The Myth of the Free Market in Pharmaceuticals
Actually no, I didn ' t write that title, although I could have. In fact I could have written this entire article, but it was written by Rena
M. Conti, Ph.D., Richard G. Frank, Ph.D., and David M. Cutler, Ph.D. Unfortunately it ' s paywalled, and there ' s no abstract, buthere ' s the link so you can read the first sentence, and you can register to read it for free. (You get two free articles per month.) Since I ' m giving them a referral, I don ' t feel terribly guilty about raiding this piece fairly extensively. It begins:Critics of U.S. policy aiming to reduce spending on prescription drugs claim that the gove...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 25, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Rehashing
Psalm 105 is a lengthy song of praise that recounts God ' s faithfulness to the Israelites, mostly reciting purported events in Exodus. The introduction is adapted -- largely copied actually -- from 1 Chronicles 16, in which David sets up the Ark and commissions a song of praise by Asaph. Note verse 35 -- there are no caterpillars in the canonical version of Exodus. The caterpillars have come up before, which presumably means that they were working from an alternative version of the story. I don ' t need to harp on the moral depravity of the story -- the 7 year famine God causes, the murder of Egyptian children, the g...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 24, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Dementia
Clinical psychologist John Gartnerpulls out his Ph.D. to tell the world what ought to be obvious. Donald J. Trump has fairly advanced and rapidly progressing dementia. Believe me, I know what dementia looks like and I don ' t need a degree in psychology to tell you, but for some inexplicable reason the world wants to turn a blind eye. The New York Times ran at least one story every day for a couple of months (maybe a slight exaggeration, but also maybe not) telling us that Joe Biden is old, and the next day that he ' s still old, and the next day that he ' s still old . . . Every time he forgot a name or got a date w...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 23, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Okay, somebody asked
A commenter suggested that if I want to know why people support the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, I should ask them. For some reason this particular individual did not propose an answer. However, Jordan Klepper has gone to many Trump rallies and asked the question. So, now you have your answer. They are blithering idiots. (Source: Stayin' Alive)
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 22, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Natural History
Psalm 104 is historically important, because it is among the biblical passages the church used to convict Galileo of heresy. He wrote to the Grand Duchess Christina " Astronomers seem to declare what is contrary to Scripture, for they hold
the heavens to be spherical, while the Scripture calls it " stretched
out like a tent. " (v. 2) He argued that such passages should not be taken literally as scientific findings might discredit them. In fact, verse 5 was specifically cited at his trial. We know now that God is not the explanation for any of the natural phenomena described here, whether accurately or not. Rel...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 21, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Arguing with idiots
Chris Quinn, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer,wrote this now famous editorial a couple of weeks ago. It is a sad day when the editor of a big city newspaper is forced to go on the record defending the concept of reporting the truth. I ' ll just give an excerpt, in case you haven ' t read it.The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.The
truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his
false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended
to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The Return of the King
You may recall that an earlier psalm purported to be the last Psalm of David, but as we know, the current Book of Psalms is actually a compilation and the editors just didn ' t delete that. There are more psalms attributed to David and we ' ve come to two of them today. Psalm 101, attributed to David, is a sort of oath of office. Psalm 103 is a song of praise, which gives God several attributes that he clearly doesn ' t have. No, he doesn ' t heal all diseases (v. 3), doesn ' t renew youth (v. 5), doesn ' t work vindication and justice for all who are oppressed (v. 6) and most certainly is not merciful and...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Spring Garden Street
That ' s actually the name of a street in Philadelphia where my paternal ancestors lived, but it seemed like a good title for this post. If I still had the energy to keep up the Windham County blog I would have put it there, but for now I ' ll just leave it here.Living in the temperate zone we do have to get through the winter, but our reward is spring, which you can ' t have otherwise. I got a load of horseshit from my neighbors last fall and now I ' m starting to spread it around. I planted a Concord grape next to my front porch, with a decent scoop of manure in the hole, and my idea is that it will grow up the column an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 16, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
If data is the new oil, there ’ s going to be war over it
By MATTHEW HOLT
I am dipping into two rumbling controversies that probably only data nerds and chronic care management nerds care about, but as ever they reveal quite a bit about who has power and how the truth can get obfuscated in American health care.
This piece is about the data nerds but hopefully will help non-nerds understand why this matters. (You’ll have to wait for the one about diabetes & chronic care).
Think about data as a precious resource that drives economies, and then you’ll understand why there’s conflict.
A little history. Back in 1996 a law was passed that was supposed to ma...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 15, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Health Tech The Business of Health Care 21st Century Cures Act Carequality Data Epic HIPAA Integritort Joe Biden Judy Faulkner MDPortals Novellia Particle Health Reveleer TEFCA Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Yahweh Dah Bomb!
We now get a run of (mercifully short) songs of praise. Again, there are multiple gods but our god is the biggest and baddest. Yes, he is also the creator, but that ' s sort of a contradiction. If the Big Y created the heavens and the earth, where did all these competing gods come from? This is never explained.There is some weird imagery in these, with geographic features engaging in anthropomporphized activities. As a final note, these were evidently written during times of victory and prosperity. They obviously don ' t pertain to the exilic situation in which the book was compiled.98 O sing to theLord a new song,for...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 14, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
We Da Peeps
In the previous post I listed some structural and contingent reasons why the relationship between voting and any idea of popular sovereignty is problematic. I didn ' t even mention some of the specific kludgy features of the U.S. system, such as the overrepresentation of small states in both the Senate and the Electoral College, which is itself an unwieldy and dangerous anachronism; gerrymandering; and obstacles to voting.However, let ' s assume we had none of those problems. In fact, propose a fantasy world in which we either had direct democracy -- all legislation by referendum -- or that representatives had to take a hi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 12, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
More Poli-sci
This post will be in two parts -- or maybe I ' ll just get to one part now and do the second part separately, we ' ll see how it goes. The first part is some empirical true facts about elections and electoral democracies, or republics if you prefer to use that term for representative systems such as ours. I don ' t want to get hung up on vocabulary. The second is philosophical -- how should we understand democracy, popular rule, We The People? How does that work and how can it work and how should it work?So, Part One. Many people assume that elections and the resulting legislative and executive (and in some states, judicia...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 11, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Political Science
I always do my best to write clearly and precisely, but it seems I don ' t always manage to get my meaning across. So let ' s try a couple of ideas again. Please read carefully, and think about what I actually write, not what you think I might think or what other people think. The First Amendment applies only to government. It constrains what government can do, it does not place any constraint of any kind on any other entity. The courts have interpreted it a bit more broadly than its literal language. If " congress shall make no law . . . " then the executive cannot have any legal authority to do what no law permits. ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Ye Gods!
Now we get some (mercifully short) songs of praise. The fun thing about these is that they cast Yahweh as the greatest among a pantheon of gods. That ' s how people thought about gods in the time most of the Tanakh was written. You ' ve got your god, we ' ve got ours, but ours is the baddest baddass of all the gods. This is somewhat different from polytheistic religions. All the Roman or Norse gods were gods of the Romans or Norsemen, although Jupiter and Odin were the head honchos. So the basic structure of the Deuteronomistic history is that when the Israelites please God, he gives them victory over their neighbors,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Dump Punts
Apparently realizing that they were caught on the horns, as it were, the dumpsters handlers wrote a statement for him in which he tried to split the baby by saying that abortion policy should be left entirely up to the states. Presumably he agreed to this although his dementia is too far advanced for him to have written the statement.The whole issue has never been anything but opportunism for him. He proclaimed himself to be a strong supporter of abortion rights until he decided to run for president as a Republican, and then he had a very difficult time articulating exactly what he thought about the entire question until t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 8, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
