Inauguration Weekend

A crowd of about 400,000 people came to this concert on the National Mall that surrounded the reflective pool of the Lincoln Memorial. Aaron, Emily and I drove up on the Saturday before this event and stayed in an empty apartment that Aaron's sister-in-law owned that was two blocks from the Watergate. Aaron's mother lives at the Watergate so this was our home base for the inauguration weekend. 

This concert was a star studded event that included artists and actors including Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Bono, John Mellencamp, James Taylor, Sheryl Crow, Garth Brooks, Steve Carell, Jack Black, Beyonce, and many more. Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama gave a speech near the end of the ceremony.  Below is a video of Obama's speech near the end of the concert. 

On Tuesday, inauguration day we got up at about 7:30am and headed towards the mall at about 8:30am. We figured that we would not get very close but we wanted to get near the Washington Monument because this was a higher ground and from there we would be able to see in both directions toward the Capitol and towards the Lincoln Memorial and look out over the crowd. We had been talking to other people who said there would be leaving at 5am or earlier to get a good spot. We were not quite that enthusiastic and it worked out really well for us. We basically walked right in at the Lincoln memorial and were able to make it up to exactly where we wanted to next to the Washington Monument. There was a good size crowd, but I guess because we were going to be so far away from the Capitol there was no security. By the time we got to where we wanted to be we had about another hour to wait in the freezing cold before the show started. The cold doesn't really set in until you stop and stand still for a little while. 

The crowd was already very large (art of crowd counting) at this point, and the entire mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument was already filled up, although both sides of the mall would continue to fill up and back out the side streets. Here is a satellite image of the crowd. Several large screen TVs were set up about every hundred yards or so and we watching one of the last ones back. The crowd and the greeters were all pretty happy and pumped up. 

The photo below is of the Washington Monument looking away from the Lincoln Memorial. This picture was taking shortly after Obama's inauguration while the crowd was dispersing. We came from the opposite side of this monument where we were watching the inauguration on TV screens with the Capitol building and a sea of people in the background.  For more inauguration photos I found a slide show with a lot of good pictures including some of the crowd taken from the Capitol and looking out towards the Washington Monument taken by the BayAreaNewsGroup.

Healthcare Guaranteed

I have just finished reading a book called Healthcare Guaranteed by Ezekiel Emanuel, in part for preparation for a health care policy class I am taking as an elective this next semester. In this book Emanuel has laid out a pretty good plan and defended it well and he compared and contrasted it with several other ideas such as a single payer system, health savings accounts, and others. He calls his plan the Guaranteed Health Access Plan. 

So anyway, I wanted to see if this book and his idea were getting any attention in the media to see if it was on any politicians radar screen. What I found out is that he is one of three brothers. One of his brothers is Rahm Emanuel, the new Chief of Staff for the Obama administration. Curiosity satisfied... I think it will be getting a thorough review.

I found a video of him on ABC 7 news out of San Francisco that introduces a brief outline of the plan and talks about the book. PBS also has a video and transcript posted on their web page that goes into more detail than the ABC 7 piece. Not much else comes up under a google search of news articles about Ezekiel Emanuel or from the name of the book. I did however find the website and blog for his plan using a regular google search. The blog has some interesting posts, some of them parallel what the ideas he wrote in his book while others expand and update his arguments. One that I found particularly interesting was the post "AMA Takes on Health Insurance Reform." 

One area of the book that wasn't particularly well thought out or discussed was why some doctors were advocating for a single payer system. In my mind this can be boiled down to the hassle of dealing with multiple insurance companies and because Emanuel's plan uses health insurance companies to cover patients and pay doctors, I feel like this is a gap that still needs some thought.