Bookworm Room

When we met the Blues, one of the people we met was the team’s flight surgeon, who struck me as a lovely young woman:  warm, dedicated and intelligent.  I’m sure Neptunus Lex wasn’t talking about her when he wrote this hysterically funny post a few years ago.  (And no, I didn’t go hunting that post [...]

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This is a matched set of stories from the London Times, both about British dental care, and both warning of the travails when the government both controls much (not all, but much) of the market.  The first story involves the horrible teeth British children enjoy under national dental care.  You’ll note that the culprits aren’t [...]

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Karl Rove nicely articulates the bottom line facts driving Obama’s fear-mongering game to force through immediate and irrevocable changes to America’s health care system:
Mr. Obama’s problem is that nine out of 10 Americans would likely get worse health care if ObamaCare goes through. Of those who do not have insurance—and who therefore might be better [...]

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Faced with an epidemic, England is already planning on rationing:
Thousands of patients could be denied NHS treatment and left to die under ‘worst-case’ emergency plans for a swine-flu epidemic.
The blueprint would force doctors to ‘play God’ and prioritise intensive-care treatment for those most likely to benefit  -  ruling out patients with problems such as advanced [...]

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Don Parker nails both the costs and hypocrisy behind the mandate in the new health care bill that seniors be gently steered towards a cheap death.
UPDATE:  Thanks to Old Flyer for reminding me of this, which fits in so perfectly with the new plan:
UPDATE II:  A story from my dad’s old joke book.
In long ago [...]

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Another chapter in the “lies, damn lies and statistics” is the repeated claim from proponents of European-style socialized medicine that the US has the highest infant mortality rate of any first world country.  This is a scathing indictment, implicating American poverty, racism, prenatal and post-natal care.  The only problem is that it’s completely false, and [...]

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Here is absolutely everything you need to know about the proposed Obama/Democratic health care plan:
The president is barnstorming the nation, urging swift approval of legislation that is taking shape in Congress. This legislation — the Affordable Health Choices Act that’s being drafted by Sen. Edward Kennedy’s staff and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee [...]

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Okay, it’s actually called the Kennedy bill, but it’s the realization of Obama’s insistence on the federal government forcing and funding mandatory health insurance.  Keith Hennessey, in addition to giving links for you to read the bill yourself, explains the substantive parts of the bill, as well as the probable practical and economic effects the [...]

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October 2008:  McCain finally looks poised to lead in the polls, the market collapses and cool, calm, collected, Ivy League educated Obama vaults forward to victory.  April 2009:  It starts to look as if both the American public and Congress may be getting leery about Obama’s proposal to nationalize healthcare (i.e., have the government take [...]

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When I was growing up, my father was a teacher with a lousy salary and lousy benefits.  The only good thing he had was his dental plan.  It was a wonderful dental plan.  Provided that we got our teeth cleaned and checked twice a year, it would pay the total cost of any dental work [...]

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For three years, a single British hospital that was obsessed with following government health care mandates to the letter, succeeded only in killing 1,200 patients unnecessarily:
Twelve NHS trusts are being investigated following a damning report which today slammed ‘appalling’ care at a single hospital.
Hundreds of patients may have died after bosses at Staffordshire General focused [...]

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For reasons too complicated to explain, I have more than a passing knowledge about medical informatics — or, in simple terms, the trend to put all patient records in computerized systems.  That’s why, at a soccer game, a young woman who is clearly an Obama supporter asked me what I thought of the move to [...]

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Again, Britain reminds us of the possible consequences of allowing the government to control health care.  (See here and here.)
As always, what amazes me about the Left is it’s never ending optimism about the government.  Its members will cheerfully concede that the government pretty much bungles most of the things on which it gets its [...]

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I carpooled to a soccer game today.  The driver, who is someone I don’t know very well, is a very charming man who is quite obviously a potential Obama voter.  He wasn’t quite sure about me and, since he was a very civil individual, he never came out and either insulted McCain or lauded Obama.  [...]

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From Genesis 3:16 (after the expulsion from Eden):
To the woman He [God] said,
“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
I’m feeling Biblical after having read a story about another one of the “miracles” of universal healthcare, as in effect in Britain:
Hundreds of women are being forced to give [...]

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Fertility treatment is big money, so there are gazillions of treatment centers in most communities.  One such center in San Diego County may well have been put out business, though, by a California Supreme Court ruling mandating that physicians have to provide treatment to lesbians and other unmarried women, even though doing so goes against [...]

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I heard on Dennis Prager today a call from a British man who pointed out that, in the 10 years of Tony Blair’s socialism, every major institution in Britain declined.  And the more the government meddled, the greater the decline.  Today’s British papers offer yet another example:  The dental portion of the National Health Service [...]

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We all know the story of penicillin’s discovery:  it arose from a lab accident when Alexander Fleming noticed that an accidental mold was killing bacteria.  That coincidental discovery changed the modern world.  It looks as if we can be seeing another pencillin moment, with an accidental fungus leading the way in the fight against cancer [...]

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Britain’s Telegraph has three interesting articles, and the London Times one:
Read about the vast difference between Britain’s and France’s socialized medicine. I’d certainly like to know what accounts for the difference before I start making changes to the American system. Color me skeptical, but I bet Obama, who shows himself to be remarkably [...]

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If you stop at the first paragraph of this AP article, you might think that Teddy Kennedy is the only person on earth who has ever faced a cancer surgery as daunting as the one he underwent (emphasis mine):
Bravery in the face of cancer? Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has given it new meaning. Few things [...]

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There’s talk of Obama giving Hillary the green light to socialize American medicine if she’ll walk away from the primaries.  Melanie Phillips gives us a good example of why the renewed specter of socialized medicine should worry us:
To the Labour Party, the National Health Service is the talismanic proof of its own moral superiority.
Time and [...]

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Many years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a medical student on his neurology rotation.  He related what was, to me, an amazing story.  The patient he saw that day was a fairly young man who had suffered a major stroke, resulting in an almost complete loss of speech (aphasia).  [...]

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One of Obama’s (and Clinton’s) many sins is the desire to nationalize medicine, so that the government gets to decide who deserves treatment and who doesn’t.  Britain, as always, serves as a useful horrible example of what can happen under such a system:
A 61-year-old grandmother has been denied vital heart surgery for being too [...]

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Britain’s health care system is again having problems.  This time, the problem is that physicians are over-prescribing painkillers, causing addictive behavior — and doing so despite strong official guidelines to the contrary.  This could just be a medical trend, but one does wonder if it’s also because doctor’s in Britain are no longer very good?  [...]

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One of the most striking things about the Jewish Bible is the respect it demands for dead bodies. As a result, Jewish ritual holds that the dead cannot be mutilated in any way and must be interred as quickly as possible — preferably within 24 hours of death. Desecration is anathema to the [...]

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