Richard E. Ralston

Public health authorities in California have for years spent many millions of dollars on television commercials that are supposed to help people quit smoking. Perhaps that is better than spending income from tobacco settlements and taxes intended for that purpose on...

One of the great scandals of our age is the fact that America spends more on food than any other nation. Many political leaders are now calling for urgent reform to bring spending on food under control. While food spending is rapidly increasing and many Americans are...

When you file your taxes this year, consider this certainty: As an ever-increasing amount of our taxes are appropriated for government spending on health care, tax policy ultimately has little to do with attempting to improve the quality and affordability of health...

Nearly a century ago, the United States Federal Reserve Bank was established. The stated purpose was to eliminate boom and bust and other fluctuations in the U.S. economy. Federal government control of banking and the money supply was declared to be absolutely...

Sometimes drugs developed to treat a specific condition can have unanticipated results for the treatment of other conditions. Sometimes this is discovered by patients and their physicians as an accidental byproduct of monitoring the effectiveness of the medication....

Americans did not invent democracy. What America rightly did, for the first time in history, was institutionalize the concept of limited government--based not on majority rule, but on individual rights. Sadly, this foundation is not properly recognized and is rapidly...

It took the Food and Drug Administration more than a century to grow into a massive, expensive, wasteful, inflexible, ineffective, distant and indifferent bureaucracy. It now violates a founding principle of the practice of medicine: "First, do no harm." The FDA does...

There are some noteworthy differences between the health care policies advocated by Senators McCain and Obama. Both candidates, however, share fundamental flaws that make either set of proposals largely undesirable and impossible to implement. Both Obama and McCain...

Many politicians now tell us that health care in America is "broken."The best initial response to that is to ask yourself whether you think that your own health care is broken. And if it is, do you want to turn your decisions about your own health over to politicians...

Americans did not invent democracy. What America rightly did, for the first time in history, was institutionalize the concept of limited government--based not on majority rule, but on individual rights. Sadly, this foundation is not properly recognized and is rapidly...

The status quo in American health care is indefensible--an expensive regulatory and bureaucratic mess. What that calls for, however, is not more layers of regulation and complicated mandates. Nor should government take over health care completely and run it as part of...

Five years ago, an expert for the British government prepared a report to recommend a plan for Britain's National Health Service (NHS). The report was recently released to assess what has happened since. Spending has grown by 50 percent in real terms, with an...

Much of the current debate about health care is between those who want the government to wipe all insurance companies out of existence and those who instead want the government to force everyone to buy regulated private insurance. Both sides ignore the fundamental...

One of the great scandals of our age is the fact that America spends more on food than any other nation. Many political leaders are now calling for urgent reform to bring spending on food under control. Even worse, while the result of this uncontrolled spending...

When talking about health insurance, "mandatory" is an increasingly popular term among politicians of both major parties, including presidential candidates. What do they really mean by it? Put simply, being uninsured would no longer be a misfortune or a choice, but a...

Michael Moore's Sicko has had a respectable box office performance for a documentary film. But it has drawn only a small fraction of the audience that turned out for his previous film, Fahrenheit 9/11. Sicko opened in a relatively small number of theaters, with a plan...

Michael Moore's comedy-drama Sicko presented a great deal of misinformation--too much to summarize in a short column. Besides, if anyone in the audience really believed that all Cubans receive superb health care when Mr. Moore's cameras are not running, there is not...

Open Public Hearing; Endocrinologic and Metabolic Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committees to the Food and Drug Administration; Gaithersburg, Maryland "Good Afternoon. I am Richard Ralston, Executive Director of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. We are...

The U.S. government now pays for and controls half of the health care in America. That is up from less than 10 percent forty years ago. Government spending on health care has increased at a rapid rate as its share of health care has increased. Yet those who complain...

Ultimately all health care is paid for by business activity. Business provides the wages, the return on investment, the insurance, the taxes that pay directly for health care, and the insurance and taxes that fund government programs. When the government manages to...

For years the advocates of a total takeover of health care by the government have pointed to the Veterans Administration as the model of efficient and caring health care by our government. It provides an ideal model, they said, for all health care. They must have...