In a recent speech to the AMA, President Barak Obama tantalized the assembled with the possibility of reforming medical malpractice law as part of the comprehensive health care system overhaul.

There is no denying the fact that American malpractice laws and awards contribute to the overall cost of medical care. The American system of malpractice law provides four distinct areas that drive up the cost of suits brought for medical malpractice. From the Wall Street journal article:

The first is jury trials, which can veer out of control and in any case introduce significant uncertainty. The second is the contingency-fee system, which allows well-heeled lawyers to self-finance litigation. The third is the rule that makes each side bear its own costs. This induces riskier lawsuits than are undertaken in most other countries, such as Canada, England and most of Europe, where the loser pays the legal costs of the winner. The fourth is extensive pretrial discovery outside the direct supervision of judges, which occurs far more readily here than elsewhere.

Besides these four things, American judges often let juries decide whether honest mistakes are malpractice instead of requiring specific acts of negligence be defined or of showing the precise causal connection between a negligent act and actual injury.

But before anyRochester medical malpractice attorney worries about being put out of business, Mr. Obama hedged his bets by declining to endorse the only medical malpractice reform with real bite — a national cap on damages for pain and suffering.

This cap would make a substantial difference. Other reforms, such as rules that limit contingency fees, shorten statutes of limitation, or confine each defendant’s tort exposure to his proportionate share of the harm, have small and uncertain effects.

Further complications occur with the latitude individual states have in setting malpractice rules and further differences occur between juries of big cities compared to those in small towns. It’s been suggested that putting in place a specialized commission such as they have in France that has uniform rules to follow and set guidelines for awards be used in place of the present system. While this step isn’t one I’m particularly in favor of, I can see certain merit to having a board review the facts of a case before it’s sent to a jury to determine if a malpractice was actually done and set a pre-trial awards scale that the jury or judge must adhere to. Sort of like an inquest in the case of a suspicious death.

And it isn’t the cost of malpractice insuranace that is driving up the cost of health care so much as defensive medical practices are. Physicians, in an attempt to avoid malpractice suits often prescribe tests and drugs they would not otherwise prescribe in order to avoid being seen as negligent. It’s these practices that are driving up the cost of health care in America.

Reorganizing malpractice laws and setting caps on awards would go a long way to controlling this aspect of health care.

What do you feel about malpractice suits? Do juries sometimes go too far in their awards? Is a jury trial the best way to handle malpractice?

I routinely look through the web for new themes that I might incorporate on one of my blogs.  I have pretty definite ideas about layout and functions they need to have, although more and more, if it’s reasonably close on those I can tweak the back end to perform like I want it to.

For me, one of the big attractions of a theme seems to be visual.

I can’t tell you the number of themes I’ve downloaded and installed only to go “ick – not me” and discard it. And then there are the ones that I’ve desperately tried to alter the graphics to make the theme more appealing to still go “EWWW! not working” and discard it. Is this something you go through, too? I would hate to think I’m the only theme-trier-on-er in the blogosphere!

I’ll admit that the graphics on this theme were not my first choice. They are in the “grunge” style which really isn’t me. I changed many of them to suit me, although the grunge flavor is still present to some extent.

Despite being something I don’t associate with the me I want to project to the world, there was something about this theme’s graphics that caught my eye and piqued my interest. That I’ve been able to make the tweaks and twitches to make it work for me is probably just pure dumb luck. But work it has and for longer than any other in the nearly 3 year history of this site!

I suppose since the theme author isn’t making an efforts to keep the theme compatible with new versions of WP, I need to begin searching for a new theme. And I’ll confess to looking in a rather desultory way, but so far haven’t even found one to try on.

If you come across any really cool themes, drop me a line — OK?

One of the most often complained of attributes that a website can have is autoplaying music.  Ever since it became possible to stream music from your site, some individuals use (and over use) this technique.

Most people I talk to really have issues with visiting a site and getting an earful of music.

But what about sales pitches? We hear ads all day long on radio and television, so is it unrealistic to not find them on the web as well?

I was reading an article the other day about enhancing your web effectiveness with sound. It talked about giving your website a voice — a real voice in this case. Using voice-over to deliver a message to your visitors that may be missed by only offering text. While text is necessary for rankings in the search engines, this article tried really hard to make me believe that my visitors would love to hear a voice giving them a short, but important message.

I’m thinking that no, MY readers would NOT be impressed by any voice giving them any information — no matter if it were James Earl Jones‘ resonating tones or the dulcet voice of Beyonce doing the talking.

Now it also talked about a sound logo — something like the Tony the Tiger’s “Grrrrrrreat!” but fitting for the website. Now they might tolerate that. MIGHT.

But all in all, I think using music, voice-overs or sound-bite logo files will not be the way of this website. Call it a personal preference of mine — I like my websites quiet and visual only.

Thinking on this deeper, though — for any visitor who is visually impaired, and who isn’t already using a screen reader, having the site be able to offer them the ability to hear it would be nice. Not sure exactly how that would work unless it could be done with CSS coding and some way for the site to “know” this visitor was visually impaired — maybe a special browser for visually impaired people.

What do you think about websites that open up with someone talking? Do you click off of them as quickly as I do? If I created a sound-bite logo for this site — say that played a 10 second something that wasn’t too loud, would that drive you away? Or could you suffer that in order to read my scintillating articles?

Well, it may end up being a question that ranks right up there with using a motorcycle jack — why would you?

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Upgrading your computer to accomodate new technology or new hardware can be done in a variety of ways, but I want to focus on the 3 most common and easiest to do by a non-technical user.

Too Little Memory

If you’re experiencing a slow down of your computer with regards to opening and closing programs, you may be undersupplied on random access memory or RAM. Having too little computer memory is one of the most common problems with today’s memory-hogging applications, but it’s one of the least expensive issues to solve.

You can’t just run out and by RAM. You will need to first determine what kind of RAM your unit needs and then determine if you can add more to it. Go to Start/Control Panel/System.  A window showing your operating system and how much memory you currently have is shown along with other information about your machine.

The next step is to either refer to your documentation or go to the website of the manufacturer of your computer to find out how much memory and what type your unit holds. My laptop is a Toshiba A215 and uses DDR2-5200 memory. It will only hold a maximum of 4 GB, so I’m at the maximum for this laptop, so can’t add more.

Purchase the correct type and number of sticks of memory, open your case and the memory is easily replaced by snapping out the old and snapping in the new.

Too Little Hard Drive Space

The next issue we encounter is where you have no more room to save files. You can and should archive files to portable media such as an external hard drive or DVD/CD. Email boxes are notorious for having too many saved emails in them especially ones with large attachments. Be sure to periodically go through your email box to delete those messages that you don’t need any longer.

Adding a new hard drive is fairly easy though. Most of the newer computers are using SATA drives so you need to find out what kind of drives your computer will accept. Older units used IDE drives and those are fairly cheap. The SATA drives are a bit more expensive.

Maintenance To Keep Your Computer Running Effortlessly

There are some rather simple maintenance tasks that you should run monthly that will help keep your computer running smoothly. Defragmenting your hard drive is one of those tasks and while the built in defragmenter works OK, there are 3rd party ones that work better and don’t keep you from doing other tasks while they work.

I use IOBit Smart Defrag – it’s a free and very weightless utility.

Cleaning your computer of temporary files is another way to keep it running smoothly. CCleaner is another free utility that works very well at keeping your computer free of unnecessary files.

If you’re having issues with your computer running slowly, have checked it for spyware and viruses then these other tips may get you back running smoothly and quickly in a hurry.

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