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Author: David Gerstman

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David Gerstman

David Gerstman blogged as Soccer Dad from 2003 to 2010. Formerly a computer programmer, he is now a blogger for The Israel Project's The Tower blog.

1) Fiji rescues UNDOF With the Syrian civil war moving closer to Israel, Austria has withdrawn its contingent of peacekeepers from the UNDOF. https://twitter.com/MediaBackspin/status/343639978338816001 Not to worry, Fiji is slated to pick up the slack. the military from the island country of Fiji who will replace the Austrian peacekeepers...

1) How can you tell the difference between a terrorist organization and a liberal democracy? The title is a trick question. In international fora, the terrorist organization gets a lot more respect. Last week the Ireland led the way to prevent the European Union from designating Hezbollah...

Erekat's Latrun gambit In commemoration of the 46th anniversary of the start of the Six Day War, the New York Times published a press release for the Palestinian Authority, On Anniversary of Arab-Israeli War, a Palestinian Plea: It was here on the wooded slopes of Latrun on...

1) Talkin' Turkey Claire Berlinski provides the recent background for the foment going on in Turkey: Of late, almost every sector of the electorate has felt unease about one part or another of Erdoğan’s agenda. Restrictive new alcohol legislation, rammed through parliament, as usual, with contempt for...

1) Music lives in Israel Arsen Ostrovsky interviewed Zubin Mehta about performing Israel: According to Mehta, "it's hard to find an emblem of cultural, national pride that burns as bright as Israel's success in classical music." He adds "the amount of culture going on in a small...

1) Remember when they used to talk about Israel like this? I'm not used to Arabs talking this way about Arabs: Brigadier General Salim Idris, the current chief of Staff of the Supreme Military Council of the FSA, said: “If the attacks of Hezbollah [on] Syrian territory...

In October 2009, Charles Krauthammer critiqued President Obama's foreign policy in a Weekly Standard article Decline is a choice: Indeed, as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture...

In an interview today, President Bashar Assad of Syria claims that Russia has delivered some of the S-300 missiles he bought.The Lebanse paper, Al Akhbar, quoted from an exclusive interview Assad gave to Hezbollah's Al Manar television channel. "Syria has received the first batch of Russian...

The other day, when I was researching my post about Thomas Friedman and Obamacare, I contacted an old blogging buddy of mine - I was on the Watcher's Council with him a few years ago - Scott Kirwin (aka The Razor). Scott views Obamacare through the...

A Better Place, the Israeli electric car company, filed for bankruptcy after burning through over $800 million. https://twitter.com/PrivCo/status/338912756872916992 Unlike other electrical vehicle makers, A Better Place was based on a concept of battery swapping instead of charging stations. The first obvious sign of trouble was when CEO Shai...

I can see clearly now the rain is gone ... How often does a cabinet secretary endorse an op-ed column? https://twitter.com/Sebelius/status/338412119940800512 Thomas Friedman must feel really good right now, Secretary Sebelius endorsed his latest, ObamaCare's other surprise.
Obamacare is based on the notion that a main reason we pay so much more than any other industrial nation for health care, without better results, is because the incentive structure in our system is wrong. Doctors and hospitals are paid primarily for procedures and tests, not health outcomes. The goal of the health care law is to flip this fee-for-services system (which some insurance companies are emulating) to one where the government pays doctors and hospitals to keep Medicare patients healthy and the services they do render are reimbursed more for their value than volume. To do this, though, doctors and hospitals need instant access to data about patients — diagnoses, medications, test results, procedures and potential gaps in care that need to be addressed. As long as this information was stuffed into manila folders in doctors’ offices and hospitals, and not turned into electronic records, it was difficult to execute these kinds of analyses. That is changing. According to the Obama administration, thanks to incentives in the recovery act there has been nearly a tripling since 2008 of electronic records installed by office-based physicians, and a quadrupling by hospitals. The Health and Human Services Department connected me with some start-ups and doctors who’ve benefited from all this, including Dr. Jen Brull, a family medicine specialist in Plainville, Kan., who said that she was certain she had been alerting her relevant patients to have colorectal cancer screening — until she looked at the data in her new electronic health care system and discovered that only 43 percent of those who should be getting the screening had done so. She improved it to 90 percent by installing alerts in her electronic health records, and this led to the early detection of cancer in three patients — and early surgery that saved these patients’ lives and also substantial health care expense.
Friedman suggests that the experiences of one doctor provide an example of how Obamacare will work universally. That's a huge leap of logic. But the next part really bothers me: