Category: Policy Issues

Posted in American Exceptionalism, Education, Free Society, Liberty, Philosophy, Uncategorized

Implications of the Metaphysical & Rational Basis of Western Civilization

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

Welcome to Friday’s Philosophical Foray beyond Healthcare.

Exploring the Metaphysical & cognitive origins of Western thought: A unique viewpoint by Professor Jordan Peterson.

Synopsis:

A Self-evident axiomatic principle of the intrinsic value of the individual >>> A proposition of Natural Rights >>> Emergence of social principles & Law based on individual sovereignty & Natural Rights >>> Moving beyond savage tribalism & divine rights >>> Unity based on collective belief in same axiomatic principles >>> Diverse elements find common ground >>> Societies more stable by way of respect for rights & sovereignty >>> Gives people tools to correct corruption & dysfunction in societal hierarchies to avoid deterioration into chaos.

Posted in Access to healthcare, American Exceptionalism, Consumer-Driven Health Care, Dependency, Direct-Pay Medicine, Direct-Pay Practice Models, Doctor-Patient Relationship, Economic Issues, Free Society, government incompetence, Government Regulations, Health Insurance, Healthcare financing, Independent Physicians, Medical Costs, Medical Practice Models, News From Washington, DC & Related Shenanigans, Organizational structure, Patient Choice, Patient Safety, Patient-centered Care, Policy Issues, primary care, Quality, Technology, Telemedicine Trends, Third-Party Free Practices, Uncategorized

Shelter In-Place Care: Another “Box Checked” for the Value of Direct Primary Care

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

HEADLINE:

FCC Unveils COVID-19 Telehealth Program, Updates Connected Care Pilot

The Federal Communications Commission is using $200 million in funding from the CARES Act to launch a new program to help providers access the broadband resources they need to support telehealth programs.

Wow, the government has discovered remote digital technology medical care!  Although, maybe a little late. What would we do without those innovative minds in D.C. ?!?

But there’s a better solution that’s been up and running for more than a decade; private citizens being free to act and chose what services they value.  It is a solution which occurred organically when an innovative supply side acted to solve other people’s problems within a cooperative marketplace driven by mutual benefit.  It is called Direct Primary Care (DPC). And it is only possible because we still have some semblance of healthcare freedom within our society.  No thanks to Washington, D.C.

But step aside, the FCC with money to burn is coming to the rescue after COVID is already in full crisis mode.

The DPC Consumer Guide -- Now Available for office/clinic use and and an educational/marketing resource for your patients.Never mind that Direct Primary Care physicians have routinely integrated remote care technology platforms into their practices for a more than a decade.  And set aside the fact that revenue in a DPC business model doesn’t rely on office visits (the opposite of social distancing) to trigger a billable encounter, the claim against which is paid out of a grossly over-priced pre-paid 3rd party fund that we call health insurance.  Instead, the Direct Primary Care physician is paid to be available to solve problems, answer questions, triage illness/injury, provide treatment and advice via the most appropriate venue for each patient.

And last, no disrespect meant to the media outlet below for featuring this story.  They are just reporting the healthcare news, as is their mission.

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https://mhealthintelligence.com/news/fcc-unveils-covid-19-telehealth-program-updates-connected-care-pilot

Posted in Access to healthcare, big government, Economic Issues, Government Spending, Government Stimulus, Health Insurance, Healthcare financing, Medical Costs, Medicare, Organizational structure, Philosophy, Policy Issues, Uncategorized

5 Charts That Explain the Student Debt Crisis – Foundation for Economic Education

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

The commonality between the insatiable rise in both healthcare costs and college tuition, post 1965, should be obvious:  Massive amounts of other people’s money in the form of government programs, payments, subsidies and loan guarantees; which economists call the 3rd-party payer effect.

As exposited in the FEE article below, the U.S. Higher Education Act introduced “incentives” into the market for higher education, encouraging both the supply side and the demand side to make decisions that they would not be as likely to make under “non-stimulated” market situations.

Similarly, the passage of Medicare in 1965 sent huge surge of money into the healthcare system. The predictable consequence of this massive revenue stream was an incentive for healthcare providers to enter the market and expand services at an unprecedented magnitude and rate.  Essentially, demand was spurred by new source of financing.  Amy Finkelstein, et.al have done excellent work in this area.  Her work indicates that Medicare funding may have allowed hospital to spend 6-fold more than what individual levels of insurance would have predicted.  And that the spread of 3rd party insurance from 1950 – 1990 may explain about 50% of the increase in real per capita spending over that time period. https://economics.mit.edu/files/788

 

 

“As Bernie Sanders tweeted last year, the cost of education, in nominal dollars, has increased by roughly 3,800 percent since the mid 1960s.

What Sanders didn’t mention was that this was when the US Higher Education Act was passed (1965), which directed taxpayer dollars to low-interest loans for students pursuing college. This increased accessibility to higher education, but the flood of federal money also caused a surge in demand and costs.

The problem isn’t unsolvable, but it will require significant changes to universities and the federal loan program. “Free” tuition and student debt forgiveness will only make the problem worse.

Instead, as University of Maryland economist Peter Morici recently argued, market discipline must be brought back to our institutions of higher learning as part of any debt forgiveness.

While policy wonks offer no shortage of proposals for tweaking the federal loan program to improve it, perhaps the best solution would be to get the federal government out of the loan business all together.”

https://fee.org/articles/5-charts-that-explain-the-student-debt-crisis/

Posted in Education, Evidence-based Medicine, Leadership, Organizational structure, outcomes, outcomes measurement, Policy Issues, Protocols, Uncategorized

Why metadata matters|Towards Data Science

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

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By Jon Brock

The article below details the reasons why we need to get data right; and even more so with metadata.  Because the combined effect of compiling (bad or inadequate) data does not make it more reliable; it likely compounds the error.

This is particularly problematic in scientific academy within the areas of medicine and nutrition research, as John Ioannidis has clearly exposed in his work.

 

Scientific data can go “absent without leave” for a number of different reasons:

The end result is what’s become known as the “file drawer problem”. The published scientific literature represents only a small and biased sample of the research that has actually been conducted. The rest is stuffed away at the back of the metaphorical filing cabinet.

There’s a lot of wasted effort here — data collected and then not used. But the bigger problem is the bias in what is published.

https://towardsdatascience.com/why-metadata-matters-ab7253ea35c7

Posted in Bailouts, Dependency, Economic Issues, Entrepreneurs, Free Society, Free-Market, government incompetence, Government Regulations, Government Spending, Government Stimulus, Job loss, Keynesian Economics, Liberty, Organizational structure, Philosophy, Policy Issues, Uncategorized, Unemployment

Focus on People During Economic Crises, Not Macro-Statistics – Foundation for Economic Education

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

By Mark Hornshaw

“Economics studies human choice under scarcity. Humans must act in the present to provide for the future. Informed choice relies on market data in the form of prices—specific prices for specific things, as we assess various different means to satisfy our ends—that is what economics is about.

Macro-statistics such as GDP and CPI, whether they are rising or falling in the aggregate, do not help much with this vital task. These statistics are compilations of vast amounts of data to come up with averages across entire countries and time-periods. It’s a dilution of the data, not an enhancement.

” “What a country wants to make it richer, is never consumption, but production. Where there is the latter, we may be sure that there is no want of the former,” said John Stuart Mill, citing Say’s law.

In a tune of rapid change and disruption, we need prices to do their job more than ever so the entrepreneurial process can work. High prices show which industries to move more resources into, and low prices show which ones to move resources out of to free them up for more urgent uses. From the point of view of consumers, high prices show us what we should cut back on, and low prices show where we can pick up bargains.

This process takes time. Interfering with this process just locks in shortages and surpluses.
So-called “stimulus,” just thrown at “the economy” to increase “aggregate demand” in the abstract, cannot work, when there are supply constraints in some industries and prohibitions in others.

Government policy should be on mending holes in the social safety net, compensating those it has forced out of business and jobs, and reducing the tax and regulatory burden it places on businesses, workers and consumers as they try to adjust.

These are all microeconomic responses to relieve suffering and remove impediments.”

https://fee.org/articles/focus-on-people-during-economic-crises-not-macro-statistics/

Posted in American Exceptionalism, American Independence, American Presidents, big government, Economic Issues, Free Society, government incompetence, Government Spending, Government Stimulus, Job loss, Leadership, Liberty, Patient Safety, Philosophy, Policy Issues, Rule of Law, Uncategorized, Unemployment

Panic Has Led to Government “Cures” That Are Worse than the Disease, History Shows – Foundation for Economic Education

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

Smoot-Hawley and the New Deal are hardly the only examples of government actions making a panic worse.

Thomas Sowell recounts several instances in which governments turned small problems into major ones by using blunt force—often price controls—to respond to public panic about rising costs of a given commodity.

One of the more famous examples of this is the gasoline crisis of the 1970s, which started when the federal government took a small problem (temporary high costs of gasoline) and turned it into a big one (a national shortage).

As Sowell explains, however, there was not an actual scarcity of gasoline. There was nearly as much gas sold in 1972 as the previous year (95 percent, to be precise).

Similar examples kind be found throughout history, from the grain shortages in Ancient Rome brought about by Diocletian’s “Edict on Maximum Prices” to the mortgage crisis in 2007.

It is no coincidence that crises—foreign wars, terrorist attacks, and economic depressions—have often resulted in vast encroachments of freedom and even given rise to tyrants (from Napoleon to Lenin and beyond). In his book Crisis and Leviathan, the historian and economist Robert Higgs explains how throughout history, crises have been used to expand the administrative state, often by allowing “temporary” measures to be left in place after a crisis has abated (think federal tax withholding during World War II).

Like an economic panic, pandemics incite mass fear, which can lead to flawed and irrational decision making.

https://fee.org/articles/panic-has-led-to-government-cures-that-are-worse-than-the-disease-history-shows/

Posted in Bailouts, Currency Manipulation, Dependency, Economic Issues, Federal Reserve, Government Regulations, Government Spending, Interest on the Debt, Keynesian Economics, Policy Issues, Tax Policy, Uncategorized

Economic Lessons from Coronavirus: Government-Subsidized Private Debt Creates Macro Vulnerability | International Liberty

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

“Little more than a decade after consumers binged on inexpensive mortgages that helped bring on a global financial crisis, a new debt surge — this time by major corporations — threatens to unleash fresh turmoil.

The root cause of the debt boom is the decision by the Federal Reserve and other key central banks to cut interest rates to zero in the wake of the financial crisis and to hold them at historic lows for years.“

https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2020/03/20/economic-lessons-from-coronavirus-government-subsidized-private-debt-creates-macro-vulnerability/

Posted in Education, outcomes, outcomes measurement, Patient Safety, Policy Issues, Prevention, Protocols, Uncategorized

Are medical errors really the third most common cause of death in the U.S.? (2019 edition) – Science-Based Medicine

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

The claim that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US has always rested on very shaky evidence; yet it’s become common wisdom that is cited as though everyone accepts it. But if estimates of 250,000 to 400,000 deaths due to medical error are way too high, what is the real number? A study published last month suggests that it’s almost certainly a lot lower and has been modestly decreasing since 1990.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-medical-errors-really-the-third-most-common-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s-2019-edition/