The Binary Circumstance

This story sounds like it’s out of the Dark Ages. Once science gets married to religion or politics, it ceases to exist. This is yet another reason why I don’t want the government messing around in my health care, although it’s obviously already too late to stop that. They’ve been doing it for decades.

This article makes you wonder how many other possible cures they’ve suppressed.

From Alternet.org:

Most Americans don’t know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no major U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29, 2000.

The ominous part is that this isn’t the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice — lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.

The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out — unsuccessfully — to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”

Seattle’s Group Health Cooperative has been around for 60 years and offers many of the features that have been proposed as necessary for health care reform.

The Seattle Times reports on the cooperative and wonders if it could be a model for America’s health care in the future.

Yet even some of Group Health’s most ardent admirers warn that replicating the co-op would be difficult — and replicating it quickly practically impossible. Sixty-two years after its founding, Group Health remains one of just two major health cooperatives in the nation. The other is HealthPartners of Bloomington, Minn.

Creating health co-ops, after all, could involve building or assembling new organizations from scratch, including management, medical staff, clinics and customers.

And that “just doesn’t happen overnight,” Kreidler said. “Group Health has had 60 years” to gain 600,000 members.

What’s more, though Group Health is well-regarded for delivering cost-effective, quality care, it hasn’t avoided such problems as ever-rising premiums and periodic financial losses.

Still, even critics of the co-op option under discussion by Congress and the administration agree that Group Health’s approach to health care is worth emulating.

It hasn’t always been that way.

Founded in 1947 by maverick-minded physicians and supporters, Group Health was the first organization in the nation to offer both insurance coverage and comprehensive medical care. The integrated approach was so radical at the time that the King County Medical Society — derisively referring to the co-op as “Group Death” — denied membership to its physicians and blacklisted its patients.

Doctors have a history of trying to block alternative ways of delivering health care just as they did with chiropractors.

It will be important for any health care reform to insure that doctors have much more competition. A free market is the best way to achieve that.

From the New York Times via CNBC:

Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.

Drug industry lobbyists reacted with alarm this week to a House health care overhaul measure that would allow the government to negotiate drug prices and demand additional rebates from drug manufacturers.

Anybody out there who thinks we’re going to end up with a health care system like the one in Canada or some socialist country doesn’t understand how the U.S. government works. Our legislators are always looking for ways to take money from the taxpayers and hand it over to the special interests that put them in office.

There was a glimmer of hope earlier in the week when it was suggested that Medicare would be able to use its massive buying power to negotiate lower prices for drugs. But this article makes it clear that lobbyists from the drug companies agreed to give up a certain amount of money in exchange for being protected from anything that smacks of free-market competition.

I’m confident that they have calculated they can give a fixed price reduction in drugs because any government plan would cover more people than the current system. They would make up any “loss” by selling a lot more drugs.

I’m not opposed to profit in health care. When you take the profit out of a market there is no reason to sell anything in that market. If you take the profit out of being a real estate agent for example, why would anybody be a real estate agent? If you take the profit out of being a good doctor, who will be a doctor?

But there are plenty of markets that are highly competitive and also very profitable. Those who offer the highest quality products at the best price make the profits. That’s exactly what we need in health care.

If you want innovation and cheaper prices in health care, you need a free market like we’ve had for years in computers and telephones. That free market could include large non-profits that exist to cover catastrophic illness to prevent people from going into bankruptcy just to stay healthy.

There are two groups of people that I don’t understand very much: those who love to own guns and those who want to ban ownership of guns.

I got into a rather spirited discussion at a dinner party this past weekend where the other guests began expressing their shock that people can now have guns in national parks. The discussion progressed to the need to ban assault weapons.

Uniformity of belief always puts me on the defensive because so many human rights violations are committed in the name of it. I expressed my view that I felt people had the right to own guns, including assault weapons. I am a libertarian after all. I believe that individuals have an inviolable right of self-defense.

I was pounced on by most of the others at the party. Once guest called me on Monday to tell me I was “crazy.”

I’ve never owned a gun and rarely feel that I might have a need for one, except when I’m around people who clearly have the desire to force their will upon me at the point of a gun. At the end of the long arm of the law there is always a gun. If only the government of a country can have guns then the citizens of that country are left defenseless. So I and most libertarians believe the constitutional right to possess firearms must be protected, just like our right to free speech. Otherwise we become like North Korea. I’m sure no citizen there owns a legal weapon.

I recently wrote an entry based on a 60 Minutes segment about how the preception that liberals were going to pass more gun controls has caused many people to run out and buy guns and ammunition.

Whenever an individual is killed by somebody with a gun or anything else it is the greatest violation of their individual rights, it takes their life away from them. It’s not the owning of a gun that violates individual rights, it’s the wrongful use of the gun.

But the fact is that very few people are killed in this country every year by assault weapons, compared to those killed in alcohol-related automobile accidents (17,000+) or those killed by infections they pick up in hospitals (90,000+). I’ve heard numbers as high as 250,000/year for hospital-acquired infections. (See related article.)

Today we have two stories that caught my eye: A loner named George Sodini goes into an athletic club and kills three women and then himself with guns.

A man who sprayed bullets into a fitness class filled with women, killing three and then himself, apparently kept a Web page in which he wrote about years of rejection by women and an earlier plan for violence at the gym in which he said he “chickened out.”

Neighbors described 48-year-old George Sodini, who worked in a law firm’s finance department, as anti-social, and the Web page in his name showcased a resume setting forth his credentials as an unhappy loner. It listed his date of death - Aug. 4, 2009 - and his status of “Never married.”

He complained of not having a girlfriend since 1984, not having a date since May 2008 and not having sex for 19 years.

“Women just don’t like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one,” he wrote. The page ended with the words “Death Lives!

I’m sure the gun control advocates have added this tragedy to their list of reasons why guns should be banned.

But I wonder if they also took note of this story: A New York wrong-way car accident that killed eight was caused by a mother who was drunk and high on marijuana.

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) — A mother drank vodka and smoked marijuana while taking a vanload of children home from a weekend camping trip that ended in disaster when she went the wrong way on a highway and crashed into an SUV, killing eight people, police said Tuesday.

Diane Schuler, who died along with her 2-year-old daughter and three nieces in her red minivan, had more than 10 drinks of alcohol in her system and a high level of the main ingredient in marijuana, authorities said. A broken 1.75-liter bottle of Absolut vodka was found in her wrecked minivan, police said.

The revelations from the 36-year-old Long Island woman’s autopsy helped explain how the woman her family called “an accomplished working mother who always put her children before any other priorities” wound up driving the wrong way for nearly two miles on a suburban parkway before slamming into the SUV.

Most who advocate for more gun controls are liberals. Liberals generally don’t advocate that either pot or alcohol should be more controlled than they are now. They generally push for looser controls on pot, which is a position that I share. And nobody is pushing for tighter controls on the sale of cars when it is abundantly clear that many people are killed every year from the reckless use of cars.

Given the tiny role that assault weapons play in the total number of deaths in our country each year, I am perplexed by the fixation that gun-control advocates have on them. There are much bigger problems in the world.

The problem is not guns or alcohol or pot and certainly not cars. The vast majority of people handle guns, alcohol, pot and cars responsibly and in a way that does no harm to others. The problem is when people use them in a way that violates the rights of others. At that point you have a crime.