Healthcare
My first thought, upon reading about Butler Hospital’s attempts to gain government approval for a 26-bed addition for psychiatric patients was, “Must everything be a controversy?” Unfortunately, the more government involves itself in every corner of American society, the more the answer becomes, “yes.” Psychiatric hospitals around the country have also been expanding, and about…
Did you happen to catch this article by Felice Freyer? Do you want a governor who will embrace the law and make the most of it? Independent Lincoln D. Chafee, Democrat Frank T. Caprio and Moderate Party candidate Kenneth J. Block all accept the law — with varying degrees of enthusiasm — and all pledge…
I’ve been holding on to this link because a couple of questions continue to nag at me: Authorities said busts carried out this week in Miami, New York City, Detroit, Houston and Baton Rouge, La., were the largest Medicare fraud takedown in history — part of a massive overhaul in the way federal officials are…
The healthcare legislation should never have become law, and as time goes on, we continue to discover what a shoddy bit of law-making it was: Talk about a paperwork nightmare: Tucked into the massive new health care law is a demand that nearly 40 million U.S. businesses file tax forms for every vendor that sells…
Did you happen to catch this in the New York Times, last week? Even as the new coalition government [of Great Britain] said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite,…
I’d forgotten it during the national debate about universal healthcare, but in processing old columns for my personal site, I came across this, from May 2005: Intrinsic human worth may not dominate the scales during other lifecycle stages for long, either. One indication of the slide is the British judiciary’s hearing arguments concerning a problem…
Remember that executive order that supposedly gave pro-life Democrats cover to vote for Obamacare? Oh well: [House Republican Leader John] Boehner [of Ohio] and other Republicans point to reports that the Health and Human Services Department is giving Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new high-risk insurance pool that will cover any abortion that…
Offering some representative anecdotes from her experience as a doctor, Alieta Eck explains the problem with the Obamacare approach to healthcare reform: Are these patients or their physicians committing fraud? No. They are simply acting legally to enhance their own well-being, following the incentives set up by the unwieldy system. People with “coverage” do not…
James Pinkerton offers a strategic angle for Republicans on healthcare: Health-care spending is a problem, but it is important to remember that spending is a secondary issue. The primary issue is health itself — how to achieve it, how to maintain it, and how to regain it in the case of sickness or injury. Health-care…
R.R. Reno makes a fair point that our pre-Obamacare healthcare system ultimately created “an ad hoc mechanism for extracting payments from the insured to finance a haphazard effort to provide at least emergency and critical care for the uninsured as well as decent care for the underinsured.” Seeing this as socialization, Reno argues that something…