The story of how I was schooled on call at 3am.

That we are engaged in the exact same debate as 15 years ago should be sobering to all of us. As a society, we have come no closer to wrestling with this issue and settling on anything resembling consensus. Is healthcare a right? Perhaps we should be talking about this more.

Prevention can, and will fail to prevent. We better recognize this before we invest our hopes into this black hole of a concept and then wake up one day and find that instead of feeling sad for that reckless person who ignored all our good advice, we instead punish him and tell him “we told you so big man”– and send him back to his path and away from the help that we are so desperately trying to provide to everyone with this current debate.

Continuing the development of our theme “how prevention often fails to prevent”, we bring to your attention a patient care interaction from today. A background primer on our thesis here: no matter how much or how loudly someone screams and yells and pays and incentivises doctors to extol the virtues of prevention, people may have a very different vision for their lives. That vision may not include in any way, your good advice to eat better, or stop smoking, or take better care to watch your blood sugar or whatever …

HR 3200 and Illegal Immigrants: Obama vs. Wilson

Wednesday night we witnessed what could only be deemed a masterful performance by President Obama stumping for his vision of health care reform.  During the speech many were stunned at the sudden outburst of Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who blurted out “You Lie” when Obama stated that illegal immigrants would NOT receive government funded health care under H.R.3200.  Since that time Rep. Wilson’s presumptive challenger in 2010 has received $750,000 in campaign contributions from around the nation, while Mr. Wilson has taken in …

Unlike Alexander the Great who reportedly solved the fourth century B.C., Rubik’s cube equivalent puzzle, of the Gordian Knot with one slice of his sword, first Clinton and now Obama have faltered badly in their attempts at offering an intelligent solution to the equally arcane, admittedly faltering, American Health Care system morass.
The failure to offer a cogent, uniquely American, solution is rooted, I believe, not only in the Administration’s fundamental misdiagnosis of the central causes of our medical malaise but their inability to methodically and practically redress these fatal …

We have posted numerous times on this topic. The notion of HC as a right, similar to basic human rights, or even rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. At the end of the debate, much of the disagreement about how much the government needs to augment health care supply comes down to the views one holds on this very, very important topic. We posted a very detailed discussion about this a few months back and this article is worthy of a re-read, or a first time read as the …

One of our very own bloggers, Dr. Douglas Mackenzie continues to contribute to the discussion on health care reform in multiple venues. Here we reprint with his permission a letter he sent to the American College of Surgeons which was published on the Foundation for Economic Education Website. He makes the impassioned argument that needs to made: its time for physicians to lead the charge and take medicine back under their control. It’s time we stopped just taking it on the chin. We aren’t just cogs in …

We have come across two (actually three, but one is a 2 parter) great posts about how government is basically stealing from our children. Now we fully understand the Libertarian slant here– and we also fully appreciate that such alarm sounding is nothing new. What got our attention and our senses perked were the people who wrote these and the relatively mainstream places we found them.
The first piece is small, from a money manager named Bill Frezza and is titled Watching Social Security Eat the Young Alive. What’s striking about …

Well Dr. Orient, our hats are off to you. That simple, that clear. Bravo.

If one were to dive deep and try to understand why our system is this good one would enter a world that is so very familiar to us, but so very foreign to most average people. That world, the world of medical practice, is one that through all of its trials and efforts, through the many successes and many failures, through all of our learning, and hours spent away from our families and friends, all of THAT, each day we get better and better at doing things that were unthinkable even a few years ago and are still largely unthinkable in other highly industrialized countries like our cousins in England.

Early on in this whole HCR mess (seems like an eternity ago), we posted a number of pieces about how the stress and the strain on our politicians was leading to some clear public cracks and were offering a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes world of how the Wizard really controls Oz. For the better part of the summer and fall however, the politics have been visible. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and most conspicuously Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) have all had …

A spokesperson for the National Prevention and Good Health Administration (NPGA) stated today that federal agents raided an illegal sugar refinery and confectionary in upstate New York and seized a reported 3 tons of raw materials used in the production of candy bars, sodas and other snack foods long illegal in the United States.

For those who do not obsess over HCR, you may have missed a little ditty by Nick Kristof that appeared in the NYT last week. Titled, “Are We Going to Let John Die?”, this twice over Pulitzer Prize winning reporter delivers a piece so ludicrous, so absurd that we can only stand back in horror wondering how desperate those on the far left must be right now. We generally do not label people in this manner– but we take the stance that most rational people would: those on the far …

A really great piece by Wesley Pruden caught our eye today. He has a bit of an edge to him, but we like that very much.
Hy wryly notes that with all of our debate swirling around right now, and the fact that so many Senators and Congresspeople hold up England and its NHS as a model for us, that we really are not very curious about that system. Or Canada’s to boot.
“We’re not supposed to ask why so many Canadians, pleased and proud of their cradle-to-grave nanny care, …

We have come across a number of articles of late in main stream news sources that talk of a possible shortage of trained MD physicians if the current versions of the Senate and House bill get passed into law. Now, before we get into the specifics of those claims, it is worthwhile to take more “long term” view of doctor supply over the years. The issues of shortages and surplus in medicine are not at all new– so the first and most important point is that we need to stop …