Author: Dana Bate, Field Producer

I have a love/hate relationship with networking. In all its grammatical forms, the word itself irritates me. I have friends who talk about "plugging in to their network," or attending "networking happy hours," or "networking to find a new job." Noun, adjective, verb - any way you use or conjugate it, to me the word just sounds so forced, as if you suddenly whip out your magical networking cape and become a Serious and Interesting Person. "Hello, I am Dana Bate, and I am networking now."

About six months after I started at NBR, the president signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 into law. Among other things, the bill created a renewable fuels standard that would require a certain amount of ethanol be produced each year, peaking at 7.5 billion gallons of biofuels in 2012. Bush then upped the ante in 2007, raising the peak to 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022 (15 billion of that being corn-based fuel).

That's a lot of ethanol.

There was boom in companies willing to produce it. But as it turns out, producing corn-based ethanol isn't the problem. Being able to use it is.

When I first heard about the idea of health insurance co-ops as an alternative to a public plan, I thought, "This is good -- lawmakers are being creative about solving the coverage issue so that a bill can actually get through Congress." But as is often the case with such ideas, the details are a little murky.

Co-ops could be a great way to expand insurance choices, particularly in markets that lack options. But when it comes to catalyzing competition in insurance markets (a goal of those on the left) and reducing stifling bureaucracy (a goal of those on the right), I'm not sure co-ops will really do either.

You know the old expression comparing opinions to a certain part of our anatomy? The point being, everybody has one? Well, when talking about health care, this is especially true.

I recently attended a panel on health care, and my oh my, everyone in the audience had something to say about (a) what's wrong with the current system and (b) what Congress should and should not do to fix it. One health economist on the panel said privately to me that he wouldn't necessary feel comfortable speaking up at a panel on the financial crisis or Iranian conflict, but everyone -- everyone -- feels they have something of importance to say about health care.

The reason for this is obvious: We all interact with the health care system in one way or another. Sure, one could argue that we all interact with the financial system as well, but health care deals with deeply personal and emotional issues, life and death and disease and pain. Anyone who has watched someone close to him or her die knows how intense one's interaction with the health care system can become.

Talk about "comparative effectiveness research" and who will use it and you're bound to mention the usual suspects: doctors, patients, insurance companies, the government. Missing from that list is none other than yours truly...the media.

Whenever a team of researchers publishes a new paper about a particular device or drug, there is a temptation to boil the study down to a headline: "Drug X could save you" or "Drug X could kill you." I realize not every media organization does this - certainly we don't do that here at the Nightly Business Report - but sometimes headlines can be misleading.

Take the two studies published on stents that I mention in tonight's broadcast. The studies do not say "stents don't work." They say for some patients, stents do not offer a measurable benefit over drug therapy, and so for those patients, paying for a stent probably doesn't make sense. Yet once these studies were picked up, several cardiologists I spoke with said they had patients tell them, "I don't want a stent. I've read they don't work."

When I began looking into the idea of a health insurance exchange, my first thought was, "Why aren't we already doing this?" Some places are. Three years ago Massachusetts instituted its "Connector," which functions in a similar fashion to the exchange I discuss tonight, and the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program has been around since 1960.

But otherwise, most of the insurance market operates like the "wild, wild west," as Linda Blumberg of the Urban Institute put it. It's almost impossible to compare plans because many private insurers won't tell you exactly what is included in a plan until you've signed up. Before I sign up for a plan, I want to know what the premiums and co-pays are, but I also want to know what the lifetime maximum coverage is and what specific drugs are covered. Right now, that isn't easy to do. An exchange would simplify that process and would also spread risk and broaden coverage.

Tell me: What image do the words "shovel ready" conjure in your mind? Personally, I picture someone wearing a hard hat hunched over a bit of groundwork, shovel in hand, ready to start digging at the word "go."

Clearly my imagination has taken some creative license with the "shovel ready" concept President Obama articulated so often in discussing the stimulus package. But I suspect a majority of the American public expected work to begin on infrastructure projects within weeks of him signing the bill into law. And yet here we are, almost 100 days later, and only a fraction of the projects have broken ground. So what gives?

Today I attended a news conference at which GE announced its "Healthymagination" initiative, a program under which the company will spend $6 billion on health care innovation and technology. What interested me more than the talk of "health IT" and "access" and "quality" was the role NBC Universal will play in all of this, as a subsidiary of GE. Check out these two points mentioned in the press release:

• NBC Universal and News will make a significant commitment to bring timely, actionable health and wellness content to consumers in the form of more than 5,000 televised reports annually on health and wellness and companion online tools.


• MSNBC will launch a new, daily program dedicated solely to health information, beginning in June. The program will be anchored by health expert and NBC News Chief Medical Editor, Dr. Nancy Snyderman. She will tackle everything from health and wellness tips and medical breakthroughs to in-depth looks at health policy.

Before heading to my first Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting last weekend, lots of people prepped me for what to expect. The crowds will be huge. The day will be long. The meeting will be unlike any other you've seen.

All of that was true. But the one event I wasn't entirely prepared for was the media scrum -- what I shall henceforth refer to as the mob of mass destruction.

Every year, Warren Buffett walks around the exhibition hall, where Berkshire businesses showcase their wares. He stops by Dairy Queen and Fruit of the Loom and any number of other businesses that Berkshire owns. All the while, cameras and reporters swarm around the Oracle of Omaha, chronicling his every move and word.

So what does it mean for a home to be "green"? Well, if it is going to be certified by one of the national green building programs - such as US Green Building Council's "LEED for Homes" or NAHB National Green Building Program - the home needs to be evaluated by an accredited third party to make sure it meets certain criteria.

The home should incorporate the obvious environmentally friendly attributes like water and energy efficiency, but the location, building materials and building process all factor into a home's greenness. An energy efficient home that wastes a lot of material in the construction phase is less green than one that minimizes and recycles waste.