Tag: medicine

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Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom nannyism privacy responsibility

Pain Economies

Pain Medicine Police

Looking for a new doctor, a colleague of mine called his friend’s primary care clinic, and was told, “We are taking all patients except pain management cases.”

He was thankful his health issues were not pain-related.

After reading Leslie Kendall Dye’s Salon piece, “But what if I actually need my painkillers?” you will easily understand: America doesn’t make it easy for those who must fight constant pain.

Ms. Dye’s story is harrowing. Her chronic pain, the residue of a ballet injury, makes her personal, day-​to-​day experience not primarily about economizing pleasures, but economizing pains.

So she takes Tramadol. Regularly. Even with the drug, her agony too often returns. What she tries to do is carry on with as little relief as possible while living an active, normal life, always risking excruciating pain levels.

And she’s constantly harassed and inconvenienced and probed and lectured. “Each time I take my painkiller prescription to a pharmacy, I can’t help feeling suspected of a crime.”

She’s not paranoid.

The government is out to get her. And her doctors.

All to “save” the lives of people who “abuse” the drugs.

I read about cases of lost souls, overdoses, suicides, black market pills, portions of towns laid waste by narcotic abuse, and I worry. I worry for the addicts, but I also worry for those of us who would not be able to carry on without responsible pain management.

She admits to feeling “conflicted” about this.

My prescription? Feel less conflicted. Were today’s standard individual responsibility, not societal responsibility, responsible patients would suffer less.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Pain Medicine Police

 

Categories
ideological culture

The Race Card, Again

Are persons necessarily racist if (a) white and (b) opposed to expansion of the welfare state — that is, merely for opposing such expansion?

In the New York Times, journalism professor Thomas Edsall, echoing a now-​familiar charge, implies as though it were self-​evident that many who oppose Obamacare-​ized medicine do so because of the race(s) of the recipients:

“Those who think that a critical mass of white voters has moved past its resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other resources from the middle class to poorer minorities merely need to look at the election of 2010.… [Obamacare] forced such issues to the fore, and Republicans swept the House and state houses across the country.”

Poor(er) people can come in all shapes, sizes and colors. But for the sake of Edsall’s freighted non-​argument, let’s stipulate that the poorest Obama-​subsidy recipients are slightly or much more likely to be minorities than not. Why must this fact motivate an individual’s opposition to seeing more and more of his hard-​earned income coercively transferred to anybody?

Change the context to a street mugging. If a mugger is non-​white, does the victim’s dislike of being mugged necessarily hinge on the race of the mugger?

Of course, any victim of crime may be a racist. But you wouldn’t simply assume it.

Gratuitous charges of racism are one sign of desperation by friends of Obamacare — a program the color-​blind horrors of which will only grow more evident over time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Help Us Help Ourselves

Hopeful about the innovations transpiring in various small sectors of fields like medicine or education? 

Atlantic Monthly blogger Megan McArdle isn’t.

According to McArdle, the history of “social science” — society? — is “littered with exciting programs that promised to both significantly improve the lives of the targeted populations, and to save money.” Yet average costs of education and health care keep going up.

Gee willikers, why?

Scalability. McArdle suggests that successful but small-​scale experiments have expertise and enthusiasm going for them that can’t be readily replicated on very large scales. The positive effects of the small programs tend to disappear when people who don’t want to change their ways have to sign off. 

She says that this isn’t a medical or educational problem but a social one.

What kind of social problem? McArdle doesn’t say.

But compare and contrast. Do small-​scale innovations in electronics and computers, for example, tend to dissolve into puddles of social lethargy and recalcitrance even if they achieve substantial improvements at lower cost? Apparently not. So what’s the difference? Well, hardware and software firms may be taxed and regulated by government, but they’re burdened with nowhere near the level of bureaucracy that swaddles schooling and medicine.

In free markets, bad solutions don’t get entrenched. Good ones don’t either, unless they prove economically viable over time. 

So how about removing the shackles and just letting us function as free people — in every realm of human endeavor?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy too much government

A Plague Upon Small Business

Those who like Big Government tend to dislike Big Business. So it must be just an unintended effect that shiny, new government programs invariably harm small businesses, aiding big ones. 

There are many examples of this. Today’s comes from the biggest new kid on the block, the new health care reform.

Who wins with it? Sure isn’t small business.

The increased paperwork and added regulations especially burden smaller operations. Big corporations can more easily eat the additional costs. Small businesses, on the other hand, have to expend a greater percentage of their gross incomes to meet new requirements, and this drain on their resources means that they can’t compete as well against the big guys, toe-​to-​toe in the marketplace.

Worse yet, even the special tax credits tossed in small businesses’ direction serve up a thorny mess of complexity and arcane paperwork. And while the credits are scheduled to evaporate, there appears no end to soaring costs.

Finally, the new IRS 1099 reporting requirements on business-​to-​business transactions of $600 or more will hit small businesses hard. These new required forms are in effect a tax themselves, because the extra paperwork will cost real money.

Is this any way to improve health care? No. It’s got nothing to do with health care. It’s just a way to increase the tax take and another way Big Government helps Big Business at the expense of the little guys.

And that’s sick.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Happy Healthcare

The funniest show on TV? Health care reform. It’s a laugh a minute.

More awkward pauses than The Office. The melodramatic back-​stabbing that makes Desperate Housewives amusing. Plus, nearly as much deliberation as Wife Swap.

Boy, do we have great politicians. For Christmas they got us much better medical care and at lower cost. But wait, the federal deficit gets reduced in the process. They just vote it into being. Shazam!

How can they do it? By sticking it to the insurance companies!

Funny, the stock prices of health insurance companies have shot up … just as this legislation is passing. President Obama brought the House down, in his weekly television bit, proclaiming these bills are “the toughest measures we’ve ever taken to hold the insurance industry accountable.”

The more sophisticated humor is how polls show most Americans opposed to the plan Congress rushes to pass. So, who are the beneficiaries? Those who slipped special deals into this 2,000-plus page bill?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that’s what legislating is all about. But giving unfair deals to certain states to entice their senator’s vote looks, well, sorta blatantly crooked. Not to mention fiscally irresponsible. The sale of Senator Ben Nelson’s vote gained Nebraska a Medicare expansion on the federal taxpayers’ tab … forever.

The silver lining is that, at the rate they’re going, forever may not be so long.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Health Rations and You

Want a laugh? To keep you from crying at what President Obama and the Congress are trying to do to health care in this country?

Over the decades, the federal government’s involvement in health care has been making it harder and harder for doctors and patients to make independent, sensible decisions about care.

Many advocates of “reform” deny the destructive consequences of past “reform” and insist that the only way to solve our problems is, in effect, to make them worse: Get government even more involved, tie the bureaucratic noose even tighter around the necks of patients and doctors.

Despite all the problems in the health care industry, we often still get great care because of the freedom that still exists. But what if advocates of Obamacare get their way and government takes over? Well, that’s the scenario satirized in a new two-​minute video produced by the Sam Adams Alliance, all about “Health Rations and You.”

It adopts the black-​and-​white style of a 1950s-​era educational film. “Health rationing. What is it? What does it mean for you?” And it’s all about how the Health Administration Bureau will give you nothing but “the best” medical care.

The video is funny. Memorable. Getting a lot of hits on YouTube. And it just might help stop this socialist monster in its tracks. Give it a look-​see, and pass it on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.