The Child-Driven Education
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Monthly Archives: February 2011
Do not mess with Stevie Nicks
Watch through the end.
Of Gods and Men
Medicine has never been better, but our overall health is worsening
Don’t miss this KevinMD.com/David Gratzer, M.D. post on how – despite the miracles of modern medicine — the poor incentives of the fractured U.S. health care finance system encourage people not to change unhealthy habits:
But if medicine has never been so advanced, the actual health of Americans is far less robust. The Era of Modern Medicine has given way to the Age of Preventable Illness. Americans have embraced a culture of extremes: too much alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and food, and not enough exercise and restraint. American leads the way in medical innovation, winning more Nobel Prizes in Medicine than all other countries combined. We also lead the world in obesity, and have the poor life expectancy statistics to show for it. [ . . .]
ObamaCare seeks to divorce people from the financial consequences of their health decisions — regulating insurance to treat people equally regardless of age or illness (community rating), offering many no-deductible services, mandating the coverage of other services, and sweetening the deal with heavy subsidies.
Let’s be clear: a patient with Schizophrenia shouldn’t be punished because his father and grandfather had the disease. But many illnesses are preventable. Rather than encourage health, ObamaCare seeks to socialize the costs of bad health.
As noted earlier here, perhaps the wisest investment in health care finance that we could make at this stage is simply better education?
Euro Tour Fun
Wisconsin, Myth vs. Fact
The Placebo Effect
The amazingly ineffective 40-year war
The dubious policies of overcriminalization and drug prohibition are two frequent topics on this blog, so this excellent Ethan Nadelmann essay on the utter failure of America’s 40-year War on Drugs caught my eye. The entire piece is worth reading, but his final point is particularly illuminating:
Legalization has to be on the table. Not because it is necessarily the best solution. Not because it is the obvious alternative to the evident failures of drug prohibition. But for three important reasons:
First, because it is the best way to reduce dramatically the crime, violence, corruption and other extraordinary costs and harmful consequences of prohibition;
Second, because there are as many options — indeed more — for legally regulating drugs as there are options for prohibiting them; and
Third, because putting legalization on the table involves asking fundamental questions about why drug prohibitions first emerged, and whether they were or are truly essential to protect human societies from their own vulnerabilities. Insisting that legalization be on the table — in legislative hearings, public forums and internal government discussions — is not the same as advocating that all drugs be treated the same as alcohol and tobacco. It is, rather, a demand that prohibitionist precepts and policies be treated not as gospel but as political choices that merit critical assessment, including objective comparison with non-prohibitionist approaches.
My question is whether the elaborate law enforcement infrastructure that has been constructed to deal with drug prohibition policy become such a powerful political force that it effectively prevents Congress from changing this disastrous policy for the better good of the majority?