I’ve been doing online publishing for quite a while now, at least 15 years, and am back at it with a new website, Office Fitness Tips. (Attention, massage clients: don’t worry, I’ll be doing this in the early morning, so you can still book appointments at your usual time.)

I have internalized so much of the technical, business, and creative arcana of web publishing that it sometimes helps to back away from the details and reflect on the purpose and potential of the medium.

How to Build a Successful Blog Business is a terrific e-book overview of the many aspects of building, promoting, and profitably operating a commercial blog. It’s a little daunting to see in one place all of the details that have to be attended to, but it’s also very helpful to have a mega-checklist of what it takes to make it as a serious blog publisher.

I’ve been so busy with my massage practice the past several years that my online ventures have mostly fizzled to this point. Office Fitness Tips integrates nicely with my massage practice, so I am confident that this effort should at least get a little traction.

This is the text of a speech I delivered at my Toastmasters group today. I have looked for a long time for a succinct description of the problems with our health-care system, couldn’t find one, and so I wrote this. It’s based in large part on T.R. Reid’s book, The Healing of America, but is also informed by numerous newspaper and magazine articles and other sources.

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I donated blood yesterday, as millions of Americans regularly do. As I lay there sharing my blood, I thought about the irony of our situation here in America. We are generous, kind people and the world’s leading nation in many ways, yet we have created a health-care system that ranks 37th in the world, according to a survey by the World Health Organization.

I have taken a long, hard look at our health-care system, and I have concluded that it is barbaric. That’s a strong word, I know. I spent a lot of time thinking about it and reviewing dictionary definitions before I decided to use it. I’m not accusing anyone of being a barbarian, but I believe we have a health care system that is demonstrably barbaric.

One definition of barbaric is: crude, uncivilized, and brutal.

Crude

Our health care system is truly crude – unrefined. It is marked by logical inconsistencies and financial inefficiencies.

Unlike every other major industrialized nation, we have a piecemeal collection of different systems that treats vast swaths of our citizenry differently. Every other modern nation puts all of its citizens in the same system (by the way, this is how insurance is designed to work – by having everyone in the same pool, risk is spread equitably across the population). Here we have 4 pools: if you’re employed or able to buy your own health insurance, then you are covered much like folks in Germany, in a multi-payer, multi-provider system; if you are a veteran or a Native American on a reservation, then you are covered much like folks in the UK’s National Health Service, a single-payer system in which the doctors work for the government; if you are over age 65, then you are covered like folks in Canada’s system (from which we also got the name Medicare), a single-payer, multiple-provider system; if you are not covered, then you are in the heaven-help-us, please-don’t-let-me-get-sick, pay-as-you-go non-system. Every other modern country has one system for everyone.

Our system is incredibly inefficient. All you have to do is think about your last encounter with your insurance company to see this. But the data also show how inefficient our system is. The U.S. spends vastly more on health care than other countries – in both absolute and relative terms. More refined systems in other countries waste many fewer dollars on bureaucracy and administrative overhead and – more importantly – they deliver better health results. That #37 ranking in the WHO survey is just the tip of the iceberg – we rank poorly in virtually all comparisons of health-care outcomes.

Our awkwardly assembled and poorly managed health-care system is indeed crude.

Uncivilized

Our health care system is also demonstrably uncivilized. It is simply uncivil to treat each other the way we do.

We leave tens of millions of our fellow citizens uncovered (and this will remain true even after the current health-care reform bill is fully implemented). Universal coverage is the ideal in the modern world, and every other modern industrialized nation except ours has figured out a way to cover all of their citizens.

And here in the U.S., those who are covered have to fight their way through armies of insurance-industry minions who try to rescind coverage and deny care.

Leaving millions of our fellow citizens exposed to the whims of illness and injury, and then denying us care even when we are covered – that is truly uncivilized.

Brutal

Finally, our health-care system is brutal.

The upshot of our crude and uncivilized system is that tens of thousands of Americans die every year for lack of medical care (25,000 to 40,000, depending on the source). That’s like having a travesty on the scale of the 9/11 attacks unfolding each and every month. That shouldn’t happen anywhere at any time. And it simply doesn’t happen in other modern countries.

Also, about a million Americans are driven into bankruptcy every year due to unpaid medical bills, a situation that is also unheard of in other modern countries.

Killing tens of thousands and bankrupting a million people every year, our health care system is definitely brutal.

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I’m not happy to deliver this news. Nor do I know how to fix this situation. Believe me, I would if I could.

Americans are not Barbarians. It’s a shame that we are saddled with such a barbaric system.

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A nice group showed up for the noodle group lunch today. There were 16 of us, plus one infant, so we had to spread out a bit.

We’ve now been meeting for more than 12 years – yikes!

Mike passed his camera around, and everyone except Michael got snapped. Here’s a Flickr slide show of the pix:

As usual, I overate, gorging myself on the panang curry combo plate. Also as usual, the service at Jai Thai was great and the food yummy.

The innovative Seattle Empty Bowls fundraiser is back in Ballard for the second year running.

Last year’s event was a run-away success, with more than 400 bowls flying off the shelves within a couple of hours. They are prepared this year with even more bowls, including some wooden ones and ones designed just for pets.

The event happens Saturday, February 27, 2010, 3:00pm, 8:00pm at the Ballard Community Center 6020 28th Ave NW and will once again benefit the Ballard Food Bank.

I’ll be there early to make sure I get another nice bowl. Hope to see you there.

Apple is starting to look just like any other technology company. Don’t get me wrong. I love my MacBook and my iPhone, and when MobileMe is working, it’s great. However, wasting well over an hour of my precious time resolving a simple login issue makes me wonder if Apple is so special after all.

I’m revamping the LarrySwanson.com website, so I added another directory to my iDisk (MobileMe’s nifty back-up gizmo). Apparently some attribute in a couple of the files in the new directory gave MobileMe some hiccups. I thought I had fixed the problem and went to the me.com interface to my iDisk to verify that the new set-up was working properly. When I tried to log in I got an “invalid password” notice. “No biggie,” I thought, “I’ll just reset the password and try again.”

Well, that lead to well over an hour of bizarrely un-user-friendly login problems at https://auth.me.com/authenticate. At this point – 15 years into mass consumer usage of the interwebs – I thought that resetting a user password would be a pretty straightforward task.

Well, no. Not at MobileMe.

After repeatedly trying their automated password-resetting system to no avail, I contacted a tech support person via their live chat gizmo. At first, she was having the same problem that I was, but after some magical background activity I was suddenly able to log in again.

I don’t like it when the interwebs behave irrationally. I’m doing a fresh MobileMe iDisk back-up right now and keeping my fingers crossed. I have multiple back-up systems in place, so I’m not too worried, but I just hate it when the interwebs get wonky.

OK, I’m done venting. . .

I just wanted to renew a few of my domain names. But, no. . . GoDaddy’s relentless up-selling system made me check and uncheck a bunch of boxes to execute this simple task. Not only that, I even had to go through a bunch of other machinations, including a call to a tech support/sales guy who had to manually cut and paste account info to remove domain protection that I don’t recall ordering in the first place. (I suspect that if you’re not careful they “give” it to you free for the first year when you first register and then make it so difficult to remove that they hope you’ll just renew it out of ignorance or frustration. In any case, a few simple domain name registration renewals took about 30 minutes of my scarce and precious time.)

After expressing my frustration with the situation to the sales guy and sharing my suspicions that the intention behind all of this unnecessary activity was to sell me more services, he said, “Yes, we hard sell. That’s how we get our bonuses.” Ah ha! Just as I suspected.

Can any of you recommend a reliable, non-sales-oriented, reasonably price domain name registrar? If so, please leave a comment below.

Empty Bowls is an innovative non-profit started by an art teacher in Michigan in the early 1990s. Ceramic artists create and donate hand-crafted bowls and then serve a simple meal in them at a fund-raising dinner. All of the proceeds go to local food banks and soup kitchens. The Empty Bowls organization supports food-related charities around the world and has raised millions of dollars to fight hunger.

Seattle Empty Bowls is holding a fund-raiser for the Ballard Food Bank Saturday, Feb. 28, 4:00-8:00 p.m., at the Ballard Community Center, 6020 28th Ave NW. There’s  a suggested $10 minimum donation (I’ll donate at least $20, and I urge you to outdo me and pitch in even more). You’ll get a beautiful hand-made ceramic bowl and a simple, hearty meal.

There will be live music (donated by local artists) throughout the evening.

If you’re interested in volunteering for the event or learning more about it, visit http://www.seattleemptybowls.org/