Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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The found passport bothers me too. If you were going to go and carry out an attack like this, why would you have your passport with you? I didn't think it was compulsory to carry ID in France any more?
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Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to despud,
If women feel strongly enough that the male-dominated parties don’t represent their views, then start a Women’s Party.
*snore*
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the reason to argue for gender quotas is so that women's "views" are represented. That's not it at all. Women make up half the population. Half of it. Or even slightly more. We're not a "single issue" group. -
Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to Angela Hart,
Well, if you take the meaning of "speaker" as something that magnifies the volume of sound input elsewhere...
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to Russell Brown,
utter fucking horrorshow
A perfect description. Chills of horror is exactly what I felt watching it – to see all those women shut down… If you want to know what rape culture looks like, that’s (one facet of) it.
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to Russell Brown,
And here’s the video of one of Key’s DPS guards pushing Kelvin Davis after he told Key he was “gutless” in the foyer earlier.
It’s not the worst assault ever, but that’s beside the point. Key was in no danger – he was already on his way. And Prime Ministerial security guards do not get to lay a hand on Members of Parliament who are doing their jobs.
I'd read this before I read any other accounts of it. Both Audrey Young ("MPs should have the freedom to walk the corridors of power without being verbally assaulted by anyone, the public, the media, or political opponents.")and Tracy Watkins ("It's one thing to have your opponents yelling insults across the House, and quite another to be waylaid by a fellow MP in the corridor and verbally abused.") paint Davis as the assaulter, and Key as the assaulted.
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What B Jones said. If Key wants to run the line that Labour are supporting rapists, then the logical conclusion is that Key wants the rapists to come to New Zealand, not stay in Australia. How on earth does that manage to win him votes?
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
What if we all had solar panels on the roof or our own wind turbine in the garden?
It would cost much, much more that $120?
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Thinking about the way health economics works, it might be possible to make a case for the $120 backup for every machine, thanks (alas) to the death of Wayne Haamia. Wayne died at 28. The average New Zealand life expectancy is, what, 81 years? So that would be 53 years of life lost, at the New Zealand value of a life year now costed at $150,000, that's $7,950,000. That would buy 66,250 of those $120 AGM batteries at retail price, and the Ministry of Health would be able to buy in bulk and get them cheaper. Even if not, I doubt very much that there are 66,250 people in NZ using BiPap machines.
Reading that news item, it's so very clear that the solution suggested by the Haamia family is far more sound and reliable than their predicted Coroner's recommendation. If your lines company calls you at 4.30am saying "halp, soz, the electricities have stopped working", that's not giving you a lot of time to find an alternative power souce: you really do need the backup power ready to go then and there. -
Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Thanks for asking :-D… though you may regret it.
And of course when I review my figures, I find I have posted in haste, and must now repent. The actual figure per night is somewhere in the range of about $700 – $1425 rather than “over $4500”. The “over $4500” figure is per hospital stay, rather than per night. Either way, it’s still a significant saving for the DHB.
Source: My own number-crunching. As an epidemiologist, I have access to and work with anonymised national hospitalisation data. I did a quick check on the Health & Disability Ethics Committee form to confirm this analysis was exempt from needing ethics approval.
One of the fields in hospitalisation data is “cost weight”. This provides an index of how expensive any given hospitalisation was to treat. Each year the Ministry of Health sets a cost weight multiplier. To find out the cost of any hospitalisation you multiply the index by the cost weight multiplier for that year.
The cost weight multiplier for 2014/15 was $4681.97. If you exclude births, the average cost weight index for a hospital stay is 1.11, which gives an average cost per stay of $5194.92 (I was being conservative with the $4500, or so I thought).
The most recent data I have is 2013, but this should be recent enough to be relevant. I excluded a whole bunch of admissions as being unlikely to be similar to the author’s relative’s case: births-related admissions, same-day discharges, transfers, non-NZ residents.
I then summed the cost weight index for all patients, multiplied it by the cost weight multiplier, and then divided by the total number of hospital stay nights. That comes to 0.25 (rounded). If we multiply this by the cost weight multiplier, we get $1161.19 per night.
There are ways to make this figure more similar to the author’s hypothetical relative visit. The most obvious one is to include only arranged admissions. That gets the figure down to $691.73 per night, though that’s for the 2014/15 tax year, so would be a little higher this year.
Or I can limit the data further by health specialty, to a range of respiratory specialty codes. That gets us back up to $1425.67 per night.
There are also additional complications – a night in hospital increases your risk of subsequent hospitalisation, which then costs the DHB more. I haven’t factored that into the cost.
So an estimate of the likely cost for the author’s relative, or any other hypothetical patient, really does depend on how we slice the cake.
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I think the DHB is extremely lucky to have had the option to pay $104 for the cost of a generator, when the average cost of a night in hospital is well over $4500.
And yes, given that planned power outages are necessary and inevitable, it makes absolute sense for a clear, workable, known back-up plan for medically dependent people to be part of their care plan.