Socialized Medicine: The Noble Ideal? Health Care Policy The Health Minister of Ontario, George Smitherman is threatening the use of physical force to stop businessman Don Copeman from selling health care services to long-suffering, long-waiting Canadians. Ontario's health minister says government lawyers are examining what legal tools there are to restrict the activities of a Vancouver-based private health-care company. George Smitherman says Copeman Healthcare Inc. could break federal and provincial law when it opens three clinics in Ontario this summer. The company plans to charge patients $3,500 to register at the clinics in Toronto, Ottawa and London, and hopes to open eight more across Canada by 2007. A legal opinion prepared for the Ontario Health Coalition suggests Copeman undermines medicare by giving patients quick access to care based on ability to pay. Goodness knows, Canadians should be prevented from spending their own money to get quick access to health care and should instead be forced to wait in line for shoddy government-provided, "free" medical services. Posted by Stuart Browning 31 Jan 2006 @ 11:24am Campus Cut-ups Education The American Spectator enumerates the Top 5 Campus Outrages of 2005. Actually, this stuff seems a little tame compared to what we've documented in our upcoming film: Indoctrinate U. Also, check out this anonymous report of indoctrination at Portland State reported by Front Page Magazine. Posted by Stuart Browning 30 Jan 2006 @ 2:35pm Health Savings Account Basics Health Care Policy Terry Savage has a good HSA primer over at the Chicago Sun-Times: The health care system contains some bad incentives. Because employers or their health insurance suppliers are picking up the tab, individuals have absolutely no incentive to contain their health care costs. There's no tax-deduction incentive for individuals to buy health insurance policies because individuals can't deduct the premiums. [...] HSAs combine a high deductible health insurance policy and a tax-favored savings account. Instead of buying a health insurance policy with a $250 deductible, you'd buy a policy with a $5,000 deductible. It sounds scary, but that policy costs much less. The money you or the company saves on insurance premiums -- as much as 40 percent of traditional costs -- can go into a special, tax-deductible savings account and be used to pay for medical expenses tax-free. Unspent money grows for future years' expenses. Posted by Stuart Browning 30 Jan 2006 @ 10:47am Amazon.com to Stream Films Film Industry Google Video, Apple's iTunes/iPod video combo, and now Amazon.com. The online retailer is joining the revolution already in progress: [...] Amazon.com is preparing to enter the digital download space this spring with a service that will likely marry digital video streaming to DVD sales, reports Variety.com. Unlike Apple's iTunes service, which so far offers only short films and television programming, Amazon's plans call for full-length digital of feature films. [...] The service is expected to launch at the end of April with at least two major studio digital content partners. What's unique about Amazon's approach to digital movie streams is that the retailer plans to include with each digital purchase a copy of the content on DVD. "One supplier explained that an Amazon customer could stream a digital copy of a film for a fee and apply that charge as a credit toward the eventual purchase of the DVD," wrote Variety. "Another plan is for a customer to buy a DVD; while waiting for it to arrive, he could stream the content over his computer." Soon enough, the revolution will be streamed wirelessly to your iPod. Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney 28 Jan 2006 @ 12:35pm No Surprise Here Film Buzz The New York Times weighs in (registration required) on this year's Sundance documentaries: As ever, political subjects pervaded the documentary categories, nearly always addressed from a left-of-center perspective. It would be nice, if only for variety's sake, to encounter a pro-war or pro-death-penalty documentary here, but that seems unlikely. An interesting choice of conservative film topics. Posted by Stuart Browning 28 Jan 2006 @ 7:25am Get In Line, Mate Health Care Policy Advocates of government-run medicine should always be asked to point to a single nationalized health system that has not experienced financial crisis, health care rationing and long waits for procedures that are obtained relatively quickly in the U.S. Here are some recent news items from the U.K. describing the state of medicine under that country's National Health Service (NHS): Patient Seeks Cash from NHS for Op Mrs Heylings collapsed in severe pain on holiday in Tenerife in May last year but was told she faced a wait of up to nine months for NHS surgery. However, the gallstone - which measured more than an inch - caused her such agony she decided to use her savings to pay for a private operation. Surgery Delayed 'Due To Finances' Surgeons employed by a Kent NHS trust have been left to "twiddle their thumbs" after staff were told to delay operations to save money, an MP claims. Tunbridge Wells MP Greg Clark has said leaked internal memos show staff at three hospitals were ordered to put off non-urgent operations until 31 March. [...] All surgery on children classed as non-urgent is also being delayed. Meanwhile consultants have been banned from giving outpatient appointments and GPs are banned from giving hospital outpatient appointments until further notice. 150 In Rush For New NHS Dentist THIS is the shocking state of dentistry today. More than 150 people queued for hours at the opening of a new NHS surgery in Milnrow, Rochdale this morning. They turned up from 6.30am ready for Zimbabwean-born dentist Dr Shamiso Ketani to open the doors of his new practice at 9am. Many brought chairs and flasks of hot drinks as they waited to register in a line which snaked its way along Dale Street. Seven Deadly Hours in Ambulance A PATIENT died after an ambulance took SEVEN HOURS to transfer him between hospitals just 45 minutes apart. Joe Walsh, 46, was only being moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow. But he was left languishing in the back of a transport ambulance while it dropped off other patients in Livingston, Kilmarnock and Ayr. And just for laughs: Patient Sues Over Long Wait For Sex Change Claire - formerly David - Eastwood, 48, was told by doctors more than a year ago that she faces a six-year wait on the NHS to get the surgery she needs to transform her life. Following the diagnosis in October 2004, that she was a woman born as a man, Ms Eastwood was told she would have wait up to three years just for her first appointment at the Leeds Gender Identity Clinic. Posted by Stuart Browning 26 Jan 2006 @ 12:05pm Rise of the $100,000 Idiot Education According to the Associated Press, academia isn't doing a very good job at educating: Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food. Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers. More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school. Gee, I wonder why students aren't learning much in college. Still, the report cited what it called "brighter news": Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education. Terrific! After spending an average $100,000 for four years of education, college students can read! Time to break out the bubbly. Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney 23 Jan 2006 @ 4:41pm Portrait Of A Survivor Health Care Policy Viewers of our film Dead Meat will remember Susan Warner as the Canadian woman in Calgary who waited 18 months for knee surgery. During her long wait for medical treatment, she endured excruciating, bone-on-bone pain as a result of the loss of the cartilage in her knee. In order to tolerate the pain, her doctor prescribed large doses of narcotic pain relievers such as Oxycontin while telling her that she would "most likely" become addicted. Susan finally got her surgery, but was by then hopelessly addicted to the drugs. I just received the good news from Susan that after many months of detox hell, she is finally drug-free and has her life back. Advocates of socialized medicine often use dishonest, out-of-context comparisions of life expectancy averages in Canada and the U.S. to make the fallacious argument that Canadians receive a higher quality of care than Americans while ignoring the fact that much of what modern medicine provides is increased quality of life. Joint replacement surgery, for the most part, is not necessary to live and the Canadian medical system did not consider Susan's condition an emergency. She was not going to die if she didn't receive prompt treatment - so she had to wait - and suffer - while the Canadian system rationed health care. Aging baby boomers should keep this in mind as health care increasingly becomes the central domestic policy debate in this country. Posted by Stuart Browning 22 Jan 2006 @ 12:56pm Where In The World Site News Tucson Cactus 01/21/06 I'm in Arizona with my hi-def Sony HVR-Z1U on another dark, nefarious, McCarthyite, On The Fence Films mission. Bwahahahaha! Posted by Stuart Browning 21 Jan 2006 @ 8:08pm From Each According To His Ability ... Health Care Policy Apparently, doctors in Germany are chafing under the conditions imposed on them by government to provide the health care services that the citizens of the country have a "right" to: Christoph Heinrich, an anesthetist making 25,000 euros ($30,295) a year in the northern German town of Jever, works two weeks each month at a private hospital in Britain to supplement his income. "I was making less than a skilled tradesman," Heinrich, 51, said in a telephone interview from Berlin as he joined a march against government plans to curb public-health costs. "I couldn't do it anymore.'' [...] "My professional existence is on the line,," said Christa Schmaler, 55, a neurologist and psychologist who has a practice in Gruben, about 70 kilometers south of Frankfurt/Oder near the Polish border. '"My savings will allow me to continue one more year." Schmaler has asked her landlord to lower the rent. She also canceled her life and pension policies. [...] "We are so deeply frustrated we are thinking about emigrating," said Christel Robotham, 53, who runs a specialist cardiology practice with her English husband Charles, 58, in the south-west German town of Neustadt, near Mannheim. She estimates the practice generates about half the income it did 10 or 15 years ago because of a drop in the amount paid by health insurers for state patients. Robotham now uses money generated from private patients to subsidize the treatment of those in the state health system. Posted by Stuart Browning 20 Jan 2006 @ 6:10pm Better Remember to Keep Flossing Health Care Policy The wait for "free" government dental care is a little long in one U.K. city: Patients' options are severely limited because there are currently no dentists taking on new NHS patients in the town. The choice is to sign up with a private dentist, or add your name to a 4,000-strong waiting list to register with an NHS dentist. Posted by Stuart Browning 20 Jan 2006 @ 12:45pm Let the Sunshine In, Professor Education He's an influential thinker in the field of 'critical pedagogy', has written numerous papers decrying the evils of 'whiteness', and as Andrew Jones at the Bruin Alumni Association writes, UCLA professor Peter McLaren has an interesting web site: Entering the domain of Peter McLaren (or at least his webpage) is a full sensory experience. The eye is dazzled by a revolving red Communist star and noble Che Guevara iconography. The ears are delighted by the solemn strains of The Internationale, the anthem of Marxist socialism ... So, why has the good professor now password-protected his university-sponsored and taxpayer-funded website? This seems to me a great disservice to the parents of present and future UCLA students who want to learn more about this leading educator. Posted by Stuart Browning 19 Jan 2006 @ 9:50am Consumer Advocates at UCLA Education If you bought a car only to discover that it came with no passenger door, you might be upset, and rightfully so. You paid for a full car and got something less than that. And if you banded together with other consumers who have been ripped off the same way, you'd be hailed as a consumer hero. Most cars cost far less than four years at college, which now averages over $100,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree. Yet, like the car that comes with a major part missing, many colleges provide educations that are unbalanced and incomplete. Sometimes, you might sign up for an English class only to find out that it is really a class on politics. (This happened to me in a freshman English class at Bucknell.) An alumni group at UCLA, the Bruin Alumni Association, is fighting back against such consumer rip-offs by letting the public know which professors are inappropriately injecting politics into the classroom: "We're just trying to get people back on a professional level of things. Having been a student myself up until 2003, and then watching what other students like myself have gone through, I'm very concerned about the level of professional teaching at UCLA," said [former UCLA student Andrew] Jones, who said he is supporting himself with a modest salary from the organization and is its only full-time employee. Needless to say, some professors are upset that alumni and students are demanding that professors perform the job function for which they're being paid: "Any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism. Any decent American is going to see through this kind of right-wing propaganda. I just find it has no credibility," [education professor Peter McLaren] said. The [Bruin Alumni Association] website also lists history professor Ellen DuBois, saying she "is in every way the modern female academic: militant, impatient, accusatory, and radical -- very radical." In response, DuBois said: "This is a totally abhorrent invitation to students to participate in a witch hunt ... against their professors." But DuBois minimized the effect on campus, saying "it's not even clear this is much other than the ill-considered action of a handful, if that, of individuals." Interesting spin. Merely quoting professors and warning potential students (consumers) about what they can expect in certain classrooms is considered "reactionary" "McCarthyism," "right-wing propaganda" and an "abhorrent" "witch hunt." I wonder if these professors feel the same way when 60 Minutes or 20/20 exposes the malfeasance of other businesses that are engaged in consumer rip-offs. Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney 18 Jan 2006 @ 3:16pm Where In The World Site News Beverly Hills Sunrise 01/18/06 I'm here in LA with the post-production team of our upcoming film Indoctrinate U. Blogging will be light. Posted by Stuart Browning 18 Jan 2006 @ 11:19am Wal-Mart and the Cynical Left Health Care Policy Sure, the new "pay-or-play" law passed by the Maryland legislature hurts Wal-Mart shareholders and employees as Arnold Kling, Donald Luskin and TigerHawk point out. However, many on the left don't care as it serves to increase the pain inflicted on corporations in a bid to enlist them as supporters of government-run health insurance as the execrable Ezra Klein admits: On the other hand, I'm all for watching 50 states pass bad policies much like this one. And only partly because I'm a hack. The end game here isn't, or at least shouldn't be, better health benefits from Wal-Mart, but an eventual national insurance policy that severs the tie between employers and health care and brings coherency to our fractured, inefficient, and inequitable system. But until behemoths like Wal-Mart and the smaller businesses exempted from this mandate lose their ability to hide from health costs, they'll never sign on. Force them to pay, however, and the choice becomes expending precious resources to administer their own plans or paying a smaller surcharge to let the government do it for them. And that should clarify things real quick. Update: Lefty filmmaker Jim Gilliam is in the same amoral camp. Posted by Stuart Browning 17 Jan 2006 @ 11:30am Paul Krugman Knows What's Good For You Health Care Policy Writing in this morning's New York Times, Paul Krugman expounds (subscription required) on last week's diabetes series (see my earlier commentary) with his typical mantra that the individual is helpless and that only government can make decisions about what's good for you: ... people who are forced to pay for medical care out of pocket don't have the ability to make good decisions about what care to purchase. His opinion is that since some people do not take the responsibility of thinking for themselves and making decisions in their own interest, everyone must turn over life-and-death decisions about health care (and an even larger portion of their income) to government bureaucrats. Posted by Stuart Browning 16 Jan 2006 @ 10:18am Chronic Disease and Personal Responsibility Health Care Policy The New York Times ran an informative four-part series last week detailing the deadly toll taken by type 2 diabetes on various New York City neighborhoods. As the stories show, long-term disease management can be relatively costly and difficult to stick with. The series spotlights the alleged failures of a health care system adept at providing expensive - and more profitable - acute care such as amputations and dialysis for the life-threatening complications that arise from long-term diabetes while failing to consistently provide disease management functions like counseling, education and periodic 'A1c' blood sugar tests. Missing, however, is any emphasis on the personal responsibility of those who have diabetes to monitor and control their condition. The articles present a long parade of victims who are helpless to resist fast-food restaurant advertising, unable to control their urges, unwilling to change old habits, unmotivated to exercise (even though Central Park is adjacent to East Harlem, the epicenter of the diabetes epidemic) and even defiant: "Listen, if I want to eat a piece of cake, I'm going to eat it," she said. "No doctor can tell me what to eat. I'm going to eat it, because I'm hungry. We got too much to worry about. We got to worry about tomorrow. We got to worry about the rent. We got to worry about our jobs. I'm not going to worry about a piece of cake." Certainly, no one disputes the difficulty of managing a chronic disease like diabetes while coping with the other challenges of life. However, to imply that the health care system - and society - has failed these people is risible. Posted by Stuart Browning 14 Jan 2006 @ 6:52am Get In Line For Your "Free" Government Dental Care! Health Care Policy Apparently, dentist are fleeing the NHS and going into private practice: Mrs Moreland, of Mottram, says some practices will only take on children and residents who claim benefits. "I've paid national insurance and tax all my life yet I can't get NHS dental treatment, it's bad management. I've been trying to find lists of charges for private treatment but it's all so expensive." Posted by Stuart Browning 13 Jan 2006 @ 9:10am He/She Should Make Up His/Her Mind Health Care Policy Socialized health care systems sometimes make it easier for people to use the health care system in a frivolous manner (since they're not paying for it anyway): Inmate goes from man to woman and back on NHS Update: Upon further reflection, I think that this could have been a case of misdiagnosed gender identity disorder. Posted by Stuart Browning 13 Jan 2006 @ 7:32am Doctors in California "on the brink" Health Care Policy Doctors in San Diego county are dropping out of Medicare, Medicaid and the field of medicine altogether: In Escondido, internist Dr. Akber Safi said he quit his practice in June because the "Medicare, Medi-Cal and insurance company bureaucracy wouldn't allow me to do what I'm trained to do - take care of patients." He has opened an import-export business. While Stuart Gitlow M.D., in an email to me this week, asked this rhetorical question: What I don't understand is why people don't understand that while physicians may not have political power, they certainly have the power of choice to leave medicine, or not enter it in the first place. Some San Diego county residents are starting to understand. Posted by Stuart Browning 12 Jan 2006 @ 6:58am Podcast Interview Film Buzz Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and wife Dr. Helen Smith recently interviewed Stuart Browning and Evan Coyne Maloney for their newly-inaugurated podcast series. Links to the MP3 of the interview can be found at Instapundit and Dr. Helen. Posted by webmaster 11 Jan 2006 @ 7:20pm Great Moments in Socialized Medicine (Continued) Health Care Policy With the latest reports of health care spending in the U.S rising to an all-time high, its always useful to look to the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) as an example of what not to do in order to reduce health care costs: have government ration care. Mother's fury at five-month wait for son's new wheelchair Cut man's 27-hour hospital wait Row over ambulance waiting times Posted by Stuart Browning 11 Jan 2006 @ 7:11am Atlas Shrugged Health Care Policy Here's an eloquent statement by a physician, Stuart Gitlow M.D., that I received permission to post today. Informed Americans should know that we have been warned: Currently, we take the kids that do the best in high school, then do the best in college, then do the best on their MCATS, then don't mind being $200k in debt and having no income until they're 30 or so, then require them to pay massive malpractice liability payments each year, jump through outrageous regulatory hurdles, and follow recurrent training guidelines and requirements. And then we say: "we're going to lower your pay." I don't think so. I think you'll get an entire generation to say, "Take a hike." You'll then end up with whomever you can get to be a doctor, and we'll see a rapid deterioration in quality of care and a large number of would-have-been-doctors going off to do other things. I run a cash-only practice, so I don't care from a business standpoint. Patients pay at the time they're seen. The business aspect couldn't be easier; I charge less than most docs and I net more, all without turning anyone away. But since so many docs are reluctant these days to try that type of practice, I fear for the changes in the wind. The changes won't change my practice at all, but they'll sure change what kind of healthcare I can obtain in 20 years for the worse. Posted by Stuart Browning 9 Jan 2006 @ 3:45pm On The Fence Films - In The News Film Buzz Health Care Policy The Heartland Institute publishes Health Care News monthly. Available in print or online, it's a valuable resource for advocates of health freedom and individual rights. This month's issue highlights our short film Dead Meat: On the Fence Films, founded by technology entrepreneur Stuart E. Browning and lawyer Blaine Greenberg, says it is working to create a new breed of political documentary that informs, entertains, and considers points of view different from those offered by The New York Times, CBS News, and other major media outlets. [...] Before his unexpected death in March 2005, Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Conrad F. Meier, managing editor emeritus of Health Care News, was actively involved with the On the Fence Films crew in producing the documentary. Many other proponents of consumer-directed health care reform--including David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute and Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute--also worked on the film. "Dead Meat will be compulsory viewing for all Americans who have a love affair with a Canadian-syle single payer system," said Pipes. Posted by Stuart Browning 9 Jan 2006 @ 2:30pm Indoctrinate U: A Progress Report Film Buzz Evan, Blaine, and I are meeting next weekend in Los Angeles to kick-off the final post-production phase of our upcoming film Indoctrinate U, a documentary that exposes political persecution, ideological brainwashing and totalitarian tactics on today's American campus. In the meantime, American Enterprise Magazine has a review of Brainwashing 201: The Second Semester in the current (January/February 2006) issue. BW201 is an interim (unreleased) short which uses footage from the upcoming feature film and was screened last fall at the Liberty Film Festival in Hollywood: "Fascists have no right to speak!" yelled a left-wing protestor, stomping onto the stage at the premiere of Evan Maloney's new film, Brainwashing 201. It was a dramatic example of what Maloney's picture is all about-the lack of fairness on college campuses, where liberal academics turn their classrooms into pulpits for political indoctrination, while conservatives "have no right to speak." For those who haven't been on college campuses recently, Maloney's documentary is eye opening. Non-left academics are harassed for their political views. Students who show a conservative bent are threatened. Military recruiters are driven off campus. [...] Indeed, students in the film express amazement at how left-wing academics manage to wedge politics into nearly every subject. "It's pretty inventive," says one. "In geography class I learned that gender is socially constructed," illustrates another. "I really don't know why issues such as global warming, globalization, and militarism are brought up in a class in German literature," puzzles a third student. [...] There are also many humorous moments in the film, as when Maloney goes in search of the "Men's Center" on various campuses. He appears at each college's "Women's Center" and asks for directions to their counterpart. "We figured it was like the men's room and the women's room. The bathrooms are right next to each other," he states. While seemingly laughable, Maloney points out that under the federal Title IX rules that have been used to push a feminist agenda at universities, not having a "Men's Center" might actually be illegal. [...] Campuses are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas where issues stand and fall on their merits. Brainwashing 201 demonstrates effectively that this is now far from the case. Posted by Stuart Browning 8 Jan 2006 @ 4:47pm Great Moments in Socialized Medicine (Continued) Health Care Policy While the advocates of 'single-payer' blather on about the "canard of waiting lists in the UK and Canada" - reality continues to mock them - and the victims of socialized medicine suffer - needlessly. Here's a sampling from the British press in just the last few weeks: Hospitalized woman left in agony for 48 hours We Could Not Let Our Child Wait For Surgery The Breast Cancer Lottery: 9 Months to Wait for Treatment Posted by Stuart Browning 7 Jan 2006 @ 11:12am Who Are The Uninsured? Health Care Policy While perusing U.S Census Bureau Health Insurance Data (great fun for the whole family!) - I came upon some numbers that might provide a little counterbalance to all the "45 million uninsured and without access to health care" propaganda that we keep hearing: More than one third of all the uninsured are members of households with over $50K in annual income. Indeed, nearly one fifth hail from households pulling down more than $75K a year. People without Health Insurance By Household Income Posted by Stuart Browning 6 Jan 2006 @ 10:32am Clueless (or heartless?) at Ezraklein.com Health Care Policy Left-wing blogger Ezra Klein wrote me to say that my article detailing the mendacity of the New York Times' Paul Krugman was itself just a pack of lies and that I have it all wrong on Canadian health care: .. you just offered up a lot of lies, half-truths, and myths. ... the idea that Canada doesn't treat sick and ill people (obviously wrong -- it's America where folks forego treatment, Canada treats absolutely everyone, no exceptions) ... Unfortunately, the egalitarian paradise that he and others defend so passionately routinely rations health care so that patients wait inhumane periods of time - something that does not happen in the U.S. Take for example this Canadian woman who will wear a bag for the rest of her life after doctors removed her bladder: She was on a waiting list for the implantation of a bladder stimulator device for years. The reason the wait time was so long is that the bureaucrats who administer the Canadian health care system arbitrarily decided that the hospital where she would receive the operation could do only 12 of these types of operations per year. She was number 32 on the waiting list. Do the math. She waited for three years in pain until the bladder atrophied so much that it had to be removed. Yes, she was able to go to the doctor all she wanted. She didn't even have to pay anything. Not even a co-payment! However, as Dr. Jane Orient says "Other countries declare a right to health care. Their citizens can go to the doctor all the time, but the doctors can't do very much. Access for all means access to nothing." The government-run global budgeting system that the Canadian authorities use to fund hospitals (and ration care) is precisely the prescription that Klein and others like him recommend for the American health care system. Update: I have received an email from Ezra Klein informing me that he does not advocate a Canadian-style system here in the U.S and instead advocates a French-style "multipayer" system with an expansion of FEHBP tied to wage subsidization as an interim solution. Posted by Stuart Browning 5 Jan 2006 @ 11:17am The Health Care Lies of Paul Krugman Health Care Policy Although I'm not an official member of the Krugman Truth Squad, New York Times editorial page columnist Paul Krugman churns out enough mendacity and innuendo to keep a truth army occupied - so I'm just getting around to doing my part in response to his November 7 column in which he declares national health insurance the "obvious solution" to the problems in our health care system. Obvious, that is, if you accept Krugman's "facts" at face value: Let's start with the fact that America's health care system spends more, for worse results, than that of any other advanced country. In 2002 the United States spent $5,267 per person on health care. Canada spent $2,931; Germany spent $2,817; Britain spent only $2,160. Yet the United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than any of these countries. What Krugman doesn't say is that its easy to hold down health care costs if you do what Canada does: withhold medical treatment from sick and injured people. The U.S health care system could save billions of dollars if we drastically reduced the number of doctors, hospitals, outpatient clinics, medical devices and diagnostic machines available. If we followed Canada's lead, we would severely limit each surgeon's allotted hours in the operating room so that they couldn't perform too many surgeries. Americans would wait months and years for critical medical tests and treatments - many would suffer greatly, become crippled, addicted to painkillers, go blind or die while waiting - however, the country would spend a lot less money on health care. Continued ... Posted by Stuart Browning 4 Jan 2006 @ 6:07am Selective Principles at Harvard Education Harvard University sure has interesting priorities these days: Representatives of autocratic theocracies that finance terror, oppress women and consider homosexuality a capital crime are welcomed at Harvard and other campuses. But not the U.S. Marines. At many of our so-called institutions of higher learning, which have become de facto liberal re-education camps, there's a crusade to ban military recruiters. These champions of diversity and human rights say the problem is the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality, which they say violates their anti-discrimination policy. [...] But if opposition to repugnant views is the issue, why did Harvard, while it was justifying the ban on military recruiters, accept a $20 million gift from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and agree to set up a Middle East research center? [...] Talal, a member of the ruling family of a repressive, totalitarian, sexist theocracy, is the individual whose $10 million gift to 9-11 families was returned by then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani after Talal said, "Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek." Putting his money where his mouth is, the prince in 2002 participated in a Saudi-sponsored live-broadcast telethon to benefit the families of homicide bombers who killed Israelis. It eventually raised $100 million, $27 million of which was his personal donation. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is a capital crime, and penalties allowed by Sharia law for such "deviant sexual behavior" range from imprisonment to flogging to death. In the past, people accused of homosexual behavior have been beheaded. Maybe Harvard's policy on Saudi repression is "don't ask, don't tell." Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney 3 Jan 2006 @ 1:35pm Great Moments in Socialized Medicine Health Care Policy Here's one I missed: In December, NHS hospitals in England intentionally made patients wait longer for their surgeries due to budgetary pressures: Surgeons in some hospitals in England have been told to delay operations to cut debts faced by primary care trusts. A leaked letter in the Times newspaper said one group of hospitals in London is delaying operations to a level just within NHS waiting time targets. One hospital in Staffordshire had been told to allow waiting lists to grow, a move which has so far affected around 500 people. Posted by Stuart Browning 2 Jan 2006 @ 6:51am