Health Care
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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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May 19, 2022 — John Hinderaker
In the nick of time, the science of infant nutrition has evolved. It is hard not to sympathize with this tweeter’s take: Behold, The Science! It's amazing that @AmerAcadPeds is so flexible with The Science when a Democrat is president.https://t.co/n7SXoYVhSf — NYC Angry Mom (@angrybklynmom) May 19, 2022 This article has the background, with pros and cons about feeding cow’s milk to infants. The obvious question is, if the 12-month
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May 15, 2022 — Steven Hayward
So I pull up Fox News to find an opinion article titled, “It’s Time for Medicare for All.” And I notice the byline of the purported author: “Sen. Bernie Sanders.” To be sure, the article that follows does sound quite a lot like the real Bernie Sanders, the Socialist Democrat from Vermont. But it’s hard to imagine the real Bernie Sanders willingly appearing at Fox News. Though it is hard
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May 11, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Two years ago it was toilet paper, now it is baby formula–a much more serious shortage. I am tuned in to it in part because one of my daughters is the mother of eight-month-old twins and has had a hard time finding formula. What is going on here? My colleague John Phelan looks at the issue and concludes that the culprits are shutdowns and the FDA: What is going on?
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December 20, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding discloses a sickening story from the Biden administration: it is now introducing race into our health care system: [T]he Biden administration is now giving doctors a financial incentive to blame “differences in health outcomes” on “systemic racism” against minorities, and to adopt “value statements” that treat race as a “political” rather than “physiological” reality, even though some health conditions (like sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease)
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April 29, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, Joe Biden lied about a range of issues. NRO identifies three of Biden’s deceptions. Phillip Klein exposes Biden’s falsehood regarding health care. Biden claimed that giving Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs will “strengthen the Affordable Care Act – expand Medicare coverage and benefits – without costing taxpayers one additional penny.” Nonsense. Klein points out that the Congressional Budget Office has twice concluded that
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March 13, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Bernie Sanders says coronavirus is proof that we need socialized medicine. Because China’s socialized health care system has done such a great job? I don’t know. Logic isn’t Bernie’s strong suit. A better analysis comes from Cato’s Dan Mitchell, who begins by noting some liberals’ claims that the virus is an argument for Big Government or, at least, Big Medicine. Dan argues that, on the contrary, the federal government has
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December 17, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Last Friday, Bernie Sanders tweeted an attack on the Mayo Clinic: Mayo Clinic executives have decided to strip away access to health care from tens of thousands of rural Midwesterners—putting profits over people. Under Medicare for All we will end the corporate greed in health care that is leaving rural Americans behind.https://t.co/0niOP7A5TI — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 13, 2019 Sanders’s tweet links to a post by a college English teacher
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November 19, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Washington is preoccupied mostly with trivia these days, but if you scour the news you will see that important events are also taking place. Like the Trump administration’s announcement on Friday of two new rules relating to price transparency. Pretty much all non-socialists agree that price competition in medical services needs to be sharpened, and for that to happen, patients need to have skin in the game, and the wherewithal
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November 2, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The opioid crisis has been prominent in the news for the last several years, while more recently the controversy over vaping has erupted to new heights, with the Trump Administration proposing to ban many vaping products. There are some glaring contradictions and ironies between our attitudes and policy responses to both issues, but it takes someone of Sally Satel’s perception to notice these dimensions. Sally Satel, a resident fellow of
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August 7, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The left wants to discount the role of mental disturbance in mass shootings. By doing so, it can keep all of the focus on guns and “white supremacy.” In addition, allowing mental disturbance to enter the conversation might lead to a discussion of family breakdown and loss of religious faith. The left wants to steer clear of that discussion at all costs. Hence, we see dishonest news stories, like the
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August 5, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Paul has noted the comments that President Trump made on the weekend’s two mass shootings this morning. His post embeds a video of the president’s speech, which is 10 minutes long. I recommend that you watch it. It was thoughtful, measured, and, in my opinion, struck all the right notes. It consisted in large part of denunciations of the murderers and sympathy for their victims. Beyond that, Trump’s comments were
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June 23, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Health care is an issue of utmost importance to many Americans, and polling suggests that, by a considerable margin, voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the issue. But according to this report in the Washington Post, Democratic presidential candidates, by talking so much about “Medicare for all,” aren’t hitting the sweet spot on health care. Instead, they are missing the point. Based on public opinion research, the Post
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