Most Americans want some sort of health care reform, but it is doubtful that many have any real idea what Obama’s “health care czar” has planned for them. I explain in today’s American Spectator:
Tom Daschle advocates the creation of a federal health care bureaucracy whose decrees will supersede the judgment and decisions of physicians and their […]
Health Care BS
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Monthly Archives January 2009
OBAMACARE COULD KILL YOU
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” complications. […]
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 drive […]
MEDICAID FORESHADOWS GOVT HEALTH CARE
Scott Gottlieb points out in the Wall Street Journal that Medicaid is an unmittigated disaster for patients:
Accumulating medical data shows that Medicaid recipients’ poor health outcomes aren’t just a function of their underlying medical problems, but a more direct consequence of the program’s shortcomings.
And how do our “leaders” in D.C. respond to efforts to fix the program? Why, they […]
FREE HEALTH CARE KILLS AGAIN
Just when you think Britain’s socialized medical system can’t get any worse, it does. The Mail Online reports the following:
A vulnerable patient starved to death in an NHS hospital after 26 days without proper nourishment.
How, you ask, is that possible, even at an NHS facility?
Martin Ryan, 43, had suffered a stroke which left him unable to […]
U.S. HEALTH SPENDING SLOWS … WHY?
One of the pretexts that single-payer advocates use to justify their push for government-run health care is cost. This is presumably why they have been so quiet about recent reports showing that health care inflation is slowing. As the Health Affairs Blog puts it:
National health care spending grew at its lowest rate in nearly a decade in 2007.
And what […]
SANJAY GUPTA: ANYONE KRUGMAN DISLIKES …
As I have said before, I have a rule of thumb that has served me well in assessing public figures: Anyone Paul Krugman dislikes can’t be all bad. Thus, Krugman’s snide comments about Sanjay Gupta suggest that the latter may well be a good Surgeon General.
Krugman’s main beef against Gupta is that he was one of the few media […]
THE WAISTLINE POLICE
Paul Hsieh points out that lifestyle regulation must inevitably follow in the wake of government-run health care. And this isn’t a matter of speculation. It’s already happening in the Land of the Rising Sun:
Imagine a country where the government regularly checks the waistlines of citizens over age 40. Anyone deemed too fat would be required to undergo diet […]
NYT ON THE BUSH HEALTH CARE LEGACY
The NYT, having provided dishonest and snide coverage of President Bush for the past eight years, has actually managed to give him some credit for his health care record:
It is only fair to note that President Bush can also lay claim to some signal achievements in health care — achievements that we urge President-elect Barack Obama to continue and […]
MORE ON UNIONIZED HEALTH CARE
The American Thinker has been good enough to run my piece about the plan Andy Stern and his accomplices (which include our President-elect) have for completely infiltrating health care. Anyone doubting that this is bad news for nurses (and thus patients) should read this post by Nurse K:
Our aides have been hit with an obscure union rule that says you will automatically be […]