Earlier this week we recorded the very first episode of the Health 2.0 Show. We're calling this new webinar series "The Health 2.0 Show with Indu and Matthew."  The first episode features a quick talk about the new report from Health 2.0 Advisors, called The Past and Future of Health 2.0, and a great interview with Thomas Goetz of Wired Magazine. Thomas’ new book, The Decision Tree, comes out  next month.

Here’s a link to the blog about the topic.  And here’s the webinar. Some technical notes: The sound starts at 0.45 seconds. (Oops!) Matthew’s presentation starts at 7.56. Thomas’ talk and interview starts at 23.06.

This time of year, no matter what your worldview, religion or culture, it’s hard, as you hurry past the homeless huddled on the street, to not feel like Scrooge. Whether you’re taking your family to the Nutcracker, or pounding the pavement for a job yourself, walking past so many shivering mounds of human misery takes a toll on the psyche. Maybe your kids are tugging on your arm, asking why can’t something be done? Maybe you (like so many of us) just don’t feel comfortable handing out bits, or even wads, of cash. So what can YOU do to make a small difference? Here, folks, is the 3rd Annual Doc Gurley Homeless Gift Guide, with tips for how you too can safely give an affordable, life-saving gift to the neediest among us. Because when it comes to the homeless, that’s when, truly, The Giving Is Easy. And once you see how simple and rewarding it can be to drop a gift with a homeless person, be sure to pass the word along. Email friends, post your efforts on Facebook or MySpace. Put together gifts to have in your car for those awkward moments when you’re waiting at an intersection, staring at a scrawled “anything helps, even a smile” cardboard sign. It will change the whole tenor of your life.

Still feeling reluctant to throw together a homeless gift? Keep in mind that, when it comes to your health, studies show that acts of altruism benefit YOU – your life satisfaction, your overall level of contentment, and even how long you live. If altruism was a drug, it would outsell Viagra.

Still not convinced? Channel some of your Niner frustration into a slightly different competitive arena. Hey, we’ve got to do something to redeem our city’s good name – in the compassion-for-the-homeless nationwide stakes, San Francisco and Berkeley won top slots for Meanest Cities in America.

Still not convinced? Well, when it comes to gifts for the homeless, I’m not exaggerating about that life-saving part. How often can you give a simple gift, for less than 5 bucks, that can actually save the life of someone you pass each day? Now that’s effective gifting. Life on the streets takes a lethal toll, and many people die unacknowledged. If you have a moment to spare in memory of the destitute, head over to City Hall as you leave work tonight at 5:30pm for our city’s Solstice Homeless Death Memorial. Light a candle against the darkness tonight if you can, because each person deserves a moment to honor their passing.

How To Give:

Safety first – for you and your gift recipient. While many of us realize that giving an obvious gift to a street person might attract unwanted attention to yourself, you may not be aware that you could also be making your gift-recipient a target for assault later. When it comes to handing out a gift, here’s what you mutter to yourself as you do it (hey, you’ll blend in even more!): Discreet, discreet – the motto on the street. The safest and best way to gift a street person is to do what you already do – give small gifts to the folks you predictably pass on your usual routes, whether you’re going to work, going out to dinner, or heading to a movie. Keep a gift handy and, instead of bending over to drop a buck in a cup, put your bag on the ground and keep going. Don’t break stride, and avoid getting into long conversations. Don’t make a show of giving gifts around a large area and certainly don’t go into areas you don’t know. I’d say don’t gift alone, or in isolated areas, and don’t give gifts to crowds. Gift should be given in plain bags – no bows, no garish colors, no Tiffany sacks. It’s nice, though, to tuck inside a small bow or giftcard (“From Me, To You”). You wouldn’t wave money around, and the same applies to your gift. Anytime you might consider handing someone a dollar, hand him/her a gift instead. And do it as discreetly, and with as little fanfare.

What To Give:

Oooh (rubs hands together), now’s the fun part! You can give hope, joy and inspiration with ANY small gift, including that old standby, money. But if you’re looking for some practical tips, here’s a few ideas.

1) Give warmth – you can find nice knit watch caps for as little as a dollar at many stores, including Target. Tips: try to stick to gender-neutral colors, although brights like red are nice. Women and transgender people forced to live on the street are often targets of sexual violence, and tend to dress to stay under-the-radar. If you give a hot pink pom-pom hat to the homeless woman on your corner to brighten her day, don’t get your feelings hurt if it seems to have quickly disappeared. Same holds true for mittens and scarves. Darker colors are also nice because they don’t show wear so quickly. Heat-shield blankets (also widely available in camping sections, for approx. $3 each at Target) can save a life – especially now with winter settling in with a vengeance.

2) Give protection – If you’re considering gifting an umbrella, don’t go buy one! Instead, buy (for about the same price) a sturdy plastic poncho. Umbrellas are bulky for homeless people, and, frankly, too frail. Umbrellas rarely withstand continuous rain. You can also consider giving a nice Intruder Alarm, like the one I found. It combines a piercing alarm-lock to protect valuables, and an LED light, all into one small key-chain-sized device. Consider making your gift-bag a gift too. Street people struggle to carry belongings in those thin white plastic bags. A sturdy cloth bag, or a reusable heavy-plastic rain-proof one, with a small treat inside, is a gift all by itself.

3) Give health – Footcare is a huge deal if you’re exposed to constant rain, have no reliable access to a bathroom, and spend all day on your feet. Two pairs of sturdy new socks (two pairs so you can swap them out when one pair gets wet), a washcloth for drying between toes, and a toiletry-sized bottle of lotion make a great theme gift, especially now when continuous rains can actually cause homeless people to suffer from that World War I horror – trench foot. You can also gift a small first aid kit, or hygiene items. If you’re gifting toiletries, however, keep in mind that everything has to be carried at all times, so travel-sized is MUCH better than Costco-sized. It’s hard to give nourishing food, but giftcards of all types (food, transit, drugstore) make a nice gift. Be sure, however, to buy cards for locations that are very close by, and ones where a street person, maybe if not exactly welcomed, can at least reliably enter the premises.

4) Give joy – I personally think every present should have a little treat in it. Say, one high-quality, individually-wrapped chocolate, or a small fluffy whimsical item that would make anyone smile. When you buy these in packs, you can get them at very affordable prices to split among many homeless gift-bags. You can even combine joy and practicality by gifting a Santa-hat – it will keep a head warm, and help with panhandling.

5) Give understanding – with the economy so dire, many people may not be able to afford buying anything new. Giving a gift of something you already own (but rarely use), is fine. Maybe you have some old polartec throws, or a blanket or two that no one uses. You can also gift a street person with a BIG used item, like that old sleeping bag, or a coat, or even a tent. If you do gift a used item, be sure it’s obviously freshly laundered and mended. Homeless people are often victimized by receiving “free,” second-hand stuff that is infested with lice or scabies. It is an awful form of torture to have a warm item you’re afraid to use – so be sure YOUR gift smells laundry fresh!

Got a Homeless Gift suggestion or experience to share? Weigh in with the comments section (sorry, but please be warned – our comments section, for this article only, is officially a No-Scrooge-Zone)!

This article republished with permission from the San Francisco Chronicle

We’re continuing a tradition at THCB started last year. Asking you to take a moment this weekend to discuss your desires for how to live the end of your life as meaningfully as possible–If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here Matthew Holt

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.
It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.
Our original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.
To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

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Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.
So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.

(To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. )

To see more videos from past Health 2.0 conferences, or to purchase the entire conference DVD sets from ’07 & ’08 click here. 2009 DVD sets will be available shortly, please check back for updates.

Regina’s story has been on THCB before—Fred’s Life & Death at 73 cents a page. But you may not have seen the mural. (From NPR)

Former Minnesota Senator Dave Durenberger, a thinking centrist Republican (remember them?) puts out an occasional newsletter full of gems. This is today’s zinger:

The Senate has a better bill than the House, but it also has a 60-vote requirement which empowers the odd-ball “if not my way, the highway” members – like Joe Lieberman claiming that something like a public insurance plan violates his “conscience.” I guess I don’t understand Conservative Judaism.

To see more videos from past Health 2.0 conferences, or to purchase the entire conference DVD sets from ’07 & ’08 click here. 2009 DVD sets will be available shortly, please check back for updates.

To see more videos from past Health 2.0 conferences, or to purchase the entire conference DVD sets from ’07 & ’08 click here. 2009 DVD sets will be available shortly, please check back for updates.

As you may know if you’ve read my postings, I’m an outspoken advocate of tightening Medicare fraud and abuse laws. There will be a post on this in a day or two. It’s actually the stuff that’s legal that is the problem: doctors self-referring patients for radiological scans, surgery, hospitals admissions to facilities they have an ownership interest in. I think there is just as much “fraud” of this type- rampant self dealing- on the private insurance side.

The scandal is: what’s legal. And I stand by my earlier statement that the big money is in running up the tab on the privately insured, not in Medicare. On private insurers’ margins, I’ve never subscribed to the populist garbage about obscene profits. Uwe Reinhardt had an excellent analysis of the Wellpoint 10K the other day in the New York Times. Health insurance is actually not a very good business. Many of these firms would be a lot more profitable if they were better managed, and eliminated a lot of the paper and clerical overburden, and if they were more aggressive in bargaining with providers. Since the same companies process Medicare claims, I don’t see us escaping them. Management in both our private and public systems is mediocre and not improving. (Medicare has been without an Administrator for two years, spanning two administrations).

It’s really a waste of my time to participate in a philosophical BS argument about government=bad, private sector= good. That sort of ended after college for me. We have a mixed system. I’ve worked in both private and public sectors. If we want to cover the 55 plus population, my best case scenario is for Medicare to assume the insurance risk, and contract with well managed HMO type health plans to actually co-ordinate the care. We’ve both spend decades working in this field, Nate- 34 years in my case; I’ve spent most of my time in provider space, and have a much clearer idea than you do about where the waste is. Don’t get me started- if all you’re looking at is claims data, and in essentially one market, believe me, my friend, you don’t know what you don’t know . . .”

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