The Cato Institute has published an excellent policy analysis that includes a scathing indictment of various attempts by government bureaucrats to restrict the personal autonomy and privacy of Medicare patients:
Over the past 20 years, the Medicare bureaucracy … has limited the freedom of Medicare beneficiaries to purchase medical services with their own money.
For example, if […]
In addition to the good news released last week about hospital mortality rates, the CDC reports a positive trend in cancer death rates:
Death rates from cancer continue to fall in the United States, dropping more than 2 percent per year from 2002 through 2004, cancer experts reported on Monday.
And it would appear that the rate […]
We are constantly being told by the advocates of socialized medicine that the quality of American health care is bad and getting worse. Well, as usual, the facts are not their friends. A new AHRQ study shows significant improvement in hospital mortality rates:
Between 1994 and 2004, risk-adjusted impatient mortality rates for six selected diagnoses and […]
Al Gore’s Nobel Prize reminded me of something that I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time: the health care implications of global warming. This subject has, in recent years, been getting more and more attention in some precincts of the medical community. Per the Washington Post:
Spurred by what they see as an increasing […]
A consistent refrain sung by the socialized medicine crowd is that universal health coverage will generally improve the medical care received by the uninsured. Well, as usual, the facts do not support their claims. This 2006 study in the NEJM found no connection between coverage and quality of care:
We found that health insurance status was […]
I think I need to be in Ron Paul rehab. I keep saying to myself, “No more posts about Ron Paul,” but then I see some article or headline that knocks me off the wagon. This time it was the good doctor’s statement of faith on abortion:
I am also the prime sponsor of H.R. 300, […]
My tinfoil hat must have a leak. This angle had never occurred to me until I read Tim Carney’s piece in the Examiner:
The biggest lobbyists in the [health care] industry all support the Democratic bill. America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the trade association for HMOs, supports the bill, as do its biggest members, such as […]
McCain has finally weighed in on health care, and his plan appears to have some sensible elements. Here are some highlights, as reported by the AP:
Allowing people to buy health insurance nationwide instead of limiting them to in-state companies, and permitting people to buy insurance through any organization or association they choose as well as […]
In response to this post, in which I mentioned how touchy “single-payer advocates are about the “S” word, I received a comment from C.M. Hughes reciting the de rigueur “progressive” talking point about socialized medicine:
The reason we don’t like equating single payer with a socialized system is because they AREN’T EQUAL! Socialized systems, like England’s, […]
For those of us not blinkered by ideology, it has long been obvious that the free market offers the best cure for what ails American medicine. And there are small pockets of the health care market that prove it. In his latest column, John Stossel discusses how free competition manifests itself in the market for laser […]
