Peace Tree Farm

Wi-Fi on the beach

Well, OK, not quite on the beach, though that’s where I’ve been spending some quality time the last few days.

I’m currently gazing out at Gate E71 of TPA (Tampa International Airport), waiting for my flight back home to Seattle via Denver. I’m taking advantage of TPA’s free public Wi-Fi service to while away the next couple of hours. I’m rather surprised that they’re so forward-thinking here ... to the best of my knowledge, SeaTac charges for their Wi-Fi.

I spent the week attending a business meeting held annually at a fancy pink resort right smack on the Gulf of Mexico. Our group had to stay at a differently-garish hotel about a mile away, also directly on the sands.

Though there was a modicum of education and training, this conference was all about the networking—aka drinking Planters’ Punch at the beach bar. And it was all about the food—Chef Erik took bows at several sessions during the conference. And it was all about the sunsets—though I was looking for something a bit more extensive, I believe I saw a very brief pinpoint green flash just as the last bit of the sun dropped below the horizon one night.

Beyond the amenities, I don’t have much to say about the conference. No one is very happy with the way things are going with our collective efforts—funding diverted away from valuable federal programs, unreasonable and nonsensical evaluation criteria, the real threat that our efforts to improve the quality of healthcare provided to some 40 million of our fellow Americans will be thwarted at every turn by the Administration’s desire to reward its corporate friends making expensive electronic health records (EHR) software, rather than undertake less costly and less obtrusive methods to help everyone.

I’ve likened the planned approach to No Child Left Behind—Mark McClellan and his masters want to demonstrate “success” by lavishing all the attention on a small number of favored providers, resulting in large improvements (verging on perfection) among those “partners”. Everyone else is on their own, and there are even rumblings of NCLB-like punishment of those who don’t “measure up”. It’s still another example of the Dubya technique of ever-greater separation of insider-friends from everyone else, of the corporatist, oligopolist realities behind the Ownership Society.

I detest it. It poisons my every working hour, leaves me wondering why I continue to work in this field when I know that every day of Bush’s control of HHS and CMS and Medicare puts our society’s present and future all that much more at risk. Colleagues try to assure me that “this too shall pass”, but I too often wonder whether we’ll soon be wrenched beyond some societal/governmental/financial point of no return.

Well… This wasn’t supposed to turn into a harangue. I meant to simply drop in a few happy-talk lines about whiling away a few minutes on Wi-Fi. But I’ll leave it here anyway. Far be it from me to forego a bit of actual content here on the blog.

Posted by N in Seattle on 06/17 at 10:56 AM