Funny how so much money is spent on the Iraq War and bailing out Wall Street, but there's never enough money for entities that really matter to Americans. Health care and education takes a backseat in America once again.

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Check out this very thoughtful summary of the current vaccination debate. Here's her conclusion:

Not vaccinating your kids is sort of like not voting: it might not make much of a difference, but you're betting on most everyone else making a different choice, and the outcome is one everyone has to live with. So it's not surprising that some refer to non-vaccinating families as freeloaders (or, in Amanda Peet's more incendiary language, "parasites"). But unlike those who fail to vote, parents who opt out of vaccinating their children are doing so for the very best reasons: they love their children and want the best for them. The question is, how fair is it to "protect" your children from vaccines if it puts other kids at risk?

Read the whole article here, then voice your thoughts in comments.

How's this for a health care plan? According to CNN, John McCain health care policy adviser John Goodman told a Dallas Morning News reporter that "nobody in the United States is technically uninsured, because everyone has access to hospital emergency rooms."

Wow, talk about clueless. And familiar. Yes, Bush said the same thing back in the summer of 2007 when he adlibbed the following: "The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."

Here's a story we just wrote for TIME about homebirth, which as you'll recall from June's 'My Homebirth Was a Felony' conversation is super controversial. An excerpt:

Obstetricians in the U.S. are concerned about the recent push by direct-entry midwives to receive licenses so they can practice their craft without fear of prosecution. This summer, Missouri reversed its 25-year ban on non-nurse midwives. Twenty states have similar legislation they are either introducing or planning.

It's a really intense time for people on both sides of the issue: the doctors who are afraid the rate of death during childbirth will rise with a rise in homebirth and the midwives who are afraid their work will be further regulated or even criminalized. Read the full story here.

The American Medical Association recently issued a controversial position essentially opposing home birth:

"That our AMA support state legislation that helps ensure safe deliveries and healthy babies by acknowledging of the concept that the safest setting for labor, delivery and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital . . ."

Women's Health News has a good analysis of the statement and on what it might mean for the regulation of birth, which is done on a state-by-state basis.

Madeline Holler has an amazing article up now on Babble.com about her illegal Missouri home birth (of an 11-pound girl!), which her midwife could have been charged with a felony for attending.

Feministing has an alarming post up about the rising number of pro-life pharmacies and what their refusal to stock birth control means for women. According to the Washington Post:

The pharmacies are emerging at a time when a variety of health-care workers are refusing to perform medical procedures they find objectionable. Fertility doctors have refused to inseminate gay women. Ambulance drivers have refused to transport patients for abortions. Anesthesiologists have refused to assist in sterilizations.

Jeanne Sager has written an interesting Babble article called "Off the Charts: Why some pediatricians are abandoning percentiles" about how American growth charts overseen by the CDC have been thrown out of whack by the obesity epidemic, and how they weren't all that hot to begin with because they weren't based on the best standards of care, like the World Health Organizations were.

So, it turns out that a baby's being in the seventh percentile for weight or height doesn't always indicate a "failure to thrive," as some parents have been told.

The author of this Boston Globe article has a new way of mapping the U.S. Rather than looking at topography or industry, he looked at personality types, specifically these five: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism and openness to experience.

Then he mapped the personality tests his team did across the country and voila! All regional stereotypes are scientifically proven to be true! For example, the map at right is of neurotics. (That would be our hometown in the heart of the storm.)

Here's what he says about the rest of the country:

Portland, Oregon, is living up to its reputation as an alternative-culture mecca with this new city-wide art commission: "The Acupuncture Project."

The website (full of pretty images of locations with 23-food-tall "needles" stuck in them) explains the project:

"Think of the city as a body the way traditional Chinese medicine does-- not only as a physical entity but also as a system of energy that flows in distinct pathways called meridians. The energy, or Qi, needs to be in balance. If a person's Qi is out of balance, disease can set in. The same could be true for a city. This project explores the junction between art, regional planning, the environment, Asian medicine and the health of a city."

This AP story on the world's oldest person, 115-year-old Edna Parker, has a lot of sunny details about balloons and roses, and it's all very lovely, but what we wanted to know was how did she do it?

The article, anticipating this question, runs down the latest developments in longevity research. Basically, here's what you need to live past 100:

1. Amazing mutant genes that ward off aging.
2. Healthy habits.
3. The ability to handle stress well.

The various life expectancy calculators around the web more or less concur with that estimation, although they give more weight to one element or the other. We just took this quiz and were told we should live to 95. This one says 89. So we're convinced the first one is superior.

How long does it say you'll live? Does that sound about right to you? Would you even want to live to be more than 100 if it meant outliving your children like Edna has?

A recent Babble article by Kerry Cohen, "What's Wrong With This Picture?" calls into question the need to "fix" kids on the autism spectrum.

For a long time, I struggled with the pain I felt at being told my son wasn't good enough. It is hard to describe how painful it is to read the evaluation reports: your son - your beautiful, chubby, funny little boy, the one with the Horshack laugh, the one who uses stuffed animals to act out scenes from his favorite video - is not doing x, y and z.

Kim Mance just wrote an incredible piece for Babble (which, omigod, just got nominated for the 2008 National Magazine Award for Overall Excellence Online) about a difficult position she found herself in regarding discipline and her ill son.

When she brought him home from a grueling hospital stay, his future unclear, she thought the best thing to do would be to make him as comfortable as possible as he battled his cancer. Then all hell broke loose at her house, and she was put in the position of feeling like a monster: punishing a kid who'd already suffered so much.

Of course, laying down the law turned out to be the best thing she could have done for him. Read the whole article here. But be warned: it's a tear-jerker.

This weekend, watching a spring training baseball game on TV, we were accosted with another horrible anti-smoking TV ad. This one showed sick children hooked up to machines in a hospital. We covered our son's eyes, but not before he saw disturbing footage of a very ill kid. Isn't daytime TV supposed to be safe from that kind of thing?

These new grisly anti-smoking ads are just as bad as the amputation one, the "throat-hole guy" and all the other gross-out ads designed to repulse us into quitting smoking (which we did six years ago with no help from rotting-body imagery, thank you very much).

We're with Andrea Peyser, who in today's New York Post condemns the ads, saying, "A news broadcast would not post pictures of medical atrocities without warning. But these X-rated ads run without a rating. The Health Department needs to toss them out with the Marlboro Man."

A medical student, Karl Svensson, was expelled from a prestigious Swedish medical school, the Karolinska institute, after it was revealed that he had been affiliated with a Neo-Nazi group and convicted of a 1999 murder, reports the AP.

...The university knew nothing about his dark past until getting two anonymous tips that Svensson's original identity was Hampus Hellekant, an alleged neo-Nazi sympathizer who had served seven years in prison for the murder of a labor union activist, Wallberg-Henriksson said.

He was convicted along with two other men in 2000 in the fatal shooting of a member of a far-left union, Bjorn Soderberg. Prosecutors said the killing was revenge for the Soderberg's public denouncement of a co-worker who belonged to a neo-Nazi organization.

I recently moved my computer, and suddenly I can get 30+ TV channels through my computer, I try not to watch TV but for example right now in a little mini window I am watching the Canada-US game on TSN. Out of curiosity, last night I was watching the Iowa circus coverage on CBS and could not help to notice every commercial during the hour period I watched, was about pharmaceutical products, except for the odd windex commercial.

I realize the CBS evening news markets to the older baby boomer generation, are these old people sick or what. How many pills does the average 60 year old take these days? Bill Maher was on Letterman the last night and he went on a very good rant about pharmaceuticals, I suggest checking it out. Otherwise, I came across this not so surprising article today.

OTTAWA - Drug companies spend almost twice as much on marketing and promoting their products than on research and development, says a new study.

In their analysis of data from two market research companies, Marc-Andre Gagnon and Joel Lexchin of Toronto's York University found that American drug companies spent US$57.5 billion on promotional activities in 2004.

By comparison, spending on industrial pharmaceutical research and development in the United States was $31.5 billion in the same year, according to a report by the National Science Foundation, which included public funding for industrial research...Read More Canadian Press...