do it. think it. blog it! ... a twisted world

The one thing I have not heard folks rant about is Outsourcing Medicare. Seems like most of the people/folks affected in this outsourcing turnaround are people from an I.T. background. Most of the layoffs that have occured in the I.T arena have caused the numbers of jobless intelligent folks rise pretty high. But however, nobody talks and rans about Outsourcing Healthcare. Maybe there's a very good reason why !

"President Bush believes all Americans should have access to affordable, quality health care." source: GeorgeWBush.com

I read another article on the same topic on MSNBC. It's excerpt is as follows:
"Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life-threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to $200,000—an impossible sum for the 53-year-old carpenter from Durham, N.C., who has no health insurance….
Total bill: about $10,000, including roundtrip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal."

It’s just way cheaper for one to fly to India for a heart surgery, than to do it at home in the US or Canada for that matter. Many US and Canadian doctors are "foreign", so you can say the odds are decent that if you did the surgery in the US or in Canada, your doctor might have been trained in India by that doctor. !!.

I also heard that pretty recently a canadian gentleman who was on a waitlist for more than a year for a surgery, flew to India, had his surgery done in the best of hospitals from the country by the best of doctors and had an extremely comfortable stay during the entire trip and sure did have a successfull surgery and is now back in Canada in top shape !!!. The cost of the trip was less than what his family would have to incurr if he had the surgery in Canada even if the Canadian Government paid for it in full.. (a lot of the costs in canada for surgery are not directly related to the surgery, but nevertheless there ARE expenses).

So all said and done, I believe that (it may already have started) very soon, Medicare Outsourcing would be the next boom. And nobody is gonna rant about it. The very folks who rant about layoffs, joblessness, market downslide, economic downturm, quality, management styles, profitability etc (just because the jobless sector effected them directly) are not gonna bat an eyelid if they needed to go to India for a surgery themselves or for someone they are close to. It'd be better for them to do it in India right away as they can afford it rather than not do it because of deductibles, premiums, waitlists etc and loose someone thats near and dear. I dont believe that I would hear someone say :"I'd rather die here than go to India for a surgery"

It’s for some reason thought to be OK to make it so expensive you need a medicare plan. And it’s good to restrict medicare plans to the rich and famous. The fact remains that the US, Canada Included is considered a “first world” nation, yet one needs to fly to India to get surgery.

In a recent article published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers on Oursourcing and Profitability, it's pretty ironic that the participants from Tuomey Healthcare System, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, and Modern Healthcare. All pretty notable names in the Medicare Sector.

Daniel Templeton blogged this morning about Blogging Advice and quotes "It seems somehow wrong to try to make money by pushing your expertise about an open source code base." I personally dont see anything wrong with publishing some ads and making a earning on it. The definition of OpenSource does not mean no revenues... (at least from my perspective). I refuse to believe that theres no revenue from opensolaris, openoffice, openldap, java, or any sourceforge, java.net or any opensource project for that matter. Revenue always exists in some form or the other. May not be a direct pay for use, but there's always a revenue from it. It's peoples hard work that goes into creation of opensource software and hardwork translates to revenues in some form. There's a huge difference between Open Source, freeware, and shareware.

blogger.com the most popular blog site used to push ads themselves, They then changed their approach and removed their advertisements to enable their users to be able to run their own ads and earn a income. Matthew Haughey wrote about his experience in an essay called Blogging for Dollars in which he included four of his own hints.

Putting ads on your blog is pretty much the same routine as adding a hit counter, a quiz, a guestbook or any other blog add-on.

I run Targeted Google Ads on MY blog, and I dont see anything wrong with it. I dont get paid for blogging my thoughts, I do it because I like to share the thought and hope it helps someone; but in the process if I generate a wee bit of revenue from it, Why Not ?

On the Same subject: Biz Stone a fellow blogger who works on Blogger at Google wrote a review on the book Who Let the Blogs Out; which makes some pretty good reading too..

The Revolution Is Being Bloggerized !!
Brice Dunwoodie the co-founder of CMS wire writes "Not that there's anything wrong with this. In fact its all positive from what I see. "

All in all Blogs + AdSense = BlogSense
All said and done, I would have to disagree on Daniels comment on "ads as an indication of a lack of respect for the readers and medium".

Charlene Li, writes "Although Weblogs (blogs) are currently used by only a small number of online consumers, they've garnered a great deal of corporate attention because their readers and writers are highly influential. Forrester believes that blogging will grow in importance, and at a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services. Companies that plan to create their own public blogs should already feel comfortable having a close, two-way relationship with users. In this document we recommend best practices, including a blogging code of ethics, and metrics that will show the impact of blogs on business goals." source : http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,35000,00.html

I was breaking my head over a methodology to come up with a unique identifier for storing entries in a LDAP server. Entries stored in the system could have been sourced from varied applicates and datasources, and the probability of entries having the same unique identifier as another entry sources from another system was very high. Initially I thought of using the conventional Social security Number, but then I learnt that SSN's were not unique. I also toggled thoughts between using sequential numbers, first, middle and last name combinations etc. After all the thought I wondered if others never encountered such issues when having to provision systems from varied sources and ensuring that all sources sent a unique identifier when performing the addition to the LDAP server?

So after all the brain racking I came up with a probable neat way of ensuring that the numbers were unique using JNI!!. I wrote a simple "C" API that concatenated the MAC address of the machine with the EPOC timestamp and the time since last reboot in nanoseconds. This have me a 16 bit number that was unique to the nanosecond. Well, I have a unique identifier now, But how could I use it was my next hurdle.

After a little more pondering (googling and discussing approach methodologies with friends), I realized that with JNI available, life of bridging the gap between java and native code was made much simpler.

I used the tutorial written by Beth Sterns to build my JNI Interface. So if any of you out there ponder on how to use and build JNI interfaces, I'd recommend the Beth Sterns Tutorial anyday !!!. It sure did make my life easy, and I bet it would do the same to yours too..

There also is a MAC OS Runtime for thos MAC geeks.

"Note that the ability to load dynamic libraries is subject to approval by the current security manager. When working with native methods, you must load dynamic libraries. Some applets may not be able to use native methods because the browser or viewer they are running in restricts the ability to load dynamic libraries. See Security Restrictions for information about the security restrictions placed on applets. "