So far, so good.

It looks like Felicia, the former hurricane, will likely no longer be accompanied by high winds when it makes its way to Oahu sometime tomorrow.

Whew.

I wanted to recommend one additional interview that aired on National Public Radio last week. It’s an interview with Jessie Gaeta, a doctor who runs a program in Boston that provides housing for the chronically homeless.

She has a very interesting analysis of the community costs of homelessness, especially via the health care system.

This group of people are using emergency rooms and being hospitalized at astronomical rates. I really think of them as – this group – as the highest utilizers of our state’s Medicaid systems, primarily, and let me give you some examples about how often a chronically homeless person maybe needing emergency medical care, which is quite expensive. I’ll tell you that a doctor I worked with named Jim O’Conell(ph) followed a group of 119 chronically homeless street dwellers over the course of five years in Boston. And he asked the question: how often is this group of people needing to use the emergency room or being hospitalized? And he found that this group of a 119 people, over the course of five years, used the emergency rooms in Boston over 18000 times.

CONAN: Wow.

Dr. GAETA: And required hospitalized 900 times, which doesn’t even speak to the number of hospital nights they spent in the hospital. So you can see that’s quite an expensive group from medical point of view.

What this seems to indicate is that the prevailing social policy, which largely sidesteps the homeless, results in shifting the burden to the health care system. Makes me think about a national policy on the homeless as a key part of health care reform.

In any case, you can listen to the program here, or just read the transcript.

I also tracked down the full report on those sleeping Go! airline pilots. It’s worth a review. It’s not a flattering look at this segment of the industry.

I don’t understand why news stories on a report like this don’t automatically include a link to the full text when it is available.

And I ran into this little history of the People’s Party in Hawaii put together by one of its members. One of the party activists way back when was the young Chuck Bollingmo Smith, who now as Charles Smith writes the “Of Two Minds” blog, which I so frequently recommend.