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If a severe pandemic materializes, all of society could pay a heavy price for decades of failing to create a rational system of health care that works for all of us.
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From a population point of view, it's actually very important that as few people as possible get the flu. People getting the flu is not a private matter. The risk for healthy people is really about your friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.
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Every single administration in American political history has put cronies and pals and donors into political positions. But normally those people become the ambassador to Liechtenstein or the deputy undersecretary of commerce.
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There are several very good websites which describe the details of preparedness planning for citizens.
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Many low-income children face chronic stress from nutritional deprivation or persistent violence at home or in the community. By addressing their medical, emotional and developmental needs through a comprehensive clinical care model, we can lower their risk of developing long-term physical and mental health issues.
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Immigrant children are highly vulnerable. Their level of disadvantage and fragility has consistently grown due to factors outside their control.
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Every school should have well-rehearsed emergency response protocols covering a variety of possible scenarios, from fire to armed intruders. Schools should have good lines of communications with local emergency response officials and practice those relationships in drills and special exercises.
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Poverty leads to hardship and failure.
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President Obama was deeply and clearly affected by the Sandy Hook disaster.
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The problem with most children's hospitals is that they are passive. They are high quality. They are filled with the best doctors. But their function is to wait until kids get sick and get referred in.
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Kids get a lot of lip service in disaster planning, but they tend to get far fewer resources than they need. The mantra of 'children are our most valuable resource' is almost never matched by actual funding.
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Fallout shelters are like bell-bottoms. They've gone in and out of favor.
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The larger the disaster, the more necessary it is to have the government as the principal driver of recovery.
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Americans do not have a good track record when it comes to preparing for disasters, unless they see a clear possibility of personally being in harms way.
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Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program are the two most important safety net programs for children.
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If we ensure access to health care and 'best practice' asthma treatment for children, especially those at high risk, there is the potential to save the health care system billions of dollars.
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There's only so much academic disruption that a young child can deal with before he just can't catch up.
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There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb.
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The reality is that it's harder to recruit pediatric subspecialists if you're not recruiting them for a children's hospital.
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The risks are far greater to your child of not getting immunized than any kind of speculative potential relationship between the vaccine and the development of autism.
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When children are hungry, sleepy from a night spent fighting untreated asthma, or hobbled by symptoms of undiagnosed illnesses, they are less likely to do well in school.
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Hospitals are about healing.
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No organization should be allowed near disaster unless they are willing to cooperate with some level of established leadership.
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There has been a transition from a nuclear-annihilation scenario to an isolated-terrorist-nuclear-bomb scenario. But we're still locked into a mind-set that nuclear war would be so overwhelming that any kind of preparedness would be futile.