Healthcare: Not just another business

Health | Ano Lobb | Friday 20th November 2009

A reader comment on a posting about electronic medical records (EMR) suggests that medicine needs to follow other industries into the digital age. This is likely inevitable: Medical record keeping is bound to become more digitized over time. The primary reasons are monetary: It facilitates the generation of bills to send to patients and payers, the jury is still out on whether it increases quali
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Leading News and Opinion

	10 Rules for Sustaining Your Social Enterprise Social Enterprise \| Marcia Stepanek \| Thursday 29th October 2009 The climate for investor funding is still a stormy one; it's always tough to hear about the social ventures that don't make it past the early stages. It's no wonder, then, that a recent post by Peter Haas on the TED Fellows 2009 blog caught my eye. It's all about how to avoid getting blown out of the water before you can scale. Herewith, with thanks to Peter [and apologies to him for some paraphrasing] are some suggestions about how to sustain you and your social venture -- from the start: 1. Don't start a new organization. Better to ask what you can do to help something that already exists to become more effective. Think twice about starting something from scratch when you might achieve your goals faster by working first in a management position somewhere else. 2. Clearly define what you do and stick with it. In other words, take baby steps. Don't try to save the whole world in one fell swoop. "In the massive unmet need, there is always the temptation to run the feeding-housing-water-sanitation-ecotourism-renewable energy-child education-dolphin-saving program," Haas says. But being too diverse in your goals can be a turn-off to potential investors. Better to propose doing one or two things well and being selective about program expansion, he says. Read More

	PopTech Recap: Mobile Enterprise Social Enterprise \| Marcia Stepanek \| Thursday 29th October 2009 I'm back in New York from Maine, where I was attending PopTech's 2009 conference: America Reimagined. In going through my notes of last week's presentations by the more than 50 speakers -- entrepreneurs, academicians, inventors, artists and advocates -- four people [mostly PopTech fellows] were especially focused on finding ways to use cellphones to help those living at the Bottom of the Pyramid. [PopTech organizers also tipped their hats to BoP projects; this year's attendee bags given to each conferee were BoP-friendly, developed by MIT architect Sheila Kennedy, who has helped spearhead PopTech's portable lighting project. The FLAP bag [for Flexible Light & Power] is a Timbuk2 messenger bag outfitted with small solar array, battery and LED. A removable panel lined with reflective material amplifies the light from a tiny bulb tucked into a strap. PopTech organizers said AfriGadget's Erik Hersman recently took some prototypes to Africa for field testing. The upshot? "Solar isn't just for rooftops and calculators anymore," says PopTech. Now you can literally wear power on your shoulder.] Here's a brief summary of some of the BoP projects and their founders: * FrontlineSMS:Medic: When founder and PopTech fellow Josh Nesbit traveled to Malawi in the summer of 2007 to intern at a hospital there, he was struck by the inadequacy of medical services in the region. "That hospital had two doctors attending to a quarter of a million people," recalls Nesbit, a Stanford pre-med student at the time. Further, healthcare workers had to travel dozens of miles to isolated African villages just to see patients, often having to lug boxes of medical records with them. Nesbit says he was at the hospital for six weeks before he met a single health care worker from the community, a man whose name was Dixon. "He opened his notebooks and there were beautifully handwritten drug adherence charts, but Dixon was walking 35 miles every day to the central clinic, just so the nurse could check his work," Nesbit said. So Nesbit bought 100 cell phones at $100 each and trained community health workers how to text-message each other and the clinic, instead -- transforming all of those paper records into texts that can quickly be sent from one cellphone to another. "All of a sudden, these remote community health workers were connected." Out of this effort came a change of career focus for Nesbit and the for-profit FrontlineSMS, a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem and inexpensive cell phones. At PopTech last week, Nesbit launched Phone Hope, a new drive to collect old and used cellphones from people in the States, recycle them, and use those credits buy new, more appropriate phones for health workers in Malawi, Bangladesh and distressed communities in the United States. "If we are able to recycle just one percent of discarded phones for one year, we could help clinics provide better health care to 50 million people," Nesbit says. Recycle your old phone and help health workers save lives. Read More

	Cluster Bombing A Responsible Business Corporate Social Responsibility \| David Connor \| Thursday 29th October 2009 This morning I read a newspaper report about some of the world's biggest banks funding the trade of cluster bombs and making a more than tidy profit from doing so. Without wanting to get immersed in the bigger debating pool of the role of business ethics in Corporate Social Responsibility, or vice versa, it does beggar belief that alleged beacons of responsible business practice actively pursue profit from, at best, morally questionable transactions. Today's Guardian newspaper (UK) said about one of the protagonists, "HSBC, led by ordained Anglican priest Stephen Green, has profited more than any other financial institution from companies that manufacture cluster bombs." This is the same organisation that you'll see involved in most of the mainstream tick boxes such as the UN Global Compact, Equator Principles, etc. and coming third in the Fortune 100 2008 AccountAbility Rating. £657 million in fees from such business may make financial sense in the short term but the damage to reputation should cost them much more over the longer run. It is the ammunition (excuse the pun) that this gives to the CSR naysayers that concerns me the most, and to be fair they'd have a valid point. HSBC is an organisation proclaiming to be pushing Sustainability as leaders, and by inference attempting to achieve a moral high ground beyond many public perceptions of the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility. This particular topic is surely an opportunity for true leadership to make a moral stand, even if the trade itself 'at the moment' remains legal. Read More

	Changing Paradigms Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Thursday 29th October 2009 Full disclosure: I have not watched Michael Moore's recent opus on the evils of our economic system, Capitalism: A Love Story. What I have seen, however, is how much scorn and derision, sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit, Mr. Moore received as he made the rounds of the mainstream press while promoting his movie. Sure, you expect that kind of reaction from certain less progressive news outlets, but watching Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America, and Bill Maher on his show Real Time dismiss Michael Moore was a bit of a surprise. Some of it is because Mr. Moore incorrectly argues that the replacement for capitalism is democracy; capitalism is an economic system, democracy is a system of governance. His general premise, however, is correct: people with more money wield more influence within our system - capitalism has eroded the foundational basis of our democracy as a 2006 Mother Jones does an excellent job of explaining. What I found uniquely interesting from a Sustainable Development perspective is how many people feel that his efforts are a bit like whistling in the wind. Apparently an economic paradigm other than the flavor of capitalism we're currently practicing cannot exist. If this is true, we're in trouble. Our current economic system is based on perpetual economic growth . That is to say, we need to consume more this year than we did last year, and more next year than we do this year. If we don't consume in ever increasing amounts, the system collapses. Unfortunately, we live on a finite planet. And, as we're becoming increasingly aware, our current methods of production and consumption are literally consuming the planet. At the same time, however, billions of the world's people exist in a constant state of hunger and without basic sanitation. In short we have both a resource and an allocation problem, and in many ways our current economic system (in which wars are profitable and peace is not) is the root cause of this problem. Read More

	Emailing your way to Success! Responsible Careers \| Cynthia Stringer \| Thursday 29th October 2009 As you brand yourself and explore how others see you it's important to review all channels and venues for communication. Most professional careers rely on email communication as a primary mode of generating results. Some of the most basic include voicemail, email, resumes, and cover letters. Each of these in their own right provides an experience of who you are and what people can expect from you. As a Career Coach I assist clients in aligning each of these individual outreach tools to their advantage. Email is a form of communication, which is timely, direct, and personal. Using it to your advantage allows you to show your best assets and places you in a certain light. I advise people to plan ahead and build a brand, which they want to be known for and carry that through everything, including their communication. Take a moment and review now how effective your email relations are in regards to getting in front of and meeting people who can further your career path. The path of email communication involves filtering and focusing what email come to your attention, and making decisions about them. Do you want to keep them and respond, delete or forward them. Additionally, how might you reverse market the emails and as they come to you and instead of thinking they are trying to sell or give you something you turn it around and ask how you two both might support and contribute to one another. This is a form of collaborating with everything that comes into your life and engaging in a win win perspective. In my work with networking the career advise I provide is called the 3 foot rule, anything within that distance has the potential to move your career goals forward. Read More

	Healthy mothers, healthy kids, healthy societies Health \| Ano Lobb \| Thursday 29th October 2009 How do we reduce infant mortality? In a nutshell: Take better care of mothers. In two nutshells: Gender equality and reproductive self-determination. Several recent postings have discussed the global death toll among children and youth from malaria, diarrheal disease, and accidents. Such staggering numbers could crush the spirit if we had no ideas about how best to improve them. Exhaustive research, including a recent 100-page review of the literature by researchers at Aga Khan University, Save the Children and Johns Hopkins University, has provided evidence of what works. From a social and political perspective, increased maternal autonomy (recognition of gender equality, and women's rights), and increased maternal education have both been proven to decrease infant mortality and increase health. Societies that are matriarchal, for example, have lower infant mortality than equivalent societies that are patriarchal. Mothers in full control of their reproductive rights are healthier. And there's a dose response relationship between a mother's education level and reduced infant mortality: Each added year of maternal education increases survival for her children. Such steps are ideal in that they address underlying causes of ill-health while strengthening human rights and social development. But they can be difficult to improve in a timely fashion, since they require changing social mores and developing an educational infrastructure. Read More

	A Focus on India and Its Energy Climate Change \| Juan Carlo Pascua \| Wednesday 28th October 2009 Energy is synonymous with wealth. The more energy a country uses, the wealthier a country has to be. More energy use means more carbon emissions (leading to global warming), but it also means more economic growth: food, goods, and jobs. Few countries stand to grow in the next few decades as much as India. Energy is tied to growth. Ten years ago 1 billion Indians lacked access to electricity, now it is closer to 400 million. India's energy consumption is growing. A fight for more energy use is a fight against poverty; energy increases will produce more food, transport more kids to schools, transport more people to work, and transport more food to markets. Yet, as of 2003, India's power usage was 70% from coal- the greatest polluting fuel we have to burn. Energy in India is inherently tied to coal. Asking India not to delve into their vast coal supply is asking India not to fight poverty. As of January 4, 2009 there remained 267 billion tons of coal within India's borders. That resource could power 78 billion US households in one year. However, India cannot go blindly following the path of developed countries. It has a unique opportunity for sustainable growth that isn't curtailed by an out of date infrastructure- a roadblock to other nations trying convert to renewable energy. Read More

	Private thoughts on a public option Health \| Ano Lobb \| Wednesday 28th October 2009 A previous posting on competition garnered lots of interest and a question about the logic of a government sponsored health plan in the US, the so called "public option." The specifics of this particular pudding are still baking in the unreliable oven of Washington politics, but some general assessments can be made about a potential role of government: 1. The central problem with paying for healthcare over a person's lifetime is that the same entity collecting premiums when you are a healthy 20 year-old needs to be the one paying for your care when you're an unhealthy 70 year-old. In the US, health insurance is coupled with employment, guaranteeing that no insurer will cover you for long. So the company collecting premiums when you are a healthy youngster will not be the same company paying for your care when you are old and sick. This means unpredictable risk for private insurers, who respond in various creative ways that are not good for patients. Governments seem much better suited to managing this type of life-long coverage. 2. Rhetoric aside, Americans seem generally comfortable with current public options: Few suggest eliminating Medicare, Medicaid, and Veteran's Care. They realize that government doesn't provide care, so "government run healthcare" means government is guaranteeing your ability to pay your doctor to see you. And American's overwhelmingly support government-run essential services such as fire departments, police, libraries and road maintenance. Read More

	Solar Power Does More Than Simply Save the Planet Ethical Consumption \| Caitlin Chock \| Wednesday 28th October 2009 In many well developed countries, those living there often take the little things for granted. We couldn't imagine only having firewood to heat our homes, cooking over that same log burning fire, or living without many of the appliances and devices we use on a daily if not hourly basis. Well, this is the reality of those living in small villages across Argentina. For those residing in Misa Rumi their sole means of providing warmth and food for their families was also responsible for soil erosion, deforestation, carbon gas emissions and other negative environmental effects. Yet, thanks to the EcoAndina Foundation, these villages have been able to adopte more ethical consumption habits. Those traveling to these remote villages are part of EcoAndina's resolve to implement the townspeople with solar energy power. Replacing their traditional burning habits, they are now able to heat their soups and other warm meals atop a solar stove. This new technology is greatly appreciated by those living in the villages as one such gold panner Julian Martinez replies, "We use the solar stove every day and it works well...it's not bad at all, I think it gives good results." These stoves, equipped with a sundial to adjust to the moving sun are then able to ignite almost instantly. Read More

	Heating Your Home the Green Way Ethical Consumption \| Caitlin Chock \| Wednesday 28th October 2009 At least for those of us in the Northern hemisphere, the winter months are upon us and with that comes colder temperatures, blustery winds, and chilly rains or snowfalls. As the temperature outside drops, inside we are apt to turning up our thermostats. In doing so, we are also contributing to an estimated 4 tons of gas emissions a year from each home. In addition to having a negative effect on the environment, heating costs in the winter and cooling costs in the summer make a big dent in our bank accounts as well. There are plenty of ways that we can still keep warm, while cutting back on the poisonous gasses we send pluming into the atmosphere and adopt a more ethical energy consumption. Luckily, with global warming being a rather hot topic, energy suppliers have begun changing the means by which they generate their power and can offer greener electrical options. This may not be available to everyone, but for those who's electrical companies offers wind, solar, and other renewable systems this is an excellent way to lesson your impact on the environment. When energy is collected by windmills and solar panels instead of coal or oil the subsequent adverse effect on the atmosphere drops astoundingly. Yet these options aren't available everywhere, and the only way to urge electrical companies to rely more on renewable resources rather than the conventional ones is to raise the demand for greener energy. That means that a lot of the power for changes rests in our, the consumers' hands, because if the market for green energy sources outweighs the other, energy companies will have no choice but to follow through. Read More

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	10 Rules for Sustaining Your Social Enterprise Social Enterprise \| Marcia Stepanek \| Thursday 29th October 2009 The climate for investor funding is still a stormy one; it's always tough to hear about the social ventures that don't make it past the early stages. It's no wonder, then, that a recent post by Peter Haas on the TED Fellows 2009 blog caught my eye. It's all about how to avoid getting blown out of the water before you can scale. Herewith, with thanks to Peter [and apologies to him for some paraphrasing] are some suggestions about how to sustain you and your social venture -- from the start: 1. Don't start a new organization. Better to ask what you can do to help something that already exists to become more effective. Think twice about starting something from scratch when you might achieve your goals faster by working first in a management position somewhere else. 2. Clearly define what you do and stick with it. In other words, take baby steps. Don't try to save the whole world in one fell swoop. "In the massive unmet need, there is always the temptation to run the feeding-housing-water-sanitation-ecotourism-renewable energy-child education-dolphin-saving program," Haas says. But being too diverse in your goals can be a turn-off to potential investors. Better to propose doing one or two things well and being selective about program expansion, he says. Read More

	PopTech Recap: Mobile Enterprise Social Enterprise \| Marcia Stepanek \| Thursday 29th October 2009 I'm back in New York from Maine, where I was attending PopTech's 2009 conference: America Reimagined. In going through my notes of last week's presentations by the more than 50 speakers -- entrepreneurs, academicians, inventors, artists and advocates -- four people [mostly PopTech fellows] were especially focused on finding ways to use cellphones to help those living at the Bottom of the Pyramid. [PopTech organizers also tipped their hats to BoP projects; this year's attendee bags given to each conferee were BoP-friendly, developed by MIT architect Sheila Kennedy, who has helped spearhead PopTech's portable lighting project. The FLAP bag [for Flexible Light & Power] is a Timbuk2 messenger bag outfitted with small solar array, battery and LED. A removable panel lined with reflective material amplifies the light from a tiny bulb tucked into a strap. PopTech organizers said AfriGadget's Erik Hersman recently took some prototypes to Africa for field testing. The upshot? "Solar isn't just for rooftops and calculators anymore," says PopTech. Now you can literally wear power on your shoulder.] Here's a brief summary of some of the BoP projects and their founders: * FrontlineSMS:Medic: When founder and PopTech fellow Josh Nesbit traveled to Malawi in the summer of 2007 to intern at a hospital there, he was struck by the inadequacy of medical services in the region. "That hospital had two doctors attending to a quarter of a million people," recalls Nesbit, a Stanford pre-med student at the time. Further, healthcare workers had to travel dozens of miles to isolated African villages just to see patients, often having to lug boxes of medical records with them. Nesbit says he was at the hospital for six weeks before he met a single health care worker from the community, a man whose name was Dixon. "He opened his notebooks and there were beautifully handwritten drug adherence charts, but Dixon was walking 35 miles every day to the central clinic, just so the nurse could check his work," Nesbit said. So Nesbit bought 100 cell phones at $100 each and trained community health workers how to text-message each other and the clinic, instead -- transforming all of those paper records into texts that can quickly be sent from one cellphone to another. "All of a sudden, these remote community health workers were connected." Out of this effort came a change of career focus for Nesbit and the for-profit FrontlineSMS, a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem and inexpensive cell phones. At PopTech last week, Nesbit launched Phone Hope, a new drive to collect old and used cellphones from people in the States, recycle them, and use those credits buy new, more appropriate phones for health workers in Malawi, Bangladesh and distressed communities in the United States. "If we are able to recycle just one percent of discarded phones for one year, we could help clinics provide better health care to 50 million people," Nesbit says. Recycle your old phone and help health workers save lives. Read More

	Cluster Bombing A Responsible Business Corporate Social Responsibility \| David Connor \| Thursday 29th October 2009 This morning I read a newspaper report about some of the world's biggest banks funding the trade of cluster bombs and making a more than tidy profit from doing so. Without wanting to get immersed in the bigger debating pool of the role of business ethics in Corporate Social Responsibility, or vice versa, it does beggar belief that alleged beacons of responsible business practice actively pursue profit from, at best, morally questionable transactions. Today's Guardian newspaper (UK) said about one of the protagonists, "HSBC, led by ordained Anglican priest Stephen Green, has profited more than any other financial institution from companies that manufacture cluster bombs." This is the same organisation that you'll see involved in most of the mainstream tick boxes such as the UN Global Compact, Equator Principles, etc. and coming third in the Fortune 100 2008 AccountAbility Rating. £657 million in fees from such business may make financial sense in the short term but the damage to reputation should cost them much more over the longer run. It is the ammunition (excuse the pun) that this gives to the CSR naysayers that concerns me the most, and to be fair they'd have a valid point. HSBC is an organisation proclaiming to be pushing Sustainability as leaders, and by inference attempting to achieve a moral high ground beyond many public perceptions of the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility. This particular topic is surely an opportunity for true leadership to make a moral stand, even if the trade itself 'at the moment' remains legal. Read More

	Changing Paradigms Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Thursday 29th October 2009 Full disclosure: I have not watched Michael Moore's recent opus on the evils of our economic system, Capitalism: A Love Story. What I have seen, however, is how much scorn and derision, sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit, Mr. Moore received as he made the rounds of the mainstream press while promoting his movie. Sure, you expect that kind of reaction from certain less progressive news outlets, but watching Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America, and Bill Maher on his show Real Time dismiss Michael Moore was a bit of a surprise. Some of it is because Mr. Moore incorrectly argues that the replacement for capitalism is democracy; capitalism is an economic system, democracy is a system of governance. His general premise, however, is correct: people with more money wield more influence within our system - capitalism has eroded the foundational basis of our democracy as a 2006 Mother Jones does an excellent job of explaining. What I found uniquely interesting from a Sustainable Development perspective is how many people feel that his efforts are a bit like whistling in the wind. Apparently an economic paradigm other than the flavor of capitalism we're currently practicing cannot exist. If this is true, we're in trouble. Our current economic system is based on perpetual economic growth . That is to say, we need to consume more this year than we did last year, and more next year than we do this year. If we don't consume in ever increasing amounts, the system collapses. Unfortunately, we live on a finite planet. And, as we're becoming increasingly aware, our current methods of production and consumption are literally consuming the planet. At the same time, however, billions of the world's people exist in a constant state of hunger and without basic sanitation. In short we have both a resource and an allocation problem, and in many ways our current economic system (in which wars are profitable and peace is not) is the root cause of this problem. Read More

	Emailing your way to Success! Responsible Careers \| Cynthia Stringer \| Thursday 29th October 2009 As you brand yourself and explore how others see you it's important to review all channels and venues for communication. Most professional careers rely on email communication as a primary mode of generating results. Some of the most basic include voicemail, email, resumes, and cover letters. Each of these in their own right provides an experience of who you are and what people can expect from you. As a Career Coach I assist clients in aligning each of these individual outreach tools to their advantage. Email is a form of communication, which is timely, direct, and personal. Using it to your advantage allows you to show your best assets and places you in a certain light. I advise people to plan ahead and build a brand, which they want to be known for and carry that through everything, including their communication. Take a moment and review now how effective your email relations are in regards to getting in front of and meeting people who can further your career path. The path of email communication involves filtering and focusing what email come to your attention, and making decisions about them. Do you want to keep them and respond, delete or forward them. Additionally, how might you reverse market the emails and as they come to you and instead of thinking they are trying to sell or give you something you turn it around and ask how you two both might support and contribute to one another. This is a form of collaborating with everything that comes into your life and engaging in a win win perspective. In my work with networking the career advise I provide is called the 3 foot rule, anything within that distance has the potential to move your career goals forward. Read More

	Healthy mothers, healthy kids, healthy societies Health \| Ano Lobb \| Thursday 29th October 2009 How do we reduce infant mortality? In a nutshell: Take better care of mothers. In two nutshells: Gender equality and reproductive self-determination. Several recent postings have discussed the global death toll among children and youth from malaria, diarrheal disease, and accidents. Such staggering numbers could crush the spirit if we had no ideas about how best to improve them. Exhaustive research, including a recent 100-page review of the literature by researchers at Aga Khan University, Save the Children and Johns Hopkins University, has provided evidence of what works. From a social and political perspective, increased maternal autonomy (recognition of gender equality, and women's rights), and increased maternal education have both been proven to decrease infant mortality and increase health. Societies that are matriarchal, for example, have lower infant mortality than equivalent societies that are patriarchal. Mothers in full control of their reproductive rights are healthier. And there's a dose response relationship between a mother's education level and reduced infant mortality: Each added year of maternal education increases survival for her children. Such steps are ideal in that they address underlying causes of ill-health while strengthening human rights and social development. But they can be difficult to improve in a timely fashion, since they require changing social mores and developing an educational infrastructure. Read More

	A Focus on India and Its Energy Climate Change \| Juan Carlo Pascua \| Wednesday 28th October 2009 Energy is synonymous with wealth. The more energy a country uses, the wealthier a country has to be. More energy use means more carbon emissions (leading to global warming), but it also means more economic growth: food, goods, and jobs. Few countries stand to grow in the next few decades as much as India. Energy is tied to growth. Ten years ago 1 billion Indians lacked access to electricity, now it is closer to 400 million. India's energy consumption is growing. A fight for more energy use is a fight against poverty; energy increases will produce more food, transport more kids to schools, transport more people to work, and transport more food to markets. Yet, as of 2003, India's power usage was 70% from coal- the greatest polluting fuel we have to burn. Energy in India is inherently tied to coal. Asking India not to delve into their vast coal supply is asking India not to fight poverty. As of January 4, 2009 there remained 267 billion tons of coal within India's borders. That resource could power 78 billion US households in one year. However, India cannot go blindly following the path of developed countries. It has a unique opportunity for sustainable growth that isn't curtailed by an out of date infrastructure- a roadblock to other nations trying convert to renewable energy. Read More

	Private thoughts on a public option Health \| Ano Lobb \| Wednesday 28th October 2009 A previous posting on competition garnered lots of interest and a question about the logic of a government sponsored health plan in the US, the so called "public option." The specifics of this particular pudding are still baking in the unreliable oven of Washington politics, but some general assessments can be made about a potential role of government: 1. The central problem with paying for healthcare over a person's lifetime is that the same entity collecting premiums when you are a healthy 20 year-old needs to be the one paying for your care when you're an unhealthy 70 year-old. In the US, health insurance is coupled with employment, guaranteeing that no insurer will cover you for long. So the company collecting premiums when you are a healthy youngster will not be the same company paying for your care when you are old and sick. This means unpredictable risk for private insurers, who respond in various creative ways that are not good for patients. Governments seem much better suited to managing this type of life-long coverage. 2. Rhetoric aside, Americans seem generally comfortable with current public options: Few suggest eliminating Medicare, Medicaid, and Veteran's Care. They realize that government doesn't provide care, so "government run healthcare" means government is guaranteeing your ability to pay your doctor to see you. And American's overwhelmingly support government-run essential services such as fire departments, police, libraries and road maintenance. Read More

	Solar Power Does More Than Simply Save the Planet Ethical Consumption \| Caitlin Chock \| Wednesday 28th October 2009 In many well developed countries, those living there often take the little things for granted. We couldn't imagine only having firewood to heat our homes, cooking over that same log burning fire, or living without many of the appliances and devices we use on a daily if not hourly basis. Well, this is the reality of those living in small villages across Argentina. For those residing in Misa Rumi their sole means of providing warmth and food for their families was also responsible for soil erosion, deforestation, carbon gas emissions and other negative environmental effects. Yet, thanks to the EcoAndina Foundation, these villages have been able to adopte more ethical consumption habits. Those traveling to these remote villages are part of EcoAndina's resolve to implement the townspeople with solar energy power. Replacing their traditional burning habits, they are now able to heat their soups and other warm meals atop a solar stove. This new technology is greatly appreciated by those living in the villages as one such gold panner Julian Martinez replies, "We use the solar stove every day and it works well...it's not bad at all, I think it gives good results." These stoves, equipped with a sundial to adjust to the moving sun are then able to ignite almost instantly. Read More

	Heating Your Home the Green Way Ethical Consumption \| Caitlin Chock \| Wednesday 28th October 2009 At least for those of us in the Northern hemisphere, the winter months are upon us and with that comes colder temperatures, blustery winds, and chilly rains or snowfalls. As the temperature outside drops, inside we are apt to turning up our thermostats. In doing so, we are also contributing to an estimated 4 tons of gas emissions a year from each home. In addition to having a negative effect on the environment, heating costs in the winter and cooling costs in the summer make a big dent in our bank accounts as well. There are plenty of ways that we can still keep warm, while cutting back on the poisonous gasses we send pluming into the atmosphere and adopt a more ethical energy consumption. Luckily, with global warming being a rather hot topic, energy suppliers have begun changing the means by which they generate their power and can offer greener electrical options. This may not be available to everyone, but for those who's electrical companies offers wind, solar, and other renewable systems this is an excellent way to lesson your impact on the environment. When energy is collected by windmills and solar panels instead of coal or oil the subsequent adverse effect on the atmosphere drops astoundingly. Yet these options aren't available everywhere, and the only way to urge electrical companies to rely more on renewable resources rather than the conventional ones is to raise the demand for greener energy. That means that a lot of the power for changes rests in our, the consumers' hands, because if the market for green energy sources outweighs the other, energy companies will have no choice but to follow through. Read More