As I was meandering through the blogosphere, reading various posts on the Walter Reed mess, I came across the following comment (#5) attached to a post in Think Progress.
Remember, folks … when the trolls show up yammering about how the Walter Reed situation is an indictment of socialized medicine, just throw this in their face. […]
It’s interesting that the people who have actually experienced Canadian health care are considerably less enthusiastic about it than Americans whose only knowledge of that system comes from the BS circulated in the mass media. Here’s a great post by Jeff Sandquist, a native Canadian who offers the following advice:
When you hear about promises of […]
Because there have been so many fat targets recently, I’m just getting around to Elliot Wicks’ Health Affairs post, in which he extols the virtues of a provider tax as a means of financing universal health coverage. The crux of his analysis is as follows:
For almost all states, achieving near-universal coverage … means imposing some […]
It turns out that Walter Reed’s problems were well-known before the press exposed it to the larger public, and Congress was warned. But the bureaucrats did nothing. The folks at medpundit have captured the essence of government-run health care in the following excerpt from congressional hearings conducted in 2005:
GAO’s Gregory Kutz describing the soldiers’ problem: […]
One of the ill effects of clueless commentary on health care is that some people actually take it seriously. An example of that can be found in Mockingbird’s response to Timothy Noah’s recent bloviations. Here’s the crucial passage:
Noah offers good information and a rarely discussed perspective on health care along with some sharp questions.
In […]
Michael McBride has clearly absorbed the obvious lesson of the Walter Reed scandal:
If you want to see what universal, government-backed health care will look like … look at Walter Reed … This is the harbinger of a national health care system, and the by-product of a non-competitive industry. Without competition or incentives to improve, public […]
Timothy Noah begins his review of Jonathan Cohn’s book on the history of American health care with an amusing piece of unintentional irony. After advising his readers that certain facts must be faced if health care is to be successfully reformed, he delivers himself of the following:
Reality 1: The current system is increasingly inaccessible to […]
Gail Wilensky’s Health Affairs piece on the SGR is informed and thorough, but her approach to the subject is symptomatic of an ailment that afflicts many designers of health care policy: a tendency to disregard the market as a viable solution for any problem. Here’s a revealing selection:
Medicare needs to institute policies that … reward […]
Lance Burri has discovered yet another societal ailment that will allegedly succumb to the miraculous healing power of government-run health care: medical law suits. It’s obviously true that its advocates believe “universal health care” will cure an improbably high number of society’s ills, but this is a new one on me.
Burri quotes a publication called […]
Thanks to Kevin, MD for bringing Aggravated DocSurg to my attention. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is indeed an unfunded mandate for providers, including hospitals. It also renders profoundly ironic the calls for “universal” health care that continuously emanate from the mass media and various Washington demagogues.
For the untutored, EMTALA […]
