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When I wrote the post on the internet and books the other day, it occurred to me that one of the disincentives I have for reading books is that they're, well, harder to blog. That doesn't keep me from doing it, but if I need a new post, I'm likelier to start clicking around articles and other blogs rather than taking something off the shelf. Books just aren't a very natural fit for this form. First, articles and blog posts have shorter, more discrete, arguments, which is better for a single post. From a sheer time management perspective, you can't copy and paste from a book, which makes taking a lot of text a pain in the ass. You can't link to the text of a book, so your readers just have to trust your recitation of its arguments. And there's a lot more context in a book than an article, so you need more wind-up in the writing.But whatever. I'm going to try to blog more interesting things I read in book. Like this bit, from page 37 of Ezekiel Emanuel's Healthcare, Guaranteed.:
Except for the Hollywood writers' strike in 2008, almost all of the strikes and labor/management conflicts in the United States over the past decade have been related to healthcare. Demands for healthcare benefits have been at the to of the agenda in strikes staged by grocery workers in California; nurses at the Robert Woods Johnson University Hospital in New Jersey, mechanics at the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky; janitors in Houston, Texas; and the United Auto Workers during their recent negotiations with the car companies. Given the state of national healthcare, so-called "fringe benefits" can no longer be considered fringe. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 30 percent of America's total worker compensation now goes to benefits rather than to take-home pay.I talk a lot about healthcare as an economics issue, but it's also a labor issue. Unions would be better off if employers weren't terrified of being saddled with endless health care costs that follow an uncertain -- but always upward, and always fast -- cost trajectory. Negotiations could be about how much workers get paid for the work they do, rather than how much employers pay if the workers comes down with late-stage cancer. That makes a lot more sense for both sides, and it's one of the many, many reasons we've got to sever the link between health care and employers.
