Annals of Government Medicine
September 29, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I missed this piece from Steven Rattner (who was a key figure in the Obama auto bailout) when it appeared in the NY Times a couple weeks ago. Tacitly acknowledging that costs are going to soar out of sight, Rattner opens with this frank admission: “We need death panels.” Jonah Goldberg wonders: When can Sarah Palin expect her letter of apology?” Rattner goes on to back away from “death panels,”
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July 12, 2012 — Scott Johnson
The Daily Mail delivers the news of another inspirational example of government medicine in England, much of it packed into the headline: “Elderly patients are being ‘deprived of food and drink so they die quicker and free up bed space’, claim doctors.” The practice in issue goes under the delicate name of a “care pathway.” Like the stairway in the Led Zeppelin song, it’s a pathway to heaven. The Daily
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July 9, 2012 — John Hinderaker
A key rule in Great Britain’s socialist health care system is: don’t get sick on the weekend! Hundreds of people die or suffer serious disability unnecessarily every year because they suffer a stroke at a weekend when NHS care is poorer, a major study has found…. A team from Imperial College London and the National Audit Office has found 350 people die within seven days of their stroke unnecessarily because
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June 28, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Finally back in Ashland, Ohio, after my turn this morning at Bill Bennett’s radio mic, which is always fun. Dinner tonight with Mike Huckabee. Wonder what will be on his mind? I wont’s sugarcoat this: today’s Supreme Court decision was a significant defeat for the cause of constitutionally limited government, made all the more galling by the fact that Justice Kennedy—the usual wobbler—was on board for striking down the whole
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June 24, 2012 — Steven Hayward
With the Supreme Court set to rule on Obamacare as soon as tomorrow, everyone is reading the tea leaves and making predictions. Orin Kerr, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, took note of the jaunty bearing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in a recent speech before a liberal group, wondering if it meant she was pleased with the outcome of the case. Meanwhile, a poll of former Supreme Court clerks found
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June 21, 2012 — Steven Hayward
There’s an explosive story out today in the Daily Mail over in the UK claiming that Britain’s National Health Service euthanizes 130,000 elderly patients a year. This claim doesn’t issue from some loopy former governor of an arctic province; it comes from professor Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent. He made this claim in a speech to
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June 21, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The British politician Denis Healey is generally credited with “the First Law of Holes,” which goes: If you’re in one, stop digging. Nancy Pelosi has apparently never heard of Healey’s First Law of Holes. Courtesy of Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post, Pelosi is trying to explain her infamous 16 words from 2010 about the Obamacare bill: “But we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can
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April 30, 2012 — Scott Johnson
The Daily Mail delivers the news of another inspirational example of government medicine in England, much of it packed into the headline: “Doris, 95, was left on a hospital trolley for 28 hours – and when her son asked where she was, doctors didn’t have a clue…” The Daily Mail reporter raises the question whether Doris Miller’s case represents an aberration, a preview of coming attractions or an example of
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April 7, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Obamacare is a Trojan horse, intended, as Barack Obama has said, to lead to the extinction of private health insurance and its replacement by socialized (“single payer”) medicine. So it is pertinent to observe how socialized medicine has worked out in countries where it has been in place for some decades, like the United Kingdom. One key feature of socialized medicine, wherever it exists, is the establishment of death panels.
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March 26, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Obamacare today, which makes the timing ideal to consider this news story from the cradle of socialized medicine, the United Kingdom. The article is titled “Elderly dying due to ‘despicable age discrimination in NHS.'” Thousands of elderly people are dying unnecessarily early because “despicable” age discrimination in the NHS is denying them treatment for cancer, a charity has warned. A lack of treatment
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March 11, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Nature dictates that young people incur little in the way of medical expense, on the average, while old people incur a great deal. Thus every government scheme that strives to supplant the obvious, fair alternative–everyone pays for his own medical care, with the aid of whatever insurance he may have purchased–attempts to do two things: 1) force young people to contribute far beyond their own medical costs, and 2) limit
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March 9, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Just in the nick of time, our pal Remi Munasifi and his pals at ReasonTV offer up a Remy-style take on the Fluke business. Less than two minutes long.
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January 25, 2012 — Steven Hayward
When Bill Clinton used his 1996 State of the Union address to kick off his ultimately successful re-election campaign, he uttered one of the few SOTU lines that people still remember: “The era of big government is over.” It did not matter narrowly that this was another Clinton lie; he went on in that speech to outline something like 97 small ways government could get bigger, from school uniforms to
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January 4, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So this is a catch-up post, updating and extending some previous stories here, and with a few new short items worthy of note. When I wrote my Commentary magazine cover story in October on how liberals were abusing the legacy of Ronald Reagan (especially the gross distortion that “Reagan raised taxes” as a predicate for Obama’s design to raise income taxes today), a friend remarked to me that I’d be
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December 29, 2011 — John Hinderaker
Britain’s National Health Service has taken a lot of heat because patients often wait a year or more for operations, and many die in the meantime. The NHS could have responded to this criticism by making its operations more efficient so that waiting times could be reduced, like a private company would, for fear of losing business to competitors. But in government medicine, such incentives are lacking. So the NHS
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December 18, 2011 — John Hinderaker
A National Health Service hospital, Alexandra Hospital of Redditch, West Midlands, is being sued in a class action for malpractice. The incidents detailed include leaving patients to starve to death. On the whole, the allegations sound as though you put the postal service in charge of health care. Not a bad analogy, come to think of it: The cases against Alexandra Hospital include: * A 35-year-old father-of-four who his family
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December 2, 2011 — John Hinderaker
Under the U.K.’s National Health Service, death panels put patients who are believed to be terminally ill on a “death pathway.” Of course, it is sometimes inconvenient to mention the fact to the patient’s relatives: NHS doctors are failing to inform up to half of families that their loved ones have been put on a scheme to help end their lives, the Royal College of Physicians has found. Tens of
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