Health Care

Drugged Up on Power

by Sheldon Richman July 2, 2003

Congress, pushed by a president who clearly intends to get reelected partly by stealing the Democrats’ ideas, is moving toward expanding Medicare to include prescription drugs. That may be good news for win-at-any-price Republicans, but it’s bad news for sound medical care, and, more important, for individual liberty. Here’s ...

Health-Care Socialism

by Scott McPherson June 1, 2003

Some ideas die hard. Among the most resilient is the Utopian belief that health care could be cheap, free, and available to all, if only we’d let the government take care of it. It was in the spirit of reviving this tragically unwise socialist idea that former president Bill Clinton and Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) addressed separate audiences last ...

What’s Missing From This Picture?

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2003

Writing in the Los Angeles Times last year, Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of The Hungry Gene, said, Obesity is the consequence of environment acting on genetic inclination, and that genetic predisposition combined with an increasingly obesegenic environment underlies the current pandemic. Whats missing from this picture? Human volition, free will. Whats remarkable about Shells statement is how unremarkable it is these days. ...

Free or Not?

by Sheldon Richman February 23, 2003

Free Bonus! FanMail!! Time magazine recently published its annual cover story on health, focusing on the relationship between mind and body. To its credit, it contains some rarely heard criticisms of the mental-health laws, which nearly everyone accepts as appropriate in the land of the free. But as John Cloud writes, “ diagnoses can ...

Healthcare Socialism

by Scott McPherson February 21, 2003

Some ideas die hard. Among the most resilient is the utopian belief that health care could be cheap, free, and available to all, if only we’d let the government take care of it. It was in the spirit of reviving this tragically unwise socialist idea that former president Bill Clinton ...

The Mental Health Parity Scam

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2002

President Bush, in yet another slap at the free-enterprise system, wants to force health-insurance companies to cover mental illnesses in the way they cover bodily illnesses. This is known as “mental-health parity.” According to the Washington Post, the psychiatrists in the audience applauded when Bush made his announcement. No kidding. They stand to reap big ...

The Newest Medical Threat

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2002

How would you like it if every time you went to your doctor, for whatever reason, he asked: Over the past two weeks, have you felt down, depressed, or hopeless? Have you felt little interest or pleasure in doing things? Get ready for a further medicalization of the common tribulations of life. The U.S. Preventative Services ...

Health Is the Health of the State

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 2002

PRESIDENT BUSH has named a new surgeon general, Dr. Richard Carmona of Arizona, to succeed Bill Clinton’s man, Dr. David Satcher. Satcher is the surgeon general who vowed to get us all to lose weight with his “Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity.” As he put it, “Our ultimate goal ...

Andrea Yates: Person or Nonperson?

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2002

Andrea Yates has been convicted of murder. But the debate over the insanity plea will continue. Yates admitted to methodically drowning her five young children in a bathtub. Yet she claimed that mental illness made her do it and she didn’t know right from wrong. This is nothing but a modern, secular version of ...

Healing the Health-Care System

by Lawrence D. Wilson December 1, 2001

HISTORY CAN OFTEN yield insights into our dilemmas. Health care is no exception. The Founders of America envisioned a health-care system based on principles of the dignity and liberty of every person. They were: 1. A right to work. England’s system of guilds and licenses kept many people out of the healing arts. America would allow anyone to become a doctor ...

Does the Truth Not Matter?

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2001

Thank you, Philip Morris. The tobacco company has reminded us that today “the truth” doesn’t mean that which corresponds to reality. It means “that which furthers a political agenda.” Philip Morris recently had a study done for the Czech Republic to answer the oft-made charge that smokers impose financial burdens on nonsmokers. Conducted by Arthur ...

A Stupid Way to Get Health Insurance

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2001

Who came up with the idiotic idea that workers should get health insurance through their employers? If it’s such a great idea, why is no one getting their fire and auto insurance that way? Does it make sense to be tethered to your boss in this manner? There are people who fear changing jobs because ...