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...
Healthcare
It’s Time to Nationalize Grocery Stores ;)
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...
Death and Taxes and the Motive of Governement-Managed Health Care
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...
Federal Health Board: Hazardous to Your 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...
Obama’s Socialist “Reforms” for American Healthcare are Impractical and Immoral
In his March 7th weekly address, Obama said this: [B]ecause we cannot bring our deficit down or grow our economy without tackling the skyrocketing cost of health care, I held a health care summit on Thursday to begin the long-overdue process of reform. Our ideas and...
Medical Progress Requires Freedom of Information
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....
Government Medical Care Always Becomes Political Medical Care
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 “Federal Health Board:” Another Scheme to Ration Healthcare
Tom Daschle, President-elect Obama's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, has big plans for healthcare. Mr. Daschle has proposed a new "Federal Health Board," an agency that would have unprecedented powers over the healthcare industry. This...
Freedom from the FDA
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...
The Politics of Health Insurance
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...
Who Broke Health Care?
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...
Government Medical Care Always Becomes Political Medical Care
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...
Ted Kennedy vs. Universal Healthcare: A Double Irony
Senator Ted Kennedy recently underwent an operation to remove a brain tumor at Duke University. Besides Hillary Clinton, no other politician in America has devoted as much of his political career to the enslavement of physicians. The name Ted Kennedy (and Clinton) is...
Seven Simple Rules for Health Care Reform
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...
A New Medical System Is Needed — for the British Nation
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...
Free-Market Health Insurance Is Not the Enemy
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...
National Grocery Reform
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...
What Mandatory Health Insurance Really Means
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...
Why Did Sicko Fizzle Out?
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...
Sicko: What Michael Moore Forgot to Tell You
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...
On The Politicization of Healthcare
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 Wisconsin Experiment with Socialized Medicine
"On, Wisconsin ... run the ball clear down the field!" It's time to amend the Wisconsin football song so we can cheer on the Badger State's politicians as they move toward health-care socialism. The Wall Street Journal editorial-page editors are upset that Wisconsin's...
All Power to the Post Office
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...
Health Care’s A Mess–So What’s the Solution?
They say health care in the United States is outrageously expensive because of a failure of the free market. But we don't have a free market in health care. States throughout the country regulate private health insurance, and have turned it into a one-size-fits-all...
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