I remember having a discussion with a friend once about the prudence of a municipality charging a nominal fee (~$1) for each bag of garbage it picked up. I argued in favour of the policy as I thought it would discourage waste and, I argued, my friend should also support it based on his support for the principles of free market economics. Surely a $ ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I went in to work late because I wanted to watch the SCOTUS decision coming in live. What a complete clusterfuck that was.  CNN blaring that the mandate was struck down, then I checked Drudge who said the same thing. I went over to Globe and Mail and it was saying that it had been upheld. WTF? I went to Twitter and started seeing the ( Read more... )

The SCOTUS is hearing objections to the Affordable Care Act and people are making a big deal of the fact that they're going to listen to six whole hours of oral arguments! OTOH, the Michael Rafferty (the scumbucket accused of killing Tori Stafford)  trial ( Read more... )

What do you call a $1300/day hospital bed in Canada? A scandal. What do you call it in the US? A bargain! (from my tweet)

There's a reason that individual mandates were a conservative idea in the first place. In theory they can bring down costs and keeps the "free market" in play. Now that conservatives have suddenly decided to change their mind and hope they're declared unconstitutional, I'd love to hear any other clever ideas they have for bringing down costs while ( Read more... )

Earlier this month a federal judge, Laurence Silberman, ruled in favour of the Obama health reform law. Notable here, though, was that one of the judges, in a 2-1 decision, was a Republican (Reagan) appointee and a fairly well known as a staunch conservative. He makes the point that health care is somewhat unique in terms of things bought and sold ( Read more... )

George Carlin's 2005 classic on the American Dream ("you have to be asleep to believe it") has been making the rounds again recently. In it he rails against the fact that the country and the politicians are bought and sold by the big corporations. It's a (very depressing) comedy routine so his case is overstated, or at the very least I'd like to ( Read more... )

The last time I went to the doctor's office they were loudly informing someone that they did not accept Medicaid and that he'd have to go somewhere else if he wanted his visit covered. Today, I got to hear (i.e., couldn't avoid hearing) a (middle aged) woman explaining to an administrator that she'd brought her (elderly) mother in to help her pay ( Read more... )

Some hippie liberal types will point to a story like this as evidence of the severity of the crisis in the US healthcare system:  An American robs a bank of $1, just for free health care in jail. Bullpucky, it's evidence that US prisons should stop treating sick people.

San Francisco is going to put a circumcision ban on the ballot in November.  Unlike other recent cases of gov't meddling in San Francisco, e.g., the "happy meal" restrictions, I think this is a sensible law to consider. It's the kind of situation in which the government really can play a useful protective role in a potentially physically abusive ( Read more... )