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Archive for the 'Healthcare' Category

A Liberal’s Thoughts On A Conservative’s Problem

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

by Mike

A commentator on this site Blue Foot, just posed a really interesting question that I thought I would take a shot at answering. But the answer got long, so I thought I’d put it in a post instead of a comment. The question was:
“So what’s the path to small government?”
So I’m pretty liberal [...]

What Conservative Purity Looks Like

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

by Mike

The Republican Party is holding their national meeting this winter. This is standard fare for both parties, and these meetings are generally taken up by electing and appointing various people, tweaking the platform in small ways, and generally being an excuse for party leaders to get together and schmooze each other once in awhile.
A [...]

A Bad Test

Friday, November 20th, 2009

by Mike

Whatever you think about the mammogram debate right now, the evidence indicates that the mammography tests are broken. The stats that are floating around right now are this: if 1900 women received regular breast cancer screenings during their 40s, exactly one of them would discover a curable cancer that would have otherwise killed them. [...]

Abortion and Health Insurance Reform

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

by Mike

Abortion is a complicated issue. Even the most ardent pro-choice advocates have to deal with the fine line between abortion and infanticide, while the most ardent pro-life advocates have to deal with the fine lines between abortion, contraception, and miscarriage. The current debates focus on ease-of-access debates (government subsidies, parental consent, etc.) none [...]

A Good Idea

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

by Mike

Make sure to check out this op-ed in today’s New York Times. The author, John Cougan, is a lawyer for the public commission in Rhode Island that oversees the health care industry. He argues that a huge problem that contributes to the confusion, denial of care, and legal hassle that surround the health [...]

Grassroots Movements

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

by Mike

I’m sick of people justifying rude, insensitive, anti-democratic, behavior behind the phrase “grassroots movement”. Just because a movement is supported by quite a few people, doesn’t make the movement any more beneficial or legitimate than a movement that is only supported by a few. In fact, many of the worst tragedies we’ve seen [...]

Understandable But Inexcusable

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

by Mike

I hang out in some pretty liberal crowds. And so, in 2004 when Bush was reelected after what felt like four solid years of shocking, undemocratic growth in executive power and an administration more concerned about privacy and loyalty than about real Americans with real problems, a lot of my friends did some pretty [...]

Controlling the Debate

Friday, July 10th, 2009

by Mike

The Democratic Party is losing the health care debate. I still believe that some version of health care reform will be passed this year; even moderate Democrats and Republicans ran on that in this last election and they want to be able to take something home. But the public debate right now, as [...]

What’s To Blame For Our Free Spending Ways

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

by Mike

Conservatives like to blame budget deficits on spending increases. During the 2008 election, they blamed their own addition to spending on the budget deficits of the Bush years. Lately, I’ve seen many conservatives blame spending for the budget crisis in California. And they have the numbers to back up their claim, or [...]

21st Century Snake Oil

Friday, March 27th, 2009

by Mike

As far as I can tell, most of the problems with the American pharmaceutical system are demonstrated by the case of a new drug that’s just hitting the market: Treximet.
The story of Treximet begins awhile back with the introduction awhile back of Imitrex by GlaxoKlineSmith. Imitrex (active ingredient: sumatriptan) that GKS introduced awhile back [...]