Daily Archives Wednesday, January 2009

MEDICARE MUCKS IT UP … AGAIN

Kevin Pho has a great piece in USA Today on Medicare’s idiotic “never event” policy. At first glance, the idea seems reasonable: don’t pay hospitals when they make preventable errors. Unfortunately, like all government initiatives, this one is being taken to absurd lengths: Where Medicare goes wrong, however, is by extending the no-pay rules to include “reasonably preventable” [...]

SCHIP AND THE STILL-DUMB TOBACCO TAX

What is it about bad ideas that makes them so hard to kill? In a sane world, a tobacco tax to fund a health care program would be laughed out of existence. I mean, it creates a need for smokers. It’s an idea so dumb that only Congress could think of it: If the above video doesn’t [...]