1.
Featured
Article: Why the World Needs
America
Foreign-policy
pundits increasingly argue that democracy and free markets could thrive without
U.S. predominance. If this sounds too good to be true, writes Robert Kagan,
that's because it is.
By ROBERT KAGAN | WSJ |
FEBRUARY 11, 2012
History
shows that world orders, including our own, are transient. They rise and fall,
and the institutions they erect, the beliefs and "norms" that guide
them, the economic systems they support—they rise and fall, too. The downfall
of the Roman Empire brought an end not just to Roman rule but to Roman
government and law and to an entire economic system stretching from Northern
Europe to North Africa. Culture, the arts, even progress in science and
technology, were set back for centuries.
Modern
history has followed a similar pattern. After the Napoleonic Wars of the early
19th century, British control of the seas and the balance of great powers on
the European continent provided relative security and stability. Prosperity
grew, personal freedoms expanded, and the world was knit more closely together
by revolutions in commerce and communication. Read more . . .
With the outbreak of World War I, the age of settled
peace and advancing liberalism—of European civilization approaching its
pinnacle—collapsed into an age of hyper-nationalism, despotism and economic
calamity. The once-promising spread of democracy and liberalism halted and then
reversed course, leaving a handful of outnumbered and besieged democracies
living nervously in the shadow of fascist and totalitarian neighbors. The
collapse of the British and European orders in the 20th century did not produce
a new dark age—though if Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had prevailed, it
might have—but the horrific conflict that it produced was, in its own way, just
as devastating.
Would the end
of the present American-dominated order have less dire consequences? A
surprising number of American intellectuals, politicians and policy makers
greet the prospect with equanimity. There is a general sense that the end of
the era of American pre-eminence, if and when it comes, need not mean the end
of the present international order, with its widespread freedom, unprecedented
global prosperity (even amid the current economic crisis) and absence of war
among the great powers.
American power may diminish, the political scientist G.
John Ikenberry argues, but "the underlying foundations of the liberal
international order will survive and thrive." The commentator Fareed
Zakaria believes that even as the balance shifts against the U.S., rising
powers like China "will continue to live within the framework of the
current international system." And there are elements across the political
spectrum—Republicans who call for retrenchment, Democrats who put their faith
in international law and institutions—who don't imagine that a
"post-American world" would look very different from the American
world.
If all of
this sounds too good to be true, it is. The present world order was largely
shaped by American power and reflects American interests and preferences. If
the balance of power shifts in the direction of other nations, the world order
will change to suit their interests and preferences. Nor can we assume that all
the great powers in a post-American world would agree on the benefits of
preserving the present order, or have the capacity to preserve it, even if they
wanted to.
Take the issue of democracy. For several decades, the
balance of power in the world has favored democratic governments. In a
genuinely post-American world, the balance would shift toward the great-power
autocracies. Both Beijing and Moscow already protect dictators like Syria's
Bashar al-Assad. If they gain greater relative influence in the future, we will
see fewer democratic transitions and more autocrats hanging on to power. The
balance in a new, multipolar world might be more favorable to democracy if some
of the rising democracies—Brazil, India, Turkey, South Africa—picked up the
slack from a declining U.S. Yet not all of them have the desire or the capacity
to do it.
What about the economic order of free markets and free
trade? People assume that China and other rising powers that have benefited so
much from the present system would have a stake in preserving it. They wouldn't
kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Unfortunately,
they might not be able to help themselves. The creation and survival of a
liberal economic order has depended, historically, on great powers that are
both willing and able to support open trade and free markets, often with naval
power. If a declining America is unable to maintain its long-standing hegemony on
the high seas, would other nations take on the burdens and the expense of
sustaining navies to fill in the gaps?
Even if they did, would this produce an open global
commons—or rising tension? China and India are building bigger navies, but the
result so far has been greater competition, not greater security. As Mohan
Malik has noted in this newspaper, their "maritime rivalry could spill
into the open in a decade or two," when India deploys an aircraft carrier
in the Pacific Ocean and China deploys one in the Indian Ocean. The move from
American-dominated oceans to collective policing by several great powers could
be a recipe for competition and conflict rather than for a liberal economic
order.
And do the Chinese really value an open economic system?
The Chinese economy soon may become the largest in the world, but it will be
far from the richest. Its size is a product of the country's enormous
population, but in per capita terms, China remains relatively poor. The U.S.,
Germany and Japan have a per capita GDP of over $40,000. China's is a little
over $4,000, putting it at the same level as Angola, Algeria and Belize. Even
if optimistic forecasts are correct, China's per capita GDP by 2030 would still
only be half that of the U.S., putting it roughly where Slovenia and Greece are
today.
As Arvind
Subramanian and other economists have pointed out, this will make for a
historically unique situation. In the past, the largest and most dominant
economies in the world have also been the richest. Nations whose peoples are
such obvious winners in a relatively unfettered economic system have less
temptation to pursue protectionist measures and have more of an incentive to
keep the system open. . .
Another problem is that China's form of capitalism is heavily dominated by
the state, with the ultimate goal of preserving the rule of the Communist
Party. Unlike the eras of British and American pre-eminence, when the leading
economic powers were dominated largely by private individuals or companies,
China's system is more like the mercantilist arrangements of previous
centuries. The government amasses wealth in order to secure its continued rule
and to pay for armies and navies to compete with other great powers. . .
Finally, what
about the long peace that has held among the great powers for the better part
of six decades? Would it survive in a post-American world?
Most commentators who welcome this scenario imagine that
American predominance would be replaced by some kind of multipolar harmony. But
multipolar systems have historically been neither particularly stable nor
particularly peaceful. Rough parity among powerful nations is a source of
uncertainty that leads to miscalculation. Conflicts erupt as a result of
fluctuations in the delicate power equation.
War among the great powers was a common, if not constant,
occurrence in the long periods of multipolarity from the 16th to the 18th
centuries, culminating in the series of enormously destructive Europe-wide wars
that followed the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon's defeat in 1815. .
. .
There is
little reason to believe that a return to multipolarity in the 21st century
would bring greater peace and stability than it has in the past. The era of
American predominance has shown that there is no better recipe for great-power
peace than certainty about who holds the upper hand. . .
But
international order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the
domination of one vision over others—in America's case, the domination of
free-market and democratic principles, together with an international system
that supports them. The present order will last only as long as those who favor
it and benefit from it retain the will and capacity to defend it. . .
If and when
American power declines, the institutions and norms that American power has
supported will decline, too. Or more likely, if history is a guide, they may
collapse altogether as we make a transition to another kind of world order, or
to disorder. We may discover then that the U.S. was essential to keeping the present
world order together and that the alternative to American power was not peace
and harmony but chaos and catastrophe—which is what the world looked like right
before the American order came into being.
—Mr. Kagan is a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings
Institution. Adapted from "The World America Made," published by
Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright © 2012 by Robert Kagan.
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2.
In the
News: Professor Muhammad
Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel peace prize
Grameen’s
business empire
Grabbing Grameen: Property rights in peril in Bangladesh
From The Economist | print edition
| Jan 28th 2012
HE IS
probably Bangladesh’s most celebrated citizen. Muhammad Yunus, winner of the
2006 Nobel peace prize, founded Grameen Bank in 1983 to provide tiny loans to
poor rural women. Grameen became a global model for microfinance. It also
spawned 48 other firms in sectors that stretch from textiles to mobile phones.
Yet the Bangladeshi government seems determined to take Mr Yunus down a peg.
In May 2011
the government pushed him out of his job as boss of Grameen Bank, saying that
he was past the retirement age for someone running a government bank. (Grameen
Bank mostly belongs to its borrowers but the state owns a slice.) Mr Yunus says
this is just a pretext for a power grab. The government now wants to assert
more control over other firms in the Grameen network, which includes assets
worth an estimated $1.6 billion. Read more . . .
This is
controversial, to put it mildly, not least because some Grameen firms have big
foreign partners. Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s largest telecoms provider, was
created with Norway’s Telenor and generates sales of nearly $1 billion a year.
Grameen Danone Foods, a yogurt-maker, and Grameen-Veolia, a water company, are
joint ventures with French giants. BASF Grameen, which makes mosquito nets, and
Grameen Intel, which creates software for poor farmers, also have foreign backers.
The government says that Grameen Bank owns or
part-owns all these firms, and that its stakes partly belong to the government
itself. Mr Yunus’s aides say the members of the Grameen family are all
independent entities with no legal ties to each other.
The
government will have none of this. Officials are furiously trying to unearth
evidence that Mr Yunus in fact controls them. A lawyer for Bangladesh’s central
bank, a state body, reasons that since Grameen Bank is a “state authority” and
Mr Yunus was a “public officer”, all companies created with the help of the
bank’s finances, its people or even its goodwill are in effect state resources.
The
government is calling for the Grameen Empire to be brought together “under a
single structure”. Bangladeshi business folk are horrified. If a Nobel prize is
no defence against expropriation, that doesn’t bode well for the security of
property rights in Bangladesh. . .
People and their property are not safe when the government is in session.
People and their property are not secure if the government owns a small
slice of it.
The long arm of the state is the biggest threat to freedom: Yesterday,
Yesteryear, Today and Tomorrow
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3.
International Medicine: How I woke up
to the untruths of Barack Obama
By Christopher Booker Jan. 28, 2012
This
article is from the U.K. Telegraph.
|
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Government
Medicine does not give timely access to healthcare; it only gives access to a
waiting list.
This in turn gives rise to the ever
growing power of government.
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4.
Medicare: A rare injection of politics into the prayer
breakfast - health care overhaul.
Obama: Jesus Would Back
Higher Taxes
Thursday,
02 Feb 2012
President Barack Obama linked his
economic policies to his Christian faith, saying on Thursday that meeting the
nation's challenges requires strong values as much as smart policies.
Obama, making his third appearance as
president at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, used his remarks to
justify many of his actions, such as his call for the wealthy to pay more in
taxes and his health care overhaul. He said they were not only economically
sound but also rooted in his Christian values.
"When I talk about shared responsibility,
it's because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling
and at a time when we have enormous deficits, it's hard for me to ask seniors
on a fixed income or young people with student loans or middle-class families
who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone," Obama said.
"But for me as a Christian, it also
coincides with Jesus' teaching that, for unto whom much is given, much shall be
required," he said.
(Editor’s
note: I don’t think He was talking about taxes – helping the poor was voluntary
then and should be now. Force charity is NOT charity! Forced charity is NEVER
perceived as charity. Forced charity never helps the down trodden. It distorts
their perspective. It removes all thankfulness. It becomes an entitlement.
Thankfulness is replaced by demands. Demands can never be satisfied. It’s
always more . . . more . . . more . . . There is and will never be enough. As
one down trodden patient told me, the rich can afford to pay 100% in taxes. Oh
really? Maybe you think they can afford 200% in taxes? Certainly, he replied.
They can well afford it.) Read more . . .
His remarks came one day after
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney created a flap with clumsy comments
about the struggling middle class. "I'm not concerned about the very poor.
We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned
about the very rich. They're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very
heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.
You can focus on the very poor, that's not my focus," Romney said.
Obama didn't mention Romney or the other
Republican candidates. But his defense of his policies was a rare injection of
politics into the prayer breakfast. The annual event is hosted by lawmakers
from both parties, and speakers usually refrain from direct political
references, sticking instead to calls for civility and respect in Washington.
The president said his faith also guides
some of his foreign policy decision, including supporting foreign aid or
sending U.S. troops to Africa to target a notoriously violent rebel group.
"It's not just about strengthening
alliances or promoting democratic values or projecting American leadership
around the world, although it does all those things and it will make us safer
and more secure," he said. "It's also about the biblical call to care
for the least of these, for the poor, for those at the margins of our society;
to answer the responsibility we're given in Proverbs to speak up for those who
cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute."
Obama said that while personal religious
beliefs alone should not dictate a politician's decisions, leaders should not
abandon their faith entirely.
"We can't leave our values at the
door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue
that has held our nation together for centuries and allowed us to become
somewhat more perfect a union," he said.
Obama speaks often about his faith but
prefers to worship in private. He said Thursday that he starts each morning
with a brief prayer, then spends time reading scripture. Sometimes, he said,
pastors come to the Oval Officer to pray with him, for his family and for the
country.
© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
Read more on
Newsmax.com: Obama: Jesus Would Back Higher Taxes
·
It’s certainly difficult to understand
where Obama obtain his Christian upbringing. Sen. Barack Obama's pastor
says blacks should not sing "God
Bless America" but "God damn America." The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was Obama's pastor
for the last 20 years prior to becoming president.
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Government is not the solution to our
problems, government is the problem.
-
Ronald Reagan
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5.
Medical
Gluttony: Only one
diagnosis can be treated in one doctor’s visit (Dr. Goodman)
Medicare has strict rules about how tasks can be combined. For
example, “special needs” patients typically have five or more comorbidities — a
fancy way of saying that a lot of things are going wrong at once. These
patients are costing Medicare about $60,000 a year and they consume a large
share of Medicare’s entire budget. Ideally, when one of these patients sees a
doctor, the doctor will deal with all five problems sequentially. That would
economize on the patient’s time and ensure that the treatment regimen for each
malady is integrated and consistent with all the others. Read more . . .
Under Medicare’s payment system, however, a specialist can only
bill Medicare the full fee for treating one of the five conditions during a
single visit. If she treats the other four, she can only bill half price for
those services. It’s even worse for primary care physicians. They cannot bill
anything for treating the additional four conditions.
Since doctors don’t like to work for free or see their income
cut in half, most have a one-visit-one-morbidity-treatment policy. Patients
with five morbidities are asked to schedule additional visits for the remaining
four problems with the same doctor or with other doctors. The type of medicine
that would be best for the patient and that would probably save the taxpayers
money in the long run is the type of medicine that is penalized under
Medicare’s payment system.
Read Goodman’s Healthcare Blog at
the NCPA.
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Medical
Gluttony thrives in Government and Health Insurance Programs.
It Disappears with Appropriate Deductibles and
Co-payments on Every Service.
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6.
Medical
Myths: Insurance
companies have to provide advice nurses to control doctor costs.
A
patient of mine called her insurance company, Health Net, for advice on her
epigastric pain [severe pain in the pit of her stomach]. She was told to see
her doctor as soon as possible and have him obtain a globulin level, a blood
test for Strep, an ECHO of the heart and an ultrasound over her sternum. Read more . . .
When
she came to the office she had severe epigastric tenderness consistent with Gastro
Esophageal Reflux Disease (GERD). [She was immediately given Aciphex, a stomach
acid reducer, and Gaviscon, an acid neutralizer.] She also had exquisite
tenderness of her rib cartilages next to her sternum or breastbone, consistent
with a costochondritis or inflammation of her rib cartilages. [She was given
two ES Tylenol tablets immediately.] During the next 10 minutes or so, her
hostility dissipated as she realized her pains were resolving. The demands for
the tests that the Health Net RN recommended also disappeared. Another example
of thousands of dollars worth of testing found to be irrelevant for the price
of one office call.
The
standard HMO impression of doctors as being incompetent and the cause of rising
health care costs since about the 1980s has again backfired on the HMO. They
are incompetent to play doctor or to treat patients by phone in order to save
costs. In this case, if the HMO's recommendations had been followed, the cost
would easily have been ten-fold higher and the patient would have remained undiagnosed
or inappropriately treated.
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Medical Myths as to costs originate when someone else
treats the patient.
Myths disappear when the Doctor reassumes charge on
Every Service.
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7.
Overheard
in the Medical Staff Lounge: Can Santorum
Restore America?
Dr. Milton: Well it looks like the Candidates are
sitting in different chairs this week.
Dr. Ruth: Senator Santorum was a surprise.
Dr. Dave: He may be
a bit far to the right, but we may be ready by November to have a conservative
level head in the White House.
Dr. Yancy: I wasn’t
for Santorum. But I can take his stand for the greater good of human kind to
bring us back closer to the center. Read more…
Dr. Michelle: Do you think he’ll undo Obama Care?
Dr. Yancy: I’m not sure anybody will be totally
successful in repealing it.
Dr. Milton: Well, one
thing we know for sure, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich won’t come close to
repealing it.
Dr. Joseph: As a retired
surgeon, I would have to agree with my surgical colleague Yancy. Obama has been
so terrible for surgeons, but no one out there fully comprehends how awful he
has been.
Dr. Yancy: Allowing
Obama to complete his destructive course will destroy the surgical profession.
In short order we would have surgical Nurse Practitioners or Physician
Assistants do much of the surgical work.
Dr. Joseph: You would
have one catastrophe after another before the public realizes the magnitude of
his subversion of the surgical profession. Some of us older surgeons would even
say it borders on criminal intent.
Dr. Milton: But by that
time, several of the more aggressive PAs would be firmly entrenched with the
administrators.
Dr. Rosen: One can
almost foresee the aggressive Physician Assistant scheduling his patient for a
colon cancer resection.
Dr. Milton: The
current surgical reviews of the path reports, operative reports and the charts
takes several months to make sure everything jives. And with a good result from
several PAs, it might take a year or two to straighten out that mess.
Dr. Edwards: By that time,
many of the PAs would be firmly entrenched. With hospital administration on
their side, they could no longer be removed.
Dr. Rosen: But that
could be a source of optimism. Santorum will have an uphill battle with his
position on moral issues. Looking at how far we’ve strayed in the last three
years, he just may be an effective force for Change—a different kind of Change.
A major force for the restoration of our Republic.
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The Staff Lounge Is Where Unfiltered Opinions Are
Heard.
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8.
Voices of
Medicine: A Review of Articles Written by Physicians: Medical Research
Inside Medicine by Dr. Michael Wilkes,
Sac Bee Feb2
For too long, medical journals have
controlled and manipulated the release of scientific information to enhance
profits and prestige.
Journals such as JAMA, Lancet, and the New
England Journal of Medicine, are multimillion-dollar businesses, thanks to the
US Government, scientists around the globe and plentiful drug advertisement.
The federal government funds the great
proportion of medical research in hopes of improving our health. Once a study has
been completed, researchers publish results in medical Journals for two
reasons. First, they believe their research is important and they wish to have
others read and know about it. Second,
publication in medical journals is necessary for the researcher to get
promoted. Read more . . . .
Medical journals do not pay authors for
papers the way other magazines do. They get manuscripts for free. The journal
then decides if the paper appears to meet criteria for publication and, if so,
they send the paper to other scientists for what is called Peer Review.
If the paper is evaluated by fellow
researchers as well done and meets journal standards, it is accepted and the
journal publishes the report in a paper magazine, online, or both.
To summarize, the journals get the papers
for free, asks other scientists to review the papers for free, and publish a
magazine filled with federally funded research that nets the journal millions
of dollars through subscriptions and sales of advertisements.
It gets worse.
Let’s say I want my medical students to
read a research paper in my class that I wrote and published in a medical
journal. I can’t use the paper unless I pay the journal to use the article I
wrote which was funded through your tax dollars.
California schools pay hundreds of
thousands of dollars each year to subscribe to scientific journals that are
jam-packed with research that has been funded by the state and federal
governments and was conducted by our own researches at California’s colleges
and universities.
Shouldn’t the people who funded the
research—taxpayers—have free access to the knowledge produced?
Medical journals also use draconian news
embargoes that forbid health reporters from reporting on research in their
journal until some arbitrary time and day that the journals select.
I’m not sure how they got all this power
and control, but it needs to change. . .
To read more, go the Sacramento Bee, February 2, 2011, page D 3.
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VOM
Is an Insider's View of What Doctors are Thinking, Saying and Writing about
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9.
Review: The Iron Lady
The Real Margaret Thatcher Story By DANIEL YERGIN
In the late 1970s, inflation neared 20% and the ruling party still wanted
to own the means of production. Enter the grocer's daughter.
A movie
producer once shared with me a maxim for making historical films: Faced with
choosing between "drama" and "historical accuracy,"
compromise on the history and go with drama.
That is
certainly what the producers of "The Iron Lady" have done. The result
is a masterly performance by Meryl Streep as former British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher. But the depiction of Mrs. Thatcher in the movie misses much
of the larger story. That story—the struggle to define the frontier between the
state and the market, and the calamities that happen when governments live
beyond their means—is directly relevant to the debt dramas now rocking Europe
and the United States. Read
more . . .
After World
War II, Britain created the cradle-to-grave welfare state. A clause in the
constitution of the Labour Party which came to power in 1945 called for
government to own the "means of production." That ended up ranging
from coal mines and the steel industry to appliance stores, hotels and even a
travel agency. . .
By the late
1970s, enormous losses were piled up at state-owned companies, debts which had
to be covered by the British Treasury. A desperate Britain needed to borrow
money from the International Monetary Fund. Inflation was heading toward 20% as
the deficit mounted and strike after strike disrupted economic life. Even grave
diggers walked off the job. The continuing deterioration of the country seemed
inevitable. Some predicted that Britain would soon be worse off than communist
East Germany.
Enter
Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocery-shop owner who had begun her own
professional life as a food chemist but decided she preferred politics to
working on ice cream and cake fillings. In 1975, she was elected leader of the
Conservative Party. Four years later, she became prime minister, determined to
reverse Britain's decline. That required great personal conviction, which Meryl
Streep brilliantly captures.
Mrs. Thatcher
came with her own script, a framework provided by free-market economists who,
even a few years earlier, had been regarded as fringe figures. One telling
moment that "The Iron Lady" misses is when a Conservative staffer
called for a middle way between left and right and the prime minister shut him
down mid-comment. Slapping a copy of Friedrich Hayek's "The Constitution
of Liberty" on the table, she declared: "This is what we
believe." . . .
As prime
minister, she encountered enormous resistance, even from her own party, to
putting beliefs into practice. But she prevailed through difficult years of
painful budget cuts and yanked the government out of loss-making businesses.
Shares in state-owned companies were sold off, and ownership shifted from the
British Treasury to pension funds, mutual funds and other investors around the
world. This set off what became a global mass movement toward privatization.
("I don't like the word" privatization, she said when we met. What
was really going on, she said, was "free enterprise.")
But it was
labor relations that were the great drama of the Thatcher years. The country
could no longer function without labor reform. This was particularly true of
the government-owned coal industry, which was being subsidized with some $1.3
billion a year. The Marxist-led coal miners had great leverage over the entire
economy because coal was the main source for generating Britain's electricity.
Everyone remembered the paralyzing 1974 National Union of Miners strike which
blacked out the country and brought down a Conservative government.
By the 1980s,
it was clear that another confrontation was coming as Mrs. Thatcher's
government prepared to close some of its unprofitable mines. The strike started
in 1984 and was marked by violent confrontations. But the Iron Lady would not
bend, and after a year the strike faltered and then petered out. Thereafter,
the road was open to reformed labor relations and renewed economic growth. . .
.
Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were intellectual soul mates, but the movie does not
touch on arguably their greatest collaboration, which was ending the Cold War.
Mrs. Thatcher's visit to Poland in 1988, for instance, gave critical impetus to
the Solidarity movement in its struggle with the Communist government.
But the
difference between how Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher are seen today is striking. The
bitterness of the Reagan years has largely been forgotten. Not so with Margaret
Thatcher. She remains a divisive figure. Her edges were sharp, as could be her
tone. Moreover, she was a woman competing in what had almost completely been a
man's world.
Yet her true
impact has to be measured by what came after, and there the effect is clear.
When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took the leadership of the Labour Party, they
set out to modernize it. They forced the repeal of the party's constitutional
clause IV with its commitment to state ownership of the commanding heights of
the economy.
They did not
try to reverse the fundamentals of Thatcherite economics. Mr. Blair recognized
that without wealth creation, the risk was redistribution of the shrinking
slices of a shrinking pie. The "new" Labour Party, he once said,
should not be a party that "bungs up your taxes, runs a high-inflation
economy and is hopelessly inefficient" and "lets the trade unions run
the show."
The lesson
that governments cannot permanently live beyond their means had been learned.
When economies are growing in good times, that lesson tends to be forgotten.
Yet the longer it is forgotten, the more painful, contentious and dangerous the
relearning will be. That is the real story of the Iron Lady. And that is the
story in Europe—and the U.S.—today.
Mr. Yergin is author of "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking
of the Modern World" (Penguin 2011) and chairman of IHS CERA.
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The Book Review Section Is an Insider’s View of What
Doctors are Reading about.
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10. Hippocrates & His Kin: Some patients
enjoy the freedom of ordering their own tests.
Medicaid benefits allows for more flexibility in health care.
A Medicaid patient had numerous
tests done in several cities. It turns out she had relatives in each and also
property, including a farm. She stayed with members of her family as she
travelled and took care of her business endeavors. It allowed her the ability
to obtain almost any test she desired at the different clinics in the several
cities she visited. She said most doctors were very accommodating in ordering
what she felt she needed.
It must be
gratifying to obtain almost any test she wished without physician interference.
It is also
very expensive. But she didn’t have to worry about that.
Gingrich
extends his stay in California
Newt Gingrich had a photo-op session at the San Diego
Zoo feeding the Pandas. The Pandas seem to like Newt.
You suppose the Pandas will vote for Newt?
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Hippocrates
and His Kin / Hippocrates Modern Colleagues
The Challenges of Yesteryear, Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow
*
* * * *
11. Organizations Restoring Accountability in HealthCare,
Government and Society:
•
The National
Center for Policy Analysis, John C
Goodman, PhD, President, who along with Gerald L. Musgrave, and Devon M. Herrick
wrote Lives at Risk, issues a
weekly Health Policy Digest, a health summary of the full NCPA
daily report. You may log on at www.ncpa.org and register to receive one or more
of these reports.
•
Pacific
Research Institute, (www.pacificresearch.org) Sally
C Pipes, President and CEO, John R Graham, Director of Health Care Studies, publish a monthly Health Policy Prescription
newsletter, which is very timely to our current health care situation. You may
signup to receive their newsletters via email by clicking on the email tab or directly access their health
care blog.
•
The Mercatus
Center at George Mason University (www.mercatus.org)
is a strong advocate for accountability in government. Maurice McTigue, QSO,
a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, a former member of Parliament and cabinet
minister in New Zealand, is now director of the Mercatus Center's Government
Accountability Project. Join
the Mercatus Center for Excellence in Government.
•
To read the rest of this column, please go to www.medicaltuesday.net/org.asp.
•
The
National Association of Health Underwriters, www.NAHU.org. The NAHU's Vision
Statement: Every American will have access to private sector solutions for
health, financial and retirement security and the services of insurance
professionals. There are numerous important issues listed on the opening page.
Be sure to scan their professional journal, Health Insurance Underwriters
(HIU), for articles of importance in the Health Insurance MarketPlace. The HIU magazine, with Jim
Hostetler as the executive editor, covers technology, legislation and product
news - everything that affects how health insurance professionals do business.
•
The Galen
Institute, Grace-Marie Turner President and Founder, has a weekly Health Policy Newsletter sent
every Friday to which you may subscribe by logging on at www.galen.org.
A study of purchasers of Health Savings Accounts shows that the new health care
financing arrangements are appealing to those who previously were shut out of
the insurance market, to families, to older Americans, and to workers of all
income levels.
•
Greg Scandlen, an expert in Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), has
embarked on a new mission: Consumers for Health Care Choices (CHCC). Read the
initial series of his newsletter, Consumers Power Reports.
Become a member of CHCC, The
voice of the health care consumer. Be sure to read Prescription for change:
Employers, insurers, providers, and the government have all taken their turn at
trying to fix American Health Care. Now it's the Consumers turn. Greg has
joined the Heartland Institute, where current newsletters can be found.
•
The Heartland
Institute, www.heartland.org,
Joseph Bast, President, publishes the Health Care News and the Heartlander. You
may sign up for their
health care email newsletter. Read the late Conrad F Meier on What is Free-Market Health Care?.
•
The Foundation
for Economic Education, www.fee.org, has
been publishing The Freeman - Ideas On Liberty, Freedom's Magazine, for
over 50 years, with Lawrence W Reed, President, and Sheldon Richman as editor. Having
bound copies of this running treatise on free-market economics for over 40
years, I still take pleasure in the relevant articles by Leonard Read and
others who have devoted their lives to the cause of liberty. I have a patient
who has read this journal since it was a mimeographed newsletter fifty years
ago.
•
The Council
for Affordable Health Insurance, www.cahi.org/index.asp, founded by
Greg Scandlen in 1991, where he served as CEO for five years, is an association
of insurance companies, actuarial firms, legislative consultants, physicians
and insurance agents. Their mission is to develop and promote free-market
solutions to America's health-care challenges by enabling a robust and
competitive health insurance market that will achieve and maintain access to
affordable, high-quality health care for all Americans. "The belief that
more medical care means better medical care is deeply entrenched . . . Our
study suggests that perhaps a third of medical spending is now devoted to
services that don't appear to improve health or the quality of care–and may
even make things worse."
•
The
Independence Institute, www.i2i.org, is a
free-market think-tank in Golden, Colorado, that has a Health Care Policy
Center, with Linda Gorman as Director. Be sure to sign up for the monthly Health Care Policy
Center Newsletter.
•
Martin
Masse, Director of
Publications at the Montreal Economic Institute, is the publisher of the
webzine: Le Quebecois Libre. Please log on at www.quebecoislibre.org/apmasse.htm to review his free-market based articles, some of which
will allow you to brush up on your French. You may also register to receive
copies of their webzine on a regular basis.
•
The
Fraser Institute, an
independent public policy organization, focuses on the role competitive markets
play in providing for the economic and social well being of all Canadians.
Canadians celebrated Tax Freedom Day on June 28, the date they stopped paying
taxes and started working for themselves. Log on at www.fraserinstitute.ca
for an overview of the extensive research articles that are available. You may
want to go directly to their health
research section.
•
The
Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org/,
founded in 1973, is a research and educational institute whose mission was to
formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free
enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values
and a strong national defense. -- However,
since they supported the socialistic health plan instituted by Mitt Romney in
Massachusetts, which is replaying the Medicare excessive increases in its first
two years, and was used by some as a justification for the Obama plan, they
have lost sight of their mission and we will no longer feature them as a
freedom loving institution and have canceled our contributions. We would
also caution that should Mitt Romney ever run for National office again, he
would be dangerous in the cause of freedom in health care. The WSJ paints him
as being to the left of Barrack Hussein Obama. We would also advise Steve
Forbes to disassociate himself from this institution.
•
The
Ludwig von Mises Institute,
Lew Rockwell, President, is a rich source of free-market materials,
probably the best daily course in economics we've seen. If you read these
essays on a daily basis, it would probably be equivalent to taking Economics 11
and 51 in college. Please log on at www.mises.org to obtain the foundation's daily reports. You may also log
on to Lew's premier free-market site to read some of his lectures to medical groups. Learn how state medicine subsidizes illness or to find out why anyone would want to
be an MD today.
•
CATO. The Cato Institute (www.cato.org) was
founded in 1977, by Edward H. Crane, with Charles Koch of Koch Industries. It
is a nonprofit public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington,
D.C. The Institute is named for Cato's Letters, a series of pamphlets that
helped lay the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution. The
Mission: The Cato Institute seeks to broaden the parameters of public policy
debate to allow consideration of the traditional American principles of limited
government, individual liberty, free markets and peace. Ed Crane reminds us
that the framers of the Constitution designed to protect our liberty through a
system of federalism and divided powers so that most of the governance would be
at the state level where abuse of power would be limited by the citizens'
ability to choose among 13 (and now 50) different systems of state government.
Thus, we could all seek our favorite moral turpitude and live in our comfort
zone recognizing our differences and still be proud of our unity as Americans. Michael
F. Cannon is the Cato Institute's Director of Health Policy Studies. Read
his bio, articles and books at www.cato.org/people/cannon.html.
•
The
Ethan Allen Institute, www.ethanallen.org/index2.html, is one of some 41 similar but independent state
organizations associated with the State Policy Network (SPN). The mission is to
put into practice the fundamentals of a free society: individual liberty,
private property, competitive free enterprise, limited and frugal government,
strong local communities, personal responsibility, and expanded opportunity for
human endeavor.
•
The Free State Project, with a goal of Liberty in Our
Lifetime, http://freestateproject.org/,
is an agreement among 20,000 pro-liberty activists to
move to New Hampshire, where they will
exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which
the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and
property. The success of the Project would likely entail reductions in taxation
and regulation, reforms at all levels of government to expand individual rights
and free markets, and a restoration of constitutional federalism, demonstrating
the benefits of liberty to the rest of the nation and the world. [It is indeed
a tragedy that the burden of government in the U.S., a freedom society for its
first 150 years, is so great that people want to escape to a state solely for the
purpose of reducing that oppression. We hope this gives each of us an impetus
to restore freedom from government intrusion in our own state.]
•
McLauren Institute MacLaurinCSF is a community of
students, scholars, and thinkers working together to explore and understand the
implications of the Christian faith for every field of study and every aspect
of life.* Our Mission: MacLaurinCSF bridges church and
university in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, bringing theological resources
to the university and academic resources to the church. Our goal is to
strengthen Christian intellectual life in this region by creating public space
for leaders in the academy and church to address enduring human questions together.
MacLaurinCSF is grounded in the Christian tradition as articulated in Scripture
and summarized by the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds, and our conversations are
open to all.
•
The
St. Croix Review, a
bimonthly journal of ideas, recognizes that the world is very dangerous.
Conservatives are staunch defenders of the homeland. But as Russell Kirk
believed, wartime allows the federal government to grow at a frightful pace. We
expect government to win the wars we engage, and we expect that our borders be
guarded. But St. Croix feels the impulses of the Administration and Congress
are often misguided. The politicians of both parties in Washington overreach so
that we see with disgust the explosion of earmarks and perpetually increasing
spending on programs that have nothing to do with winning the war. There
is too much power given to Washington. Even in wartime, we have to push for
limited government - while giving the government the necessary tools to win the
war. To read a variety of articles in this arena, please go to www.stcroixreview.com.
•
Chapman University: Chapman
University, founded in 1861, is one of the oldest, most prestigious private
universities in California. Chapman's picturesque campus is located in the
heart of Orange County – one of the nation's most exciting centers of arts,
business, science and technology – and draws outstanding students from across
the United States and around the world. Known for its blend of liberal arts and
professional programs, Chapman University encompasses seven schools and
colleges: The university's mission is to provide personalized education of
distinction that leads to inquiring, ethical and productive lives as global
citizens.
•
Hillsdale
College, the premier
small liberal arts college in southern Michigan with about 1,200 students, was
founded in 1844 with the mission of "educating for liberty." It is
proud of its principled refusal to accept any federal funds, even in the form
of student grants and loans, and of its historic policy of non-discrimination
and equal opportunity. The price of freedom is never cheap. While schools
throughout the nation are bowing to an unconstitutional federal mandate that
schools must adopt a Constitution Day curriculum each September 17th
or lose federal funds, Hillsdale students take a semester-long course on the
Constitution restoring civics education and developing a civics textbook, a
Constitution Reader. You may log on at www.hillsdale.edu to register for the annual weeklong von Mises Seminars,
held every February, or their famous Shavano Institute. Congratulations to
Hillsdale for its national rankings in the USNews College rankings. Changes in
the Carnegie classifications, along with Hillsdale's continuing rise to
national prominence, prompted the Foundation to move the College from the
regional to the national liberal arts college classification. Please log on and
register to receive Imprimis, their national speech digest that reaches
more than one million readers each month. This month, read ? Choose
recent issues. The last ten years of
Imprimis are archived.
* * * * *
Words of Wisdom,
Recent Postings, In Memoriam, Today in History . . .
Words of Wisdom
"If
you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got."
—
High-tech proverb
"We do not want to gain at someone else's loss;
we want to gain while helping the other person to also gain." — Jose Silva: an American parapsychologist and author
Some Recent Postings
In The Jan Issue:
1. Featured Article: Understanding Lung
Function
2. In
the News: Have you thought about Outsourcing
your New Year’s Resolutions?
3. International Medicine: Schumpeter:
Saving Britain's health service
4. Medicare: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right
5. Medical Gluttony: A Letter from the HMO
concerning an 85-year-old patient with a stroke
6. Medical
Myths: The High Cost of
Technology
7. Overheard
in the Medical Staff Lounge: There
will be no effective opposition to Obama
8. Voices
of Medicine: From the North Coast
Physician
9. The Bookshelf: The Unbreakable Bond Between a Marine and His Military Working Dog
10. Hippocrates
& His Kin: The Low Cost of
Technology
11. Professionals
Restoring Accountability in Medical Practice, Government and Society:
In Memoriam
Norman Edmund 1916-2012
He
Supplied the Gadgets to Scientists of All Ages By STEPHEN MILLER- WSJ
Norman Edmund
founded a mail-order operation that for decades was the go-to source for telescopes,
microscopes and science toys and gadgets of every description.
Mr. Edmund,
who died Jan. 16 at age 95, founded the company during World War II that later
became Edmund Scientific, a reseller of military lenses rendered obsolete by
the invention of radar. The company grew into a supplier for schools and
industry, and especially for hobbyists.
The Edmund
catalog featured boomerangs, lenses, sextants, chemistry kits, robot parts,
gyroscopes and the famous drinking bird, which appeared to be a
perpetual-motion machine.
The company's
Barrington, N.J., showroom burgeoned with government-surplus supplies, an array
of telescopes and a functioning 38-foot periscope from a Japanese submarine.
"The
Edmund Scientific catalog was a geek's paradise," said Neil deGrasse
Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. "At a time when no
one had access to lasers, they had them for sale."
Growing up in
Camden, N.J., Mr. Edmund was voted "most studious" by his high school
class. Shortly after graduating from the Wharton School with an accounting
degree, he was stricken with tuberculosis and pursued photography during an
extended recuperation. He fell into the mail-order business by accident after
he purchased several lenses wholesale and sold the spares he didn't need.
In 1942, he
founded Edmund Salvage to purchase government-surplus optics—lenses, prisms and
bombsights—and by the end of the war his inventory was taking up rented space
in more than 30 garages.
His wife
Pauline—who was his nurse in the tuberculosis ward—initially handled most of
the bookkeeping from a card table in their living room. Mr. Edmund perused
hundreds of scientific journals for ideas about new products.
The company
grew fast after World War II, and actually sold optics back to the military
during the Korean War. "Gee, you have more optics than the Army!" the
company said an official told him at the time. . .
"Edmund
is the best source we know of for low-cost scientific gadgetry," Stewart
Brand wrote in "The Last Whole Earth Catalog."
Mr. Edmund
retired to Florida in 1975, where he fished for tuna on his boat, called the
Pickled Herring, and wrote about science education. His son Robert Edmund took
charge of the family-owned business. Under his leadership Edmund Scientific
sold the catalog business, which still exists, and renamed the company Edmund
Optics, which makes optics for retinal scans and other military and industrial
applications.
Read
the entire Remembrance in the WSJ – subscription required . . .
On This Date in History – February 14
On this date, Saint
Valentine's Day, commonly shortened to Valentine's
Day,[1][2][3] is
a holiday observed
on February 14 honoring one or more early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine. It is traditionally a day on
which lovers express their love for each other by
presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards (known as "valentines").[1][3] The
day first became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished.
It was first established by Pope Gelasius I in 496 AD, and was later deleted from the General Roman
Calendarof saints in 1969 by Pope Paul VI.
Modern Valentine's Day
symbols include the heart-shaped outline,
doves, and the figure of the winged Cupid.
Since the 19th century, handwritten valentines have given way to mass-produced greeting cards.[4] Read more . . .
On this date in
1766, Thomas Malthus was born in England. He propounded one of the gloomier theses
about life by arguing that population increases in a geometrical ratio while
subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio. He argued for “moral
restraint,” postponing
the age of marriage, as the best way to prevent the supply of people from out
running the supply of food. So what shall it be? On February 14, you have a
choice of Valentine’s Day romance or the “wait a while” counsel of that man
born on this day, Thomas Malthus.
After Leonard and Thelma
Spinrad
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Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the father
of socialized medicine in Germany, recognized in 1861 that a government gained loyalty by
making its citizens dependent on the state by social insurance. Thus socialized
medicine, any single payer initiative, Social Security was born for the benefit
of the state and of a contemptuous disregard for people’s welfare.
We must also remember that ObamaCare has nothing to do with appropriate
healthcare; it was similarly projected to gain loyalty by making American
citizens dependent on the government and eliminating their choice and chance in
improving their welfare or quality of healthcare. Socialists know that once
people are enslaved, freedom seems too risky to pursue.