It is always important to remember that healthcare and health insurance are two very different things, and neither of them is a guarantee of good health. Therefore, when people talk about Obamacare providing people with medical care, we have to remember that it primarily provides people with health care insurance. And as I have written about previously, insurance coverage…
A quote from Far From the Tree I thought I’d share: “There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together,…
A recent Gallup poll shows that the percent of Americans without health insurance has dropped significantly in recent months. Here’s a picture of their findings: This drop has occurred largely in response to Obamacare – to the expansion of Medicaid in those states which went along with that provision of the law, and with the…
We all know that healthcare costs in the U.S. are too high. But why is American healthcare so expensive? Some experts blame the desire for profit. Russell Andrews, a neurosurgeon and author of Too Big To Succeed laments “the morphing of American medicine from a function of a humanitarian society into a revenue stream for healthcare profits, drug…
I’m-sure-you-know-this-by-now fact-of-the-day: the US leads the world in healthcare costs. As I’ve written previously, a big reason for this is that prices in the US for healthcare services are higher than elsewhere. This was nicely illustrated in a Health Affairs article from 2012. The article looked at how many physicians per capita practiced across six countries,…
The New Yorker recently published a very nice article on Pope Francis. At one point in the article, the Pope explains why he is trying to deemphasize all the controversies that have taken up so much of the Church’s attention in recent years, controversies about birth control, abortion and the like. His explanation shows a respectable…
Read the following quote, and try to guess which U.S. president made this statement: “A responsible budget is not our only weapon to control inflation. We must act now to protect all Americans from healthcare costs that are rising $1 million per hour, 24 hours a day, doubling every 5 years. We must take control…
In a recently published article, a team of researchers showed that a simple graphical cue, showing people which foods are healthy and unhealthy, significantly improve their eating behaviors. Here is a nice summary of the study results, as summarized on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website: With a problem as large as America’s obesity epidemic,…
In an earlier post, I wrote about JFK’s disdain for domestic politics, and how such disdain doomed his lackluster efforts to pass Medicare legislation. As it turns out, Richard Nixon, the man he defeated in the 1962 Presidential Election, held similar disdain for domestic affairs when he was President of the United States, and not…
In a previous post, I presented a quote from Dwight Eisenhower that foreshadows the Obamacare insurance exchanges, and argued that Obamacare is a centrist healthcare law, one that rather than socialize the healthcare system instead promotes private hospitals and private insurance companies. I even wondered whether Eisenhower might support important components of the Affordable Care Act….