Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The Real Reason Medical Costs are Rising

Today's post is on the Black Ribbon Project blog.

Preserving the independence of the patient-physician dyad is the key not only to quality medial care, it is also the key ingredient to solving the problem of rising health care costs.

Read more here: "The Real Reason Medical Costs are Rising" (and some ideas on what to do about it.)


Thursday, September 23, 2010

Politics are getting really interesting!

Donny York of the ShaNaNA has come out in favor of capitalism ad limited government.
The video clip and the music are not what you would call first class, but it's worth watching just to support York's efforts to correct his past mistakes.

Here's what he has to say in a commentary piece today on PJ Media:

With apologies to vast numbers of my un-reconstructed fellow sojourners of Woodstock Nation, I’m out of the closet and into the fired up. “Ready to go” indeed. Hasn’t it ever dawned on you that our “peace” and Yasgur’s Farm demonstration of the viability of socialism were dependent on a life-support umbilical cord from the Nixon era capitalist grown-ups?

Didn’t you ever come to notice how the robust creation of wealth must be assured before any conversation about its redistribution can even be useful?

To those of my Woodstock cohort who are now aghast at the “tea party” (which more assuredly has “changed the world” than it’s said our misadventure at Yasgur’s farm did) I return that stunned glare, then the sputter: “But… I thought you were smart. I thought you were a nice person!” Being a nice person aligns with being in the fight for the nicest societal arrangement, among all of human history’s rarest gems: limited government.

Like, dig it, man. Some of today’s teapartyers are grown up flower children. Imagine there’s no statism. It’s easy if you try. They may say you’re a dreamer. But you’re not the only one.
Nice to know that even famous committed socialists can rethink their premises.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

ACA intentionally undermines the Doctor-Patient relationship

The new healthcare law has multiple provisions which disrupt individualized decision-making between the physician and patient. This is no accident. It is by concerted design.

Dr. Donald Berwick, the new head of CMS, wrote the following on the doctor-patient relationship:

“Today, this isolated relationship is no longer tenable or possible… Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient dyad must be reformulated to fit the new mold of the delivery of health care...Regulation must evolve. Regulating for improved medical care involves designing appropriate rules with authority...Health care is being rationalized through critical pathways and guidelines. The primary function of regulation in health care, especially as it affects the quality of medical care, is to constrain decentralized, individualized decision making.” (emphasis added)

from New Rules, by Donald Berwick

Read the rest at The Black Ribbon Project.


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Saturday, September 11, 2010

Remembrance

Statues of Liberty

Friday, September 10, 2010

Food for Thought

"A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings."
-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action


HT: Dennis Gartman in today's "The Gartman Letter" via Carpe Diem

Monday, September 6, 2010

Hungry for Freedom

"The jovial forty-three-year-old leaves us a painful but effective lesson, because although we have no elections to vote directly for those who govern us, nor courts to accept claims of police abuse, much less means by which a citizen can denounce the immigration restrictions holding the national territory in their grip, we still have our bones, our skin, our stomach walls, to reclaim, by way of the fragile terrain of our bodies, the rights they have taken from us."

From Generation Y, the blog of Cuban, Yoani Sanchez, winner of International Press Institutes's (IPI) 60th World Press Freedom Hero, and the Prince Claus Award, discussing a friend who has gone on a hunger strike to protest the political oppression in Cuba.

HT Mark Perry at the Enterprise Blog where he states:

"When the history of Cuba’s freedom movement is written, it’s likely that Yoani Sanchez will be recognized as a national hero and freedom fighter, the equivalent of Lech Walesa in Poland or Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic. Yoani Sanchez demonstrates that we should never underestimate the power of one courageous individual with a computer, a blog, and intermittent access to the Internet (Sanchez says she has not actually been able to see her own blog since 2007), or the individual’s power to change the world in the Information Age, especially with a message of freedom and individual liberty. Intellectual figures like Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of Yoani and her powerful message of individual freedom in one of the only remaining regimes of totalitarianism left in the world."