Category: Health Care
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Supreme Court to Debate Affordable Care Act Next week – and plaintiff's case has imploded
With the impending, and unprecedented, 3 days of arguments over the Affordable Care Act occurring early next week, it’s interesting to see that the test case being used to challenge the law has now become a test case demonstrating the necessity of the law. Mary Brown, the woman who asserts no one has the authority…
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Accountability in Science Journalism: two recent examples of failures in the NYT and Forbes
Ed Yong demands higher accountability in science journalism and has made me think of how in the last two days I’ve run across two examples of shoddy reporting. These two articles I think encompass a large part of the problem, the first from the NYT, represents the common failure of science reporters to be critical…
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What is the cause of excess costs in US healthcare? Take two
We’ve discussed it before, why are costs so much higher in US healthcare compared to other countries? The Washington Post has a pointless article which seems to answer with the tautology costs are high because healthcare in America costs more. How much more? Well, we spend nearly twice as much per capita as the next…
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Conservatives crow over push for privatization in British NHS, compare apples to oranges
Hot Air and the daily caller are excited to pronounce socialized medicine dead as the British NHS plans to contract with private hospitals and providers on top of socialized care. From The Caller: Joseph A. Morris, a former Reagan White House lawyer who now serves on the board of the American Conservative Union, told TheDC…
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Drug Shortages Reveal the Free Market is Failing Our Sickest Patients
**Update, the NYT has an editorial in their Sunday edition recommending the passage of two bills in congress requiring advanced notice from drug manufacturers in event of likely shortage. Health affairs discusses the increasingly frequent shortages of critical, life-saving, generic drugs. This is a serious problem that seems mostly limited to the U.S. healthcare system,…
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More Evidence that Universal Health Care Would be Less Expensive
We’ve written quite a bit about single payer health care systems as well as other models that are a mixture of public and private spending. We’ve also analyzed some of the sources of excess cost of US healthcare to other countries. What is uniformly true about universal health care systems is that they all spend…
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What Illegal Abortion Looks Like
Many are linking to this story around the blogosphere and I encourage everyone to read it. In it, a Ob/Gyn describes her emergency care of a woman who arrived in her ED in hemorrhagic shock from a botched illegal abortion. Though clearly it was touch and go and there was some panicky action, our heroine…
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Why no one should take Nexium and it should never have been approved
As Chris discussed Saturday the WSJ had a silly article in which a woman demands a prescription drug from a flight attendant, asking for the wrong drug to treat her problem acutely, and then shockingly was refused this service. Worse, Nexium is mentioned by name, multiple times, and Nexium is actually a drug which should…
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Healthcare reform
With the recent victory of this administration in passing health care reform I felt it was time to talk again about the importance of this issue and some of my own experiences in the last year of my surgical training. I was, and still am of the belief that reform, whatever form it might take,…
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This day in Crankery, November 16th
So who here has actually read the health care bill?. I’ve been devoting a bit of time each week to peruse more and more of it, and while there are endless obstacles to a complete understanding of it (including legalese and the annoying tendency of legislation to contain edits to other bills without including the…