An unsuspecting mother was accused by hospital staff taking part in a security exercise of stealing a baby from a ward as she left the building with her new daughter.

Clare Bowker, 37, was confronted by staff as she got into her car outside Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands [U.K.]. She was asked to accompany them to the maternity unit with Hannah, her seven-week-old baby, and her other daughter Holly, then four, where she was told a baby had been snatched. Mrs Bowker was questioned by police and her bag searched to verify her identity.
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A distressed Mrs Bowker was allowed to leave the hospital after 40 minutes, still believing the situation was real.
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The Good Hope Hospital Trust has agreed to pay her undisclosed compensation, believed to be a five-figure sum, to cover her suffering and loss of earnings.

Apparently, there has been a steady, driving force from Democratic circles (Hi Pete Stark!) over the years to restrict the existence of physician owned facilities. The assumption is that when doctors own a hospital, they will order more unnecessary tests and procedures because there exists a financial incentive to do so.
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I'm not naive enough to think this doesn't happen. Doing the right thing for the patient always takes precedence over any financial gain. But at the same time, isn't this a market driven, capitalistic country?
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I just think the Pete Starks of Washington have it in for us. Once again, it's an attempt to demonize physicians as profiteers looking to wring everything they can out of the system.

Contrast that with law firms, which are forbidden by law and ethics codes from allowing anyone but a lawyer from having an equity stake in a law practice [purportedly to avoid any conflict between "serving the interest of the client" and "serving the interest of the owners"].

Over the last few decades, one of the biggest trends in health care has been entrepreneurial doctors' efforts to strip out the most profitable business from general hospitals.
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When cardiac or orthopedics departments migrate away from the general hospital, it is not easy to find alternative funding for vital public services.
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This "cream-skimming" recalls the classic debate about whether insurers should be allowed to "cherrypick" the healthiest consumers as a business model. This worry is at the heart of various Congressional, administrative, and state moratoria on Medicare reimbursements for the procedures done at specialty hospitals.

Savings from reduced damages awarded by juries and fewer lawsuits filed against large businesses since the mid-'90s has created a climate in which medical and insurance companies can expand, the study states. Across Texas, the reforms have resulted in nearly $113 billion in additional annual spending, almost 500,000 new jobs and $2.6 billion a year in increased state budget resources.

Um, no.

This is what economists call the Broken Window Fallacy.

You are only seeing the macroeconomic benefits achieved (for insurance companies and defendants). You are not seeing the macroeconomic benefits foregone (for affected plaintiffs).

The additional money meritorious plaintiffs would have received but for tort reform would also have "stimulated the economy" in one form or another.

The net effects may tilt one way or the other -- there's little way to know for sure. But evaluating a policy -- any policy -- based only on the gross effects ("what is seen") while ignoring the offsets ("what is not seen") is an fundamental logical error.

Unfortunately, it is a fundamental logical error that permeates almost every aspect of American factional politics -- including health care policy generally and tort reform specifically.

Shirley Giarde of Walla Walla, Wash., was not prepared when her husband, Raymond, suddenly developed congestive heart failure last year and needed a pacemaker and defibrillator. Because his job did not provide health benefits, she has covered them both through a policy for the self-employed, which she obtained as the proprietor of a bridal and formal-wear store, the Purple Parasol.

But when Raymond had his medical problems, Ms. Giarde discovered that her insurance would cover only $22,000, leaving them with about $100,000 in unpaid hospital bills.

Even though the hospital agreed to reduce that debt to about $50,000, Ms. Giarde is still struggling to pay it — in part because the poor economy has meant slumping sales at the Purple Parasol. Her husband, now disabled and unable to work, will not qualify for Medicare for another year, and she cannot afford the $758 a month it would cost to enroll him in a state-run insurance plan for individuals who cannot find private insurance.

Perhaps the problem isn't so much with health insurance as with Ms. Giarde's "Purple Parasol" business model. If her business can't produce enough income for her to pay her bills, then she's in the wrong business.

Debate a "right to health care" all you like, but don't claim that there is a right to run an unprofitable, sub-mediocre business and then get taxpayer-extracted health insurance on top of that.

P.S. What exactly was the back story of Mr. Giarde taking a job with no health benefits in the first place? Because I have no doubt that there was in fact a back story.

McCain's prescription would seek to lure workers away from their company health plans with a $5,000 family tax credit and a promise that, left to their own devices, they would be able to find cheaper insurance that is more tailored to their health-care needs and not tied to a particular job.

Under McCain's plan, $3.6 trillion worth of tax breaks over a decade that would have gone to businesses for coverage of their employees would be redirected to individuals, regardless of whether they are covered by a company plan.
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McCain's plan is aimed primarily at giving individuals the power to make health-care decisions by granting the same tax breaks for insurance whether workers get a policy from an employer or on their own. Aides call it a "radical" rethinking of health care that would drive costs down and give people more choice.

Under current law, the federal government gives a tax benefit when employers provide health-insurance coverage to American workers and their families. ... Many workers are perfectly content with this arrangement, and under my reform plan they would be able to keep that coverage. Their employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged.

But for every American who wanted it, another option would be available: Every year, they would receive a tax credit directly, with the same cash value of the credits for employees in big companies, in a small business, or self-employed. You simply choose the insurance provider that suits you best.

We need to adopt new treatment programs and financial incentives to adopt "health habits" for those with the most common conditions such as diabetes and obesity that will improve their quality of life and reduce the costs of their treatment.

Watch your diet, walk thirty or so minutes a day, and take a few other simple precautions, and you won't have to worry about these afflictions.

With health reform at the forefront of the national campaign, some charge that proposals to restructure our health care system represent dangerous steps moving the country towards government-run health care and socialized medicine. Similar rhetoric was heard last fall when President Bush vetoed legislation reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

In terms of direct spending, federal subsidies for health care and coverage, provided through Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs, are projected to equal $829 billion in FY 2008. Medicaid and Medicare cover 42.7 million and 42.4 million people, respectively, with some poor seniors and people with disabilities receiving coverage from both programs. The government also provides publicly funded health care to almost 9 million current and former federal employees and dependents through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program; 3.7 million veterans who receive health care through the VA; and the country's active-duty soldiers and their dependents. Only 5 percent of the insured population in the United States does not receive some kind of government subsidy, either directly or through a tax benefit. These government expenditures involve sizeable transfers of income, generally from higher-income to lower-income individuals, particularly in the case of the general revenues used to finance Medicare and Medicaid.

Millions of baby boomers are about to enter a health care system for seniors that not only isn't ready for them, but may even discourage them from getting quality care.
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Medicare may even hinder seniors from getting the best care because of its low reimbursement rates, a focus on treating short-term health problems rather than managing chronic conditions and lack of coverage for preventive services or for health care providers' time spent collaborating with a patient's other providers.

The American Medical Association responded that seniors' access to Medicare in coming years "is threatened by looming Medicare physician payment cuts."

A 101-year-old Briton may be kicked out of New Zealand after immigration bosses rejected his plea to spend his final years living with his son, his only living relative.

Despite savings of £145,000 and a £33,000 a year pension, the widower may have to pack his bags after being told his circumstances "do not make him special." A retired research chemist whose son is a university professor, the man, who has not been named, had pleaded to stay in New Zealand after arriving in 2006.
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But although the unnamed man told the country's Residence Review Board that he ... is hale and hearty, officials have been unmoved by his plight fearing he may be a drain on health resources.

"Presumably his son has visited him in that time and there is no evidence as to why his son could not continue to do this in the future."

Any food establishment to which this section applies shall not be allowed to serve food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the State Department of Health after consultation with the Mississippi Council on Obesity Prevention and Management established under Section 41-101-1 or its successor. The State Department of Health shall prepare written materials that describe and explain the criteria for determining whether a person is obese, and shall provide those materials to all food establishments to which this section applies. A food establishment shall be entitled to rely on the criteria for obesity in those written materials when determining whether or not it is allowed to serve food to any person.

He said that while, regrettably, he doesn't believe his bill will pass, this is serious. He wrote it, he said, because of the "urgency of the obesity crisis and need for government action." He hopes it will "call attention to the serious problem of obesity and what it is costing the Medicare system."

The notion that "other people pay for obesity" is totally circular and obnoxious. Keep the true nature of this argument in perspective: The nanny-state central planners decide to provide public health care benefits, of whatever flavor, which are by definition paid for with public money (i.e., taxpayer money). They then turn around and tell those very same taxpayers that, since it's "the public's" money and not theirs, the government can therefore impose controls on the public's behavior to compensate for the resulting mismatch -- that the government itself created! -- between the "public" that pays for the benefits and the "public" that receives them.

The government creates the moral hazard in the first place, then turns around and decries it -- all the while escalating the tax-and-regulate, tax-and-subsidize, tax-and-ban, tax-and-control spiral and all the while defending the practice with Orwellian economic double-talk.

The spending binge is rooted in the nation's technophilia: medical technology accounts for as much as half the growth in health care spending. Although this trend has benefited everyone — witness the near halving of cardiac arrest deaths from 1980 to 2000 — not all those added dollars have been as well spent as drug and device manufacturers would have us believe. Our love affair with next-generation imaging machines, implantable devices and the like has blinded us to the reality that scant evidence often exists for whether something novel works any better than existing equipment, procedures or chemicals.

For [evidence-based medicine] to work as it should will require that a new president follow through with adequate funding, an assurance that Medicare (and, as a consequence, other insurers) will consider seriously its findings and, perhaps most important, a Federal Reserve-like independence from the momentary whims of the political establishment.

Overworked nurses have been ordered to stop their work five times a day — and move Muslim patients' beds to face towards Mecca.

The procedure is creating turmoil among staff on NHS wards already struggling through a lack of beds.
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One nurse at Dewsbury said: "It would be easier to create Muslim-only wards with every bed facing Mecca. Some people might think it is not that big a deal but we have a huge Muslim population in Dewsbury. If we are having to turn dozens of beds to face Mecca five times a day, plus provide running water for them to wash before and after prayers, it is bound to impact on the essential medical service we are supposed to be providing."

But we also are keen to accommodate all faiths, for example if a patient is Roman Catholic then we would try and ensure they can receive Holy Communion.

Under Arizona law, all superior court cases with less than $65,000 at stake go to arbitration. In Maricopa County, the arbitrators are drawn from a pool of local lawyers who get paid $75 a day. That's chump change for lawyers, many of whom would scoff at $75 an hour.

But the arbitration program is mandatory. All County attorneys with at least five years of experience must serve at least two days per year, if asked. [Mark] Scheehle was asked three times in two years. The third time, he refused, and the County fined him $900. So Scheehle sued, challenging the arbitration service as an unconstitutional taking and a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. ... But ultimately, the Ninth Circuit concludes that the Maricopa County program survives Scheehle's constitutional claims.

To hear the Bush administration tell it, expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program would entice hordes of families to drop their private coverage and put their children on the public dole. As the Health and Human Services secretary, Michael Leavitt, argued in a recent television appearance, states that cover middle-income children as well as the poor are essentially telling people to "cancel your private insurance and we'll have the government pay for it."

"So I ask: Would Jesus have vetoed the SCHIP bill?"

Is he suggesting that Jesus was a tax collector? Because I can think of a Bible passage or two that would suggest otherwise.

There is no rational basis to invoke any government entitlement program, or any compulsory tax that finances one, as "proper Christian policy."

"Doing good works" is not the moral equivalent of "forcing your neighbor to pay for them." No true Christian has difficulty with this basic concept.

It is mind-boggling to me to think that there are self-professed "Christians" who consider it a "Christian" virtue to force other people to be "Christian." It's offensive when the conservative theocrats do it, and it's no less offensive when liberal theocrats do it.

The conservative theocrats put "God" on the money in our wallets. The liberal theocrats now want to put "God" on the tax bill that pulls the money out of our wallets. While both insolently claim the moral high ground.

Bottom Line: There is no cognizable difference between Shavar Jeffries and James Dobson.

A pox on both their churches.

The U.S. health-care system has two distinct parts — financing and delivery. The financing system is how we pay for health-care services. It is composed of employer-based insurance, the individual insurance market, Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, the veterans health system and other programs. Today, the private part — employer-based coverage and individual insurance — accounts for just under 55 percent of all payments for health care, while government contributes about 45 percent.

The delivery system consists of about 850,000 doctors, 5,000 acute-care hospitals, 39,000 pharmacies and 8,100 home health agencies, as well as hospices, surgical centers, radiological centers, laboratories and other outlets that provide the actual health-care services Americans need.

Properly speaking, socialism is when the state owns or controls the means of production. Thus "socialized medicine" is when the doctors are state employees; when the hospitals, drugstores, home health agencies and other facilities are owned and controlled by the government.

The top-earning 25 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $62,068) earned 67.5 percent of the nation's income, but they paid more than four out of every five dollars collected by the federal income tax (86 percent). The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $364,657) earned approximately 21.2 percent of the nation's income (as defined by AGI), yet paid 39.4 percent of all federal income taxes. That means the top 1 percent of tax returns paid about the same amount of federal individual income taxes as the bottom 95 percent of tax returns.

From other IRS data, we can see that 90.6 million of the tax returns came from people who paid taxes into the Treasury. That leaves 42 million tax returns filed by people with positive AGI who used exemptions, deductions and tax credits to completely wipe out their federal income tax liability.

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Beyond question, there are parents in Fairfax and Montgomery who could easily afford to send their kids to private schools but who send them nonetheless to the excellent public schools in their neighborhoods They thus increase government spending and withhold revenue from the private-school industry, but I've never heard anyone complain about that. A free public education is a right, or, if you prefer, an entitlement in America, because the nation long ago decided that an educated population is a national good.

You might think that the same logic would apply to providing children with health care, that the gains to the nation from having a healthy population would outweigh those of bolstering private health insurance companies in the name of laissez-faire ideology. According to President Bush and the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, though, you'd be sadly mistaken. Bush fears that expanding health care for children from uninsured families who can't afford to buy insurance on their own (it costs about $11,000 a year for a family of four) would enable some families, as he put it at a news conference last month, collectively to "move millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care."

Lori and Steven Siravo earn $56,000 a year and say they can't afford health insurance.

They consider themselves lucky to live in New Jersey, where the family's income isn't too high to qualify their 16-year-old daughter, Carlie, for U.S. government-subsidized coverage under the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
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Steven, 49, drives a Chevrolet Caprice Classic that's almost 20 years old, and she drives a 5-year-old Chevy Monte Carlo. The above-ground pool out back is 17 years old, bought when "we had money" before Carlie was born, Lori said.

The one luxury is a full-size pinball machine Steven bought for his wife on her 40th birthday.

The family's monthly bills consume most of their take-home income. Pulling out her checkbook, Lori said there's the mortgage ($1,500), utilities ($743), phones and Internet service ($200), car insurance and gasoline ($205), property taxes ($230), basic cable television ($48), food ($600) and credit-card payments ($325) on an outstanding $11,000 balance. That's $46,212 a year, not including clothes, school books and extra-curricular activities for Carlie.
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There's also $352 a month on a home-equity loan the Siravos took out to send Carlie to a private Catholic high school.

The twelve pending appropriations bills amount to more than $15,000 in spending per U.S. family. At this late date, Congress is likely to pass these important bills hurriedly and without careful consideration, perhaps in an omnibus package.

Defense - Costs: $4,625.93

Labor/HHS/Education - Costs: $5,861.36

There is a fundamental and self-apparent difference between Medicaid and universal health care: Medicaid is not universal — it is welfare. It is those who don't benefit from it paying for those who do. So there is of course a basis — perhaps a heartless one, but a basis nonetheless — for attaching strings to Medicaid eligibility that do not carry over to bona fide universal health care (including Medicare).

Socialized medicine (including Medicare) is different from Medicaid: it is taxing people to fund a compulsory universal scheme, then saying that because the health care is "free" (!), the government can attach strings on the very people who (involuntarily) paid for the coverage in the first place.

So the government takes my money, and then demands that I conform to its (i.e., politicians' and bureaucrats') standards of "correct" lifestyle choices in order to get my money back. All in the name of establishing a "compassionate" and "enlightened" paradigm.

This is what I have previously dubbed "The Krugman Lie."