take them back as it were - even if only for 2 hours. We hope that this wil ba chance to not only to experience the essence of our time at Oxford but to be part of this and to meet each other.
We also know that millions love choral music. We also asked ourselves if we could also offer you more than just a performance - could we set it up so that choral fans could get behind the scenes? We have done that too.
For those of you for whom this kind of choir is new - here are a few tips as it were.
At the heart of this kind of choir are the trebles/sopranos who are all boys aged 8 -13. They go to a school that is yards away from the cathedral and there are in effect professional musicians. They are as to a local church child's choir as a formula one racing car is to my Toyota Echo. If you can imagine it - I was a boy chorister once too. I will open a window into their lives in the next few weeks. You will see them at work and at school.
The alto parts are sung by men as are all the other traditional parts. You will meet some of them too and find out what it is like to be part of this. I will introduce you to all the key players in fact and to this most magical of places, my college, The House know to all else as Christ Church.
This choir was founded 500 years ago. If you have watched the Tudors - Christ Church was founded by Cardinal Wolsey. The choir therefore has a long and great tradition.
I am biased of course as a grad myself, but I think that this choir is easily in the top 10 in the world today - so if you live in Charlotte NC, Washington, New York, Boston or Toronto and you love music - this is a treat.
Over the next 3 months I will be taking you behind the scenes as this great choir gets ready and then goes on tour. I hope that you will enjoy the story as it unfolds.
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Social Media - Can you do an Inception on yourself?
As large organizations struggle to come to grips with whether to use Social Media and then how to use it – the world watches its power in the Arab world and America’s political system gets ready to deploy it in full force in the 2012 election.
This is how important Social Media is to the regime in Egypt. They shut it down knowing its power. We don’t know how events will unfold, but there is no doubt that the autocrats that run most of the Middle East are in grave peril and that both the spark and then the fire that has been unleashed has been carried by Social Media. The real power has been given to the people.
Now think of your organization. Just as the power in a nation has now been given to the people, the real power of your Brand has also been given to the people. If you are not listening to the people who use Social Media and then interacting with them, you are in the same kind of peril. If you think that you can fool the people about the quality of your offering, you are in peril.
The new era is here for organizations and for all of us. You can’t hide anymore. Your life and work is now public. If your life or work don’t fit, then you will be exposed.
Think that this is just a Middle East issue? Well our politicians don’t.
The 2012 election will be the Social Media Election. Why? Because, the politicians know that they will not get a second chance – they know that they will have to be in the stream. Proof? Who is the most popular man in Washington right now? Twitter’s Rep on the Hill.
This is only a start. The election coverage will be dominated by the web.
The New Hampshire primary is over a year away, and the first major candidate has yet to formally declare. Just don’t tell that to outlets like Politico, Talking Points Memo and RealClearPolitics, which are already planning to smother the 2012 campaign trail in a way they could never have imagined four years ago when they had far smaller staffs of bloggers and shoestring budgets.
With an eye toward earning greater respectability, this crop of political Web sites is hoping for more than just page views and traffic-driving links from the Drudge Report. They want to establish themselves as the Blogs on the Bus.
“We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor and co-founder. “Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan.”
Politico will host, with NBC News and Telemundo, the first debate of the campaign season on May 2, getting a head start on a season of face-offs that is already remarkably busy. (Politico edged ahead of Fox News, which scheduled a debate for May 5.)
This is how the new news organizations will do it but now even a citizen can do as good a job – have a look here at how one person, Andy Carvin, covered the Tuscon events while looking after his 2 children that Saturday
You will see that one well connected person can use their network and a few tools to offer up an insight to rival any offered by even the New York Times.
So in this context, where does your organization stand. I am sure that you are doing something now. But what is the relative importance that you have put on becoming expert at this? When I say expert I don’t mean by having a Twitter or Facebook strategy to simply push out your message. I mean this:
- Have you been able to accept what all of this means to your culture – that you can no longer control the message or your brand or that you can hide problems?
- That your number 1 job is to “Listen in Real Time” to what people are saying and oing abut things that matter to you. Research is transformed by this into a need for “Intelligence”. Think now like a General at war. You can and must know minute by minute what is going on.
- Your second job is to interact in a human way with both your allies out there and with those that have problems with you. No more Corporate Speak – No more “Your call is important to us”. You have to be authentic at the SM interface – in fact you have to lose that language and approach in every part of your external interaction
- The hardest job of all is that you have to make the new relationship with those outside your organization the same as the one that you have inside. And here is where the challenge lies.
Getting good at using Social Media is not about using the tools. They are easy to use as tools. They are cheap to install. They are the cheapest tools you have ever deployed.
But to use them well demands a revolution in organizational culture and this is not hard – it is very very very very hard to pull off.
It is as hard as any real life change such as eating in an entirely different way that is based on a new lifestyle. Or not marrying a clone of your first failed partner.
Using Social Media is all about giving up your old identity of control. The old you has to die, before you can do this well.
So there can be no cookie cutter – 5 best steps – template – Best Practice approach. There can’t be for giving up alcohol either.
But there is an approach to making great life changes that does have a high success rate. It is based in these steps:
- You – the CEO – have to “know” in your gut that it is a life or death decision. That your organization will never amount to anything now unless you can make this life change. If you don’t feel this – you are not serious.
- You have to know that you cannot demand this of your self or of anyone else. You cannot part the Red Sea with your command. if you still think you can “Drive Change” – you are not serious.
- You have to make the change in relationship and how you use power yourself. How you are will be the virus. If you don’t understand that this is all about you how you are - you are not serious
- It helps to have a someone close to you who has done this – in AA it is a sponsor – in late 16th Century Europe it may have been your Jesuit confessor – someone close who will not judge you – who has shared all you doubts – who will never reveal to anyone what they have learned from you – someone you can call at any time. A true friend who cares about YOU. If you don’t understand that this is the model of the relationships that you will have to make your own with others – you are not serious.
- It helps to start small – for all will learn by creating new habits. Our work creates new habits and new habits create a new “Normal” and our new Normal is the new culture. If you want to start big, you don’t understand yet.
- Small experiments also create other evangelists in your organization and so give you the network power top spread the change – again – not because you have commanded it but because – you planted the seed in your own persona – you have been your own “Inception”. If you don’t understand how much you need willing partners – you have missed it all!
There is now work that is more difficult than this. But what choice do you have?
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Race and Colour - Who are you now?
Census forms, workplace diversity forms etc all ask us what race we are. BUT as we mix, how do you answer?
My son is WC and his wife is Korean. What will their kids be? How will they define themselves? My WC cousin is married to a Sikh. What about their kids? This mixing is part of the world that is emerging in the west. I think that this is a good thing. In my own life it has opened us up as a family. Not only at the obvious level of the new marriage but among the in laws. We become united in our love for both our children and of course the grandchildren belong to us all.Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com
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Shades of the Bastille?
The army and the people seem to be one.
Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com
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January 29, 2011
Our real leaders
Sad - HT to Dwight Towers
Amplify’d from dwighttowers.wordpress.com
The world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive — especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally — better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.
Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.
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