Archive » Health care

There seems to be an emerging consensus not only that Vioxx is a bad drug, but that Merck has known for years about Vioxx’s cardiovascular side effects.
If this were true, why would Merck voluntarily conduct a study that measured Vioxx’s effect on cardiovascular outcomes? Wouldn’t it have been smarter, if Merck knew about Vioxx’s problems [...]

Michael Fumento is on it.

Daily Kos discusses a Families USA report asking whether families have better health care today than they did four years ago. The report cites all kinds of grim statistics, such as rising health insurance premiums and an increase in the number of Americans without insurance.
My health insurance is much less generous than it was four [...]

There’s more depressing, disgusting news on the Big Government Conservatism front. As is typically the case with government estimates, the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription drug entitlement expansion cost estimates are wrong. In the wrong direction.
The Washington Post reports:
President Bush promised Congress that his Medicare prescription drug benefit would cost no more than $400 billion over [...]

Lawrence Altman of the New York Times reports that Brazilian health officials have stopped using Chiron’s vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella after “an unexpectedly high number of children who received it experienced serious allergic reactions in an immunization program last week. The reactions included rashes and anaphylactic shock, a potentially fatal allergic condition.” At [...]

Update 10/11/2007. Welcome, new visitors. Go here.
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Paul Krugman has a column in today’s New York Times decrying America’s health care system. He supports–surprise!–a single payer approach.
I have commented before on the problems with central planning in health care. I certainly am not convinced that a government-run system is the answer, but I do [...]

The Northridge Hospital Medical Center survived the Great Depression and the Northridge earthquake and everything in between, but it announced this week that it will be shutting down its Van Nuys campus due to the high cost of treating uninsured patients.
The announcement follows the closure of five other Los Angeles County emergency departments in the [...]

I’ve been interested in vaccine policy ever since my husband and I were pressured to vaccinate our three-day old son for Hepatitis B–a virus that is almost impossible for him to contract except through intravenous drug use or sexual contact.
The usual argument for giving a low-risk newborn the Hep B vaccine is that a decade [...]

Here’s some food for thought: According to this calorie calculator, I need about 1,800 calories a day to maintain my current weight. My friend Mike Fumento points out that I can get 40 percent of that(!) from one 20 ounce serving of Krispy Kreme’s new drink.

Update: On a related note, Jeff Quinton has kicked off [...]

When private schools fail, they shut down. When private nursing homes fail, they shut down. But when negligent government social service agencies fail, they stay open, get more money, and claim more victims. The latest horror story out of Washington state involves Suzy Sclater, a woman with cerebal palsy and the developmental abilities of a [...]

After I blogged about disclosure of pharmaceutical clinical trial results last week, several people wrote me pooh-poohing the problem, arguing that since all clinical trials are pre-registered with the FDA, there is no way pharmaceutical companies can conceal unfavorable results.
Today’s New York Times, however, suggests otherwise . According to the article,
The issue of The [...]

Socialism is alive and well right in my backyard. This article describes how militant central planners are trying to prevent a local hospital chain, Adventist Healthcare, from building a new emergency department in my town, Germantown, Maryland, which is a booming suburb of Washington DC. An excerpt:
Adventist HealthCare is seeking permission from the Maryland [...]

A group of top medical journals is considering asking pharmaceutical companies to disclose clinical trials before they start. I’m no pharma-basher, but this is a terrific idea.
From Statistics 101 we know that if a product is as effective as a placebo, 1 in 20 trials will produce a statistically significant finding due to random [...]