Category Archives: Health

Over The Counter Birth Control

Finally, the Republicans do something smart:

Just this week, legislators introduced a bill that would encourage drug companies to apply to sell contraceptives without a prescription.

But if Republican Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, along with four other GOP senators, were expecting flowers from Planned Parenthood and others for their bill, the Allowing Greater Access to Safe and Effective Contraception Act, they should brace for disappointment. Suddenly, the idea doesn’t sound so great, and the former supporters aren’t mincing words.

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said the bill is a “sham and an insult to women.”

Karen Middleton of NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado even got personal, saying, “Cory Gardner can’t be trusted when it comes to Colorado women and their health care.”

Why the about-face? Well, the story the libs are going with is that the bill will actually make the pill more expensive once it’s no longer prescription (and therefore not covered by insurance). Which would be a fair point if it were true.

As she notes, the Dems hate this because it knocks the legs out from under their “War on Women” scam.

Medical Health Records

Another ObamaCare failure:

Let’s force doctors to spend a lot of money to become technology dependent and adopt electronic health records when the old way of doing things was working just fine. And hey–as a bonus, our health information is now more vulnerable to hacking and we can lose some privacy along the way! Electronic health records haven’t saved a single life or a single dollar, but they have created a lot of expense, confusion, and tremendous demoralization for our health care providers. It wasn’t broken, and it shouldn’t have been “fixed.” If the Republican Congress was smart, it would repeal this onerous, useless provision of Obamacare.

There are a lot of things the Republicans would do if they were smart. On the other hand, I can understand why they don’t want to repeal this abomination piece meal. They need to scrap the whole thing and start over, but it won’t happen until we get someone in the White House who actually understands markets and actually gives a damn about others.

Cholesterol

Matt Wridley has a brief history of how it’s not bad for you. And this is worth repeating in the context of climate “science”:

If challenged to show evidence for low-cholesterol advice, the medical and scientific profession has tended to argue from authority — by pointing to WHO guidelines or other such official compendia, and say “check the references in there”. But those references lead back to Keys and Framingham and other such dodgy dossiers. Thus does bad science get laundered into dogma. “One of the great commandments of science is ‘Mistrust arguments from authority’,” said Carl Sagan.

Similarly, mistrust people who talk about “consensus” and quote fake statistics on how many scientists believe something.

[Update a while later]

Sorry, link is fixed now.