I’ve been away from blogging for the past week or so because my dad had a stroke last Tuesday. I was on my way to the Sutherland Institute for their environmental forum when I got a call that an ambulance had left my parent’s house.
My dad is doing much better this week and will likely be going home soon. There isn’t anyone I know who is as cool and as stong as my Dad. I’m glad he is going to be able to pull through. It sure stinks to see something like this happen to someone you love.
If anything good can come from this event I’m hopeful that it is a greater education on the part of anyone who sees this post on what the symptoms of a stroke are and a how important it is to get medical help as quickly as possible if you or someone you know gets any of those symptoms.
A Mississippi legislator proposed a message bill he knew would fail in an effort to “shed a little light on the number one problem in Mississippi.” His bill would require that restaurants turn away the obese rather than serve them.
Right now bills like this are just used to raise awareness. When taxpayers become responsible for paying each others medical bills under the socialized healthcare plans proposed by some politicians ideas like this will be taken more seriously as efforts to save taxpayer money.
H/T Boing Boing
Daniel posted this story from the telegraph which discusses a poll of doctors in Britain who believe medical procedures in their National Healthcare System should be withheld from the old or obese. I’ve stated before that I believe single payer healthcare solutions create a situation where government takes more responsibility than ever for engineering “acceptable” behavior. This story supports my concerns.
From the Telegraph:
Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.
Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.
Fertility treatment and “social” abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.
Admittedly most doctors in Britain aren’t saying things like this but a sizeable percentage are. I think a system like the British one garantees that in the long run government has a much greater stake in its citizens lives than it should. We don’t need something like that in the U.S.
Some of the usual sources are whining about successful efforts by legislators to eliminate a proposal to garantee healthcare for all Utahns. Their complaints about this proposal being killed behind closed doors resonate with me but I’m glad this wrongheaded idea was whacked. We need to provide help to those in our society who need it but universal healthcare is just an obviously stupid idea.
Why did the conservatives in our legislature feel like they needed to do this in such a sneaky manner? The arguments against this idea aren’t that hard and the positives of creating a program focused on helping our poorest residents should be pretty easy to explain.
Our current healthcare system is broken. It is too expensive and it provides incentives for people to make poor decisions on their own healthcare spending.
Things could be worse…we could be like Canada.
UPDATE: 7/31/2007 2:10
Paramaphil disagrees.
Sen. Buttars is pushing for a legal mandate requiring insurance companies in our state to cover gastric bypass surgeries and other medical procedures that treat morbid obesity.
He is perfectly willing to ignore the fact that when government forces insurance companies to cover these procedures it means everyone else’s health insurance policy premiums go up to pay for it.
This is a good example of my problem with all government involvement in the health insurance industry. I hate the idea that government can force the rest of us to finance health care for those who make risky and foolish lifestyle decisions that put their health in jeopardy.
Davis County Health Director Lewis Garrett received two mentions on the front page of yesterday’s Davis County Clipper for his work as Davis County’s number one personal behavior cop.
Garrett wants to make it illegal to light up in public throughout Davis County.
Elected officials, and the public in general, are pretty receptive to the idea of a smoking ban in public parks and other outdoor venues, Davis County Health Director Lewis Garrett told members of the board of health Tuesday morning,
A committee of health department staff and board members have worked on putting together an ordinance which would ban smoking in public outdoor areas in Davis County.
Garrett will now take a draft ordinance back to the mayors and other elected officials making up COG (the Davis County Council of Governments) before the board of health votes on it.
Emphasis mine.
This is a stupid idea. Second hand smoke has never been scientifically proven to be a health risk in the first place but to ban smoking outside in a public place can’t possibly be justified by fears for public health. What harm occurs when we allow smoking outside? Why do we need the police cracking down on yet another personal vice which doesn’t hurt anyone other than the smoker?
For Garrett the regulation of personal behavior is old hat. He’s the joker behind the rules in Davis County which state that a kid can’t go to a tanning salon unless their parents are with them. Since his rules took affect tanning salon owners throughout Davis County have complained that they have lost business to neighboring counties which haven’t adopted such silly regulations.
Davis County director of health Lewis Garrett is conceding that forcing parents to come in every time their teen uses a tanning salon won’t work until the regulations in all counties are consistent.
So, the Board of Health is backing off and allowing parents to consent to a number of sessions before they must reauthorize their approval.
“It’s a small price to pay to set the standard,” Garrett told board members on Tuesday.
Emphasis mine again.
Perfect. Davis County enacts draconian regulations on our personal behavior and when the negative repercussions quickly show up Garrett says “its a small price to pay to set the standard”. I’d argue that it isn’t a small price to pay. I don’t want Davis County to be the standard setter for restrictive nanny-state government in Utah.
Why has this man taken it upon himself to regulate personal behavior to the point where parents are being hasseled because their teenagers want to fake bake and smokers can’t go outside by themselves for a toke? People like Garrett only have a job because we fall for their scare tactics. Our governments need to relax a bit and cool down their desires to regulate our behavior…even when citizens are smoking or fake baking. Whatever happened to live and let live?
Ugly government regulation of personal appetites and behaviors is part and parcel with Republican domination of government. Hopefully Davis County residents will do something about it.
UPDATE 3/19/2007:
This morning’s Deseret News contains an article about Garrett’s “non-controversial” proposal.
Notices will be placed in local newspapers and in public places, and the health department will take written and verbal comment for two weeks, Garrett said. But he doesn’t know if many people will comment.
“It’s not a controversial issue,” he said.
Sadly Garrett is probably correct. Most smokers in this state have been shamed into thinking that their behavior is not only harmful to themselves but sinful. In an environment like that there probably won’t be many willing to make a public comment against this type of lunacy.
CATO isn’t super excited about Romney’s health insurance scheme for lots of reasons. The fact that the new agency created by Romney to oversee the program is ripping off taxpayers and policy holders as a result of its bloated salary schedule is only one of them.
Here’s hoping this works out successfully as soon as possible!
Daniel talks about incentives for drug innovation over at his blog.
Joseph Stiglitz, a Noble Prize winning economist, has written an interesting article arguing that medical a medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations. The prizes would be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries and the prize winner would not own the intellectual property to the drugs or treatments.
This is an interesting idea, and I would endorse the plan if private individuals, not governments, financed it. Bureaucrats don’t make good decisions on the whole better they don’t have good incentives. Their incentives lead them to do things to increase their power and prestige, not the quality of their product.
His analysis is right on.
America hasn’t had a problem generating new drug patents. In fact we have been bearing most of the burden for drug development for the past 20 years. Nearly every new useful drug patent is developed in America or by an American drug company. Single payer healthcare systems like Canada’s or England’s eliminate much of the financial incentive drug companies have to develop new drugs. Americans currently end up subsidizing drug development for the rest of the world because our system doesn’t use the power of government to eliminate higher drug costs. As socialized medicine becomes the norm in more and more nations (Democrats will be pushing hard for it here over the next decade) governments will have to come up with creative ways to artificially provide incentives for drug companies to innovate. This is unfortunate because the market does a much better job of rewarding developers for inventing drugs people want/need than any prize fund manager could.
Medical innovation over the past 100 years has improved peoples’ lives more than nearly any other technological innovation. We will all be worse off when it is turned over to bureaucrats with competing agendas instead of being left to the market.
My favorite econ blogger breaks down the many obstacles facing those who advocate for a national single payer healthcare system in the U.S. I think those who want to advocate for this type of a system in our country have a lot of work to do and I’m hoping they fail.
This was in the Post today. I leave it to the reader to decide what he wants to do with this information.
(Link courtesy Instapundit)
UPDATE 7/18/03 0830
There are a lot of things wrong with the article linked above but the headline on the story was just too funny not to post. To say that abusing yourself is the way to fight prostate cancer is silly. Why not just marry a good woman and have frequent sexual relations? Sounds a lot healthier (and more fun) than what the article describes as the prescription for a healthy prostate.
I think that pro-marriage forces everywhere should be touting this study. It has been shown that married people have sex more often (and enjoy it more) than single people. Now those advocating marriage can also point to a study that married men who are enjoying all of this good frequent sex also benefit from a healthy prostate! Whoo hoo!!!
