The New York Times reported yesterday on a study that suggests that children who attend school near a fast-food restaurant are more likely to be obese than kids whose schools are further from the grease.
How much more likely? Five percent, after other factors (income, education, race) are taken into account. Maybe the researchers have declared five percent to be a statistically significant number, but "statistically significant" and "meaningful to non-statisticians" often do not mean the same thing. The mere existence of a trend is not enough to warrant action, if the trend is a slight one.
Furthermore, even if the increase were fifty percent instead of five, governments would not have the right to do what food policy wonk Kelly Brownell suggests in the article: “Zoning laws that prohibit fast-food restaurants near schools are absolutely indicated, and neighborhoods that choose to zone out fast-food restaurants are probably taking a step to protect the future health of their children,” he says. If neighborhoods buy kids an easy way out of getting fat at the cost of individual rights -- the right of a property owner to build a restaurant on his own land, whether that land is 100 yards or 100 miles from the nearest schools -- that is too high of a price to pay.
It's not the responsibility of the government to keep children from getting fat. The government can only do so by violating rights. If children are obese, that is no one's responsibility but their parents'. If this study has any effect at all, it should be to get parents talking with their children about good food choices -- NOT to add ever more rights-violating restrictions on already beleaguered American businessmen.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Insurers offer to start charging healthy people more
That's what I think the title of "Insurers offer to stop charging sick people more," one of today's AP stories, should be.
Two insurance giants, America's Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, have written to senators indicating that they are willing to phase out premiums that vary by prior health history if Congress requires all Americans to purchase coverage.
That is bad, bad news for healthy people like me.
It's key that the insurance companies are making this offer in exchange for forcing everyone to be covered -- because that's the only way this scam will work. If insurers don't charge more for higher-risk people, then they simply have to raise costs for everyone. But that would mean health insurance would be an even worse deal for healthy individuals than it already is -- and healthy Americans would flee. Except that they won't be allowed to, should AHIP and Blue Cross/Blue Shield get their way.
My health insurance already costs my employer and me far more than I get out of it in health benefits. (See my November 26, 2007 post for a more detailed breakdown.) If insurers trade risk-priced premiums for a universal coverage mandate, that disparity is going to get even worse.
Let's not shackle the healthy to pay for the sick.
Two insurance giants, America's Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, have written to senators indicating that they are willing to phase out premiums that vary by prior health history if Congress requires all Americans to purchase coverage.
That is bad, bad news for healthy people like me.
It's key that the insurance companies are making this offer in exchange for forcing everyone to be covered -- because that's the only way this scam will work. If insurers don't charge more for higher-risk people, then they simply have to raise costs for everyone. But that would mean health insurance would be an even worse deal for healthy individuals than it already is -- and healthy Americans would flee. Except that they won't be allowed to, should AHIP and Blue Cross/Blue Shield get their way.
My health insurance already costs my employer and me far more than I get out of it in health benefits. (See my November 26, 2007 post for a more detailed breakdown.) If insurers trade risk-priced premiums for a universal coverage mandate, that disparity is going to get even worse.
Let's not shackle the healthy to pay for the sick.
Friday, March 6, 2009
What I won't stand for
As the Boston Globe puts it, "President Obama yesterday presented his goal of fixing the healthcare system as a political imperative, as well as a moral and economic one: Americans, he said, will no longer stand for soaring costs that have bankrupted millions of families, hobbled businesses, and crowded out other public needs."
How long does he think bright young Americans will stand for working hard to get the best grades as an undergraduate, spending thousands of dollars and four years of time on medical school, and working long hours at low pay as residents, only to find that when they've completed their rigorous training, they are not permitted to make money because others need their care? What kind of doctors will we have once ObamaCare starts cutting fees and interfering with treatment decisions?
How long does he think pharmaceutical companies will stand for having their voices increasingly silenced and their research bogged down in FDA regulations, all while Congress forces down the price of the drugs they have worked so hard to create? How much innovation in healthcare are we going to see?
Obama may be upset that healthcare is expensive. Okay, so Americans don't like it. But he will not succeed at wishing away the fact that healthcare costs money. Any laws he puts in place to force down the price of drugs and medical care (as opposed to allowing the free market to determine costs, which would lead to lower costs over time on a voluntary basis) will only create shortages -- as we lose talented could-have-been-doctors to other professions, as we lose innovative therapies when investors choose to look elsewhere than the regulation-beset pharmaceutical industry. Then we won't have good care at any price--and that's something I can't stand for.
How long does he think bright young Americans will stand for working hard to get the best grades as an undergraduate, spending thousands of dollars and four years of time on medical school, and working long hours at low pay as residents, only to find that when they've completed their rigorous training, they are not permitted to make money because others need their care? What kind of doctors will we have once ObamaCare starts cutting fees and interfering with treatment decisions?
How long does he think pharmaceutical companies will stand for having their voices increasingly silenced and their research bogged down in FDA regulations, all while Congress forces down the price of the drugs they have worked so hard to create? How much innovation in healthcare are we going to see?
Obama may be upset that healthcare is expensive. Okay, so Americans don't like it. But he will not succeed at wishing away the fact that healthcare costs money. Any laws he puts in place to force down the price of drugs and medical care (as opposed to allowing the free market to determine costs, which would lead to lower costs over time on a voluntary basis) will only create shortages -- as we lose talented could-have-been-doctors to other professions, as we lose innovative therapies when investors choose to look elsewhere than the regulation-beset pharmaceutical industry. Then we won't have good care at any price--and that's something I can't stand for.
Monday, March 2, 2009
A Gross misunderstanding
The blog post upon which I comment is two weeks old, but it's simply too awful to be ignored. New York Times blogger Jane Gross attacks critics of ObamaCare, saying that we need government intervention to get rid of healthcare waste. The examples she gives are mammograms for patients in nursing homes (who might not even seek treatment for breast cancer should it be discovered); CPR on the very elderly; expensive pharmaceuticals for patients with Alzheimer's who derive little benefit from the drugs. Obama's proposal of spending stimulus-package money on analyzing healthcare to ferret out inefficiencies, she strongly implies, is just what we need.
There's an extraordinary amount of evasion going on here -- because Ms. Gross is ignoring the fact that government intervention is exactly what got us to such a scale of wastefulness in the first place.
Why would a patient in a nursing home, too demented to recognize her own family, much less consent to treatment for breast cancer, be given regular mammograms? A) Because she's on Medicare, and when the government is paying, her children are probably only too happy to say "Do everything you can for my mother!" knowing that they won't foot the bill. B) Because malpractice law is so non-objective that hospitals would far rather spend taxpayer dollars ordering unnecessary tests than fork over their own money in a lawsuit later.
The problem (well, one of them) with government-funded healthcare is that medical decisions are put into the hands of politicians -- and that means that decisions are made based on which group has the most pull, not mutual trade to mutual benefit. Probably a patient advocacy group made up of people who'd lost their mothers or sisters to breast cancer were upset that missed mammograms had cost their loved ones their lives. So they decided that every woman deserves a mammogram, and lobbied Congress until mammograms became a Medicare entitlement. And now, women get mammograms regardless of whether it makes medical sense, and sometimes regardless of whether the patient actually wants one. Voila! Wasteful medicine, courtesy of the government.
If the government were to get out of healthcare -- paying for it AND regulating it -- then every individual could decide for himself what level of healthcare he wants and can afford. The elderly man who has lived a long and happy life and does not want to spend his declining years pumped full of pharmaceuticals could just tell his doctor, "No, I'd rather not have that." His counterpart who wants to extend his life as long as possible, regardless of how healthy his last years are, would be free to spend his own money making that choice. Every individual would be able to exercise his right to trade to mutual benefit in the realm of healthcare -- and there would be no such thing as "wasteful" spending, because each individual would purchase only what he wanted and could afford.
Don't make the Gross evasion of thinking that government intervention can solve America's healthcare problems. What we need to do is remove the government interventions that caused those problems in the first place.
There's an extraordinary amount of evasion going on here -- because Ms. Gross is ignoring the fact that government intervention is exactly what got us to such a scale of wastefulness in the first place.
Why would a patient in a nursing home, too demented to recognize her own family, much less consent to treatment for breast cancer, be given regular mammograms? A) Because she's on Medicare, and when the government is paying, her children are probably only too happy to say "Do everything you can for my mother!" knowing that they won't foot the bill. B) Because malpractice law is so non-objective that hospitals would far rather spend taxpayer dollars ordering unnecessary tests than fork over their own money in a lawsuit later.
The problem (well, one of them) with government-funded healthcare is that medical decisions are put into the hands of politicians -- and that means that decisions are made based on which group has the most pull, not mutual trade to mutual benefit. Probably a patient advocacy group made up of people who'd lost their mothers or sisters to breast cancer were upset that missed mammograms had cost their loved ones their lives. So they decided that every woman deserves a mammogram, and lobbied Congress until mammograms became a Medicare entitlement. And now, women get mammograms regardless of whether it makes medical sense, and sometimes regardless of whether the patient actually wants one. Voila! Wasteful medicine, courtesy of the government.
If the government were to get out of healthcare -- paying for it AND regulating it -- then every individual could decide for himself what level of healthcare he wants and can afford. The elderly man who has lived a long and happy life and does not want to spend his declining years pumped full of pharmaceuticals could just tell his doctor, "No, I'd rather not have that." His counterpart who wants to extend his life as long as possible, regardless of how healthy his last years are, would be free to spend his own money making that choice. Every individual would be able to exercise his right to trade to mutual benefit in the realm of healthcare -- and there would be no such thing as "wasteful" spending, because each individual would purchase only what he wanted and could afford.
Don't make the Gross evasion of thinking that government intervention can solve America's healthcare problems. What we need to do is remove the government interventions that caused those problems in the first place.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
