The theme of the 13th Annual Meeting of DDP has been set, and program planning is well underway. Mark your calendars now, and note the change in date: Grants Pass, Oregon, is the scene and August 4-6 is the time. The time and place will permit you to take advantage of the offerings of the beautiful Northwest.

You will need to plan ahead if you want to participate in the world famous Ashland Shakespeare Festival or to take a jetboat cruise to legendary Hellgate Canyon on the Rogue River.

Ashland is located 15 miles south of the Medford-Jackson County Airport, which is about a 30-minute drive from Grants Pass. This season features Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II, and Macbeth, along with This Day and Age by Nagle Jackson, Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, Emma's Child by Kristine Thatcher, or The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney. To be assured of a seat, you must order tickets as soon as possible ─ call (503)482-4331.

DDP has reserved a limited number of places on the 2-hour jetboat tour that boards at 1:45 p.m. Friday, August 4. Price is $21 for adults; advance reservations required (call DDP at 520-325-2680). A 4-hour dinner cruise, costing $37, departs at 4:15. Whitewater cruises are also available. To make reservations for a dinner or whitewater cruise, call Hellgate Excursions at (800)648-4874.

On Friday evening, there will be a welcome reception, where you will have an opportunity to meet many of the speakers. The meeting will convene early Saturday morning and adjourn late Sunday afternoon. The banquet will be Saturday evening, August 5.

PROGRAM PREVIEW:

Helping to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the dawn of the Atomic Age will be men who were there. Edward Teller will give his perspective with a look toward the future. Ed York, who was present at the first atomic bomb test, will speak of that event.

Splitting the atom had implications far beyond the harnessing of nuclear energy. The use of atomic tracers was a breakthrough for chemistry and biology. Martin Kamen will tell about his discovery of carbon-14.

Also on the agenda is Bruce Merrifield, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the first solid-phase synthesis of a protein, another epoch-making discovery.

Building on the progress of the last century, humankind could make still greater leaps. Robert Zubrin of Martin-Marietta will discuss prospects for a mission to Mars.

Every new dawn also casts a shadow, given the dark side of human nature. Protection against accompanying dangers will, as usual, have a prominent place on the agenda. Conrad Chester, formerly of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and one of our foremost experts on civil defense, will discuss the Sverdlovsk incident (an outbreak of anthrax due to a Soviet biological weapons facility) and defenses against chemical and biological warfare. Sam Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb, will discuss the terrorist threat now posed by enhanced radiation weapons.

Continued progress is not a foregone conclusion. Enemies of science, technology, and freedom are still on the offensive, citing imagined threats to the health of the human race and the Planet itself. One of the most potent threats strikes at the heart of science, which is the freedom of inquiry. Peter Duesberg, a virologist from the University of California at Berkeley, will speak on the efforts of the scientific establishment to silence dissenting views on the etiology of AIDS.

Confirmed speakers also include Drs. Howard Maccabee, Arthur Robinson, and Jane Orient. A full program will be available soon. For advance registration, call DDP at (520)325-2680.

COST OF GOVERNMENT DAY: JULY 10

Tax Freedom Day, the day on which Americans begin working for themselves, has been getting later almost every year. It now occurs on May 5. In response, taxpayers have fought against tax increases and have at least slowed the rate of growth. Politicians have countered with the enactment of hidden taxes─regulations and mandates─to achieve their social objectives. Americans now work at least until July 10 to pay for both on-budget spending and off-budget regulatory costs.

Calculations for Cost of Government Day include most federal regulations except civil rights, minimum wage, and anti-trust laws. They do not include most state and local environmental or consumer protection laws, which impose substantial burdens (Americans for Tax Reform, 202-785-0266).

Costs are not evenly distributed. One farmer, for example, was fined $45,000 for filling in a one-acre glacial pothole, which made farming difficult on his property. He also was ordered to dig out the pothole. A company that makes steel doors in North Carolina was fined $5,000 for inadvertently writing a name on line 18 rather than line 17 of an EPA form. A ``phantom fish,'' an allegedly endangered sturgeon, could have cost the states of Alabama and Mississippi billions of dollars and thousands of jobs by shutting down major waterways.

One mechanism for developing commerce-destroying regulations is to establish a secret and biased ``advisory committee.'' This procedure violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act and government-in-the-sunshine law and has been successfully challenged in court. (The prototype lawsuit, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons v. Clinton, challenged the President's Task Force on Health Care Reform. Dr. Orient will discuss this strategy at the DDP meeting.)

Many managed care organizations are writing ``Standards of Care'' for a number of medical conditions. ``Total quality improvement'' may be the pretext; cost containment is the goal. Physicians who ``deviate'' may incur increased malpractice liability and may lose their contract with the HMO.

Although the development of good standards could benefit patients, some guidelines could be used to deny certain types of care, say on the basis of age, as rationing becomes a fact of life.

Not coincidentally, some managed-care ``providers'' are trying to engineer their own version of tort reform (Kidney Cancer News, Jan. 1995).

On the other hand, there are proposals (one is pending now in the Arizona State Legislature) to require managed-care organizations to divulge the financial incentives in their contracts with physicians and other ``providers.''

Under the defeated and discredited Clinton ``Health Security'' Act, most Americans would have been forced into managed-care networks. Still, preferential treatment for managed care, a feature of federal law for many years now, would be extended in some Republican proposals now developing in the present Congress.

The effect of managed care on medical treatment and future progress will be discussed by Dr. Maccabee at the DDP meeting.