Health Care
December 19, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The Lancet, headquartered in Britain, was once a respected medical journal. Now, it is mostly a left-wing rag. The current issue, just out, leads with an editorial titled “2025: an annus horribilis for health in the USA.” Really? Our health has gone downhill? Has life expectancy declined? Was there an epidemic that I missed? No. The entire editorial is an anti-Trump screed. 2025 was a horrible year, not for Americans’
»
December 12, 2025 — John Hinderaker
I remain convinced that the Democrats’ 2025 government shutdown was mostly a dry run for a much more substantial shutdown that they contemplate for next year. They wanted to know whether a shutdown would work for them politically. If so, they will trot out the same strategy, in spades, in 2026. Unfortunately, it did work. Chuck Schumer explains: Co-host Joe Scarborough asked, “Let’s circle back here, Senator, because you caught
»
November 12, 2025 — Bill Glahn
In the end (if this is the end) what was it all about? The record-long federal government shutdown (43 days, over six weeks) could end as early as tonight, if the House of Representatives goes along with the deal passed by the Senate on Monday. My theory is it all had to do with the odd-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia. A week later, everyone now believes that last
»
October 6, 2025 — John Hinderaker
With the ascendancy of MAHA, the pharmaceutical industry has come under attack from the right as well as the left. That is unfortunate. Has any institution done as much for human well-being over the last 150 years as the international pharmaceutical industry? I doubt it. Continuing improvements in human health depend on continuing innovation in drugs. That is obvious, but short-sighted policy-makers–and voters–focus more on on reducing the costs of
»
October 2, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Democrats are trying to justify their government shutdown by claiming that they aim to restore “cuts” in health care spending. There have been cuts, of course, with regard to illegal aliens and those who persistently refuse to seek employment or go to school. But that isn’t all the Democrats claim, at least, to be talking about. My colleague Matt Dean explains what is going on: The healthcare “cuts” Democrats are
»
December 13, 2024 — John Hinderaker
On the left, everything is violent except violence. We see this often in the context of speech, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez extended the universe of violence to include denial of health insurance coverage: “This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as
»
October 6, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“71 will support research to find cures for diseases that affect millions of people, including cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Please support the effort to find cures. . . It could save the life of someone you love.” That was actor Michael J. Fox in an ad for Proposition 71, the Stem Cell Research Initiative, also supported by Christopher Reeve and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose father-in-law Sargent Shriver was afflicted
»
April 17, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
On April 17, 2016, my mother Victoria Billingsley passed away at the age of 94. Today (April 17, 2024) she received a letter from Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare about “the recent cyber incident affecting local hospitals in the Southwest Ontario region,” including approximately 46,000 patients of Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare. As the letter explains: We can confirm that, unfortunately, you were included in this group and some of the personal health information
»
April 9, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Britain’s National Health Service is the great symbol of that nation’s leftward turn following World War II. Historically, it has enjoyed broad popularity, even as the quality of health care actually delivered has fallen lower and lower. But now, the NHS has reached such a crisis that a return to private health care seems inevitable if not imminent. In the Telegraph, Allison Pearson writes: “The NHS is killing us –
»
April 9, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
As Steve notes, a Canadian social scientist is out with “a paper that finds job applicants who include non-binary pronouns (like “they/them”) on their resumes get fewer call backs than normal people.” That is hard to top, but consider COVID Vaccine Hesitancy and Risk of a Traffic Crash, published by the American Journal of Medicine but authored by a trio in Canada. As Sir Bedivere (Terry Jones) might say, who are these
»
March 10, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
In testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday, former Centers for Disease Control and Protection Director Robert Redfield confirmed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had deliberately tried to shut down debate about the lab leak theory. Lawmakers focused on a Jan. 31, 2020, email from Scripps Research Institute virologist Dr. Kristian Andersen to Fauci in which
»
February 6, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Britain’s National Health Service is a product of the socialist wave that overtook the U.K. following World War II. It has long been held up as an exemplar by those who seek to impose socialized medicine in other countries, like ours. But today, the state of the NHS is dire. The Wall Street Journal headlines: “The U.K.’s Government-Run Healthcare Service Is in Crisis.” Now the state-funded service is falling apart.
»
January 25, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Dr. John Calhoon, the outgoing president of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, posted the slide immediately below as part of his farewell remarks. See if you can spot anything wrong with it: Of course you know what happened next: Dr. Calhoon was called out for his “hurtful” remarks by the STS’s new president and board of directors. You’d almost think the STS board had confused Dr. John Calhoon with John
»
September 24, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Having hosted Troy Senik on the mid-week podcast, I’m now back to checking on his Kite and Key Media offerings more regularly. Their latest offering, below, explores a subject that has tended to be ignored or dismissed by our public health and social policy establishment, because it runs counter to the imperatives of liberalism to embrace every possible “crisis” no matter the evidence: Mass Psychogenic Illness. The problem is likely
»
August 29, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Cast your mind back to the early 1980s for a moment, and the early innings of the AIDS epidemic. It was widely understood that AIDS was predominantly spread through high-risk or unprotected homosexual contact, and public health authorities, even in San Francisco, initially said that gay bathhouses that were venues for casual and largely unprotected sexual encounters should be closed down. In those days, however, the ethic of “liberation” and
»
July 21, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Socialized medicine has long been a chief goal of the Democratic Party, but it is hard to understand why anyone would voluntarily entrust his family’s health care to the tender mercies of any government, even the most benign. We have tracked the United Kingdom’s experience with socialized medicine in our “Annals of Government Medicine” series, and I wrote here about the current crisis in British dentistry: nine out of ten
»
June 22, 2022 — Steven Hayward
As the COVID pandemic unfolded in 2020, I predicted that before it was over, we’d surely hear calls for a cabinet level “Department of Pandemic Planning” or some other equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security that we set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to “coordinate” government agency activity at all levels of government. That prediction has moved a step closer to fulfillment. From the New York Times today:
»
