Obamaville May 24 - The Election - Trump's Greatest Reality Show - America's Greatest Test

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In one corner - The most experienced candidate ever to run for President Hillary Clinton

In the other corner - The most outrageous inexperienced candidate ever to run for President Donald Trump

For those of you who take the 2016 presidential campaign so seriously that you are blinded by hate, overwhelmed by fear, and terrified by the thought of losing, well, I really do not know the antidote to help you make it through the long, dark night.

Had President Obama been successful in legalizing marijuana perhaps there might have been a joint strong enough to help but such was not the case.  You might consider an extended vacation in Colorado where you could remain on a Rocky Mountain high until after November.  Then again, you might consider securing an option on a nice home in Nova Scotia to settle in if you lose.

How long ago it seems this campaign for the ages started with a line up of highly qualified Republicans in the shape of governors, senators, former senate candidates, males, and a female, quite an all-star line up.  Many thought it was the best and most qualified field of candidates ever assembled. Of course, the GOP had two former presidents ready to come to the aid of the heir-apparent of the GOP dynasty, the Bush family.

On the Democratic side was the pre-emptive favorite to win it all, a former White House First Lady, senator, secretary of state, and career politician who just happened to also be a multi-millionaire.  Waiting in the wings was another former popular president known for his wit and charisma who expected to whisk his wife back into the White House, Bill Clinton.

The Democratic field was "fixed" for Hillary but the Republican field was expected to be a blood bath between the conservatives, the more conservatives, the radical right-wing conservatives, and those who wore both suspenders and belts, along with a quiet little voice from a libertarian in the wilderness named Rand Paul for diversity.

The odds on favorites to square off in the fall election were Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the legacy candidates with the blue blood and access to a couple of billion dollars for the campaign.

Then someone opened the gates of Hell, most likely an innocent bureaucrat who was tired and pulled the wrong lever.

The Outcasts Emerge

One should expect the unexpected when two certain losers in the eyes of the news media and politicians materialize on the scene.  One was wrapped in gold and stepped out of an escalator from heaven while the other suddenly appeared through a fog of socialism and appeared older than Moses.

The news media laughed and immediately condemned them to the scrap heap of presidential trivia mocking their intent and ridiculing their credentials.

I mean, Trump, the Republican candidate, never ran for political office before.  Fact is he was a Democrat before he filed and a long time contributor to left wing causes including previous campaigns of Hillary Clinton.

His claim to fame, he build VERY big buildings and was more or less a billionaire.  Most knew him as a reality talk show host who gave bombastic a new definition, knew almost nothing about what a president does, and considers his best advisor to be the person facing him in the mirror.

On the Democratic side came a candidate who was not even a Democrat but a registered Independent riding his own wave of socialism for the masses, and standing for about everything America hated.  A socialist might be a Stalin, Hitler, Castro, or some figment of our imagination but not a real person in the citadel of Democracy.

We had a history of destroying socialism in wars and elections since 1776.  As if not being a Democrat and being a rabid socialist were not enough to get the Democratic nomination, add to that the fact Bernie Sanders was also as old as Moses and Jewish to boot.  If elected, he would be the oldest person ever elected to the presidency.

America prides itself in being modern and the last three presidents were all part of the Baby Boomer generation, meaning they were born after the Great War.  We think young and spend a fortune trying to act young so the prospects for someone old enough to be our grandfather, well not quite, winning the election was outrageous.  Our national slogan seemed to be "Young is fun and old sucks."

Enter the time machine and come to the present.

The pre-emptive president Hillary Clinton is coming upon the last primary elections of the presidential year and lo and behold, pesky old Bernie Sanders is still around drawing tens of thousands of young people disenfranchised by Hillary to campaign rallies and causing a rather significant number of worry lines in the already battle tested face of Clinton.

As for the Republican challenger to the Clinton machine, perhaps even more remarkable than Bernie, is the brash and brazen golden boy from Queens who virtually destroyed the entire field of highly qualified Republicans on the way to the nomination.

The impact of Bernie Sanders on the election is rather historic while the impact of Trump on the election just might be cataclysmic.

You see, Bernie was a conventional politician, even a sitting Senator, an indentured member of The Establishment, who used the system to poke holes in the Clinton mystic.  I suspect because he was from Vermont, and the first socialist mayor of a big town, few people ever heard of him.

Trump, well he had other ideas on how to win.  Having never run for office before, he had no loyalty to conventional rules, experience, or consultants.  In fact, he had no clue what they might be.

What he did have was a sixth sense of the mood of the public and he tapped right into a sense of frustration and disgust with the political establishment and the news media establishment by the people.  Whether by design or accident, he knew people were not interested in experience or flowing promises and policy platforms.

People were mad as Hell, and there was no better person to lead them in their anger and frustration than Donald Trump, the outsider from politics, the man who got things done.  He may not have the answers, he may twist facts and exaggerate, but they could count on him to fight for the little people against the ironclad political establishment running and wrecking our nation.

The result, the election rules, and decorum went out the window along with every rule of survival in politics.  Even our vaunted fourth estate, the press, was steamrolled by Trump because of his free wheeling style and most unusual approach.

Bernie calls for a revolution, Trump already shoved it down the throats of The Establishment, and we have not even reached the conventions to nominate the party candidates.

Nearly a month before the end of the primary elections and two months before the convention Trump finished demolishing the entire sixteen-person field running against him.

Already he has turned his machine gun barrage of charges against Hillary and at times it has resembled the Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago.

No one has a clue as to what will happen the last six months until the election.  Trump has already surged into a tie with Hillary.  Leaders of foreign nations have condemned Trump, and still he climbs in the polls.

America is in for one of the most entertaining presidential campaigns in history as Donald Trump finally gets his wish, to be part of the greatest reality show in history.  If he wins, he most likely faces even bigger hurdles winning over the people and then the leaders of the world.

Nothing will ever be the same in politics and maybe not even in life, as we know it.  Some people have long held the belief that people grow into the responsibilities of the presidency.  Students of history can point to many examples and even our most recent president, Barack Obama, has overcome many issues with inexperience to grow into the job.

The survivor of this raucous campaign, whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, face many challenges if elected president, and will most certainly be tested by our friends and enemies around the world.  Healing America after the election will be the greatest challenge.  For our part, we must help America heal.

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Health Care in America - What you better know! Insights by Dr. Jon Robison

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Dr. Jon and sidekick Lady

Jon Robison

Dr. Jon Robison at salveopartners.com

What Do the EEOC, Wellness Industry, Urban Dictionary, Humpty Dumpty and George Orwell Have In Common?

May 18, 2016

                 "A word means what I choose it to mean—neither more or less.”                                                                                                                            --Humpty Dumpty

Written Together With Al Lewis 

The wellness industry is rejoicing at the EEOC’s final rulings on workplace wellness programs. The results boil down to this. The programs can require participation, compel employees to hand over medical information from screenings and health risk assessments (and even their DNA) and punish them if they don’t comply, as long as the programs are voluntary.

If you are having trouble reconciling the words require, compel and punish with voluntary, so were we. In fact, befuddled by the EEOC / Wellness Industry’s use of the term “voluntary” we went to the source seeking answers.  Google helped us to look more deeply into definitions of “voluntary” to make sure we weren’t missing something. Here are a couple we found:

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                        Dictionary.com -- done, made, brought about, undertaken, etc., of one's own accord or by free choice

·                   Merriam Webster -- done or given because you want to and not because you are forced to: done or given by choice

No less befuddled, we were determined not to give up! We thought: “This definition has got to come from somewhere; they cannot just have made it up. Perhaps a more updated, hip source is needed here. What about the Urban Dictionary?” And sure enough, there we found the answer:

Urban dictionary -- do it or you will lose your job

Now we were getting somewhere. In the eyes of the wellness industry and now also apparently the EEOC, “voluntary” means “coerced, pressured, incentivized, and/or punished.” In other words “voluntary” means “involuntary.” (In the wellness industry, defining things as their opposites is par for the course. Health Fitness Corporation’s Chief Medical Officer has famously described the difference between making “life-saving catches of 514” Nebraska employees with cancer and admitting that these employees never had cancer at all as “semantics.”)

Fascinating! We wondered if there might be any literary precedents for defining this particular word as the opposite of what it really means.

Then we remembered George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Consider Napoleon’s decree that, in addition to an already 60-hour work week, the animals would be asked to work on Sunday afternoons as well:

          “This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself              from it would have his rations reduced by half.”

Lessons Learned

We might take solace in the fact that the EEOC and the wellness industry settled on punishments of "only” 30% (roughly $1800) for employees who choose not to volunteer. Interestingly, one politician didn’t think that punishment would generate enough voluntary participation. He said we should impose penalties for all programs of 50% (now possible only for smokers); he must have been a big Orwell fan.

Aside from the self-serving albeit admittedly highly creative use of the English language, here are the problems with these guidelines:

·          It has been proven that forced voluntary wellness programs (the “pry, poke and prod” variety of programs) have not paid and cannot pay for themselves;

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            Even the so-called best programs –the ones that win the Koop Award -- show trivial risk reduction (before adding back in dropouts and non-participants), and fabricate their savings figures;

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             Screenings and HRA’s are more likely to lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment than to health improvement;

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          Many workplace programs--like those for weight loss--are completely ineffective, that is, when they are not busy harming employees;

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         Thirty years of consistent and definitive research that the incentive approach being recommended does not lead to sustained behavior change and engenders a wide variety of iatrogenic consequences;

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           These type of programs are highly unpopular with employees, which means they are much more likely to diminish than enhance employee engagement.

The real question here is not how much employers can punish employees who refuse to submit to forced “wellness or else” programs. The real question is: are these initiatives a good idea? And the answer, according to all the research not financed by the wellness industry itself, is a resounding NO! So how about asking Congress to put an end to involuntary, voluntary wellness programs, and instead allow only truly voluntary, voluntary ones?

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Health Care in America - What you better know! Insights by Dr. Jon Robison

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Dr. Jon Robison and sidekick Lady

Jon Robison

Dr. Jon Robison at salveopartners.com

Top 10 Reasons To…JUST WALK AWAY!

May 23, 2016

Business is certainly booming for wellness at the workplace. Especially since the passage of the wellness provisions of the Affordable Care Act, new employee wellness promoting entities are popping up like dandelions in the spring.  And more and more companies are spending considerable amounts of money on these programs. In fact, in the next few years, the workplace wellness industry is predicted to grow by almost 8 and 1/2% annually, leading to revenues of more than 12 billion dollars in the United States alone. Unfortunately, as health care expert Leah Binder wrote in Forbes in 2014:

“This rapid escalation in employer investment has spawned a “Wild West” kind of market for wellness and disease management, with thousands of vendors overwhelming employers, often touting exaggerated claims of effectiveness.”

With this in mind we propose some simple guidelines (with links for additional information) to help you just walk away from proposals (suggested by vendors, consultants, brokers, relatives, etc.) that are more likely to interfere with rather than enhance employee engagement and well being. From the least to the most egregious we propose;

The Top 10 Reasons to - JUST WALK AWAY:

10. Someone tells you they can save you money on health care costs                                by instituting bio-metric screens and/or HRA’s at the workplace.

 9. Someone suggests that you will have a better chance of showing savings from       employee wellness programs if you use VOI rather than ROI.

 8. Someone uses the terms participation and engagement interchangeably.

 7. Someone suggests that a healthy organizational culture has to do with gym            memberships, broccoli in the cafeteria and stress management programs.

6. Someone suggests that pry, prod, poke and punish “wellness or else”                        programs will improve engagement and lift employee morale. Also:                        http://www.firstreportnow.com/articles/debate-employer-sponsored-                  wellness-programs

5. Someone offers you an employee weight loss program, contest, competition,         app, or a secret weight loss berry from the Amazon. Also:                                            https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/poodle-science-what-can-teach-us-weight-      health-jon-robison?trk=mp-author-card                                        

4. Someone suggests that they can show you how to turn extrinsic motivation            into intrinsic motivation with or without a magic wand.

3. Someone suggests that in order to get employees to participate in wellness            programs you need to be more aggressive or stern with them, make                        participation mandatory or perhaps have them find another job if they don’t.

2. Someone cites Katherine Baicker’s 2010 wellness ROI publication as proof            that wellness saves money. Also http://ift.tt/1xB22Hb

And, without  a doubt, the current number one reason to just walk away!

1. Someone suggests that your wellness program is voluntary even though you pay employees to participate and/or fine them if they don’t.

We hope this list will save you from spending time and money on initiatives that have only minimal efficacy and a high likelihood of iatrogenesis.  So, the next time someone proposes one of these to you, remember the immortal words of the hit single of the American baroque pop band - The Left Banke – rated by Rolling Stone as #220 of the 500 greatest songs of all time -  and - Just Walk Away - Renee. (Four Tops cover Here)

ps - As we continue the process of ushering workplace wellness into the 21st Century, please feel free to add your own reasons to just walk away – and, in the interest of saving time and energy, I am guessing someone will want to add - just walk away – if someone (like me) suggests you should just walk away(for any of the above 10 reasons).

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Polls and the News Media - the Nastiest Poll of All - SIX Percent

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As we sit back and tune in to another polarizing cable news show about the presidential race, we prepare ourselves for a barrage of insults, half-truths, rumors, innuendo, lies, distortions, agitations, and frustrations, and that is just what is coming from the news reporters and commentators, not the candidates.

They say deaths from opiate over-doses in America have tripled in the past four years.  One wonders if the polarizing hatred seen on cable television 24/7 might be a factor.  What bigger source of pain can there be than politicians, especially ones who will say anything to win and make up all kinds of lies about the others.

Right next to the beer and remote control are the bottles.

In the bottles, you will find the legal pain relief opioid drugs including:

• codeine (only available in generic form)
• fentanyl (Actiq, Duragesic, Fentora)
• hydrocodone (Hysingla ER, Zohydro ER) 
• hydrocodone/acetaminophen (Lorcet, Lortab, Norco, Vicodin)
• hydromorphone (Dilaudid, Exalgo)
• meperidine (Demerol)
• methadone (Dolophine, Methadose)
• morphine (Astramorph, Avinza, Kadian, MS Contin, Ora-Morph SR)
• oxycodone (OxyContin, Oxecta, Roxicodone)
• oxycodone and acetaminophen (Percocet, Endocet, Roxicet)
• oxycodone and naloxone (Targiniq ER)

Now you are ready to face the pain of what you are about to hear.

I am pretty certain lying and political campaigns are synonymous, inter-related, Ying and Yang.  Even fact checkers have to be fact checked to see whose side they are protecting.  Instead of saying "Veritas vos liberabit", "The truth is out there," perhaps one should say "Est ex veritate non est," "No truth is out there."

With that in mind we come to a poll that should be the most dreaded news ever reported by the media.  Of course they do not report it.  What they do report is how Trump has the highest unfavorable rating in modern history.

It is the truth they refuse to report that weighs down on them.  Here is the headline they should be reporting.

   

New Polls force Democrats to push Panic Button as Main Street Media attack Trump

Since we know polls in America show journalists covering the presidential campaign are liberal by a 12-1 margin, it should be no surprise that the liberal media is taking up the attack to stop Trump in the general election.

Trump still has not secured the Republican nomination and Clinton continues to battle Bernie Sanders for media coverage, but the media is acting as if Trump is a real threat to beat the media favorite Clinton.

Quite a contrast to earlier in the campaign when the media dismissed Trump yet wanted him to win the GOP nomination since polls showed Hillary winning by a landslide if Trump were the opponent.

A funny thing happened on the way to the conventions and polls confirmed it after Trump's landslide wins in the Northeast and Indiana primaries blew his last two opponents, Cruz and Kasich, out of it.

Trump and Clinton are now in a near dead heat in nationwide polls and the general election has not even begun.  This week when Trump suddenly started winning the support of major GOP party officials and it looks like the Republicans are going to be united more tremors were felt in the Clinton campaign.

The press says very little about the crosstabs in the polls, and for good reason.  You hear Trump has the highest unfavorable score ever recorded at 65%, yet no one says Hillary has the second highest unfavorable ever recorded at 57%.

So the media has mounted a massive campaign to discredit Trump and drag out anything he ever did in his life, say 30 to 50 years ago, as if it will have a direct effect on whether he pushes the nuclear button.  That is about as yellow as journalism can be.

However, I am not defending Trump.  I say, what he says and does today, is far more relevant than what he did three or four decades ago.  I mean people do change over the course of a lifetime. Besides, every time he opens his mouth he is capable of stumbling over his tongue.

To me fair reporting is an issue of credibility.  Now to get to the most dreaded poll results not reported.

The American Press Institute published a survey April 18, 2016, and the real headline was:

"Only 6% of Americans trust the media"

Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public’s view of other institutions. In this presidential campaign year, Democrats were more likely to trust the news media than Republicans or independents.

The bottom line is this.  Why is the media trashing Trump as a strategy to defeat him, pointing to his negative ratings in public polls, when 94% of the same public does not trust the media?

To me the 35% of the public trusting Trump today is six times better than the public trusts the media, 6%.  That is truth in reporting.

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