Health Care

Off His Rocker?

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2000

A baseball player who uttered some uncouth, even bigoted, remarks about various groups of people in New York City was ordered to undergo psychological testing - and possibly treatment - by his employer, Major League Baseball (MLB). John Rocker, an awesome relief pitcher with the Atlanta Braves, has apologized for his statements in a Sports Illustrated interview, but that ...

The Contagious Disease Acts

by Wendy McElroy March 1, 2000

The Contagious Disease Acts (1860s) in Britain occasioned "the western world's first feminine revolt of any stature." So wrote historian Michael Pearson in his book The Age of Consent: Victorian Prostitution and Its Enemies. The revolt was for sexual equality and against a double standard in the law. The 20-year crusade against the C.D. Acts was led by a ...

None Dare Call It Extortion

by Sheldon Richman December 1, 1999

What do you call it when one person threatens violence against another unless he obeys? How about "extortion"? Consider this sentence from the New York Times on Christmas day: "Brandishing new data showing that the drug industry earns higher profits and pays lower taxes than most other industries, White ...

Welfare Is Welfare

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 1999

When is welfare not welfare? When it goes to the middle class. At least that's what many people want to think. A controversy in Bill Clinton's state of Arkansas illustrates the point. A few years ago President Clinton and the Republican Congress created the Children's Health Insurance Program, which ...

All Smoke

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 1998

Let's see if I have this straight: The tobacco companies will pay the states $206 billion over the next 25 years to "reimburse" them for medical expenses incurred for the treatment of Medicare patients with smoking-related illnesses. As part of the settlement of state lawsuits, the companies have pledged to combat teen smoking in ...

Our Corrupting Welfare State

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 1998

Champions of the free society have long warned that the welfare state-in which the government does for people what they ought to do for themselves-has a corrosive effect on the character of human beings. There is no better evidence of this than what people have come to expect from what we mistakenly call "health ...

Clinton Tests Our Devotion to Liberty

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1998

President Clinton is up to something that will surely put the American people's love of liberty to the test. He wants to assign every citizen a "unique health identifier," an identification number that would permit the government to gather information about our health and compile it into a national database. No one noticed when ...

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 1998

have a great idea. Haircut insurance! Before you double up, hear me out. It's important to look good, right? It's more than important. Good hair can make the difference between success and failure in business and personal relationships. The bad-hair day is a scourge we have tolerated far too long. The value of a kempt ...

What They Don’t Know

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1998

Vice President Al Gore says that if the tax on cigarettes is raised $1.10 a pack in the next five years, teenage smoking will drop 42 percent on average nationwide. Not 41 or 43 percent. Forty-two percent. Further, he says that 991,000 deaths from smoking would be avoided. ...

The Creeping Takeover of Medical Care, Part 2

by Sheldon Richman December 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 In Part I we saw that the right to medical care is a pseudo right. It cannot be a real right because it conflicts with rights that stand the test of authenticity. But that is only the beginning of what's wrong with trying to enforce a right to medical care. Imagine for a moment a ...

Killing and Lying for Safety: Airbags and the Salvation State

by James Bovard December 1, 1997

Airbags symbolize the bogus paternalism that increasingly blights Americans' lives. In order to save lives, federal regulators seem to have granted themselves a license to kill. While airbags are sometimes seen as an arcane consumer issue, they are actually a great lesson of the danger of the combination of ...

The Creeping Takeover of Medical Care, Part 1

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 President Clinton favors barring health-insurance companies from using genetic testing to determine whom they will insure. If that position is enacted into law, it will be one more step toward what he has been aiming at since he came into office: a government takeover of medical care. Why shouldn't health underwriters use the results of ...