You Can Quote Me
Back in 1993, in the pre-internet days, I reviewed the 16th edition ofBartlett ’s Familiar Quotations for Liberty magazine. I ’ve just gotten around to tracking down that article andgetting it posted. One of my complaints then was thatThe dozen years since the fifteenth edition have been marked by a worldwide turn toward markets, from Reagan and Thatcher to the New Zealand Labor Party ’s free-market reforms to the fall of Soviet communism. This historical trend seems to have escaped editor [Justin] Kaplan, of Cambridge, Mass., who has given usmore quotations from Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Robert Heilbroner, wh...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 31, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: David Boaz Source Type: blogs
A Victory for Consumer Protections and Health Insurance Freedom
Last year, the Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services worked within federal law to expand consumer protections and restore Americans ’ freedom to choose the health insurance that meets their needs. On Friday, a federal court rebuffed an effort to block those protections and force Americans into ObamaCare. First, a little background.In 1996, Congress exempted “short-term limited duration insurance” from federal health insurance regulations. Congress never defined what “short-term” or “limited duration” meant. So in 1997, the Clinton administration gave meaning to those terms by decreeing...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 21, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Michael F. Cannon Source Type: blogs
King v. Burwell Literally Overturned Part of the Affordable Care Act
I have aletter to the editor in today ’s Washington Post: The July 8 front-page article “Court ’s ruling on ACA could cost GOP” claimed that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act “twice,” presumably referring to National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius in 2012 and King v. Burwell in 2015.King v. Burwell did not uphold the ACA. On the contrary, King overturned part of the ACA.The King plaintiffs challenged the Internal Revenue Service ’s unexplained decision to spend funds that the ACA plainly does not authorize it to spend and to impose the ACA’s mandate penalty o...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 21, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Michael F. Cannon Source Type: blogs
Trump Promises Spending Cuts -- Someday
Possibly good news on the front page of the Washington Post today. A headline reads:Trump aims to cut spending after 2020The article begins:President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for sweeping budget cuts if he wins a second term in the White House, five people briefed on the discussions said, a move that would dramatically reverse the big-spending approach he adopted during his first 30 months in office ….[But for now] Trump is advocating swiftly lifting the federal debt ceiling, which would allow for more spending and borrowing.And that ’s what we’ve gotten in Trump’s first two and a half years, includi...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 20, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: David Boaz Source Type: blogs
Knight Institute v. Trump
The U.S. Court of Appeals for theSecond Circuit has affirmed a district court ’s ruling that Donald Trump may not block Americans from viewing or responding to his tweets. In an opinion largely mirroring that of the district court, Judge Barrington D. Parker determined that Trump’s use of his account in his capacity as President of the United States rendered it a limited public forum. As such, Trump’s decision to block the accounts of individual critics amounted to government viewpoint discrimination, rather than a private exercise of associational rights.The case hinged upon whether or not Trump used his twitter acc...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 10, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: John Samples Source Type: blogs
Joe Biden on Impeachment for Illegal Warmaking
I don ’t know if the moderators oftonight ’s Democratic primary debate are taking requests, but here ’s my question for former vice-president—and current frontrunner—Joe Biden:“Mr. Biden, the last time you were running for president, you promised that if George W. Bush ‘takes this nation to war in Iran, without congressional approval,I will make it my business to impeach him.’ Now, over a decade later, war with Iran is again on the horizon, and just this Monday,the president said he does not need congressional authorization to wage war. If he acts on that belief,will you call for Congress to impeach Preside...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 27, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Gene Healy Source Type: blogs
A War on Press Freedoms in the Name of National Security
One reliable bipartisan characteristic of U.S. leaders is an obsession with shaping the foreign policy narrative and concealing any information that contradicts their version of events. Indeed, many of them harbor the desire to prosecute anyone who leaks classified material that exposes blunders, lies or crimes. Two events in the past few weeks demonstrate that the desire to squash such disclosures is running at high tide: the attempt toextradite and prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on espionage charges, and President Trump ’s angry outburst accusing theNew York Times of “treason” for its story disclosing U...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 25, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Ted Galen Carpenter Source Type: blogs
An Aborted War, and the Failure of Trump's " Maximum Pressure " Campaign on Iran
President Trump ’slast minute decision to abort a US military strike on Iran is a welcome sign that someone in the administration knows when to slam the breaks on the “maximum pressure” campaign. There is no national security interest at stake in thedowning of a U.S. drone in the Persian Gulf that could come close to thecosts and risksassociated with bombing Iranian territory and military assets. Furthermore, contrary to those in the administration that tried to encourage a U.S. strike, it is likely such an attack would be escalatory, in contrast to Trump ’s strikes on Syria in 2017 and 2018. Iran has the capabil...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 21, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: John Glaser Source Type: blogs
Everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Many of my friends in the Reality Based Community are very puzzled by the adulation given by what seems to be an irreducible 39% of Americans to a man who is a massive failure as a businessman, who squandered a fortune given to him by his father only to be given another one; who squandered the second fortune and turned to supporting himself by laundering money for Russian gangsters and appearing on Nonreality TV as a fictitious version of himself; who is a racist who launched his political career promoting the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; a serial sexual predator; an ignoramus; a patholog...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 20, 2019 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Federal Subsidies Micromanage Local Activities
The federal government spends more than $700 billion a year on 1,386 subsidy programs for state and local activities such schools, transit, and housing. In a recent study, I described 18 reasons why these aid programs should be eliminated. One reason is that the rules that come with federal subsidies undermine citizen control of their own communities. The Obama administration, for example, tried to manipulate local zoning laws through the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. Those particular rules have been loosened up, but micromanagement is an ongoing threat from all federal aid programs.A recent local n...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 19, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
The Annual Death Rate in Immigration Detention Rose in 2017 and Fell in 2018
Since the Trump Administrationannounced a punitive immigration detention policy in 2018 that separated families,reportshavesurfacedofimmigrantswhohavediedwhileindetention or shortly after being released tomedical facilities for treatment. It’s understandable why news consumers and suppliers are interested in deaths in detention facilities given the Trump Administration’s actions on this issue, but the distinct impression from reading all of these stories is that being detained is more dangerous than ever. To check whether this was true or if this impression was just an artifact of cognitivebias, I decided to esti...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 14, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Alex Nowrasteh Source Type: blogs
Health Insurance 101 -- yet again
I just cannot understand why it is so difficult to get people to grasp what seems to me a simple idea. Let ' s try one more time.The purpose of insurance is to spread risk. That ' s the essence of the concept. Health insurance (or health care insurance as some prefer to say) is different from other kinds of insurance in some ways, so let ' s just talk about health insurance.Health care costs are unpredictable. It is true that there are risk factors associated with some conditions, most notably smoking tobacco. Nevertheless, no matter how healthful your lifestyle, you still just might need expensive health care. You might b...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 14, 2019 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
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A new proposal from the Trump administration would roll back civil rights rules governing federally assisted health programs. Issued by the Obama administration in 2016, these rules implement Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability.
(Source: The Commonwealth Fund: Blog)
Source: The Commonwealth Fund: Blog - June 13, 2019 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Sara Rosenbaum Source Type: blogs
How To Teach Kids (Digital) Health Literacy?
In a world of social companion robots, chatbots, or artificial
intelligence buddies, adults have the responsibility to teach kids well how to
live a healthy life with the available technologies, how to balance between the
online and the offline world, how to keep their mental stability in the face of
innovations. As it’s an awfully difficult job, we collected examples where
digital health technology could help and in which areas should analog methods
prevail.
The land where kindergarteners play with the texture
of raspberry
When was the last time you paid attention to the
crunching sounds while eating a raw carrot...
Source: The Medical Futurist - June 11, 2019 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Future of Medicine Health Sensors & Trackers apps children cognitive health digital health digital literacy eating fitness health apps health literacy healthy eating healthy lifestyle Innovation kids mental health physical Source Type: blogs
Testing An Evo Psych Theory Outside Of The Lab: Prestige And Dominance-Based Social Hierarchies Emerge Even Amongst Cornish Choirs And Chess Clubs
By Matthew Warren
Psychologists have noticed that aspiring leaders generally pursue one of two different approaches for getting to the top of the social food-chain. Some people exert influence by building up skills or knowledge that command respect and deference from their peers – known as the prestige strategy. Others prefer to rule by fear instead, forcing others to fall into line – the dominance strategy. This dichotomy has even been suggested to account for the vastly different leadership styles of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
But many of the studies that have looked at the dynamics of prestige and dominance ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - June 11, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: evolutionary psych Social Source Type: blogs
