In an allusion to Boston’s incompetently executed and egregiously expensive road repair project, today’s WSJ calls Romneycare The New Big Dig:
The Massachusetts nonmiracle ought to be a warning to Washington. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both proposing versions of RomneyCare on a national scale, with similar promises that covering everyone under a government plan will reduce costs.
But, as anyone remotely […]
Well, I guess it’s up to me to ask the uncouth yet obvious question: If U.S. health care is inferior to the systems of Canada and Europe, why wasn’t a rich and famous man like Senator Kennedy immediately sent to one of those places so that he could get the best care available?
As Whitecoat noted the […]
Arnold Kling reiterates a fundamental reality of health care economics that should be obvious to any sentient being:
We cannot have open access to health care services, consumer insulation from expenses, and sustainable health care spending. Pick two.
Unfortunately, as the Commonwealth Fund has recently demonstrated, many participants in the reform debate continue to believe that […]
I hate to see Panda depart. As GruntDoc puts it, “he’s been one of the best writers in the medical blogosphere.”
And his response to the claim that a single-payer system is better than socialized medicine because, in the former, the government merely controls the money is one of my all time favorite quotes on the subject:
If you were to get […]
Occasionally, the failures of socialized medicine are so egregious that they knock the scales from the eyes of the most ardent true believers. That’s what happened to Sarah Anderson, an English ophthalmologist, according to the Daily Mail:
I have spent my working life in the NHS. And for all its perceived failings, I have been proud of […]
Sometimes the publications of the Commonwealth Fund read like articles from The Onion. A good example can be found in this proposal, which begins as follows:
This issue brief sets forth a framework for expanding health coverage that … has the potential to achieve near-universal coverage and improve quality and access, while generating health system savings of $1.6 trillion over the […]
Dick Armey has a good op-ed in the WSJ about the cowardice of congressional Republicans on health care reform. Here’s the money quote:
Rather than promoting the principles of consumer choice, individual responsibility and provider competition that would transform our broken health-care system, key Republicans are bowing to political pressure and signing on with the government-run health-care Democrats.
And, as […]
It would appear that the purchase of health insurance isn’t “legal,” according to the tenets of Islam. The Economic Times reports:
At a seminar to deliberate whether insuring health was permissible under Islamic law Shariat, the Islamic Fiqh Academy (India) decided that availing such policies was illegal.
Why?
Representatives from around 300 Madrasas, including Darul Uloom Deoband, Jamiat […]
I noted recently that a gang of pirates auditors was about to descend on America’s hospitals in search of Medicare “overpayments.” These “Recovery Audit Contractors,” who are paid a percentage of the booty recoveries, will be ransacking patient charts in search of “errors.”
Well, the RAC program is now being rolled out nationwide, and this CMS report outlining the results of the original pilot project […]
Ron Paul’s rabid supporters are still yapping and barking. And, unless their master brings them to heel, they’ll be biting John McCain’s ankles at the upcoming Republican convention:
The forces of Rep. Ron Paul have been organizing across the country to stage an embarrassing public revolt against Sen. John McCain when Republicans gather for their national convention in Minnesota at […]
