1. Featured Article: Paperwork is 21 Percent of Health
Costs
Paperwork is 21% of health costs - $26
billion goes to administration each year in state By Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer,
The study, published in the current issue of the journal
Health Affairs, investigated the cost to insurance companies, doctors and
hospitals of billing and other administrative tasks, such as referrals and
appeals.
That translates into about $26 billion a year in
Many health experts believe that the huge amounts spent on
administration is a major source of inefficiency in the
"If you extrapolate our results
nationally, you get about $230 billion a year being spent for these insurance
administration expenditures," Kahn said. "This is money that, in my
view, would be better spent on health care."
. . . The study concluded that 21
percent was spent on insurance administration and an additional 13 percent was
used to cover other administrative tasks, such as maintaining medical records.
"What you're left with is that 66 cents (out of every dollar) is spent on
health care," Kahn said.
The three-year, $100,000 study was
funded by the California HealthCare Foundation, a philanthropic group based in
Kahn's research bolsters the
conclusion of two
The Harvard study, which compared
health care spending in the
Many physicians are frustrated by the
amount of time they have to devote to insurance paperwork.
"If you have 10 different
insurers, you don't know which one covers what. For every medication you give
you have to check the formulary," said an
Guyer said she decided to work for
Kaiser Permanente, a membership organization that does not contract with
multiple private insurers, to avoid the time and hassle associated with billing.
To read the entire article, please go
to www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/11/BUGM8FM8I11.DTL&type=printable.
"The Cost of Health Insurance
Administration in
www.chcf.org/topics/healthinsurance/index.cfm?itemID=110000
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2.
In the News:
Limits of Genetic Tinkering
Biohazards: Advances in biological science raise
troubling questions about what it means to be human - Wesley J.
Smith,
"By the end of the 21st
century," writes Reason magazine science editor Ronald Bailey in his book
"Liberation Biology," http://reason.com/lb/, "the typical American may attend
a family reunion in which five generations are playing together. And
great-great-great grandma, at 150 years old, will be as vital ... as her
30-year-old great-great grandson with whom she's playing touch football."
UCLA futurist Gregory Stock predicts
in "Redesigning Humans" that the genetic engineering of progeny for
health, intelligence, physical beauty, even sociability, will be so successful
that procreation through intercourse will be deemed "too
unpredictable," making "laboratory conception ... obligatory rather
than optional."
Princeton biologist Lee Silver
believes fervently, as described in "Remaking Eden," that the wonders
of human redesign will eventually lead to a "special point" where our
posterity will create themselves into a "special group of mental beings
who" are as different from humans as humans are from primitive worms.
...'Intelligence' will "not do justice to their cognitive abilities.
'Knowledge' does not explain the depth of their understanding. ...'Power' is
not strong enough to describe the control they have over technologies that can
be used to shape the universe in which they live."
The prospect of a 150-year-old living
human being sounds fantastical. So does pre-designing children or future
generations with godlike powers. But many futurists and scientists say we
humans are about to seize control of our own evolution.
If the impeders of scientific progress
can just be pushed out of the way, they predict, the wonders of science and
biotechnology will re-create us into superior beings who will live longer, look
better, play harder and think smarter than any of us can even dream of doing
today.
Others (including this writer [Wesley
Smith]) see such scenarios as more hype than hope.
Some of us also worry that advocates
of unfettered research are changing science from a means into an end, a belief
system rather than a method. . . .
Look out
In the
In place of humanness as the criterion
for ultimate value, these advocates offer "personhood theory," in
which rights belong to "persons," a status earned by any organism or
machine possessing minimal cognitive capacities.
If personhood theory ever governs
society, the impact would be incalculable, for as futurist James Hughes writes
in "Citizen Cyborg," "Persons don't have to be human, and not
all humans are persons."
Opponents of personhood theory warn
that it would lead to the most vulnerable humans being exploited as mere
objects.
They note that some supporters of
personhood theory already advocate infanticide for profoundly disabled babies
and organ harvesting from people diagnosed to be in a persistent vegetative
state.
The already simmering humanhood versus
personhood controversy is going to boil over as our scientific and
biotechnological capacities advance.
For example, what if it becomes
technologically feasible to create cloned human embryos and gestate them in
real or artificial wombs to fetal stage for use in drug testing or for organ
procurement? (Such experiments have already been conducted successfully in
cows.)
Those who believe that humanhood
provides intrinsic value argue that such "fetal farming" should be
prohibited because it reduces nascent human life to the status of a mere
harvestable commodity.
Personhood theorists, on the other
hand, would tend to support using cloned fetal nonpersons to save the lives of
persons and to reduce the suffering of animals currently used in medical
research, which are seen as having greater moral value because they possess
higher cognitive capacities.
Another issue touching on the meaning
and importance of human life is the creation of animals called chimeras that
have been genetically engineered to contain some human DNA. . . .
Once having children was generally
conducted in a simple way: Men and women got married, made love, and had babies
-- although not always in that order. . . .
Infertile couples now conceive through
in vitro fertilization. Women who can't carry a child can arrange to have their
baby gestated by a surrogate birth mother. . . .
But critics worry that our growing
mastery over reproduction could slide from liberty into license and even into
reproductive anarchy. Look for these issues to cut through the body politic
like a laser in the coming decades:
-- Is there a right to reproduce?
This issue strikes at core beliefs
about the importance of natural limits, age, gender, sexual orientation,
feminism, traditionalism, normality and the purposes of becoming a parent. . .
.
How all of this will turn out, nobody
knows. But as Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on
Bioethics, has said: "All of the natural boundaries are up for grabs. All
of the boundaries that have defined us as human beings, boundaries between a
human being and an animal on one side and between a human being and a super
human being or a god on the other. The boundaries of life, the boundaries of
death. These are the questions of the 21st century, and nothing could be more
important."
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at
the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics
and Culture. His current book is "Consumer's Guide to a Brave New
World." Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
Read the whole article at
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/06/INGKGFGTEG1.DTL&type=printable.
*
* * * *
3.
International Medicine: European Report
Health Care Cuts in Europe
by
Paul Belien, The Brussels Journal, Wednesday,
November 23, 2005 .
When conversations turn to health care, I am always
reminded of my grandfather. He was 91 when he died. He had never been ill. He
had never needed medical treatment in his whole life. Upon reaching his nineties,
however, he required prostate surgery.
Like all Belgians, my grandfather had paid wage-related
contributions to cover health insurance throughout his entire professional
life. The Belgian health care system is a so-called pay-as-you-go system. Today's
young and healthy do not set money aside for their own future needs, but are
compelled to pay for today's sick and elderly. As my grandfather had never
needed much health care, he had been a net contributor to the system. Now was
the first time he was going to claim something back.
He had his operation in May. In November he was dead. The
prostate operation had gone fine, but afterwards the hospital had given him an
antibiotic drug that caused complete deafness. Though there were other, but
costlier, drugs available, the hospital gave the old man the cheapest one. They
knew about the side-effects, but it did not strike them as an unreasonable and
unjust thing to do. Why should it? A man who has already had 90 healthy years
of life surely has no right to complain about deafness when some people get
more seriously ill or die at a far younger age. When my grandfather left the
hospital he was completely deaf. He lost his will to live. Six months later, he
was dead.
In many Western European countries, health care is the
fastest growing segment of government spending. Over the past forty years there
has been a significant increase in health-care spending. According to the
latest OECD figures (2003), Western European countries spend between 7.3 and
11.5% of their gross domestic product on health care. Ten years ago it was
between 6.9 and 9.9%. In 1960 it was only around 4%.
Much of the rise in
There are only two ways to keep the present government-run
European health-care systems going. One can either drastically increase the
financial burden on those at the paying end of the system the young and
healthy of today or one can drastically limit the quality and the
availability of health care for those at the receiving end the sick and the
elderly.
For decades governments increased the financial burden on
the working population. When this burden became intolerable, they shifted their
policies towards cutting back quality. In
Other ways in which many governments in
For almost a decade now, governments have been stifling
medical innovation in
As is often the case, many of continental
While these measures were successful in the field of cost
control, they had devastating consequences for the pharmaceutical industry. The
German pharmaceutical companies, no longer keen on developing new drugs, saw
their world-wide share of drug patents drop to 8% from 16%. Doctors, afraid
that they would have to pay the pharmaceutical bills out of their own pockets,
started to refer their patients to specialists and hospitals. Patients with
minor illnesses, requiring common and cheaper medicines were helped, but the
doctors would "dump" their more serious cases instead of treating
them in more costly ways. As a result, in 1993
"Money is being saved even if it costs lives to do
so. Whenever possible many hospitals are turning away expensive patients
covered by the sickness funds. The only good patient is a cheap patient."
Unfortunately, the German system has become the European
model. Politicians in neighbouring (sic) welfare states, noticing the drop in
German health expenditure, started to follow the German example. The only thing
that mattered in their eyes was cost control. Many adopted the policy of adding
drug volume control to price control and finally to prescription control.
At
the root of these decisions is the understandable desire of governments to
control health-care costs. But rationing is clearly not the answer. What many
governments in
Meanwhile,
the larger and more fundamental problem of how to finance the health-care
systems is not adressed. Instead of funding the provisions of today's sick with
taxes from today's healthy and young, people should be building up reserves for
their own future liabilities. What
To read the entire report, please go to www.canadafreepress.com/2005/brussels112305.htm.
Paul Belien is the editor of the Flemish quarterly Secessie and the editor-in-chief of The
BrusselsJournal. He is a columnist at the Flemish weekly Pallieterke and
at the Flemish monthly Doorbraak and a regular contributor to the Flemish conservative
monthly Nucleus, which he co-founded in 1990.
* * * * *
4.
Medicare:
Medicaid Welfare Program Seems to Be Forever, Even If You're Wealthy
My homeless patient came in last week for his annual
exam. I have been seeing him since 2002. Some may recall that he lived in boxes
behind a bar when he was out of jail for substance abuse. In 2003, he started
living in his car and obtained drinking water, showered and shaved at the YMCA.
Low and behold, people started being friendly with him. In 2004, he obtained a
job driving a truck and was able to keep body and cell phone together in an
apartment.
Last week, he came in well dressed, his beard neatly
trimmed, and could have passed for a mid-level executive. He announced that he
was now driving an 18-wheeler, sometimes a 30-wheeler, truck interstate. He
said the money was good, real good. After checking his pulmonary function and
finding that his asthma was improved, partly due to living in a clean
environment, he stated that he had been taking his standard bronchodilators and
had not suffered from asthma attacks in the past year. He also decreased his
cigarette smoking. After writing his prescriptions for the next year and
escorting him to the door, I noted that he was still covered by Medicaid
insurance, government healthcare for the poor and destitute. I looked
surprised. He said he still had two more years to go before his next review of
the disability he obtained for being on drugs.
Government
is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.
- Ronald Reagan
* * * * *
5.
Medical Gluttony:
Many Patients are Unaware of their Gluttonous Behavior
One of my patients, a 72-year-old lady, came in for an
office visit to obtain a health statement so she could continue substitute
teaching in her school district. In reviewing her medical history since her
last visit three months earlier, I found she had gone to the hospital Emergency
Room because of elevated blood pressure. On the previous Saturday it was
elevate to 210/112 at
Her emergency record noted that no medications or
treatment was given. She stated that she took her pill bottles with her and
when the nurse interviewed her, she was advised that she should take her
How can this gluttonous behavior be stopped? Was
Medicare able to stop it with their massive restrictive and oversight programs?
No, this happened under Medicare's watch. Would health insurance carriers or
managed care companies have been able to stop this with their massive restrictive
and oversight programs? No, this happened under health plan co-insurance
managed care watch.
This type of gluttonous behavior can only be
controlled through patient responsibility. It is not a classroom learnable
experience not even by this teacher after 50 years of teaching. This behavior
can only be corrected through financial responsibility. Patients with no health
insurance shop wisely and reduce their costs to about half. Patients with a
percentage co-payment also shop wisely and reduce their health care costs, by
estimates of 30 percent to 50 percent. Patients with a fixed or no co-payment,
simply use their health plan financed by taxpayers or the pool of insured
premium payers with no regard for its cost. This lady increased her health care
costs by 600 percent because it was there. There was actually a disincentive to
save costs since the $100 office call would have cost her a $10 co-payment,
while the $600 ER visits had no co-payment because it was construed as an
emergency, which it wasn't.
Single-payer or socialized medicine by any other name
has never worked and will never work. Human gluttony will always exceed human
need. Medical responsibility will never occur with third-party health care with
no or fixed co-payment plans. It will only occur with a graduated deductible
and graduated co-payment system. To think that non-economic incentives or a
police state can control one of the largest items in a family's budget is
unrealistic thinking.
To paraphrase the warning of Paul Revere:
Beware: The Socialists are Coming The Socialists are
Coming
* * * * *
6.
Medical
Myths: Government Can Control Costs
Retiring
manager gets raise: Sacramento Wednesday,
November 23, 2005 .
The City Council that pressured Thomas
to step down earlier this month quietly gave him an even nicer send-off Tuesday
- a 10 percent pay raise and potentially a higher pension for life.
The decision boosts Thomas' salary to
$208,900 from $189,901. The council made the increase retroactive to July 1,
the beginning of its fiscal year.
The council was generous to its other
top administrators as well, giving them identical retroactive 10 percent salary
increases. City Attorney Sam Jackson's salary rose to $182,800 from $166,148,
City Treasurer Tom Friery's to $169,900 from $154,502 and City Clerk Shirley
Concolino's to $122,000 from $110,946.
The timing and the substantial amount
of the pay increases could trigger a review by the California Public Employees
Retirement System, according to spokeswoman Pat Macht. . . .
If a pay raise was given as part of a
final settlement, was listed as special compensation or would not be used to
calculate the pay range for the city manager in the future, Macht said, it
might not be allowed in a pension calculation.
"It would raise a red flag - the
compensation experts would take a look at it," she said.
However, Macht said, if the raise was
given to other key managers, was recommended after a compensation survey, or
would be used to set the salary for a replacement candidate, the pension
increase would be more in line with CalPERS requirements.
In a written report to the council,
Dee Contreras, director of the city's labor relations office, said the
recommended raises were based on performance and in comparison with several
other cities in
Contreras said the raises will place
On Tuesday, the council unanimously
approved the salary increases with no discussion. It was included as part of
the consent agenda, usually reserved for noncontroversial items. . . .
Theis Finlev, policy advocate for
California Common Cause, said salary discussions such as these should always be
discussed in public on the regular agenda.
"Sacramentans were not given
enough opportunity to weigh in on this," Finlev said.
Read the entire article
at www.sacbee.com/content/politics/local_government/v-print/story/13895924p-14734780c.html.
About the writer:
The Bee's Terri Hardy can be reached at (916) 321-1073 or thardy@sacbee.com.
Also see: Documents
Show He'll Receive $80,000 To Retire Early By Terri Hardy at www.sacbee.com/content/politics/local_government/story/13900001p-14738680c.html.
Reality: No Branch of
Government Can Control Costs or Make Accurate Financial Projections. They Use
Myths Justify Their Gluttonous Behavior.
* * * * *
7.
Overheard in the
Medical Staff Lounge: Did the Bee Really Mean Investigate Congress?
Dr Milton was
reading the editorial in the November
30, 2005 , Sacramento BEE, stating that
Rep Randy Cunningham is about to move from his big house, a Mansion, to a much
bigger house, the prison. This was graphically illustrated by Rex Rabin in an
adjacent cartoon. Rep. Randy
"Duke" Cunningham's admission that he took bribes to help a defense
contractor secure contracts ends one political career but should ignite a
deeper investigation of Congress, according to the BEE.
"Though unsavory, it is not
unusual for members of Congress on powerful defense committees and
subcommittees to receive campaign donations from defense contractors or to be
recruited for lucrative lobbying and defense industry jobs after they leave
elected office. From Congress to the school board, proving that contributions
are made with the specific intent to influence an official act or received
because of an official act is what's difficult to pin down.
"But that wasn't the case for
Cunningham, R-Rancho Santa Fe, and his quid pro quo. Cunningham blatantly and
shamelessly took private favors in exchange for steering contracts to his
benefactor. Cunningham admitted in U.S. District Court that he used his
position on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee to steer government
contracts to a defense contractor in exchange for personal favors. . . . All
told, Cunningham admitted in court to receiving at least $2.4 million in
bribes."
Dr Rosen: But won't investigating
bribes decimate Congress?
Dr Milton: Hopefully. And wouldn't that be the biggest step in restoring
freedom in our country?
* * * * *
White Paper For Patient Safety: In Search Of The "Black Box" For Reliable And Cost-Effective Quality Control Of The Delivery Of Medical Care. By Gil N. Mileikowsky, MD
The reason airline transportation is
the safest of all transports is due to the famous "black box" that
provides the necessary first step, i.e. the accurate
"diagnosis." Without that reliable "forensic"
analysis, the "blind lead the blind."
The reason the Federal
Aviation Agency (FAA) is effective is because it has jurisdiction over every
aspect of the airline industry, including pilots, mechanics, flight attendants,
management and manufacturers. It can prevent disasters because it has the
power to act immediately, without the intervention of any other agency, e.g.
the U.S. Department of Justice and its lengthy process. The FAA can
ground, at once, a particular type of plane or an entire airline company, with
good cause. Without it, planes would crash daily.
There is no such equivalent
in the healthcare industry, however the taxpayer is spending billions of
dollars on multiple layers of county, state, federal and not-for-profit
agencies that are defective by design. On
Is it possible to have a
"black box" in the health care industry?
Absolutely, yes.
In clinical research, to
evaluate new treatments we use randomized "double-blind" studies,
where neither the physicians nor the patients know which pill is a placebo and
which pill actually contains the drug. We can do the same when evaluating
any error or complication in the health care industry, whether it's in the hospital,
the doctor's office, the pharmacy, the manufacturer of a medical device, etc.
We have about 900,000
licensed physicians in the
Whenever any error or complication
is reported, it could be submitted anonymously, i.e. without the patient's
name, the physician's name, the hospital's name, the city or state, to an odd
number (7 to 11) licensed individuals who will also remain anonymous to the
patient, physician and hospital. This anonymity will assure an unbiased,
impartial opinion, void of any possible conflict of interest. Such an
approach also eliminates any concern of "immunity," as the identity
of those individuals will never be known.
A "black box"
method of investigation should combine multiple disciplines, i.e. physicians,
pharmacists, nurses, administrators, medical device manufacturers, laboratory
technicians, etc., because errors and complications in the health care sector
can result from various sources in a hospital, a laboratory, a pharmacy, a
doctor's office, etc. "It's the system stupid," as R.M.
Wachter, M.D. and K.W. Shojania, M.D., point out in Internal Bleeding the
truth behind America's terrifying epidemic of medical mistakes.3
Such a "black box"
could be consulted in lieu of "experts" by state medical boards,
hospitals' peer review, medical malpractice cases, Medicare investigations,
etc., since their "experts" are at times the weak link or
"Achilles tendon" of the system.
Such a "black box" could also prevent future
errors and complications because the opinions of each member of such a
"black box" could be reviewed and a physician, a pharmacist, a nurse,
or an administrator whose professional opinion may fall below the acceptable
standard of practice could be identified and educated in such a proactive
"two way" analysis. Isn't the whole purpose of peer review to
learn from our colleagues' mistakes so that we can reduce errors and
complications in our industry by not repeating them.
Such a "black box"
participation should be mandatory as a part of maintaining and renewing the
licenses' of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, hospitals, etc., in the same way
that participation in peer review is mandatory under the bylaws of hospitals
for members in order to maintain their "active" status. We could
save the taxpayer a lot of money by merging all state boards - medical,
nursing, pharmacists, tissue bank, laboratory, hospitals -, into a single state
and federal oversight agencies. Thus, their investigative capabilities
would be merged into one single comprehensive unit, much like our multiple
intelligence agencies are coordinated through the "Homeland Security"
Department. This is the only way to achieve a uniform quality control
across the country. See articles in the Washington Post regarding the
disparate effectiveness of various state medical boards.4
To read the entire article,
please scroll down at http://www.delmeyer.net/HMCPeerRev.htm.
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9.
Book Review: 
HEALTHY COMPETITION - What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free
It by Michael F Cannon &
Michael D Tanner, Cato Institute, Washington, DC ฉ 2005, ISBN 1-930865-81-3,
173 pp, $10. Part II Misdiagnosis: Chapter 3: How Not to Reform Health
Care
With
The authors begin with a
popular subject of the "Right" to Health Care as claimed by Physicians
for a National Health Program, a group that claims to represent more than
10,000 doctors and medical students. (about one percent of physicians) Sen.
Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has remarked, "We have it in our power to make
the fundamental human right to health care a reality for all Americans. His
colleague Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has said, "I'm committed to
universal health care coverage because, in
The authors
respond: "Medical care can be as essential to survival as food. But does
it follow that people have a right to medical care? Would recognizing a right
to health care solve
"Whoever has the power to make these decisions will
exercise enormous power over who does and does not receive medical care. Who
should have that power? In most nations that have tried to guarantee universal
access to medical care, politicians allocate specified funds to local
bureaucracies, which in turn decide how medical care will be rationed. This is
typically achieved by making even seriously ill patients wait for care.
"A second and related difficulty is the question of
who pays. A right to health care by definition would not be conditioned on
one's ability to pay. Enforcing the right would require increasing taxes in
proportion to how generously one defines the ''right.''
"A third difficulty is the incentives such a system
creates. Patients would have little reason to constrain their consumption
because additional consumption would cost them little. Higher tax rates would
discourage work and productivity, yielding less economic growth and wealth.
Pushing down the compensation of medical professionals would discourage many
(and many of the brightest) candidates from entering the field of medicine.
Divorcing their compensation from the satisfaction of their patients would
reduce the quality of care. Since innovations that increase medical
productivity also increase spending, policymakers would discourage innovation
because every new discovery puts them in the uncomfortable position of either
increasing taxes or saying ''no'' to patients. The paradox of a ''right to
health care'' is that it discourages the very activities that help deliver on
that ''right.''
"A final difficulty is how to deliver the medical care
to which all are now entitled. Declaring health care to be a right does nothing
to solve the problem of getting the right resources to the right place at the
right time. Where are doctors most needed? Where will we place hospitals? Who
will produce surgical tools? How much will they be paid? These decisions must be
made through the political process. Not only has the political process proven
slow and imprecise at meeting shifting needs, but those with political power
would enjoy a greater ''right'' to health care than others by virtue of their
ability to affect the allocation of health resources. That has largely been the
experience of countries that have tried to enforce a right to health care. . .
.
"Fundamentally, creating a legal 'right' to health
care is incompatible with the idea of individual rights. People cannot
legitimately claim a right to something if that claim infringes on the rights
of another. Smith's right to free speech takes nothing away from Jones. The
only obligation Jones owes to Smith is not to interfere with Smith's exercise
of her rights. The same is not true of a right to health care, which would turn
the concept of rights from a shield into a sword by imposing an obligation on
Jones to provide health care to Smith.
"The underlying goal of creating a legal right to
health care is to provide medical care to the greatest number possible. The
fact that this approach would reduce the amount of medical care available to
most or all Americans suggests that we should look for other ways of achieving
this goal."
"Government-Run
Health Care . . . as is done in
"A
government-run health care system would come at enormous cost to American
taxpayers. One proposal championed by Representative and former Democratic
presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was estimated to cost as much as $6
trillion over 10 years. Supporters argue
that some of this cost would be offset by savings from reduced administrative
costs and insurance company profits. However, research suggests that government
provision of health care leads to higher administrative costs. Patricia Danzon
has estimated that administrative costs under
"Whatever its powers, government cannot repeal the
laws of economics. When individuals
perceive health care to be free, the quantity demanded increases. Faced with
the choice of bankrupting their economy to pay for the virtually unlimited
demand, or reducing the amount of health care provided, these countries opt for
the latter.
"Even with rationing, however, government-run health
care systems do a poor job of controlling the rising cost of health care. When
such factors as population growth, general inflation, exchange rates, growth in
elderly populations, investment in research and development, and rates of
crime, poverty, AIDS, and teen pregnancy are taken into account, Canadian health spending is much closer
to that of the
"Universal health care is not free. Citizens of countries
with national health care systems pay a heavy price in taxes.
"One step removed from government management of the
health care marketplace is the concept of 'Managed Competition'"
That idea would leave the provision of health care in private hands, but would
create an artificial marketplace run under strict government control. Managed
competition saw its fullest rendering in the failed
To read the rest of Part II, Chapter 3
How Not to Reform Health Care,
please go to the Cato Bookstore: www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDetails&method=cats&scid=33&pid=1441272. The price is
only $10. At that rate, consider purchasing two or three and do your friends,
who don't understand the ideas above, a favor with a gift that keeps on giving.
There are also excellent other recent titles you may want to consider.
Next month, Part III: Underlying Diseases,
Strong Medicine, Chapter 4: Too Much of a Good Thing Can Be Very Bad
To read some of
the other book reviews that are available, please go to www.delmeyer.net/PhysicianPatientBookshelf.htm.
* * * * *
10. Hippocrates & His Kin: Government Is a Way Of Not Having to Think
Harry Browne: Out of the
mouths of nurses: During a recent hospital stay,
I had an interesting conversation about government with a nurse, Kathleen
Brazil. In the middle of the dialogue, she suddenly said, "Government is a
way of not having to think." And in those eight words, she wrapped up
neatly the seduction of government for so many people. www.harrybrowne.org/
Goodness, I hope she thinks when she's taking care of the sick and
dying.
Vioxx Verdict: In the battle between sound
science and the trial bar, it was probably too much to hope that Merck would
win the lawsuit whose verdict came down Friday [August 19]. There was no direct
causal link between Vioxx and the arrhythmia that the autopsy showed had caused
the death of a
How can you have a heart
attack that can't be confirmed on the autopsy? So now attorneys, judges, and
juries can hand down verdicts based on speculation rather than evidence?
A MedicalTuesday member writes about a college friend diagnosed as mentally ill by the psychologists at the euphemistically named student-counseling center. Ended up locked up in mental institution for some months. Finally her advisor heard about it. She was a chem major and had been working with selenium. Symptoms of excessive selenium exposure are, well, apparently similar to those of mental illness. They were so tuned to seeing everything as a psychological problem that they never even considered a physical cause until the professor started raising Cain.It's always hazardous to allow allied medical fields to make a medical diagnosis. Before long, we might even hear of administrators of insurance carriers or even government practicing medicine by telling doctors how to diagnose and treat.
George
Washington's Thanksgiving Prayer "Whereas it is the duty of all
nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be
grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor . .
.that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good
that was, that is, or that will be." http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113287973488606161.html
If George Washington were alive today, he may never have become president.
Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's
Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his
Greatness states: Modern clinicians agree that
Had
Abraham Lincoln lived today in our current milieu of political correctness, he
could never have been elected president and slavery may have lasted another
generation or more.
To read more HHK columns,
please go to www.healthcarecom.net/hhk2000.htm.
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11. Organizations for Restoring Accountability in
HealthCare, Government and Society: