hospitals

This month Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) released her long-awaited health care plan. Like most proposals from Harris, who is running for president, her plan to address America’s health care woes is full of hyperbole and void of detail. 

For decades, states have had certificate-of-need (CON) laws that require health care investors to get permission from an appointed board before they can expand, purchase a new device, or offer new medical technology.

With all the talk about “evidence-based medicine,” you might think that doctors were becoming much more focused on rigorous science.

Before 1990, American physicians who had completed 3 years or more of rigorous training in a specialty and passed an examination were awarded lifetime “board certification.”

Nothing could be more confusing than fees charged by hospitals and doctors. There are many reasons why hospitals would like to keep it that way.

As Republicans contemplate repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA or “ObamaCare”)—seriously, not just as a political gesture—alarms are sounding about millions of individuals losing coverage.

As noted in Part 1, Tom Fields of Mentor, Ohio, as a 25-year advocate for legal reforms to fix the broken elder care system, provided links and documents for me to focus attention on the issue of Elder Justice. At the same time, Mr. Fields alerted me to the upcoming White House Conference on Aging which should serve as a venue to discuss Elder Care Justice and the remedies and reforms so urgently needed to fix a failing system.

In ancient times, wealthy city-states built impregnable walls to ward off attacks from neighboring tribes and other enemies. Today we have a modern-day equivalent in North Carolina, where a few large hospital chains benefit from impenetrable defenses in the form of certificate of need (CON) regulations protecting their wealthy practices from the menace of competition in the form of smaller, more innovative providers that charge less.

What does it tell you when Britain and France have stopped flights to and from the nations in Africa where Ebola has become a threat and the United States has not taken a similar measure?

The VA (Veterans Administration) scandals show why so many people have been so highly motivated for so long to fight against Obamacare. That is because of the perfectly rational fear that Obamacare will end up doing to the entire American health care system what the VA has done to health care for America’s veterans.

It’s not a national healthcare system. It’s not the free market. It isn’t what we’ve had for the last forty years. So what is Obamacare? Maybe I am too late…

I’m no economist. But I was annoyed by a recent article in the Chicago Tribune reporting a new federal survey of hospital prices. I wanted Tribune readers to think a…

Republican governors are following the script of Obama and Clinton in their campaign strategy for the Medicaid expansion that is needed to implement ObamaCare: The cast of earnest white coats and…