joshuago’s health-care Bookmarks

Augustus Monroe figured he'd drop dead long before he'd need a nursing home. A decade later, his son considers the weighty financial and emotional costs that come with a parent's immortality.

As soon as you sit down, electrical activity in the muscles drops. Levels of the enzymes responsible for vacuuming fat out of your bloodstream plunge.

One percent of a given population of patients could be responsible for thirty percent of the health care costs. Common sense approaches are needed, but a personal touch is often required to establish trust and to find the best way to address a particular scenario.

Comparative discussion of how native tribes in Canada and Polynesia are dealing with the influx of industrially processed food. Includes anecdote about navigating the seas not with a compass or using the stars, but with one's nutsack.

There is no one thing to blame. There is no one fix we can make. It really is multifactorial.

Interview with a Nobel economist who says the health-care bill will cause serious damage, but that the American people can be trusted to vote for limited government in November. Discusses the counterbalancing effect of competing interest groups, in-built suspicion of markets, and the historical intellectual shift on the view of growth from one that was state-centered to one that's market-centered.

In large part, the HCR bill entrusts the task of devising cost-saving health-care innovation to local communities, rather than to the drug and device companies and the public and private insurers that have failed to do so. This is the way costs will come down—or not. That’s the one truly scary thing about health reform: far from being a government takeover, it counts on local communities and clinicians for success.

Health care heals, but it also kills. Someone who lacked insurance over the past few decades might have missed taking their Lipitor, but also their Vioxx or Fen-Phen.

How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance? After all, they don't pay for our groceries or our gas.

The reason health care, cap and trade, and the other blocks of Obama’s New Foundation are unpopular isn’t public ignorance. It’s that the public sees them as counterproductive—and in many cases beside the point.