Natural & Physical Sciences: Health and Medicine 
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How Will ObamaCare Affect Young Adults?
Starting in 2014, the federal government will require nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance. How will that requirement, and other elements of President Obama's new health care law, affect the incomes, employment opportunities, and health care of young adults?
Cato On Campus and the Galen Institute are partnering to host a panel discussion to address these questions.
The event is open for all interns in the DC-area, and those online via an online video stream. Please plan to attend, and tell your friends. Take advantage of this opportunity to broaden your knowledge on a policy that will dramatically impact the rest of your life!
Forthcoming Death Panels in the U.S.?
Claims of “death panels” were derided as far right-wing lunacy when the Obamacare legislation was being debated over the past year. However, Cato health policy scholar Michael Tanner notes that those claims may not be as far from reality as the bill's defenders would like the public to think. President Obama's recent nomination of Donald Berwick to direct the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (the office that oversees government healthcare programs), seems to substantiate the claims of upcoming rationing of healthcare services. Tanner explains how Berwick’s infatuation with the British healthcare system, and its rationing mechanism, could lead to some interesting – and scary – developments stateside.
Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?
About a month after its passing, truths about Obamacare are emerging. Peter Suderman, of Reason, discusses how the medicine of the new legislation is becoming harder to swallow. The Administration is claiming that success is just around the bend of some new, stronger regulations, but such regulations are projected to be costly – cost being the symptom of the debt disease that has plagued the U.S. and the rest of the world. Suderman notes that, "With each passing day, it looks more likely that costs will go up, businesses will face bureaucratic burdens, and many individuals will lose their current health care plans." All sorts of other costs are emerging the longer the bill is being analyzed.
Ask the Expert: Shirley Svorny on the Future for Healthcare Professionals
Cato scholar Shirley Svorny discusses the nuances of the new Obamacare legislation in relation to aspiring medical school students. She explains that while there will likely be a shift from general physicians to specialists working in teams and that taxes will almost surely increase, there are several glimmers of hope for those pursuing futures as healthcare professionals. Namely, Svorny notes that the market will adapt to new challenges, and remarks that government regulations aren't likely to stand too much in the way.
Will You Meet This Challenge?
Cato Constitutional Studies scholar Ilya Shapiro sends out a challenge to anyone wanting to debate the constitutionality of the new health care legislation. Shapiro offers to debate anyone - anytime, anywhere. Will you take him up on it?
Is Healthcare a "Right"?
Economics professor Steven Horwitz discusses the danger of declaring things like healthcare and education a "right." Many rights, such as free speech, force people to refrain from obstructing another's right. Ensuring universal healthcare, however, is different because it would force people to do something for others. The problem with positive rights is that they distort incentives and do not result in successful policies without infringing on the negative rights of others. (It is impossible to provide a social program for some without taking money from others.) Horwitz explains that the libertarian end goal is the same as the leftist's, namely that the most people have the best healthcare. The difference is how that happens.
Price Controls Won't Help Healthcare
As President Obama resurrects healthcare reform, up from its grave in Massachusetts, his actions serve as a highlight real of his previous missteps on the subject. Cato scholar Michael Tanner offers several real world predictions of what might happen should Obama's policy actually pass the increasingly hesitant Congress. Tanner reminds that every action has a reaction, and that price controls set by government regulation will have unwanted effects. Furthermore, he notes that "limiting the prices that insurers can charge does nothing about the underlying costs of health care." Without substantative changes, Americans will end up with higher costs, less service and/or more debt. Thankfully, Tanner offers several recommendations for real reform.
IRS to Regulate Healthcare Coverage Under Pending Bill
"Since $290 billion in foregone collections isn't enough to disqualify you from your job, we might as well give you more responsibilities," is what, in essence, Congress' health bills say to the IRS. Peter Suderman of Reason calls attention to an article in Kaiser Health News that discusses new duties to be performed by the IRS under the current healthcare bills. The IRS, in addition to collecting taxes, will be responsible for checking to see if Americans have health insurance, notifying them of missing documents and assigning fines, and collecting those fines. The IRS was never intended to perform this duty, nor should it be. But it is now, under the new healthcare bills circling through Congress. We'll just have to wait and see how the ever-burdened IRS adjusts to the new challenge, and what other freedoms will be sacrificed.
The Senate Pulled a Fast One
An enormously broad healthcare bill barely passed in the Senate early this week, as most Americans were heading home for the holidays and not paying much attention to politics. Michael Cannon, Cato's director of health policy studies, comments that many people have been seduced by the concept of an 'individual mandate,' which is included in the bill's final form and uses the force of law to coerce people into buying insurance, whether or not they want it. The utopian ideals of the health bill distracted people, even though it "was an audacious proposal from the start, as it made their health care plan even more left-wing than the Clinton plan, which voters soundly rejected for being too statist." Now that the bill has moved one step closer to becoming law, Cannon notes, "The question now is whether the Left, the Right, and the mainstream will recognize the Senate health care bill for what it is."
Government, Putting You on a Diet
To cover enormous budget shortfalls, state governments are contemplating a tax on carbonated beverages. Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow Veronique de Rugy explains how the government is simultaneously patting itself on the back for halting childhood obesity, while hitting an already recession-ridden economy with additional taxes. De Rugy points out several evaluation agencies that have analyzed such policies. Some claim that a tax would curb consumption of calorie-packed drinks while raising revenue for states, while others doubt its effect. De Rugy notes that people are generally resourceful in getting what they want, so a tax won't do much else than get government involved in yet another area of the economy. Wouldn't it be a better idea to put big government on a diet?
The Cold Heart of Obamacare
Cato fellow Nat Hentoff presents what's at stake in the current healthcare reform bills. He proposes that the biggest reform that takes place is that the current bills insert government bureaucracy between patients and their doctors. Calling this intervention "death panels" misses the point, not because it's false but because it under-exaggerates the personal intrusion of government in people's private lives. "If congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care "reform" measure to send to the White House for President Obama's signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions."
Cato Institute Conference on Health Care Reform
The Cato Institute invites you to participate in a one-day conference, featuring health care experts from across the political landscape, on the state and future of health care reform in America. Even before the results of the 2008 elections were known, lawmakers in Washington, D.C., were preparing some of the most sweeping health care reforms America has seen in decades. The question is: will the reforms being crafted in Congress improve this picture, or make these problems even more acute?
January YouTube of the Month
Congratulations to Matt Bufton of the University of Windsor for submitting Cato on Campus' January YouTube of the Month. His video, "Health Care in Canada" provides a short discussion of how Canada's health care system actually prohibits competition, something almost no other developed country does.
Michael Cannon: "Healthy Competition: How to Free American Health Care"
Who: Michael Cannon What: Speech on "Healthy Competition: How to Free American Health Care" followed by a panel. Where: Disneyland Hotel Host: California Medical Association
Much to Lose in Fixing System
By Michael Tanner: "[n]ot all change is change for the better. And before we head down the road to a government-run health care system, we need to stop and think about what we stand to lose."
Does Barack Obama Support Socialized Medicine?
Cato scholar Michael F. Cannon argues that "reasonable people can disagree over whether Obama's health plan would be good or bad. But to suggest that it is not a step toward socialized medicine is absurd."
Responsible Drug Use
"Those who support drug prohibition often do so with the premise, implicit or explicit, that life without prohibition would be marked by vastly more irresponsibility, addiction, accidents, health problems, and death. Those who favor ending drug prohibition are forced to argue, not only for an unfamiliar policy, but also against this parade of horribles. Yet are we not able to think about and manage these substances rationally and responsibly?"
Kidneys for Sale: Iranian Organ Donation
By Kerry Howley: "'What can Iran teach us about good governance?' is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need."
Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism
By Robin Hanson: "Human behavior regarding medicine seems strange; assumptions and models that seem workable in other areas seem less so in medicine. Perhaps, we need to rethink the basics. Toward this end, I have collected many puzzling stylized facts about behavior regarding medicine, and have sought a small number of simple assumptions which might together account for as many puzzles as possible."
Is Health Care a Right?
In this podcast economics Professor Russell Roberts of George Mason University debates a physician who thinks health care is a right and the government should provide it.
Organ Transplants: Kidneys for Sale
"In his most controversial segment yet, reason.tv host Drew Carey offers a startling solution to the critical shortage in kidneys available for transplant: Pay people to donate their kidneys."
WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems
By Glen Whitman: "Those who cite the WHO rankings typically present them as an objective measure of the relative performance of national health care systems. They are not. The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions— some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares."
Unintended Consequences
By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt: "But with a government that is regularly begged for relief — these days, from mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens — and with every presidential hopeful making daily promises to address these woes, it might be worth encouraging the winning candidate to think twice (or even 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any law more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington, it is the law of unintended consequences."
Congress Strong-Arming Baseball? That's Foul.
By Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch: "First, Major League Baseball, along with other sports leagues and private-sector ventures, simply should not be required to submit their business plans -- much less blood and urine samples -- to Congress or any other government body."
Dismal Science Sees Upbeat Future
By Alexander Tabarrok: "Forget the talk of recession. The world is about to enter a new era in which miracle drugs will conquer cancer and other killer diseases and technological and scientific advances will trigger unprecedented economic growth and global prosperity."
The Failure of U.S. Organ Procurement Policy
By T. Randolph Beard, John D. Jackson, and David L. Kaserman: "In this article, we calculate how many lives will be lost if the United States continues in its current policy course. We do this to motivate policymakers to stop implementing one ineffectual policy action after another and attack the organ shortage with more effective weaponry in the form of financial incentives."
Drug Use and the Candidates
By Stanton Peele: "There has been massive drug and underage alcohol use by Americans over the years -- more than 110 million Americans, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, have used illicit drugs. Yet the overwhelming majority of them -- like Messrs. Bush, Clinton and Obama -- have grown up to be productive citizens. Some believe there's no need to know about their youthful misconduct."
The Great Depression: Is an epidemic of depressive disorder really sweeping America?
By Will Wilkinson: "The alleged epidemic of depression simply doesn’t exist. Horwitz and Wakefield are right: Millions who have been diagnosed with major depression never had it in the first place, even if their lives were nonetheless improved by the drugs they were prescribed."
WHO's Watching Over You
From Agoraphilia. The WHO rankings, by purporting to measure the efficacy of healthcare systems, implicitly takes all differences in health outcomes not explained by spending or literacy and attributes them entirely to healthcare system performance. Nothing else, from tobacco use to nutrition to sheer luck, is taken into account.
Drew Carey Defends Medical Marijuana
"I think it’s clear by now that the federal government needs to reclassify marijuana. People who need it should be able to get it – safely and easily," says The Price Is Right and Power of 10 host Drew Carey in a new Reason.tv video examining medical marijuana and the war on drugs.
Green Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
By Roger Bate: "There is little more annoying for a policy analyst than when two types of wrong-headedness conspire to undermine his case. Such is the case for policies driven by the pursuit of a pesticide free -- or at least pesticide diminished -- future, which will cause an increase in insect-borne disease. "
Vaccination Bill Mutates
Sigrid Fry-Revere, Director of Bioethics Studies at Cato, writes about the new HPV vaccine, and why states should not mandate it.
A Short Course in Brain Surgery
By Stuart Browning. In A Short Course in Brain Surgery, filmmaker Stuart Browning shows the callousness of "single-payer", government-run health care systems as practiced in Ontario, Canada. His film highlights the plight of Lindsay McCreith, an Ontario man with a cancerous brain tumor who went to Buffalo, NY to receive the timely medical care that is rationed in his home country.
Behind the Baby Count
By Bernadine Healy, M.D.: " We're a nation of beautiful babies. In a remarkable achievement, the loss of babies during their first year of life has plummeted by almost 70 percent since 1970. Yet the nation's infant mortality rate is used time and again as evidence of America's failed health system."
Uninsured in America
By Stuart Browning: "Uninsured in America examines the conventional wisdom that 45 million Americans cannot get health insurance and consequently do not have access to health care."
What Do We Really Know About the Spread of AIDS?
By Emily Oster. Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, looks at the stats on AIDS in Africa -- and comes up with a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is wrong. We look for root causes such as poverty and poor health care -- but we also need to factor in, say, the price of coffee, and the routes of long-haul truckers. In short, there is a lot we don't know; and our assumptions about what we do know may keep us from finding the best way to stop the disease.