health care — VOICES for REASON

At a time when hostility against the oil industry is at a high, while politicians and editorial-office heroes call for “ending our addiction to oil,” it’s important to reflect on why oil is so valuable—so “addictive,” in the terminology of our time.

A couple months ago, I blogged that “Most of us think of oil simply as the stuff that puts gasoline in our car. But oil, thanks to the ingenuity of the oil industry, does so much more. For one, it’s the building block for thousands of petroleum products—everything from Blu-Ray discs to asphalt to stitches to lipstick. And it provides the safest, most powerful, most convenient fuel, not only for automobiles but for the freighters, jets, trucks, and industrial machinery that power our global economy. Oil makes every aspect of our lives better.”

In that post, I illustrated how oil was vital in making possible something as basic as an affordable, healthy breakfast. The other day, I witnessed firsthand how vital oil is in making possible a safe, effective hospital. Sitting in on a highly advanced surgical procedure, I was struck by the skill of the surgeons, the stunning advances in medical technology (almost all of which involve petroleum components), and—what I want to talk about today—everyone’s commitment to maximize safety by keeping the environment as hygienic as possible by using oil-based products at every turn.

One of the virtues of petroleum products, including plastics, is that they are incredibly resistant to bacteria, moisture, germs. Another is that they can very easily be made impermeable, protecting whatever you want from whatever you don’t want to contaminate it. They can also be made incredibly cheaply, which allows for disposable products that are never used by more than one patient.

All of this was at work in the operating room. Just about all the furniture—the chairs, the cabinets, the drawers, were made of or coated by petroleum to keep them sanitary. The patient was lying on the bed, connected to durable, flexible plastic (oil) tubes that safely delivered food, coming from a sealed plastic (oil) bag that securely stored it. Another oil tube was designed to vacuum excess fluids. There were disposable foam (oil) cradles to prop up the patient’s arms or legs if necessary—made of oil to be disposable. The disposable, sterile gloves were either latex or synthetic—i.e., made of oil. Ditto for the disposable surgical masks and head-coverings. The doctors frequently needed to throw biological material away—which, thankfully they could do sanitarily with plastic (oil) trash-bags that could be taken away leaving no trace of their hazardous contents. Imagine if these products would have been made of wood, cloth, or metal. Can you imagine the corrosion, the bacteria-traps, the health risks? Infection used to be a highly common and deadly product of surgery—and lack of petroleum products was a big reason why.

Thanks both to the medical profession and petroleum products, you can have every expectation of your next trip to the hospital being a safe one.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

ObamaCare included a little-noticed provision that will force restaurant chains with twenty or more stores to list how many calories are in each menu item. My view: The government has no business getting involved here. If we want to know how many calories are in our lunch, we can patronize only restaurants that tell us.

But you might wonder: Who could possibly object to giving people more information?

Well, here’s one man who does. Ken Schelper is a Vice President of Davanni’s, a small chain of pizzerias. He notes that under ObamaCare’s caloric mandate, his company will have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to replace all of its store menus, brochures, and drive through signs–every time it changes a single ingredient.

Information isn’t costless. Whether it involves scientific experiments to discover how many calories are in a slice of cheese or printing new menus, providing customers with information imposes genuine costs on businesses–costs that ultimately get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer options.

Supporters of the menu requirement would have us believe that the only reason a company would choose not to provide certain kinds of information is because it’s trying to put something over on us. That’s simply not true. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that before ObamaCare passed, customers of Davanni’s were able to find out the caloric content of their food. It was on the restaurant’s website.

Image: flickr

“Brutal blackmail” and “a violation of corporate social responsibility.” That’s how some diabetics in Greece are describing the recent decision by Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company, to stop selling certain insulin products in Greece.

Novo Nordisk manufactures easy-to-use insulin delivery devices that resemble fountain pens. More than 50,000 Greek diabetics use them. But not for long. The company has withdrawn the products from the market.

Why? Because the government of Greece is trying to mitigate its financial crisis at pharmaceutical companies’ expense by unilaterally ordering a 25% reduction in the price of all medicines. According to a Novo Nordisk spokesperson, “the price cut would force its business in Greece to run at a loss.” Oh yes, there’s also a little matter of $36 million that Greece already owes the company, with no certainty of payment in sight.

By any rational standard of justice, Novo Nordisk is completely in the right here. The company has done nothing to harm Greeks—on the contrary, it has offered them a positive value they didn’t have before, benefiting tens of thousands of people. By refusing to sell its products at a loss, the company is simply leaving Greek diabetics exactly as they were before it first offered those easy-to-use insulin pens for sale. Greeks who want more such devices should figure out a way to pay for them—not expect Novo Nordisk to sacrifice for the resolution of financial problems created not by them but by the Greeks themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the health care debate, we have been arguing that the push for government control of health care is driven by a certain moral view: the view that need is a claim. That view is typically taken to be noble and benevolent, and one of Ayn Rand’s most controversial conclusions is that it is in fact vicious and unjust. Well, the latest proposal out of Massachusetts seems designed to prove Rand’s point.

Massachusetts, you probably know, passed a bill very similar to ObamaCare a few years back. Well, shocking news: the state is now hemorrhaging money. To stop the bleeding, it is clamping down on doctor reimbursements for Medicare and Medicaid, which has meant fewer and fewer doctors willing to accept Medicare/Medicaid patients. The state’s solution? Force them.

Every health care provider licensed in the commonwealth which provides covered services to a person covered under “Affordable Health Plans” must provide such service to any such person, as a condition of their licensure, and must accept payment at the lowest of the statutory reimbursement rate…

As one doctor noted: Read the rest of this entry »

In response to a recent post called “Who cares about the doctors?” I received several thoughtful comments, including two that recounted poignant personal stories. As you read this first comment, ask yourself whether ObamaCare and the whole federal-state medical regulatory system treats physicians with the respect they deserve:

My wife did a mid-life career change from power systems engineer to doctor (ER). It was a family decision. We put our own savings and investments on the line to bet on her ability to take our family to the next level of success in America. We did this willingly, as free people intending to enjoy the fruits of our labors. When I look back at the amount of time, sacrifice and work it took from all of us, most of all my wife, to get to this point, the action of the Obama administration is breathtaking in its sense of entitlement to her labor and its arrogance in assuming that the doctors will go along.

Most doctors already willingly donate their time, money and labor to treat the poor. When it is no longer their decision where to apply their labor, then we have lost the country.

But of course, it’s not just the Obama administration that displays a “sense of entitlement to her labor.” For decades, both political parties have displayed “arrogance in assuming that the doctors will go along.” Now the question is: Will doctors keep “going along,” or will they start standing up for their rights? Listen to another physician expressing a sense of personal loss: Read the rest of this entry »

Many of the opponents of ObamaCare objected to it on the grounds that it didn’t reflect the “will of the people”–as if the biggest problem with herding doctors and patients into a government health care system was that too few Americans supported the herding.

Well, wouldn’t you know it: “More Americans now favor than oppose the health care overhaul that President Obama signed into law Tuesday, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.”

Whatever the accuracy of the poll, trying to defend health care freedom on the grounds of public opinion is to place health care freedom on a foundation of shifting sand. As the founders warned us, the majority can be as great a threat to individual rights as a minority; Patrick Henry didn’t say, “Give me liberty…so long as 51% of Americans approve.”

We at VfR, on the other hand, continue to oppose ObamaCare on the grounds that it is a rights-violating, immoral monstrosity.

Amid the clamorous debate over health care, how much have you heard from the doctors? Very little. Nobody’s particularly interested in what they have to say. It’s taken for granted that they’ll always be there when you need them.

These are the forgotten men and women of American health care. They stand to one side, mostly silent, while self-important politicians noisily debate how to allocate “access” to health care. These legislators hold showy “summit” meetings of “stakeholders,” where doctors are outnumbered by the poor, the uninsured, the already-sick, the health insurers, the drug companies, and big corporations like Walmart. In this political universe of warring pressure groups, no tiny minority can expect to have much influence—even the minority that provides the services everyone is clamoring for.

Since professional organizations like the American Medical Association won’t rise to their members’ defense, it falls to the rest of us—those whose very lives may depend on a physician’s skill and dedication—to consider some pointed questions our leaders won’t ask: Read the rest of this entry »

A recent WSJ article provides a stomach-turning play-by-play of the Democrats’ health care coup:

It was dirty deals, open threats, broken promises and disregard for democracy that pulled ObamaCare to this point, and yesterday the same machinations pushed it across the finish line.

And that’s not even the half of it. ObamaCare was the wayward child of every conceivable (and inconceivable) pressure group fighting by any means necessary for whatever short-range benefit it could grab: from health insurance companies looking to gain customers at the point of a gun to businesses looking to foist their health care costs onto taxpayers; from prestige-seeking politicians looking to build an historical legacy to political hucksters who opposed ObamaCare on principle until the price was right. And let’s not forget the largest pressure group behind ObamaCare: those seeking to extract unearned health care from the young, healthy, and rich.

This was pressure group total war.

But pressure groups are only a symptom. The source of pressure group warfare is today’s mixed economy, where the government has expansive power to intervene in the economy. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Nancy Pelosi, the House’s passage of the new health care bill is utterly in keeping with the founding principles of this country. In passing ObamaCare, she said,

we will honor the vows of our founders, who in the Declaration of Independence said that we are ‘endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This legislation will lead to healthier lives, more liberty to pursue hopes and dreams and happiness for the American people. This is an American proposal that honors the traditions of our country.

I have a question. Speaker Pelosi, if government-provided health care is essential to “the vows of our founders,” then why didn’t they put it in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution–or even discuss putting it there? Did they simply fail to draw out this subtle implication of their theory?

Hardly. The ideal of government-provided health care, aka a “right” to health care, is in complete contradiction to the proper understanding of rights put forward by the Founding Fathers. This is why the acknowledged “father of the Constitution” James Madison said “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government” and “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re told that ObamaCare aims to make health care more affordable to more people, but in fact it threatens the rights of everyone involved in health care—doctors, patients, and health insurers—and thus the future of the industry.

Before Congress greases up yet another ramp on the already slippery slope toward socialized medicine, let’s pause to identify those endangered rights and some of the destructive consequences.

• Insurance companies are profit-making businesses, not social welfare agencies. They have the right to charge premiums that reflect actual risk. But ObamaCare would force them to cover almost every American—no matter how sick they already are, no matter how bad their health habits, no matter how high the cost of their exotic treatments–and to raise everyone’s premiums accordingly.

• Doctors are morally entitled to regard themselves as profit-making professionals, not public servants. They have the right to charge fees that reflect the value received by all parties to the transaction. But ObamaCare, by driving down permissible fees, will force physicians into a deadly conflict of interest: Either lose money by doing everything necessary to meet patients’ needs, or make money by satisfying some minimum bureaucratic standard.

• Patients are sovereign individuals, not particles in a social organism. They have the right to buy all the health care they deem necessary and can afford, without apologizing to those who can’t afford it. But under ObamaCare, patients will have the moral status of beggars at a soup kitchen who must uncomplainingly accept whatever gruel from the health-care pot happens to land in their dish.

Let ObamaCare be seen for what it is: yet another offensive in the long-running assault on individual rights in medicine.

Image: WikiMedia Commons