Health Care

The Doctor Is In!

Featured image We are just back from a fun vacation in California. We had a great time in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and parts in between. If I have time I will comment on my impressions of the Golden (but bankrupt) State. For now, here is a photo that I took in a rather scruffy part of Venice. If you have ever wondered how much medicine there is in medicinal marijuana, »

Remy Explains Insurance Mandates

Featured image Our pal Remy Munasifi explains the stupidity of how existing government mandates needlessly drive up the cost of health insurance.  Video is about 2:30 long: »

Is Socialized Medicine Unconstitutional?

Featured image Some liberals have comforted themselves with the idea that if Obamacare is ruled unconstitutional, it may speed the adoption of the liberals’ real goal, socialized medicine, on the theory that “single payer” will then be the only alternative to the status quo. Such thinking is understandable, as it has generally been assumed that whether or not socialized medicine is a good idea, if Congress were to adopt it, it would »

Annals of Government Medicine

Featured image 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 »

Annals of Government Medicine

Featured image 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 »

When It Comes to Benefits, Give Government the Boot

Featured image The Senate defeated the Blunt amendment today on a 51-48 vote that was almost entirely along party lines. Democrats Joe Manchin, Bob Casey and Ben Nelson voted for the amendment–Manchin and Casey must face the voters in November–and Republican Olympia Snowe, having announced that she will not seek re-election in the fall, felt free to vote with the Democrats. As usual, the Democrats characterized the issue posed by the amendment »

The Constitutional Right to Free Stuff

Featured image Last night Brian Ward and I taped the latest episode of the Hinderaker-Ward Experience, which will be available for download later in the day. One of our Loon of the Week candidates was Barbara Boxer, talking about the Obama administration’s decree that all employers, including religious institutions, must provide health insurance benefits that include contraception and certain abortion services, for free. Congressional Democrats, including Ms. Boxer, turned out in force »

Obama’s “Compromise”

Featured image After his plan to force religious institutions to provide free birth control and abortion to employees drew howls of protest, the president announced a climb-down today, in the form of a “compromise.” Frankly, however, I can’t figure out what it is. The New York Post reports: Under the new approach, insurance companies, rather than religious organizations, will be obligated to offer contraception for free to the institutions’ employees. “The result »

What’s wrong with the individual mandate?

Featured image You probably don’t need to be told. You probably have figured it out on your own. Yet the answer to the question is profoundly important. It opens the door to the question of limited versus unlimited government, freedom versus tyranny, man versus the state. A certain prominent GOP presidential candidate reminds me, however, on something like a daily basis that he needs instruction in the answer to the question. It’s »

Hayek Vindicated Again

Featured image Way back on the Federal Page of today’s Washington Post is an article that ought to be on the front page above the fold, and its deep placement on the boutique page of the bureaucracy shows how the Post, like most everyone else, doesn’t understand what a big story it is.  And it is a clinical study of Hayek’s “knowledge problem”—the impossibility of centralizing fundamentally dispersed knowledge in a timely »

The Real Problem With Obamacare…

Featured image …is not that it will cost too much, or even that it will worsen our medical care, although both of those things are true. The real problem with socialized medicine–the eventual establishment of which is the purpose of Obamacare, according to Barack Obama–is that it will destroy our freedom. Mark Steyn has written that government medicine alters forever the relationship between state and citizen: once you are dependent on the »

Debating Obamacare

Featured image The Federalist Society — are you now or have you ever been a member? — held its 2011 National Lawyers Convention last week. One of the (many) highlights of the convention must have been the debate on the constitutionalilty of Obamacare between Harvard’s Carl M. Loeb University Professor Laurence Tribe and former United States Solicitor General Paul D. Clement of Bancroft PLLC. This is an excellent debate, must watching straight »

This Week’s Applied Hayek: NPR Slip-Up Edition

Featured image Well, it’s happened again: NPR slipped up and ran a mostly positive story on Hayek, today on Morning Sedition Edition. Yes, I was in my car again, driving to the Columbus airport after last night’s Ashland University political economy class, where our reading for the week was chapter 19 of The Constitution of Liberty, entitled “Social Security,” though the chapter applies to Obamacare—and the general fiscal outlook brought about by »

Reading the Tea (Party) Leaves at the Supreme Court

Featured image Between now and whenever the Supreme Court issues its decision on Obamacare (I predict the last day of the term in late June next year), there will be endless reading of the tea leaves, textual analyses of the briefs, the dynamic of the oral argument, and so forth. (Will the Court limit the number of amicus briefs it will take on this case?  America’s forests ought to be very worried »

The Extreme Supreme Court?

Featured image The news out today that the Supreme Court will hear the Obamacare case this term is not a big surprise (they might have punted on “ripeness” grounds, as more than one lower court judge argued), but Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute points out why this is no ordinary case–it’s beyond even an extraordinarycase: What was unexpected — and unprecedented in modern times — is that it set aside five-and-a-half »

Silence of the Bams

Featured image We all know that Obamacare is in the process of being implemented and already imposing enormous costs on the economy, but we haven’t heard much about it lately. We haven’t heard much about it lately from the Obama administration in particular. Why is that? In an important article in the September issue of the American Spectator, Grace-Marie Turner — president of the Galen Institute — infers the method to the »

Silence of the Bams

Featured image We all know that Obamacare is in the process of being implemented and already imposing enormous costs on the economy, but we haven’t heard much about it lately. We haven’t heard much about it lately from the Obama administration in particular. Why is that? In an important article in the September issue of the American Spectator, Grace-Marie Turner — president of the Galen Institute — infers the method to the »