what would MacGyver do?

The health care mess. You know the one. The one screwing everything and everyone up. What would MacGyver do?

A story in today’s New York Times talks about “Bringing Comparison Shopping to the Doctor’s Office.” It opens with “Americans comparison-shop for items as small as groceries and as big as cars. But they rarely compare prices on their health care.” That’s the messaging I used when I was the flack for The Leapfrog Group, urging people to research hospitals to compare quality and track records before checking in for care. (Go to Leapfrog for a free tool that allows you to comparison shop for hospital care.)

What’s that you say? You don’t want to have to “shop” for a personal health care provider? You have quite enough on your plate, thank you? Can’t docs just get along, keep their hands clean, and be good, competent and honest?

With health care today embodying divergent modes of care, conflicting philosophies even on what “health” means, alternative vs. traditional medicine, and docs who overcharge and  ones who don’t wash their hands, we have to face the music. While our nation’s health continues its downward steady march, you need to add health literacy to your to do list.

MacGyer says do your homework when it comes to your health.

* * *

It’s Friday and I’m giving you homework? Criminy! Since school’s mostly out, I give you a funny video of BP oil execs handling a disastrous coffee spill…

One more thing: Text “GULF” to 50555 to give $10 to www.SaveOurGulf.org (founded by Robert F. Kennedy), more info at http://yhoo.it/9DPypz; or, text “WILDLIFE” to 20222 to give $10 to the National Wildlife Federation oil spill efforts, more info at http://nwf.org/oilspill.

keep your handcuffs in the bedroom

• Fully 1 of 5 families are led by a single parent.
• Only 1 of 5 families have a full-time parent at home.
• 77% agree that businesses should be required to provide paid family and medical leave.
• 75% agree that employers should be required to give workers more flexibility in their work schedules.

Really?! If my friends took this Center for American Progress (CAP) survey, I’m fairly certain those percentages would be closer to 100.

June Cleaver doesn't work here any more

I attended a CAP lunch forum this week on the work-family conflict. It’s no secret that we have “the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world.” Everyone has a sob story about how overworked and stressed they are, and how they don’t have enough time to devote to their kids and other loved ones.

i work out of my kitchen, too

Here’s mine. When I was pregnant with my first kid, I asked my employer (a progressive organization) if I could work part time after my maternity leave was up. The answer was no, so I quit because I didn’t want to stay in the usual full time (FT) professional job, which too often means working more than 40 hours/week. I was lucky to find a part time job a year later.

CAP’s “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict” profiles another person with a similar story. A TV news anchor (and mom) asked her employer if she could change her schedule to 40 hours/week, instead of the 50-60 hours she was currently putting in. The answer was no. She…that’s right, quit.

Ironically, the same all-or-nothing [full time or no time] employer soon hired her…to report part time. But now she had no job security, no pension, no health insurance, and no chance for advancement.

Employers are most likely to offer paid leave and workplace flexibility to [FT] workers, yet require long hours that make achieving a workable balance impossible for many. Conservatives and progressives alike fall for the false notion that women in these families who “opt out” of the workforce are voluntarily doing so for the sake of their kids.

I’m lucky as hell that we can live on my spouse’s income. But I can see a not-too-distant future when it may not be enough. (Of course, you could always argue that I could choose a simpler, cheaper life… Have you heard about the guy who lives with less than 50 things and blogs about the “Minimalist Lifestyle”?)

In February, the number of employees voluntarily quitting their jobs outpaced the number fired or discharged for the first time in a year and a half. Hmm, could it be that these quitters are beginning to chafe at the golden handcuffs around their wrists?

that's my spouse telecommuting. (i wish.)

In order to stem the bleeding from their ranks, the director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business says companies might try to do things like improve work-life balance for their employees.

That’s one of the things CAP’s white paper, “Resolving Work-Life Conflicts,” pushes. Families in every tax bracket need “short-term and extended paid leave and new workplace flexibility rules, as well as high-quality, affordable childcare and eldercare and freedom from discrimination based on family responsibilities.”

This past Monday, the US Senate passed a bill (S. 707) expanding the ability of federal workers to telecommute. My spouse has been trying to persuade his company to allow telecommuting. Sadly, no luck yet…

How are your handcuffs feeling?

i’m ok, you probably aren’t

You may or may not recall a New York Times best seller, I’m OK, You’re OK, published first in 1969. It’s among the top-selling self-help books of all time.

So, I’m OK, but you probably aren’t. That’s right: chances are, you probably need a bit of psychological fine-tuning. Sort of like when I said to my mother-in-law, who denied needing it, “You don’t need counseling like I need a bullet in the head.” (Yup, I said that.) (To my mother-in-law.) I know – confusing; what I meant was that she could use some counseling.

Of course, I say this out of love. For you, for my mom-in-law, for most every person I’ve ever met. Because let’s face it, who couldn’t use some professional help? Who doesn’t come armed with a swank piece of baggage or two? That’s part of what makes each of us so unique, so “lovable.”

I sent round to a small contingent of friends and family an article from the New York Times Magazine, “Married (Happily) With Issues.” Billing it as a Must Read, I added that due to its length, it should be printed out for enjoying on public transport or the loo.

The author and her spouse go through a similar counseling process as I did with mine. While her story focuses on the marital relationship, I want to write here about how crazy useful it is to learn about oneself and how to relate to others, anyone. They should teach this stuff in school! How about a “How to Win Friends” class before lunch, after Home Ec.?

In this Harvard Business Review interview, renown psychologist Daniel Goleman talks about how important emotional and social intelligence are in business settings. Of course, they’re equally important in personal life.

Emotional intelligence has to do with self-mastery…it makes for outstanding individual performers. When it comes to leadership, your success depends on everyone else’s effectiveness. So you need to be successful in influencing, persuading, growing, inspiring other people. That’s the social intelligence ability.

Emotional intelligence governs how we handle our emotions. In order to exert control over them, Goleman says you need to know what makes yourself “tick.” On the other hand, “Social intelligence is being able to tune in to other people, to read them…and to use that [knowledge] to communicate effectively with them. One of the sure signs of social intelligence is rapport. You feel [the other person is] really listening and empathizing. You feel felt.”

Professional counseling is expensive and time-consuming, but well worth the investment. Or, check out some books and seminars. Whatever you do, at least think about it. Be it on a one-on-one basis, or in league with your partner. All sorts of stuff gets discovered amongst your bags. Unpacking is hell, but you’ll feel so much more at home once you start.

And God bless her soul: my mom-in-law, she still speaks to me. And yes, I’m still unpacking bags over here.

green enough

“Give ‘em an apple!”

That’s what one panelist sniped to another a couple days ago at a discussion I attended on green marketing. She was referring to what she thought another panelist should offer her kids instead of organic gummy worms – a product she railed against as a prime example of greenwashing. The co-panelist who she was addressing had said that she’d consider buying the organic candy for her kids.

I’m totally with her. I mean, really? Was the first panelist saying that kids should never have candy? That’s fine for her, but I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone that they should ban candy from Childhood (or Adulthood, for that matter). As with everything, I believe in balance. A balance between good and evil, pleasure and discipline.

Now that our society is fully steeped in the concepts of all things green and sustainable, we find various factions pointing fingers at others for not being green enough. Such is the way of a cultural shift in the making.

On that note, I venture here into reviewing some products I wanted to try out on my quest to be healthy – for myself, others and the environment. By the way, you should know that it’s been only a handful of years since I myself switched from No regard for the environment and Very Little regard for health, to greater amounts of both. I was a non-veggie-eating, non-organic-buying, occasional smoker who thought the three R’s stood only for reading, writing and arithmetic.

A new glass water bottle has hit the market. To my knowledge, it’s the only glass bottle vying for position among others that don’t rely on plastic. Glass Lifefactory bottles ($22 for 22 oz bottle) have more utility than the standard aluminum Sigg bottles ($22 for a 20 oz bottle) because they are completely dishwasher-safe, can be used with hot liquids, and you don’t have to worry about how long fruit juice has been sitting in them. Drawbacks: breakable; heavier. (Note: it was shipped in a tight-fitting, regular strength cardboard box with no internal packing material, and arrived intact; later, my husband dropped it on the pavement and it survived beautifully.)

Now, you can go into an investigation as to how sustainably each bottle is produced and recycled, but I’ll leave that for an expert on such cradle-to-grave matters.

wrapped around 2 rolled-up tortillas

Next, my 7-year-old has been testing the Abeego food wrapper ($20) for the past month. Abeego graciously agreed to send me a free sample for this test. I wrap his sandwich every day in a hemp/cotton cloth infused with beeswax and plant extracts. He unwinds the string to unwrap and enjoy lunch handily. I’ve tried other cloth wrappers, but they all rely on a plastic component (that comes in direct contact with the food). Drawbacks: must hand wash; not sure how long it will last.

a tiffin (apparently invented in India)

I also like tiffins – stainless steel food containers. They’re good for messy food or food requiring a fork. Drawbacks: bulky; can’t be molded around food; has more than one part.

So, like everything else, these products have pros and cons that run the gamut of considerations including price, efficacy and health and environmental impact. I suspect, in the long run, that being supportive of each other’s efforts to make purchasing and lifestyle decisions will work better than sniping.

Where do you think green ends and greenwashing begins?

into the woods

“Why are the days shorter here than at home?”

That’s what my soon-to-be 7-year-old asked, in all eartnestness, the morning of our third day at the cabin in the woods. We rarely have the opportunity to be alone in nature, or anywhere outside the developed world, for more than a couple of hours at a time. We don’t have to scrape the mud off our shoes, check each other for ticks, or collapse into a chair as soon as we walk in the door, either.

mucking about the stream's edge

My son’s question is particularly ironic when you see that his days are pretty full between school, homework, piano practice, extracurriculars, Wii and the occasional play date. You’d think the days would fly by in comparison to our days of absolutely “nothing to do” in the woods at Old Rag mountain, part of the Blue Ridge mountain range in Virginia. Beyond eating and cleaning up after ourselves, our days consisted of hikes, imaginary play, books and a couple of board games.

My goal in retreating from the city was to make my kids bored. I wanted them to get to the point of having to be creative and entertain themselves outside – with no boxed games, no electronics, no markers and… no adult supervision.

For my own moments of boredom, I brought a copy of Last Child in the Woods — Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. According to author Richard Louv, kids who spend time in nature do better in school, and lack of contact with nature is linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). And we all know that hanging out in nature reduces stress.

It turns out that our trip to the country is in vogue: last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine says agritourism is trending right now. Apparently, people are in search of a “simpler life.”

the kids' "magic crystal rocks"

Of course, it took some haranguing to get the kids to come outside for no concrete purpose. They whined that taking a walk was “Boring!” But once my 4-year-old hit the trail, she proved to be quite the naturalist, crouching over a 4” x 4” patch of ground in which she could view and manipulate components of a sylvan universe. We didn’t get much trail covered as she was difficult to budge from her frequent and prolonged stops to study the world underfoot. One morning, she added lichen, fern and bloodroot to her growing store of knowledge.

I like to think as author Gretel Erhlich does: that we “stumble on divinity” when we study nature.

What are your remedies for nature-deficit disorder?

This post is dedicated to Diane and Lowell, without whose generosity (and cabin in the woods) my kids would not have come to know the wonder of watching a spider spin his web, or the joy of falling off a log suspended four feet off the ground. And to Mary and Barney who helped open wider the doors to nature.