It isn’t gun control. It’s a much tougher problem, from the standpoint of liberty.
Category Archives: Health
Brain Food
If you want to be mentally sharp, lay off the sugar. It’s bad for you in lots of other ways, too.
The Doctor Won’t See You Now
Thoughts on the current state of the American health-care system, from Mark Steyn:
They gave her the usual form to fill in, full of perceptive inquiries on her medical condition: Do you wear a seat belt? Do you own a gun? How many bisexual men are you now having sex with? These would be interesting questions if one were signing up for eHarmony.com and looking to date gun-owning bisexuals who don’t wear seat belts, but they were not immediately relevant to her medical needs. Nevertheless, she complied with the diktats of the Bureau of Compliance, and had her medical records transferred, and waited . . . and waited. That was August. She has now been informed that she has an appointment with a nurse-practitioner at the end of January. My friend pays $15,000 a year for health insurance. In northern New Hampshire, that and meeting the minimum-entry requirement of bisexual sex partners will get you an appointment with a nurse-practitioner in six months’ time.
Why is it taking so long? Well, because everything in America now takes long, and longer still. But beyond that malign trend are more specific innovations, such as the “Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology,” which slipped through all but unnoticed in Subtitle A Part One Section 3001 of the 2009 Obama stimulus bill. Under the Supreme National Coordinator, the United States government is setting up a national database for everybody’s medical records, so that if a Texan hiker falls off Mount Katahdin after walking the Appalachian Trail, Maine’s first responders will be able to know exactly how many bisexual gun-owners she’s slept with, and afford her the necessary care.
If she’s really paying over a thousand a month for insurance, she’s overpaying. She should cut back to a high-deductible catastrophic plan, and just pay the doctor (or nurse practitioner) herself.
And ObamaCare is just going to make all this much worse.
Space Crazed
What does space travel do to your mind?
You’ll know that Congress and NASA are serious about deep space missions when they stop pretending that Orion is adequate for them, and start serious work on Nautilus, or collaborate with Bigelow.
The Social Safety Net
…is a form of institutionalized child abuse. And as the New York Times would say, minorities are hit hardest.
Healthier Snacks
This is a step in the right direction, though they persist in the myth that the problem with potato chips is fat. I’d love to try a collard- or cabbage- or kale-based chip.
Finding Out What’s In The Bill
Many Senate Democrats want to delay the medical device tax, because they’re concerned that it will cost jobs.
Gee, if only someone had told them about this before they voted for it. Oh, wait.
Morons.
The FDA
Time for SCOTUS to rein it in.
Safety Netting Our Citizens
…to death:
…it’s true that at any point Rob could have taken concrete actions to change his path — and he bears moral responsibility for his failure to act — but it’s also true that our government has relentlessly incentivized every step of his deterioration, all in the name of compassion. Even worse, by providing such generous benefits with no meaningful strings attached, we’ve also essentially immunized him against the kind of assistance that he truly needs — the “tough love” that demands that a man do what he can to help himself through productive work.
The result? Another statistic. Another father who is no longer a role model for his children. Another sadly shortened lifetime’s worth of money (some borrowed from China) paid to sustain a lifestyle not good enough to enjoy and not tough enough to leave.
There’s nothing compassionate about this. And I don’t even believe that the intentions are good.
ObamaCare
Will it go the way of McCain-Feingold?
There’s still plenty to litigate, and Roberts, having been burned by the election, is unlikely to give it any more passes.