Healthcare
Long wait times will likely be more characteristic than lotteries, but somehow this strikes me as an extreme vision of the future of healthcare for the average American in a government-run system: At 4 p.m., volunteers from the clinic came out with a roll of carnival-style paper tickets. They handed each person a ticket and…
What’s vexing is that Herchell Talan of North Kingstown has the basic principle right but comes to a statist conclusion anyway: In the past 13 years, health-insurance companies have merged with each other at a frightening rate, and now a small number of companies dominate local markets. Rhode Island basically has two insurers: Blue Cross…
Our healthcare system is on life support. While the career politicians in Washington have done little, too many Rhode Islanders remain underinsured or uninsured. The system is characterized by rising costs, quality concerns and a lack of patient control. These problems hit the poor and the elderly hardest. One of the chief reasons is that…
Remember that big announcement by President Obama earlier this week that got a ton of coverage? Barack Obama praised the health care industry’s promise to cut $2 trillion in costs over 10 years Monday, taking a sharply different course than President Bill Clinton did 16 years ago in an opening bid to overhaul the U.S.…
It’s all very hush-hush, at this point, but our nation’s brightest minds — those in the U.S. Senate, of course — are set to point their considerable intellectual prowess in the direction of universal healthcare. Currently, three general plans are on the table: _Create a plan that resembles Medicare, administered by the Health and Human…
It’s difficult to know how to react to the swine flu news blitz. Cases around the globe are broadly scattered, but not extensive. The death rate in Mexico, while certainly concerning and, moreover, tragic for those who’ve lost loved ones, doesn’t seem all that high. Yet, the World Health Organization (WHO) has raised its warning…
Our state is in dire financial trouble based on structural deficits, is on the wrong end of just about every state-by-state comparative list, and is losing its “productive class” by the thousands every year, but the matter of concern for a special legislative commission is, in the words of its Co-chairman Sen. James Doyle (D.,…
Throw in environmentalism, too, because William Tucker’s thoughts on windmilled energy bring some possibilities to mind: The major limitation, of course, is wind’s intermittency — its lack of “dispatchability.” Quite simply, you can never count on it. You can’t even predict it from hour to hour with 100 percent accuracy and the windiest sites can…
In the abstract, there’s a dollar amount at which our healthcare system would hum along, factoring in how much employees would demand to do their jobs, how much supplies and operations cost, the expectations and requirements of consumers, their willingess to conserve, and so on. The more we drift from that ideal, the more we’ll…
The other day, a coworker and I had a discussion — while we worked, of course — about the many ways the law seems intended to lash us to our employers, in turn providing them with a measure of protection from competition. If they go out on their own, carpenters in Rhode Island must register…
