Parting words until Sunday

As usual, I'll be off of the planet tomorrow so you won't get the next installment of the Perils of Pauline until Sunday. Meanwhile, a couple of quick hits.

First, two people who are doing really great work are Alan Sager and Deborah Socolar at the Health Reform Program at the BU School of Public Health. They have done the actual calculations to show that we're just wasting about half of the billion smackers a week we spend on health care in Massachusetts -- a lot of it for administrative expenses. We could cover everybody, and spend less. (The People's Republic of Massachusetts is just an extreme case of the situation nationwide.) They've got it figured out, so check out their site here, and in particular check out the Access and Affordability Monitoring Project.

Second, in the Ain't Science Wonderful Department, scientists in Italy have calculated cocaine consumption in northern Italy by measuring the amount of a cocaine metabolite in the Po river. They figure it's 4 kilograms a day. Oooookay. That makes me seriously worry about Santa Monica Bay.