Review: Extraordinary Measures

I'm swamped at work, but just wanted to point out the new Brendan Fraser/Harrison Ford movie, Extraordinary Measures. (Warning: somewhat spoilerish.)

I had a mixed reaction to the film, which is about a father of three children, two of whom have a life-threatening and degenerative disease, who teams with a maverick scientist to look for a treatment that could save his kids' lives. But the mixed reaction was not because the film was half bad and half good. In fact, there was a lot of good: the father's willingness to do anything to achieve his values, the scientist's dedication to truth, the fact that the filmmakers didn't present the children's situation as the fault of Big Pharma, but rather presenting the metaphysically given difficulty of translating theoretical research into a usable pharmaceutical. I really enjoyed the heroic actions of and the interplay between the two main characters.

What made me truly, truly angry about this movie is that it's too kind to the government.

The story of a father and a scientist bringing their minds to bear on a difficult problem and making a breakthrough in medicine made me angry...because I am convinced that in the world we actually live in, the FDA would not let such a thing happen. The children in the film would have been dead before the government decided that a new treatment was safe enough to be tested in humans -- just ask the families of Anna Tomalis or Abigail Burroughs. Government officials think they are more qualified to decide whether the benefits of a new drug are worth the risk than the patients who will die without those drugs. Maybe they'll die with the drugs -- but if you were a dying patient -- or the parent of a dying child -- wouldn't you want to be the one who decides whether or not to take a chance?

Go see Extraordinary Measures, but know that there's a villain in the real world who doesn't show up in the movie -- and that villain must be destroyed.

Reasons to be wary, and reasons to be excited

Scott Brown, soon to be senator of the bluest of blue states. Bless you, Massachusetts voters!

It's not a total victory. Here's why:

1. I didn't know until today that Brown voted for RomneyCare in Massachusetts. This guy doesn't want to be the forty-first vote for the sake of defending individual rights in medicine. He wants to be the forty-first vote so that he can block the Democrats from being able to take credit for any action, and perhaps so that Republicans can propose their own bad healthcare policies.
2. As other astute Objectivist bloggers have observed, we're still not having a debate in terms of principles. It is only ObamaCare vs. the current system, which is a false dichotomy. The question should not be "our current set of controls, taxes, and entitlements" vs. "even more controls, taxes, and entitlements." The question should be: A free market in health care, or continued tyranny?

But here's why I am excited:

1. The people of Massachusetts have bought us time -- time to turn the debate toward one of principles, time to spread the idea that health care is not a right, and that doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and insurers are not slaves to be chained for the purpose of churning out care for everyone, regardless of whether or not he has earned it.
2. There's been talk of what would happen in midterm elections if healthcare "reform" was passed over the protests of the American people...but now politicians facing election this year have a concrete example staring them right in the face of what happens when you run roughshod over your constituents. And that, I hope, will scare them out of marching in lockstep with Obama's demands.

I had been discouraged by the House and Senate passages of "reform" bills and hadn't written a letter to the editor or even posted to this blog much for a while. But now I'm reenergized for activism. I thank the people of Massachusetts for that!

Screw you, Nancy Pelosi.

"Let's remove all doubt," she says. "We will have health care one way or another."

You mean, you'll have it regardless of whether or not the American people want socialized medicine, and regardless of whether it's right?

Mrs. Pelosi and her power-lusting ilk need to be stopped. As much as I'd love to see Scott Brown win today's election, it won't be enough. Even if he wins and the Democrats don't get away with their slimy plan to pass the Senate bill in the House without amendments, defeating health care "reform" this year is only a Band-Aid. Remember, HillaryCare got killed too. What we have to fight is the idea that people have a right to health care or any other of thousands of services our bloated government currently provides using money expropriated from Americans. That will take much more than a single election in Massachusetts.

Asthma asininity

My husband has asthma. It's a chronic condition. He's had it since he was a child, and he takes two different inhaled daily medications for it. Barring some extraordinary development that has yet to occur, neither his asthma nor the medications he takes for it are going to change.

Nobody in government seems to have figured out that conditions like this exist, though. Both of my husband's medications can only be obtained by prescription. His doctor is usually happy to write a script with several refills on it, but when he runs out, he has to go back to the doctor and get another script. Never mind that nothing has changed since he got the last script. Never mind that asthma inhalers have a pretty low potential for abuse. Never mind that if he wanted to act like a fourteen-year-old and use his inhaler to get high, it would be his right to do so.

Never mind any of that. He needs a prescription when his inhalers run out. Guess what? His inhaler ran out...and because today is a holiday, no one will write him a prescription. He keeps getting voicemail from his primary care doctor, and when he calls anyone else, they tell him, "We're closed, so you should call your primary care doctor," or "Wait until tomorrow." He won't die if he waits until tomorrow, but he'll be pretty damn uncomfortable...for no good reason.

Luckily, I remembered that a drugstore near us has a walk-in clinic whose nurse practitioner can write him a script, so my husband can breathe easier today. But this example is illustrative of how asinine the prescription drug requirement can be. Same for me -- I have to go back to my gynecologist once a year to get his signoff on my birth control pills, even though the way to prevent oneself from having a baby has not changed in any substantial way in the more than ten years since I started taking birth control pills. Why? Because bureaucrats at the FDA won't allow me to purchase them over the counter, and bureaucrats in New York State won't allow my doctor to prescribe me more than a year's supply at a time. (For many drugs, the allowed supply is far lower -- try getting more than a month's worth of Ritalin at a time.)

In all the talk of what dissatisfies Americans about our healthcare system, I never hear the prescription requirement mentioned. But the government telling you that you can't get drugs without a doctor's approval is just as evil as the government taking your money to pay for other people's health care, regulating insurance companies, and all the rest. It's your body -- it's your right to put anything you like into it, and your responsibility to bear the consequences of doing so.

Experimentation

Although I managed to get through the holidays without gaining weight, I've slipped a little bit off the wagon in early January. As a result, I started this week closer to 140 pounds than 135. Not a huge increase, but the way five pounds turns into ten and then into twenty is by not paying attention. So I've been following a 1500-calorie-per-day diet (plus more on days that I work out) this week.

I went into this week thinking, "I hate salad." But eating fresh, relatively unadorned vegetables gets you a lot of nutritional impact for very few calories, so I decided to suck it up.

After four days of this, I think it's not that I hate salad. I just hate bad salad, and there's a lot of it out there. You know what I'm talking about: soggy yellowish lettuce, tomatoes that aren't even close to bright red, gloppy dressing applied in mass quantities to hide the fact that the vegetables are no good.

Instead, I've eaten several times at Mooncake Foods, a great little Asian fusion restaurant near my office, for lunch. On Monday I had their chicken sausage/Asian pear salad. Wow! So much better than what I usually think of when I think of salad. The greens were actually green, the chicken sausage popped with flavor, and the pear added crunch and sweetness without a ton of extra calories.

After having a bad salad the next day, I went back to Mooncake yesterday and today -- yesterday, for the lemongrass shrimp with greens and today for steak with cilantro pesto and greens. (Each dish came with rice, of which I kept my consumption to 1/2 cup or so.) And you know what? I always thought 1500 calories for a day was practically nothing, but when you eat meat and greens, it isn't! I've had plenty of leftover calories to spend on snacks, which I've mostly been using on the delectable dark chocolate-covered almonds sold in one of the office vending machines. And I've lost two pounds.

This is not to say that I'm going to quit having quesadillas from Calexico for lunch (ZOMG AWESOME) once the weight comes off, but I suppose being more paleo at lunchtime wouldn't hurt.

Also, if you live in NYC...Mooncake Foods RULES. None of the dishes I've mentioned costs more than $10!

Nanny city: A salt on our rights

Not satisfied with having violated rights and gotten a trans fat ban and calorie count posting mandates in NYC, Mayor Bloomberg is now talking about getting New Yorkers to cut their sodium intake by "encouraging" food manufacturers to reduce the amount of salt in their products. He claims he won't legislate salt reductions, but a) that's only because they'd be nearly impossible to enforce (what food manufacturer is going to come up with salt-free products just for the NYC market?) and b) the city first started out saying it wanted voluntary participation in trans fat reduction and calorie count postings, too. And when "encouragement" didn't work, the city turned to force.

What's to say Bloomie won't try to get as much of a salt ban as he can? He'll probably do it the same way the calorie-count postings and the trans-fat ban were done: by imposing salt restrictions on restaurants. NYC can't force manufacturers of packaged foods to toe the line -- most would just quit doing business in the city rather than revamp their recipes and factories to suit the demands of one market's bureaucrats. But it can tell restaurants to change their in-city operations...or else.

This type of regulation hits chain restaurants hardest. In NYC, calorie-count postings are mandated only for restaurants with 10 or more locations in the city; the majority of city restaurants have only a single location, so the onus falls mostly on fast-food chains. I'm sure our city nanny realizes that if he tries to impose salt restrictions on all restaurants, he'd have a revolt on his hands; in fact, city chefs are already speaking out against Bloomie's sure-to-later-be-backed-by-force "request." But he can demonize McDonald's, Wendy's, Starbucks, et al., and those chains will likely meekly change their NYC operations if ordered to do so.

They shouldn't. If individuals want to eat more salt than is good for them, that's their right, and it's the right of restaurants to flavor their foods in any way they please. It's the market, not Nanny Bloomberg, that should decide how much salt is in our food.

Schumer: It's government intervention, stupid

Even as the pharmaceutical industry has been colluding with Washington in hopes of having healthcare "reform" be favorable to its bottom line, Congress has been investigating the industry's pricing practices -- and politicians don't like what they see. They're upset that certain drugs -- those that are sold to smaller numbers of patients than, say, a blockbuster like Lipitor, but that are no less important to the patients who need them -- have had huge price increases over the past decade, whereas "bigger" drugs have had smaller increases.

As the New York Times explains, sometimes these price increases happen when larger pharmaceutical companies sell off the smaller-market drugs in their portfolio, and the smaller drugmaker that purchases the drug immediately raises the price in order to profit from its investment. Or the price increase happens via a third-party distributor who purchases the drug from a pharmaceutical company and then resells it to hospitals and pharmacies. Or, the original maker of the drug might have raised the price.

Chuck Schumer, who I'm disgusted to say represents my state, exhibited the typical attitude when he said, “It is hard to find a good-faith explanation for why drug prices could go up this much. This report will lead to a strong demand for action by Congress.”

By "good-faith" he means altruistic; he means that pharmaceutical companies should continue to innovate and produce drugs, not out of pursuit of profits, but out of brother-love for anybody with a medical condition. But don't expect the kind of great minds that are needed for drug development to work as slaves or to allow themselves to be punished because their work is more vital to man's survival than others'.

In fact, although Schumer would like to blast the pharmaceutical industry for seeking "excessive" profits, there's a much more obvious explanation for why the industry has raised prices, and it's Washington that is abased thereby, not the pharmaceutical industry.

As the article points out, "drug makers’ labs have been unusually barren, and...without new products, drug makers view price increases as among the only ways to reliably increase profits." That is, drug companies need to increase prices on the products they have in order to stay afloat despite meager pipelines...but why are those pipelines so meager? You can thank the FDA for that -- see my article from the Fall 2008 Objective Standard for details on how the FDA kills innovation.

Senator Schumer, the solution is not action from Congress -- unless by "action" you mean action to remove your bureaucratic tentacles from medicine!

One good point, and a lot of bad ones

Food Rules author Michael Pollan appeared on the Daily Show last night to plug his book -- and to comment on how healthcare "reform" could impact America's diet.

In the linked clip, Pollan correctly states that once insurance companies are forced to cover everyone, regardless of preexisting conditions, it's going to be in their interest to prod you toward a healthier lifestyle so they have fewer payouts to make. This could lead to insurers offering price breaks to customers who can demonstrate that they are maintaining a healthy weight, say, or more coercive measures that Pollan hints at -- say, insurers pressing the government to tax foods deemed unhealthy.

The one good point that Pollan makes is that we need to quit subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup (a product that, according to Pollan, makes up 20% of Americans' caloric consumption!). Pollan thinks the government shouldn't be propping up a food that's basically empty calories. True -- because the government shouldn't be subsidizing any foods at all.

But Pollan then goes on to ask: What's wrong with the government encouraging healthier behavior? Why, he asks, do we get up in arms about a soda tax, but don't bat an eyelash if a doctor says we need to take drugs or undergo uncomfortable medical procedures because of our weight?

Pollan is wrong to think the two are equal. In fact, one is objectionable and the other is not. Government "encouragement" of healthy behavior is a violation of rights, whereas a doctor's prescription of statin pills or bariatric surgery is merely the consequence of an individual's own choices. The former is correctly repudiated; the latter, although unpleasant for the individual who experiences it, is the way things should work. The former punishes all Americans because some Americans overeat; the latter is simply the consequences of an individual's actions visited upon that individual, and no one else.

Gah! The double-talk!

So out of one side of their mouths, healthcare "reform" advocates bemoan the fact that health care is a limited resource. They cry because everybody can't get all the health care they need, whenever they want it, regardless of whether or not they can pay for it.

But then White House spokesman Robert Gibbs came out with this gem, calling some insurance plans "far too generous":

"The best way to bend that cost curve is to go after and work on eliminating excessive Cadillac plans that people at Goldman Sachs and big bankers might get," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "That's what the focus will be in this. I think the president believes that we can work out a solution."

So which is it? Everybody should get all the health care they want, or some people get too much and THAT has to stop? (Never mind the irony of the fact that so many of those who get so-called "Cadillac" plans are union workers in high-risk jobs, whom Democrats usually tiptoe around, unlike the "big bankers" they love to hate.)

Goals for 2010

I can't think of any frustration to express with the Senate's "reform" vote that I haven't expressed already, so instead I'm going to go in a more positive direction: my health- and fitness-related goals for 2010.

First, I want to brag that I was very successful in 2009. Thanks to my favorite iPhone app, Lose It!, I went beyond my original goal of losing 15 pounds. I went from 157 pounds to 135, the same as I weighed as a senior in high school (and I'm in much better shape than I was back then), and I've maintained that weight for 6 months.

Lots of people assumed I lost the weight for my wedding. Not true; if that were my goal, my weight loss was too much and my dress was enormous! In fact, I wanted to take the pounds off so as to run a faster, stronger marathon. And I did -- by more than 17 minutes, despite running a hillier course than the one on which I set my previous personal record.

I've investigated a bit into the paleo-eating trend that a lot of Objectivists have embraced. My personal conclusion is that I'm not willing to cut out refined sugars and starches altogether, but I do feel better when I reduce my consumption. So, in the second half of 2009, I made subtle changes like treating corn as a grain, not a vegetable (my husband and I had always been in the habit of including a vegetable with every home-cooked meal, but now I don't put corn in that slot), replacing cereal with apples and almond butter or with salami and ricotta, and cutting down portion sizes of starchy foods. Also, I've tried to be more mindful of the starchy and sugary foods that I do eat. I don't waste my time with, say, Little Debbie snack cakes any more; if I'm going to have junk food, I make it the best-quality junk food I can find -- say, homemade brioche bread pudding from my favorite Brooklyn bakery. (I also don't carbo-load before long runs any more -- I find that a meal of fish or chicken and vegetables works best for my energy levels and gastrointestinal comfort.) I like this approach -- I feel better and more energetic, but I still get to enjoy some carb-rich foods. Life without cake is life without sunshine, IMO!

So here's what I want to do, health- and fitness-wise, in 2010:

Maintain weight at 135 pounds. Even though the old pounds are gone, I continue to use the Lose It! app to keep tabs on my eating and make sure my weight doesn't fluctuate by more than a pound or two.

Beat my personal record in the marathon. I'm thinking of running Chicago this year; if I don't get in, I will probably sign up for Philadelphia again. On either of those courses, I should be able to beat my NYC time provided I maintain the high level of fitness I achieved last year.

Run a 5K. Sounds like nothing compared to the previous goal, huh? I haven't run a 5K since 2007, and I'm in much better running shape now than I was then. My previous best time was 26:47, and I'm certain I can shave that down -- so I'd like to see by how much. I'd love to get in under 25 minutes, and I'm thinking I'll try it at the Coogan's 5K in March.

Improve core strength. Although I was vigilant about running my prescribed number of miles each day last year unless I was injured or seriously ill, one area that I let slide was strength training. Stronger abs, in particular, would make me a better runner (and I'd look hotter in a bikini). I've already started adding crunches, bicycles, and other moves back to my routine. My goal for January is to do a couple of minutes of ab work at least four times a week, and I'll increase the duration and frequency from there.

Go injury-free. Other than a brief bout of shin splints, I didn't get hurt in 2009, which was really nice. I'm going to continue regular stretching to make sure I stick to that trend this year. The harder part is listening to my body. If you're a runner you'll know what I mean: your body is sending you a clear signal that you need to stop, and you want to keep going anyway to make sure you reach your mileage goal for that day/week/month. I'm not always perfect about paying attention to these signals; thus far it hasn't sidelined me, but I need to become better at discerning the "I don't wannas" from the "something is really wrong, I shouldn'ts."

Those are the goals, and if I do the work I should be even more successful this year than last year!