Shaw's Eco-Logic

I do a bit of writing over at Coach Is Right, and recently posted this piece in the wake of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. The "friend" is none other than Ben Carson, one of the latest flavors-of-the-month to establishment conservatives.

Ever since the death of Robert Taft (1889-1953), the Right has done a pretty terrible job of picking its heroes. Most notorious, of course, is uber-phony William F. Buckley, who was in favor of big government...but just until we beat the Ruskies, then, presumably, we could call it all back. These days, the list of so-called RINOs is just about endless.

As a Black conservative, Carson gained an instant spotlight, but I take him to task over an op-ed piece he wrote for the supposedly conservative Washington Times.

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In Part three, we examine the far too sacrosanct matter of federally-funded medical research. As I suggest at the outset, "[T]he public should be mad as Hell."

Highlighted is the feckless world of cancer research, including some serious fraud conducted at Northwestern University. This case is just loads of fun since the whistle-blower, who was rewarded to the tune of $498,100, could likely be involved in the fraud herself.

To coin an old phrase, "You can't make this stuff up."

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No, this piece is not meant to wax nostalgic, but rather seeks to update the old BMT into the new health care meaning of that acronym: Bone marrow transplant.

BMT has come a long way since the first one was performed back in 1956, and through various registries, it has become easier to find potential donors. It's worth publicizing this sort of thing, in that some folks don't seem to realize that health care actually exists outside of Government land.

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I guess people like "forbidden" topics.  Who knew?   So we continue...

Part two of the series deals with the incredible amount of waste in health care:  $765 billion!  That figure represents more than 30 percent of the total health care expenditures.  Not surprisingly, Obamacare hardly addresses this issue.

Also covered is the intractable problem of health care outcome metrics, in a disease care paradigm.  You realize of course, that absent third-party payers, neither of these problems would even exist.  Just one more reason to hate what Medicare did to our once excellent health care system.

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This HND piece gives you an inside look at the various "stages" of Electronic Health Record (EHR) roll-out, that must be met by those vying for cash payments from the Feds—incentives for "meaningful use." These incentives are paid out by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and will amount to well over $20 billion.

If you think that kind of money would be better suited to paying for actual health care, you're not alone. Indeed, for all of its hundreds of billions, Obamacare does next to nothing to improve delivery of health care, but I digress. In typical Fed-speak style, three stages are described, and each of them contain so-called core objectives and menu objectives, which differ depending on whether the incentive candidate is a doctor's office or hospital.

Read the complete article.