Medicare Advantage: Good? Or Bad? LC Sources
Medicare Advantage: Good? Or Bad? LC Sources
Tag: healthcare
Control Freaks Use Brian Thompson Murder To Peddle ‘Ghost Gun’ Bans
“Kits package together some unregulated parts. But the mechanism that makes a gun go “bang” is regulated and must either pass through the same channels as a commercially manufactured firearm or else be constructed from scratch or from unfinished blanks. That’s not necessarily difficult, but it means there’s really no magic legislative wand that can be waved to make DIY guns disappear.
After the high-profile assassination of a political figure in 2022, Reuters’ Ju-min Park and Daniel Leussink reported, “the man suspected of killing former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe with a hand-made gun on Friday could have made the weapon in a day or two after obtaining readily available materials such as wood and metal pipes, analysts say. The attack showed gun violence cannot be totally eliminated even in a country where tough gun laws mean it is nearly unheard of for citizens to buy or own firearms.”
The weapon the assassin used in Japan was a crude but effective two-shot firearm that looked more like an old-fashioned zip gun than the 3D-printed pistol used to kill Thompson. But while not pretty, it was just as effective.
In 2019, TheFirearmBlog published a retrospective pointing out that during the zip gun heyday in the 1950s, “a mechanically inclined youngster might upon obtaining ammunition, most often widely available .22 rimfire, find that such rounds will fit into a section of suitably sized steel tubing, often a section of the salvaged car radio antenna. From then on it is a simple matter of fabricating a means of striking the rear of the cartridge while ensuring the entire assembly is held firmly together.” The article included photographs of homemade firearms discovered in the tightly controlled confines of prisons, crafted by inmates from found materials including pipes and plumbing fittings.”
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“A 2018 Small Arms Survey report on improvised and craft-produced weapons noted that such “weapons have been manufactured for as long as firearms have existed, typically by hand or in small workshops.” Among the weapons manufactured by craft producers, the authors noted, are “mortars, recoilless guns, and grenade launchers.”
Revisiting the subject last year in the context of Europe, Small Arms Survey noted that evolving technologies make it much easier to share plans for privately manufactured firearms and to create sophisticated devices at home without specialized skills.”
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“In September, Lizzie Dearden and Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote for The New York Times about the worldwide proliferation of designs for the FGC-9, a partially 3D-printed weapon that can “be built entirely from scratch, without commercial gun parts, which are often regulated and tracked by law enforcement agencies internationally.”
As one expert told the reporters: “Now you have something that people can make at home with unregulated components. So from a law enforcement perspective, how do you stop that?””
LC: Yes, some people will always be able to build their own deadly weapons. But, most people can’t or won’t. Most gun deaths are from people who have the deadly weapon because it is easily accessible, not because they were determined to build the weapon by whatever means necessary.
https://reason.com/2024/12/13/control-freaks-use-brian-thompson-murder-to-peddle-ghost-gun-bans/
AOC’s Justifications of Violence
“Take the case of Adam Burgoyne, a man from Montreal who, on the cusp of turning 40, suffered an aneurysm a week ago today. “Had a bit of a health scare last night, but thankfully it wasn’t a heart attack,” he wrote on December 5. “Not sure what it was, though, because once they made sure I wasn’t dying I was thrown out into the waiting room and 6 hours later I said f*ck it and went home. Canadian health care, folks. Best in the world.” He died the next day.”
https://reason.com/2024/12/13/aocs-justifications-of-violence/
Seven reasons why Americans pay more for health care than any other nation
https://www.yahoo.com/news/seven-reasons-why-americans-pay-100720536.html
What RFK Jr. can — and can’t — actually do as Trump’s health secretary
“There is a more realistic move Kennedy could take to address his concern about vaccine side effects: He could resuscitate the National Vaccine Program Office, which monitored vaccine safety with particular rigor but was shuttered under the first Trump presidency.”
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“The US began fluoridating drinking water in 1945. An estimated 209 million Americans now drink tap water that contains added fluoride. The intervention is considered a historic public health win: It dramatically reduces tooth decay in children and also reduces tooth loss in adults.”
https://www.vox.com/health/385541/rfk-jr-trump-hhs-vaccines-fluoride
The stunning success of vaccines in America, in one chart
“Measles, mumps, and polio are supposed to be diseases of the past. In the early to mid-20th century, scientists developed vaccines that effectively eliminated the risk of anyone getting sick or dying from illnesses that had killed millions over millennia of human history.
Vaccines, alongside sanitized water and antibiotics, have marked the epoch of modern medicine. The US was at the cutting edge of eliminating these diseases, which helped propel life expectancy and economic growth in the postwar era.”
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“As long-accepted, lifesaving public health measures increasingly become politically polarized, routine vaccination rates are rapidly declining in much of the US. In the 2019–2020 school year, three states had less than 90 percent of K–12 students vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. By the 2023–2024 school year, 14 states had fallen below that threshold. The number of states with more than 95 percent of schoolchildren vaccinated — the preferred level of coverage to prevent outbreaks — dropped from 20 to 11 during that same period.
It is no surprise then that the number of US measles cases more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2024. Nobody has died of measles in the US since 2015, but if vaccination rates continue to decline, this highly contagious disease (one person can infect more than a dozen other people) will spread with increasing ease, which raises the risk that American kids could die.
We know how to prevent that. We’ve had remarkably safe, effective shots for decades. We just need to keep using them.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/386215/trump-rfk-jr-vaccines-health-measles-chart
One More Damned Time: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism
“Lutnick is right that autism diagnoses have risen substantially. If not childhood vaccinations, what accounts for this increase? First, greater awareness means that many people with autism spectrum disorder who in the past would have been missed by clinicians are now being identified. However, a 2020 review article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that changes in diagnostic criteria “has been accompanied by a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the last 30 years, reaching a current prevalence of more than 2% in the United States.” This contributes to the likelihood of over-diagnosis and a shift toward autism diagnoses in place of other mental health conditions.”
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“the liability system was unable to properly balance the public benefits of vaccines against their private harms. The result of this imbalance was killing off vaccine innovation and production. So Congress a year later chose to change the liability system with respect to vaccines in 1986 with the adoption of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which provides compensation to people who are injured by certain vaccines.
And the benefits of vaccines are enormous. A 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review finds that “among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.””
https://reason.com/2024/11/01/one-more-damned-time-vaccines-do-not-cause-autism/
Doctor Fighting To Break Certificate of Need Barrier in North Carolina
“Certificate of need (CON) laws exist in various forms in 38 states and Washington, D.C. The stated goal of such laws is to keep costs down by preventing overinvestment in any single market. If regulators decide an area already has enough of any type of service, they can block new construction.
As a result, nobody in North Carolina can open or expand certain medical facilities without these regulators’ permission. Even purchasing an MRI scanner without their approval can be illegal. These restrictions prohibit Singleton from using his own clinic in New Bern for most of the surgeries he performs. He must drive two miles up the road to a competitor’s office, as it is owned by a major health care player. This unnecessary red tape increases costs and decreases scheduling options, and patients suffer.
Singleton has battled this scheme since he set up his clinic in 2024. Frustrated by a wall of bureaucracy and lack of progress, he sued in 2020 with representation from our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice.
Getting to trial has not been easy. Wake County Superior Court tossed out his case in 2021 without discovery or witness testimony, and the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld that decision in 2022. The state Supreme Court ruling simply allows Singleton to go back and try again.
Singleton is not alone in this struggle. The Iowa ophthalmologist Lee Birchansky fought for more than 20 years before state regulators relented and gave him permission to perform surgeries at his own clinic. In 2016, Virginia fended off a CON lawsuit from pulmonologist Mark Baumel and radiologist Mark Monteferrante. Kentucky spiked a home health care service that entrepreneur Dipendra Tiwari tried to launch in 2019. Connecticut blocked a cancer treatment center in 2022, clearing the way for political insiders to proceed unimpeded with their own cancer treatment center 45 miles east. None of these cases involved health or safety concerns.
CON laws work great for existing providers, who do not have to worry about rivals setting up shop and attracting patients with superior service. This also means existing providers can also take their doctors and nurses for granted, as CON laws keep rivals far away, limiting their ability to poach talent.
California, Texas, and 10 other states operate without CON laws. None of these states has experienced any measurable harm. In fact, multiple studies show benefits. For example, Matthew Mitchell, a researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, says states that got rid of their CON laws have more hospitals and surgery centers per capita, along with more hospital beds, dialysis clinics, and hospice care facilities.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/29/doctor-fighting-to-break-certificate-of-need-barrier-in-north-carolina/
Luigi Mangione suffered from spondylolisthesis, a back condition. Experts say it can cause ‘massive’ pain.
“Mangione never mentioned being covered by or angry with United Healthcare specifically in any social media, according to multiple reports. But Samadani, who treats patients with spondylolisthesis, notes that many insurers require patients to undergo six to 12 weeks of physical therapy before the companies will agree to cover surgery or even imaging to diagnose the condition. And for someone with severe spondylolisthesis, physical therapy can be “excruciating” and won’t necessarily help, she adds. “It’s sort of like a torture, a mandatory torture imposed by the insurance company,” Samadani says.
And that’s if they are treated at all. Samadani says she’s seen multiple young patients who were initially turned away by doctors who didn’t believe they could have chronic back pain. “In the case of this particular kid, my guess is that he was in massive pain,” she says.”
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/luigi-mangione-suffered-from-spondylolisthesis-a-back-condition-experts-say-it-can-cause-massive-pain-002349224.html
Luigi Mangione’s Pal Reveals Rapid Unraveling Came After Carefree Vacation
“Luigi Mangione appeared carefree while enjoying a trip across Asia just months before he allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, suggesting he suffered a rapid unraveling in the lead-up to the brazen slaying.
One of a pair of friends who were vacationing across Asia told TMZ that they met 26-year-old Mangione by chance at a Muay Thai fight in Krabi, Thailand in April of this year. The trio quickly hit it off and decided to travel together.
After exploring Krabi together, the group parted ways when Mangione went to Phuket, while the pair of friends visited Malaysia. But they later reconnected for a road trip across Thailand, stopping off in Khao Sok and Bangkok, according to TMZ.
All the while, the source told TMZ, the software engineer did not show any signs of being a cold-blooded killer—in fact, he seemed like the typical young man enjoying the chance to explore a different country.
The source’s characterization of Mangione as a “super friendly, communicative, and open” person aligns with other accounts from people who had encountered the Ivy League graduate before he entered the public eye this week.”
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“There have been some signs, though, that in the months leading up to the shooting Mangione took a dark turn. His social media presence has revealed a suite of health struggles—as well as a penchant for radical political and social texts, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto.
Loved ones had expressed concern about Mangione on social media days before the murder, and The New York Post reported that his mother filed a missing-persons report for him last month.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/luigi-mangione-pal-reveals-rapid-172400493.html