Archive for the ‘Medicine’ Category
Health care is not a right
Friday, February 26th, 2010Health care is not a right. No one has a right to health care. This has been said before and explained in better, more detailed terms than I'm going to here, but it bears repeating and needs explaining plainly and frequently. As difficult as it is to define abstract ideas ...
One year of Obama crimes and failures
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010Barack Obama is already a terrible president, a war criminal who belongs in prison beside Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. He is an economic ignoramus who despises private enterprise, exalts the State over the individual, and dreams of a world in which the inert, gray, bureaucratic mediocrity of corporate-State ...
Free-market medicine link of the week
Sunday, October 11th, 2009Health Care: A Future Free-Market Alternative by Ross Levatter, published in the October 2009 issue of The Freeman. It is a relatively detailed description of Dr. Levatter's vision of the way the purchase and provision of health care would work in a free society: the way all other aspects of ...
An “up-or-down vote on health care”?!
Saturday, October 10th, 2009Sadly, we have yet another example of liberal short-sightedness and overall inability to understand the key part of an issue: this petition that the political action committee Progressive Change Campaign Committee is going to submit to Harry Reid. It reads, "Any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block ...
Fish in a barrel 3
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote, Licensed spectrum came into being for a reason. In the early days of radio, unlicensed radio stations in urban areas regularly got into "power wars" with rival stations, leading to plenty of static. Compared to this free-for-all, the licensing of radio stations in the US, ...
Fish in a barrel 2
Thursday, September 17th, 2009California tax officials: legal pot would bring $1.4B. No, you still don't quite seem to get it. If it is TAXED and REGULATED, both of which are restrictions or extortions backed with explicit threats of murder, then by definition it is NOT LEGAL. You mean, "Legal except only in the ...
Obama’s speech about socialized medicine
Thursday, September 10th, 2009I didn't watch the Savior of America's speech to Congress about further socializing our health care and insurance industry because I already knew everything he was going to say. Why would I waste my time with it? He probably said our health care system is broken, that it's too costly ...
5 myths about health care around the world
Sunday, August 30th, 2009This article by T.R. Reid in the Washington Post was pretty informative. It corrects five myths about provision of medical care and insurance in several developed countries, basically explaining how all of them are better or cheaper than ours. It doesn't make me enthusiastic about adding even more government perturbations ...
Socialized medicine links
Thursday, August 27th, 2009I really enjoyed the following writings about health care and the proposed socialization of it in the United States. They say it better than I am (currently) able to, and are all well worth taking the time to read. Two posts from David Z. at No Third Solution: Is it “Un-American” ...
Medical contrarianism isn’t always right
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009A few years ago, for a stretch lasting a year or two, I boycotted LewRockwell.com because their all-too-frequent Creationist columns were embarrassing to the libertarian movement and I didn't want to be associated with those types of people, nor reward the publication of such hokum with additional page hits. It ...
Government health insurance, Social Security, private mortgage lenders
Sunday, July 5th, 2009At this site and others you might have come across the libertarian argument that State-provided medical insurance will out-compete private medical insurance because the State has the privilege of coercing ever-increasing tax revenues out of its captives. For instance, I blagged about Sheldon Richman's recent column putting forth this and ...
Obama’s impossible healthcare reform promises
Saturday, June 20th, 2009Another excellent column by Sheldon Richman. He quotes Obama: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what. Then Richman ...
Science needs an economics revolution
Saturday, December 6th, 2008Here in the scientific research world, there is considered to be a vast dichotomy between the atmospheres and work environments in academic (university) research labs and private (big pharma and biotech) research labs. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. The impression is that in academia, you are free ...
Merck’s lies about Vioxx and the FDA
Sunday, November 9th, 2008Merck's anti-inflammatory pain-reliever Vioxx was the most widely used drug to be pulled off the market, which Merck was forced to do in 2004. The biggest story about Vioxx is that Merck suppressed and manipulated data to make Vioxx seem less risky than it was. But when people started having ...
Anti–universal health care proposal in Arizona
Sunday, October 26th, 2008I was intrigued by this George Will column in the Washington Post, which might mark the first time that has happened to me. He begins: On Election Day, Arizonans can give the nation the gift of a good example. They can enact a measure that could shape the health-care debate that ...
California’s ban on individual genetic risk assessment
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008The state of California is attempting to shut down direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Now, this is just bizarre. I don't even know what to say about it, but I felt I had to condemn it on my web page because it is just so stupid. It is also so typical of ...
Genetic-discrimination legislation scares me
Sunday, May 11th, 2008The journal Nature had a news story about the bill prohibiting genetic discrimination that breezed through the Senate and that will undoubtedly become law very shortly. Since you'd have to have access to the full content of the Nature website to read it, I will paste the text of the ...
Shoddy but equal
Sunday, May 11th, 2008In the UK, hospital maternity wards have been rejecting pregnant women because they are full. Well, it's something to look forward to here.
My biggest fear
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008The governmental injustice that gives me the most nightmarish flashes, the most cold sweats, the most nerve-wracking fear, is socialized medicine. Reading this news item made the realization that Americans are going to be victims of socialized medicine sooner rather than later hit me quite hard: Most U.S. doctors back ...
Why computers work and health care doesn’t
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008I think arguing by analogy is quite effective as a way to introduce an argument to someone whose beliefs are very different from yours. It can be quite instructive. Bill Walker wrote a good article last month about the contrast between the computer industry and the health care industry. Instead ...
Flu shots: “recommended” to “mandatory”?
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008Karen De Coster made a prediction that I made to myself when I read this announcement this morning: The Imperial Federal Government is now recommending that all children between the ages of 6 months and 18 years get a flu shot once a year. I predict that within our lifetimes, ...
Drugging unruly children is a method of social control
Friday, February 1st, 2008A letter to the editor of Nature this week strongly objected to the widespread and involuntary administration of Ritalin to children, and to a recent claim, published in Nature, that ADHD is heritable and very prevalent. Sir Sahakian and Morein-Zamir's reference to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as heritable and affecting 4–10% of ...
Biggest factor in rising health care costs:
Thursday, January 24th, 2008The doctors themselves, says Dr. Steve Cole. Thanks to Overlawyered.com.
Affordable private health care
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008A group of physicians in Rhode Island has formed what they call HealthAccessRI, a network of doctors who are providing their customers primary care for a small monthly fee, with medical insurance playing no part in it. This news article presents a very favorable view of it. The premise underlying the ...
Ron Paul speech on medicine and government
Saturday, January 19th, 2008Ron Paul gave a fantastic speech at the 15th Annual World Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine & Regenerative Biomedical Technologies, available on the homepage of worldhealth.net, about the harmfulness of government interference (coercion) in our medical care and the benefits individual freedom and choice would bring.
Medical bureaucracy
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Yesterday I blagged about a biased book reviewer who was skeptical about patients' ability to make rational decisions and look out for their own well-being, and not the least bit skeptical about the ability of a socialist State to make decisions for people and improve economic efficiency. I had another thought ...
Health care bias
Monday, January 14th, 2008In this month's edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the book Who Killed Health Care?: America’s $2 trillion medical problem—and the consumer-driven cure by Regina Herzlinger is reviewed by an unsurprisingly biased public health researcher. While the book doubtlessly has many flaws, its central premise is a valid and correct ...