Tuesday, November 30, 2004
New issue of Health Care News out
The December issue of The Heartland Institute's Health Care News is out, and it is packed full of excellent pieces.
Sean Parnell weighs in on the specialty hospital debate with "Specialty Surgical Hospitals: Better Health Care through Innovation":
Specialty surgical hospitals, which focus on a few areas of surgical practice such as heart surgery or orthopedic surgery, are a good example of innovation at work in the U.S. health care industry.
Compared to general hospitals, specialty surgical hospitals typically offer increased productivity, lower costs, and better patient outcomes. The key is specialization.
General hospitals, which fear a loss of revenue to these superior rivals, have succeeded in getting Congress to prohibit temporarily any development of new specialty surgical hospitals. Congress should lift that moratorium and allow specialty surgical hospitals to continue to expand. They lower costs and provide high-quality care ... and isn’t that what the politicians say they want to achieve?
Devon Herrick explains why consumers suffer when some drugs are pulled off the market in "Merck's Vioxx Withdrawal Illustrates Power of Regulation by Trial Lawyers":
In all likelihood, there is probably little, if anything, wrong with Vioxx. In clinical trials conducted prior to FDA's approval of the drug, Merck followed almost 4,000 patients over the course of a year. Researchers found no sign that Vioxx caused heart attacks, although they did notice an increase in high blood pressure among patients taking the drug.
The ones who suffer the consequences are the patients, and they should be allowed to decide whether a drug like Vioxx is worth the risk, rather than having the decision made for them by other people's lawyers. What is truly unfortunate is that the only people to benefit from the development of lifesaving drugs removed from the market due to these lawsuits are the trial lawyers.
And Conrad Meier underscores the problem of overstating the uninsured in "Politicians Using Flawed Data on Uninsured Population":
Prior to the November election, presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) wrote in an October essay for Health Insurance Underwriter magazine, "Roughly 45 million American have no health insurance at all."
Ever since the U.S. Census Bureau released its August 26, 2004 report on the nation's uninsured population, politicians have used the data to make health insurance policy decisions, and single-payer activists have used the data to lobby for government-mandated or -administered national health insurance. By the Bureau's own admission, however, the data are incorrect: The number of uninsured is greatly overstated.
After a closer look at the data released in August and a consideration of analyses performed since then, a more accurate picture of the uninsured problem emerges. The good news is that the number of Americans without health insurance policies is not indicative of a crisis requiring more taxpayer-funded government regulations and mandates. The bad news is that policymakers are relying on extremely flawed data.
The December issue of The Heartland Institute's Health Care News is out, and it is packed full of excellent pieces.
Sean Parnell weighs in on the specialty hospital debate with "Specialty Surgical Hospitals: Better Health Care through Innovation":
Specialty surgical hospitals, which focus on a few areas of surgical practice such as heart surgery or orthopedic surgery, are a good example of innovation at work in the U.S. health care industry.
Compared to general hospitals, specialty surgical hospitals typically offer increased productivity, lower costs, and better patient outcomes. The key is specialization.
General hospitals, which fear a loss of revenue to these superior rivals, have succeeded in getting Congress to prohibit temporarily any development of new specialty surgical hospitals. Congress should lift that moratorium and allow specialty surgical hospitals to continue to expand. They lower costs and provide high-quality care ... and isn’t that what the politicians say they want to achieve?
Devon Herrick explains why consumers suffer when some drugs are pulled off the market in "Merck's Vioxx Withdrawal Illustrates Power of Regulation by Trial Lawyers":
In all likelihood, there is probably little, if anything, wrong with Vioxx. In clinical trials conducted prior to FDA's approval of the drug, Merck followed almost 4,000 patients over the course of a year. Researchers found no sign that Vioxx caused heart attacks, although they did notice an increase in high blood pressure among patients taking the drug.
The ones who suffer the consequences are the patients, and they should be allowed to decide whether a drug like Vioxx is worth the risk, rather than having the decision made for them by other people's lawyers. What is truly unfortunate is that the only people to benefit from the development of lifesaving drugs removed from the market due to these lawsuits are the trial lawyers.
And Conrad Meier underscores the problem of overstating the uninsured in "Politicians Using Flawed Data on Uninsured Population":
Prior to the November election, presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) wrote in an October essay for Health Insurance Underwriter magazine, "Roughly 45 million American have no health insurance at all."
Ever since the U.S. Census Bureau released its August 26, 2004 report on the nation's uninsured population, politicians have used the data to make health insurance policy decisions, and single-payer activists have used the data to lobby for government-mandated or -administered national health insurance. By the Bureau's own admission, however, the data are incorrect: The number of uninsured is greatly overstated.
After a closer look at the data released in August and a consideration of analyses performed since then, a more accurate picture of the uninsured problem emerges. The good news is that the number of Americans without health insurance policies is not indicative of a crisis requiring more taxpayer-funded government regulations and mandates. The bad news is that policymakers are relying on extremely flawed data.
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