Category Archives: Healthcare

Regulated Scarcity

Free Markets, Healthcare, Law, Regulation, Socialism

When there is a shortage of a good, it is safe to say that it is a result of government incursion into the economy. And there are reported “shortages—“severe” shortages—in “drugs for chemotherapy, infections and other serious ailments.” The shortages, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch, are “endangering patients and forcing hospitals to buy life-saving medications from secondary suppliers at huge markups because they can’t get them any other way.”

How would consumer demand have been heeded in an unhampered market?

The urgent demand for a drug would have been followed by a shortfall of supply. Large demand and short supply would initially send the price of the drugs rocketing. Profits in an unhampered pharmaceutical market would signal to the many drug makers that it’s pedal to the metal: time to enter into accelerated production of this scarce commodity.

Walter Olson of CATO provides more details about “the federal government’s widely publicized crackdown in recent years on pharmaceutical manufacturing and quality-control practices” to have played a role in current shortages.

UPDATE II: Public Enema # 1 (Bum Doctors Spread AIDS)

Africa, Etiquette, Healthcare, Pseudoscience, Reason, South-Africa

It is one thing to have voodoo for values, but what about a sense of propriety?

The N2 is a major highway in South Africa that starts in my hometown of Cape Town. A repulsed reporter at The Daily Voice snapped images of a traditional “healer” administering a treatment for bewitchment alongside the road, in full view of motorists careening down the highways. The shameless sangoma (witch doctor), whose fees are probably reimbursed by the medical scheme (in the New South Africa), elaborated on his methods. Prepare to be repulsed (if you click on the image).

“Liberals labor under the romantic delusion that the effects of millennia of development-resistant, self-defeating, fatalistic, atavistic, superstition-infused, unfathomably cruel cultures can be cured by an infusion of foreign aid, and by the removal of tyrants. … the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair. … (From Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.)

UPDATED I (Sept. 5): Gray Falcon, AKA historian Nebojsa Malic—one of the top authorities in the US on the Balkans (if you want the truth)—has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot on Amazon. Do read Mr. Malic’s insights, titled “A cautionary tale beyond black and white.”

UPDATE II: The common, communal and irrational practice described above should help explain to the perpetually perplexed West why the spread of AIDS/HIV is so hard to curtail in Africa. You know that the bum “doctor” does not use disposable equipment. Nor does he have an autoclave with which to sterilize his home-made enema.

Perforations are bound to happen. Infection likely to follow.

The Father Or The Son?

Government, Healthcare, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Regulation, Republicans, Ron Paul, Socialism

Ron Paul is the elder statesman, Rand Paul is scrappy and fit for a fight. And you do know that breaking free from the moochers and the looters, if at all possible, is going to necessitate a fight. I used to wonder about Rand’s deadpan delivery. But a poker face is just what the doctor ordered together with those revolutionary statements.

“SEN. RAND PAUL (R-KY): ‘With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.'” (RealClearPolitics)

Read the entire statement; it’s beautifully put.

To libertarians what Rand Paul said is real clear. We often describe the fabricated (positive) right to health care as a right to conscript doctors in the service of humanity. For what else does it mean? (“Protesters for a public plan have the right to seek out a doctor and pay him for his services; they have no claim to the products of his labor, and no right to enlist the State to compel third parties to pay for those products.”) But to hear a man who sits in the ossified Senate echo the natural law is just wonderful.

The other day, Rand Paul was quizzed about the absence of entitlement reform in his five-year budget plan. Without flinching, Rand replied that he chose to do away with whole departments, instead.

UPDATE III: Austerity à la America (US Vs. UK)

Britain, Debt, Economy, Europe, Government, Healthcare, Inflation, Military

In their agreement to fiddle with future spending, our politicians are like bank robbers who’ve planned a string of heists, but then decided, charitably, to spare one bank.

The reckless high rollers in DC are congratulating themselves for agreeing to cut about $38 billion from federal spending this year (Bloomberg.com). This minuscule “cut” claws back some parts of an enormous entitlement program that has not yet kicked in: Obamacare.

“According to the Treasury Department, the federal government spent more than eight times what it brought in in the month of March. Eight times.” (CNN)

And the more money you stuff down the feds’ greedy maw, the more it’ll spend.

“Heads between knees, arms over heads, hold that position. Pray if you’re inclined to. Brace for impact!” That’s John Derbyshire’s advice about the coming economic collapse in the US. (If you’ve escaped the debased dollar, all the better.)

UPDATE I (April 10): “Friday’s 348-70 vote to fund the government through the week”: Only “twenty-eight of the ‘no’ votes were cast by Republicans. Sixteen of those are members of the 87-member freshman class. Also voting no: Tea Party star and possible presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.”

That’s an abysmal showing for Republicans and Tea Partiers. Can someone please send a link with an exact breakdown, plus names?

UPDATE II: Two hundred and eight House Republicans voted “yes.” And that’s not a disgrace?

UPDATE III (April 12): Little mentioned in American media is that the non- Micky-mouse countries in Europe and the English have gotten religion on austerity. In his first 100 days in office, David Cameron had gone further than Thatcher did in cutting government. Yes, yes, that’s nothing very impressive, but it’s more than anything that has been done to tackle the debt in the land of the free and home of the brave. The Merkel (Angela) told “financier- philanthropist” George Soros—also an all-round radical and BHO surrogate—to jump when he tried to muscle her into printing and inflating her country’s currency to Weimar-Republic levels.

If our media made these contrasts, perhaps Americans would begin to think beyond the “rah-rah we’re the best” mantra.