Tag: Health

Who’s Blogging about Cato

Here’s the latest round-up of bloggers who are writing about, citing and linking to Cato research and commentary:

  • Blogging about Real ID, AxXiom for Liberty posted Jim Harper’s piece about DHS officials who skirted open meeting laws to promote the program.
  • No Land Grab, a blog covering eminent domain abuse, posted the latest Cato video on the Susette Kelo case. Jason Pye, who wrote a commentary on the case for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, linked to it as well.
  • Sights on Pennsylvania blogged about international health care systems, citing Michael D. Tanner’s January article on health care reform and a 2008 Hill Briefing that compared various systems around the world.
  • Wes Messamore, AKA The Humble Libertarian, is compiling a list of 100 libertarian blogs/Web sites, and looking for recommendations. Last week, Wes penned his thoughts on the role of the U.S. in foreign policy, making heavy use of a recent Cato article by Benjamin Friedman and a 1998 foreign policy brief by Ivan Eland, citing military intervention overseas as a cause of terrorist activity against Americans.

If you’re blogging about Cato, contact Chris Moody at cmoody [at] cato [dot] org (subject: blogging%20about%20Cato) .

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics

The Easy Solution to Rising Health Care Costs

By
Doug Bandow

It turns out that solving the health care crisis is easy.  There’s never been any reason for the lengthy, divisive, and impassioned debate.  Explains the New York Times:

“Really controlling costs requires just stopping spending,” said Stuart H. Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University.

Gees, it’s no problem then.  Why didn’t I think of that?

Topics: 
Health Care

Deadly Canadian Health Care

By
Doug Bandow

Opponents of nationalize health care rightly warn about the negative impact of politicizing medical care, but it’s never easy to prove that someone who otherwise would have lived died as a result.  Yet Canadians are asking whether that may be the case with actress Natasha Richardson.  Reports the News & Observer (hat tip to Matthew Vadum at the American Spectator blog):

Questions are arising over whether a medical helicopter might have been able to save actress Natasha Richardson.

The province of Quebec lacks a medical helicopter system, common in the United States and other parts of Canada, to airlift stricken patients to major trauma centers. Montreal’s top head trauma doctor said Friday that may have played a role in Richardson’s death.

Richardson, 45, died Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York after falling Monday on a ski slope at the Mont Tremblant resort in Quebec.

“It’s impossible for me to comment specifically about her case, but what I could say is … driving to Mont Tremblant from the city [Montreal] is a 2 1/2-hour trip, and the closest trauma center is in the city. Our system isn’t set up for traumas and doesn’t match what’s available in other Canadian cities, let alone in the States,” said Tarek Razek, director of trauma services for the McGill University Health Centre, which represents six of Montreal’s hospitals.

While Richardson’s initial refusal of medical treatment cost her two hours, she also had to be driven to two hospitals. She didn’t arrive at a specialized hospital in Montreal until about four hours after the second 911 call from her hotel room at the resort, according to a timeline published by Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper.

Because of the pervasiveness of both third party payment and government regulation, the American medical system spends more than it should.  But it remains far more oriented towards meeting patient needs than does government-dominated health care.  As policymakers debate various “reform” measures, they should keep Natasha Richardson’s tragic fate in mind.

Topics: 
Health Care

Republicans Rediscover Their Big-Government Principles

By
David Boaz

Sen. Chuck Grassley, who can always be counted on to stick the federal government’s nose where it doesn’t belong, is criticizing Attorney General Eric Holder’s teeny-tiny steps toward a less oppressive enforcement of drug prohibition. Holder said on Wednesday “that federal agents will target marijuana distributors only when they violate both federal and state law. This is a departure from policy under the Bush administration, which targeted dispensaries under federal law even if they complied with the state’s law allowing sales of medical marijuana.”

Grassley says that marijuana is a “gateway” drug to the use of harder drugs and that Holder “is not doing health care reform any good.”

As Tim Lynch and I wrote in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers:

President Bush … has spoken of the importance of the constitutional principle of federalism. Shortly after his inauguration, Bush said, “I’m going to make respect for federalism a priority in this administration.” Unfortunately, the president’s actions have not matched his words. Federal police agents and prosecutors continue to raid medical marijuana clubs in California and Arizona.

And as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the power of the federal government to regulate medical marijuana:

If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything — and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.

That’s the principle that Chuck Grassley defends. Republicans claim to be the small-government party — and President Obama’s policies on taxes, spending, and regulation certainly justify a view that the GOP is, if not a small-government party, at least the smaller-government party — but they forget those principles when it comes to imposing their social values through federal force.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Third-World Accommodations

By
Michael F. Cannon

In the 2003 film The Barbarian Invasions, a patient’s wealthy son offers a handsome bribe to the administrator of a decrepit, chaotic, state-run hospital in Montreal that is (mis)treating his dying father.  “This is silly,” the startled administrator exclaims.  “We’re not in the Third World.”

Britain’s health-care system is perhaps slightly less state-dominated than Canada’s.  Yet today comes the following report:

The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient’s relative to “a Third World” health centre…

Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.

Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital’s accident and emergency department, the report found.

Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.

“What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives,” said the 47-year-old. “We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.

“There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief.

“It was like a Third World country hospital. It was an absolute disgrace.”

The politicians quoted in the story promised, again, that, you know, they would improve things.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, General, Health Care

Wednesday Podcast: ‘The Science of Medical Marijuana’

Photo: Kelly Anne CreazzoSpeaking at a Cato forum Tuesday, Dr. Donald Abrams, director of Clinical Programs at the University of California Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, discussed the science behind medicinal marijuana, and explained why the drug should be allowed for patients who suffer from a variety of symptoms.

After the event, Abrams spoke with Caleb Brown for Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, explaining the promise of marijuana as medicine:

One of the reasons I am in favor of people using the plant is because… we no longer have a health care system in the United States, we have a disease management system, and it is very expensive largely due to pharmaceuticals. If there is a plant that is a medicine that people can grow for themselves in their own backyard then I think we can really go a long way to decrease some of the costs of health care. But if we are saying that a physician is going to be able to prescribe this entity to a patient then unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, it does need to be regulated or approved and the only way to do that is through the standard route.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

More Reasons Not to Nationalize Health Care

By
Doug Bandow

Advocates of a government takeover of the health care system routinely offer up horror stories of American medicine, and no system yet has found a way around the problem of human imperfection, especially when operating in a system with such distorted incentives–most from ill-considered government policies.  Yet the horror stories in nationalized health care systems are manifold and tend to be more intractable since they result from government policy.

For instance, consider the quality of care delivered by hospitals in one region in Great Britain (with a hat-tip to Philip Klein of the American Spectator for finding this story).  According to the Daily Telegraph:

Sir Ian Kennedy, chairman of the Healthcare Commission, said the report is a ‘shocking story’ and that there were failures at almost every stage of care of emergency patients. “There is no doubt that patients will have suffered and some of them will have died as a result,” he said.

The investigation of the trust now called the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, found overstretched and poorly trained nurses who turned off equipment because they did not know how to work it, newly qualified doctors left to care for patients recovering from surgery at night, patients left for hours in soiled bedclothes, reception staff expected to judge how seriousness of patients arriving at A&E, patients left without food or drink, others who received the wrong medication or none at all, blood and faeces left on lavatories and floors, and doctors diverted away from seriously ill patients in order to treat minor ones who were in danger of breaching the four hour waiting time target.

When high mortality rates triggered questions, the trust board of directors ‘fobbed off’ investigators by saying the rates were a result of statistical errors but the Healthcare Commission found this was not that case.

The report said there was a ‘reluctance to acknowledge or even consider that the care of patients was poor’.

The trust was more concerned with hitting targets, gaining Foundation Trust status and marketing and had ‘lost sight’ of its responsibilities for patient care, the report said.

Sir Ian said: “The resulting report is a shocking story. Our report tells a story of appalling standards of care and chaotic systems for looking after patients.”

While Britain tends to be near the bottom in terms of health care system in industrialized states, there are plenty of horror stories elsewhere.  Socialism doesn’t work, whether in health care or elsewhere.  As Investor’s Business Daily reminds us:

The Swedish government system is no better. It also refuses to provide some expensive medication and, inhumanely, refuses to let patients buy the drugs themselves. Why? According to a Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons article, bureaucrats believe doing so “would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicine.”

Like Canadians, Swedes are subjected to long waits. They also have denial-of-care problems that sometimes lead to death.

A reasonable person would see the record of repeated failures in government-run medicine as evidence that such a system is not sustainable. Yet every central planner thinks he or she — or his or her immediate group — is smart enough to correct the flaws of socialist programs and therefore has the moral authority to force others to participate in his experiments. It is the same thinking that will move a person to say we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

The Obama administration seems determined to waste a lot of money “stimulating” the economy.  We can replace money lost.  But if the administration succeeds in nationalizing the medical system directly or indirectly, the damage may prove irreversible–and deadly.

Topics: 
General, Health Care

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