Reality and Denial in California Prisons

[LadyMod at scam.com]

Editorial (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/opinion/19fri4.html?th&emc=th)
Reality and Denial in California Prisons

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political courage clearly failed him when he vetoed a bill that would have permitted the distribution of condoms in California’s AIDS-ravaged prisons. At the same time, the governor ordered up a pilot distribution program for one as-yet unnamed prison. A small, exploratory program falls far short of the mass distribution effort that the system clearly needs.

Public health officials around the world have long realized that condom distribution is central to any meaningful AIDS-prevention effort. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made that point last year when it urged states to consider starting condom programs in prisons. Programs are already up and running in Canada and much of the European Union, as well as in jails in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington and New York.

Mr. Schwarzenegger said he vetoed the bill because it conflicts with state law that makes sexual contact among inmates illegal. That’s self-defeating and a denial of the reality of life behind bars, and the governor seems to know it. His veto statement acknowledged that condom distribution represents a reasonable “public policy, and it is consistent with the need to improve our prison health care system and overall public health.”

The governor should have gone with what he knows and signed this bill. His pilot program needs to get under way quickly and should be expanded as soon as possible. That’s the only way to improve California’s prison health care system and overall public health.

.

[LadyMod at scam.com]

So we realize that the tax payers can be expected then to pay these costs for every prisoner who contracts aids while in prison. A $2 condom or thousands of dollars in care? Which is more cost effective?


HIV patients will spend $600K for lifetime care (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15655257/)

Those diagnosed with AIDS expected to live average of 24 years, study says

ATLANTA - An American diagnosed with the AIDS virus can expect to live for about 24 years on average, and the cost of health care over those two-plus decades is more than $600,000, new research indicates.

Both life expectancy and the cost of care have risen from earlier estimates, mainly because of expensive and effective drug therapies, said Bruce Schackman, the study’s lead author.

The research found that the average annual cost of care is about $25,200 — nearly 40 percent higher than a commonly cited estimate from the late 1990s.

The new research also updates other studies from the 1990s, when life expectancy for HIV-infected people was closer to 10 years.

The study could influence how much state and federal governments appropriate for HIV and AIDS care and prevention in the future, some HIV policy experts said.

“They’re going to have to take into account medical advances that have extended people’s lives,” agreed Schackman, assistant professor of public health at New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College.

The study appears in the November edition of the peer-reviewed journal, Medical Care.

Life expectancy more than triples
A 1993 estimate of life expectancy for a symptomless person infected with HIV was less than seven years.

But since the mid-1990s, about two dozen HIV-fighting antiretroviral drugs have come onto the market that have essentially turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic disease.

Physicians now understand life expectancy after HIV diagnosis to be two decades or more, and the new study supports that belief.

“It’s nice to see that in writing,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, co-director of Emory University’s Center for AIDS Research.


Click for related content
South African government finally faces up to AIDS
Gene-therapy study shows AIDS suprise



The researchers drew most of their data from 18 medical practices across the United States that provide care for 14,000 patients. The researchers looked at the records of about 7,000 of those patients.

They used a computer simulation model to project HIV medical care costs, and concluded the average lifetime cost of HIV care is $618,000 per person.

That figure is roughly equivalent to lifetime cost estimates for heart disease and some other chronic conditions in women, who incur more costs than men because they live longer, the researchers said.

$2,100 a month in care
The researchers estimated the monthly cost of care at $2,100, with about two-thirds of that spent on medications. That equates to $25,200 a year. In 1998, the average annual cost was $18,300, according to an older study.

[radioguy]

But do you remember this article from the NY Times?

A War We Just Might Win
By MICHAEL E. O’HANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK
Published: July 30, 2007

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks — all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups — who were now competing to secure his friendship.

In Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived.

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.

But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).

In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army’s highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.

In the past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few “jundis” (soldiers) to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless — something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.

The additional American military formations brought in as part of the surge, General Petraeus’s determination to hold areas until they are truly secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.

In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.

Another surprise was how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.

In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the war had known little about governance or business but were now ably immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a decent life.

Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.

In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&oref=slogin


Those guys that wrote it, are a couple of libs from the Brookings Institute. A liberal think tank.

Here is what they are about:

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC. Our mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research and, based on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations that advance three broad goals:

Strengthen American democracy;
Foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans and
Secure a more open, safe, prosperous and cooperative international system.
More about Brookings research »

Here is a bit of there history:

A Commitment to Effective Government
In 1916, Robert S. Brookings joined a group of government reformers in creating the first private organization devoted to the fact-based study of national public policy issues. The new Institute for Government Research became the chief advocate for effective and efficient public service and sought to bring “science” to the study of government.

The Brookings Institution traces its beginnings to 1916, when a group of leading reformers founded the Institute for Government Research (IGR), the first private organization devoted to analyzing public policy issues at the national level.
Brookings created two sister organizations: the Institute of Economics in 1922 and a graduate school in 1924. In 1927, the institutes and the school merged to form the present-day Brookings Institution, with the mission to promote, conduct and foster research “in the broad fields of economics, government administration, and the political and social sciences.”


The Brookings trustees chose the organization’s first president: Harold Moulton, a University of Chicago professor who was known for his study of war debts. Brookings economists played a large role in crafting the 1921 legislation that created the first U.S. Bureau of the Budget. President Warren G. Harding called the bureau, which planned the government’s financial outlays, “the greatest reform in governmental practices since the beginning of the republic.”


War and Peace
In the World War II era, Brookings experts helped the government mobilize for the conflict and manage its aftermath. After the war ended, Leo Pasvolsky, a Brookings expert who had also served in the State Department, was instrumental in refining the blueprint for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dream of the United Nations.


Brookings also helped shape the Marshall Plan—the groundbreaking relief effort to help Europe recover from war. In 1948, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg (R.-MI), praised Brookings for a report that would become “the Congressional ‘work-sheet’ in respect to this complex and critical problem.”


Shaping the Nation
Nearly a year before the 1960 election, Brookings governmental studies expert Laurin Henry published a study, Presidential Transitions, designed to help whichever candidate won—John F. Kennedy or Richard M. Nixon—to launch his administration smoothly. The book was followed by a series of confidential issues papers prepared by Brookings experts and distributed to the candidates.


In 1971, Brookings began a new series of studies on the federal budget, providing in-depth analysis of various programs that helped inform the public and sharpen the spending choices for Congress. Three years later, Brookings pushed for the creation of the Congressional Budget Office. Alice Rivlin, a distinguished Brookings economist, was the CBO’s first director.


Economic Growth
Joseph Pechman, director of the Economic Studies program at Brookings, pushed hard for comprehensive reform of the U.S. tax code in the early 1980s. His research led to the Tax Reform Act of 1986—a major bill that had a profound impact on the U.S. economy.


In the 1990s, the federal government devolved many of its social programs back to cities and states, and Brookings shaped a new generation of urban policies to help build strong neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan regions. As President Bill Clinton prepared to sign historic welfare reform legislation, experts at Brookings teamed up to study the nation’s policies on children and families. In 2001, a Brookings proposal for a child tax credit became part of major tax legislation.


The ongoing effort to improve the tax system also benefited from work by Brookings economists Bill Gale and Mark Iwry. These experts argued that the key to helping Americans save for retirement was making a tax incentive refundable in order to help lower-income workers. The legislation they inspired has helped make them two of the most-quoted, and most influential, economists in the United States.


A Global Challenge
The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, increased the urgency of developing strategies to address the threat while sustaining America’s role as a force for prosperity and stability abroad and an open society at home. With remarkable speed, Brookings experts produced influential proposals for homeland security and intelligence operations. They also testified before Congress and used the Institution’s outreach capacity, including its in-house television studio, to explain the new global reality to a frightened public.


I'll dig up some more for you later :D

[LadyMod at scam.com]

Not sure what your info has to do with California prisons, but, you know? Whatever gets you off.

:lmao2:

Lady Mod

[Cat slave]

There is a possibility that much of the infected AIDS inmates were harboring it
when they entered prison. Most of those people have hardly led clean life styles
before apprehension. Maybe blowup dolls would be more efficient and cheaper.

[LadyMod at scam.com]

There is a possibility that much of the infected AIDS inmates were harboring it
when they entered prison. Most of those people have hardly led clean life styles
before apprehension. Maybe blowup dolls would be more efficient and cheaper.

Oh hell, someone would get jealous over someone else's "girl" and they would just kill each other over the dolls. Can't have that.

:rolleyes:

LOL

[Little Red Dog]

Blow up dolls are expensive. Read an article on them the other day (the movie "Lars and the Real Woman" is coming out soon) and they cost well over $100 on the average.

My vote is for the $2 condom. Hell, I'm sure prisons could get them wholesale...:yay: :yay:

[Cat slave]

Oh hell, someone would get jealous over someone else's "girl" and they would just kill each other over the dolls. Can't have that.

:rolleyes:

LOL

LOL!!!! Probably!:lmao2:

[Cat slave]

Blow up dolls are expensive. Read an article on them the other day (the movie "Lars and the Real Woman" is coming out soon) and they cost well over $100 on the average.

My vote is for the $2 condom. Hell, I'm sure prisons could get them wholesale...:yay: :yay:

Yeah, we could get them from China!:lmao2: Or make inmates share a blow up!

[LadyMod at scam.com]

Blow up dolls are expensive. Read an article on them the other day (the movie "Lars and the Real Woman" is coming out soon) and they cost well over $100 on the average.

My vote is for the $2 condom. Hell, I'm sure prisons could get them wholesale...:yay: :yay:

And buy in bulk. :winkwink:

[Cat slave]

There you go.....problem solved.:lmao2:

[Americanadian]

Yeah, we could get them from China!:lmao2: Or make inmates share a blow up!

Group sex with a blowup doll? There's something ya don't see every day. All in the name of saving a buck. :D

[Americanadian]

My vote is for the $2 condom. Hell, I'm sure prisons could get them wholesale...:yay: :yay:

Hmm...tell them to quit whining.

Condom - $2
Hand - Free

[Cat slave]

Group sex with a blowup doll? There's something ya don't see every day. All in the name of saving a buck. :D

Youre bad.:p

At least they would be tired and in a good mood all the time.:taunt: