Year: 2013

Last week, a Pew survey found that one in ten Americans qualifies as an “online dater.” Among the other findings:

In general, online daters themselves give the experience high marks. Some 79% of online daters agree that online dating is a good way to meet people, and 70% of them agree that it helps people find a better romantic match because they have access to a wide range of potential partners.

Yet even some online daters view the process itself and the individuals they encounter on these sites somewhat negatively. Around one in ten online daters (13%) agree with the statement that “people who use online dating sites are desperate,” and 29% agree that online dating “keeps people from settling down because they always have options for people to date.”

Lance Whitney points to other perils:

More than half of online daters said they met someone who “seriously misrepresented” themselves in their online profile. And 28 percent said they were contacted by someone in a way that made them feel harassed or uncomfortable. Around 42 percent of women expressed that feeling, compared with just 17 percent of men.

Read a related Dish thread, “A Dating Site For Every Subculture,” here and here.

Barry Werth examines how prescription drugs are evaluated for effectiveness and cost. From the intro to the in-depth piece:

Prices are set and raised according to what the market will bear, and the parties who actually pay the drug companies will meet whatever price is charged for an effective drug to which there is no alternative. And so in determining the price for a drug, companies ask themselves questions that have next to nothing to do with the drugs’ costs. “It is not a science,” the veteran drug maker and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer told me. “It is a feel.”

There are inherent problems with a system where the government is one of the biggest payers, and where doctors, hospitals, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, drug companies, and investors all expect to profit handsomely from treating sick people, no matter how little real value they add to patients’ lives or to society.

Drug companies insist that they need to make billions of dollars on their medicines because their failure rate is so high and because they need to convince investors it is wise to sink money into research. That’s true, but it’s also true that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, buys more than 50 percent of its prescription drugs. And it buys them at prices designed to subsidize the rest of the industrial world, where the same drugs cost much less, although most poor governments can’t afford them at even those lower prices.

Still, we have to ask: When is the high price of a drug acceptable? Perhaps it is one thing when Vertex [Pharmaceuticals] charges $841 for two pills a day—every day of a patient’s life—for medicine that will save that life, and quite another when [French drug maker] Sanofi offers a cancer drug that is twice as expensive as its alternative but offers no obvious advantages.

Previous Dish on the subject here. Update from a reader:

Your post that touched on Vertex Pharmaceuticals was startlingly well-timed for me. I am a devoted Dish reader. I also have cystic fibrosis, and at this very moment I am doing my treatments for the condition at a hotel, where I’m staying prior to my appointment for a clinical trial of Vertex’s next CF drug in the pipeline.

Your entry brings up several important further issues and questions, some of which are covered in the remainder of the Werth piece. Vertex’s research has been heavily supported by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a charity that supports CF research, so it’s startling to see a charity-funded drug coming in at $300K per year. Vertex has also pledged to provide its drugs free of charge to any patient who cannot afford them or whose insurance will not cover them, which causes one to wonder whether more and more insurance companies would take a look at the situation and decide there’s no reason for them to cover the drugs.

Finally, Vertex has based its pricing based in part on the costs of other CF treatments that patients would theoretically – and hopefully – no longer need. However, living with CF, you learn quickly that if you don’t adhere to your treatment regimens, you can lose your health pretty rapidly, and I bet a lot of patients will be reluctant to simply cease all their other treatments right away, preferring to take their time confirming that Vertex’s drugs work as well as advertised before placing all of their eggs in the Vertex basket.

Thanks for your coverage of this important issue. While CF is a relatively rare disease, it has long been important as a harbinger of emerging trends in medicine, and this is certainly another instance in which that is the case. As our capabilities increase, more personalized drugs will become available or at least possible to produce for a wide range of conditions and diseases – but at what price?

For Lee Billings, the author of Five Billion Years Of Solitude: The Search For Life Among The Stars, space exploration offers “the only chance available for life on Earth to somehow escape a final, ultimate planetary and stellar death”:

We really owe our progress and our current state not only to our biology, but also to our planetary resources – to the fossil fuels we burn, the ores we mine, the rich diversity of other species we exploit, and so on. We’re presently using most of those resources in very unsustainable ways. We’ve already plucked all the low-hanging fruit, and much of what we are burning and mining and exploiting now is only available to use through our already sophisticated technology.

So if we somehow drive ourselves extinct, if all our great edifices collapse, I think it would be very difficult if not impossible for anything else to rise up and rebuild to where we are now, even given a half-billion or a billion years. People can and will disagree with me about that, but my position errs on the side of caution, on the side that says humanity’s present moment in the Sun is too valuable to treat as something disposable.

And before the Sun dies out, we will continue to get incredible footage like this:

(Photo: Image of the Earth and Moon taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft from a distance of 61 million miles. By NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

Timothy George considers the cottage industry of “Hell Houses” – theatrical productions of the underworld designed to terrify congregations into remaining chaste and faithful:

There are many variations on this theme: a hayride through hell, a demon-guided stroll in a cemetery, a train trip of terror, and so on—but all presentations have three things in common. First, there is a series of mini-dramas, gruesome, death-centered tableaux always presented in lurid, edgy (some say cheesy), soap-opera style. These run the gamut from smoking-related cancer deaths to school shootings, teen suicides, fiery car crashes, botched abortions, homosexual teens dying of AIDS, and all kinds of family traumas—domestic violence, divorce, sex abuse (including incest), and the like. The aim of the skit is to show the truth of the New Testament dictum, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), not only physical death in this world, but also eternal punishment in hell in the next.

After the “incidents” come the consequences, namely, a visit to hell. “Hell” is a dark, smoke-filled room complete with strobe lights and the shrieks of tortured souls. The dénouement is a Mel Gibson-esque portrayal of the crucifixion followed by a personal appeal to accept Jesus Christ. Sometimes an actor impersonating Jesus makes the appeal himself in a breath-minted, nose-to-nose encounter with those presumably shaken by what they have seen.

The demand has grown since Jerry Falwell pioneered the idea in the 1970s:

Colorado-based Keenan Roberts has led the way with his publication of a how-to kit for pastors and youth ministers who want to put a little scare-mongering into their teen evangelism program. For several hundred dollars you can buy this resource with directions on how to construct an effective Hell House. There are scripts for seven rooms and instruction on how to present a graphic hell scene and a closing “come to Jesus” scenario. If you want some help putting on a sizzling evangelism event this Halloween, then Roberts’ Hell House Outreach Kit just might be what you are looking for! This kit, available in all fifty states and twenty-six countries around the world, is sold to church leaders who want to “get prayed up and powered up” and “prepared for the ride” of their ministry life. The kit comes with this admonition: Shake your city with the most “in-your-face, high-flyin’, no denyin’, death-defyin’, Satan-be-cryin’, keep-ya-from-fryin’, theatrical stylin’, no holds barred, cutting-edge” evangelism tool of the new millennium!

Reading Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer alongside Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, Will Di Novi finds the book fitting for our own downbeat era:

[The novel’s protagonist] Binx Bolling is at first glance an unusual poster boy for the current depression, an era in which the quest for self-realization might seem an unaffordable luxury. But the search for meaning has never ebbed and flowed according to the fluctuations of the stock market. Millions of Americans led interior, profoundly solitary lives during the bubble years that started the twenty-first century, and they now confront even more acute feelings of dislocation. Binx is a soulful and profane standard-bearer for that disillusionment, “smelling merde from every quarter” of American life. He fails in his half-hearted love affairs. He confounds his family with his disregard for rectitude and tradition. Alienated from both the Old South and the New America, Binx staggers towards the same sobering realization that dogged Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1979. ”We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” Carter preached in his speech. “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

His concluding thoughts on the novel’s enduring lessons:

“Whenever there is a chance of gain there is also a chance of loss,” Binx declares in the frenzied aftermath of a car crash. “Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.” There’s something strangely comforting about Binx’s equanimity, his stoicism in the face of forces beyond his control. Like Binx and his Mad Men contemporaries, unaware of the assassinations and race riots and terrifying hairstyles lurking just around the corner, we have no idea what will emerge out of the seismic changes convulsing our national governments and our global economy. Consider The Moviegoer a signpost in these strange times, a beacon lit by the eternal flames of Percy’s imagination: the alienation and despair that persist in times of plenty and paucity alike; the power of language and humor to still these tremors and give them meaning. The malaise will endure, he warns us. The search will continue.