Category Archives: Health

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary

James Gandolfini’s Heart

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Was he really a walking time bomb?

Maybe. He certainly sounded like a good candidate, given his weight, though we don’t really know what his other stats were, probably for privacy reasons. I think that the doctor quoted is just speculating, and his credibility went down with me when I read this:

A holiday heart attack is a surprisingly common phenomenon, said Dr. Crandall, chief of the cardiac transplant program at the world-renowned Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic.

“Heart attacks often manifest on holidays when you’re not eating the normal meals,” he said. “You eat excessively, indulging in high fatty foods, and this causes the blood to thicken. The result is a blood clot, which can rupture, resulting in the blockage of blood flow to the heart, causing heart attack and sudden death.”

Do “high fatty foods” really “cause the blood to thicken”? Is there any actual empirical evidence for this? Or is it just nutritionally ignorant lipophobia?

Culinary, Health, Science And Society

High Blood Pressure

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So I’m looking at the reviews of this book over at Amazon, and while it gets lots of praise, there’s a very big omission — no one says that it actually worked for them. If it does, I’ll pick up a copy, but that’s my primary criteriaon — does it work? Not what her credentials are.

In my case, I don’t eat bananas because I think they’re too starchy. There are other ways of getting potassium (one thing I’ve done is to not only cut way back on salt, but to only use sea salt, which also provides other salts than just sodium chloride).

[Update a while later]

Also, I’m not sure there’s any evidence that exercise helps.

Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Health-Care Propaganda

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Of the “non-profit” type (though I think plenty of people are profiting):

How do they get away with it? The Obama picture looks like something from a totalitarian cult of personality, but now that he is safely re-elected, he is not a candidate for office. Neither, it turns out, is Speaker Perez, who is currently serving his third term in the Assembly, is prohibited by California law from seeking another term, and has not launched a campaign for another office in 2014. Further, the brochure makes no reference to any specific legislation, only to the general goal of providing “everyone” with “access” to “affordable health care.”

This column does not think the Internal Revenue Service should take a punitive approach to the endowment’s propagandizing for semi-socialized medicine. (Similarly, our colleagues on The Wall Street Journal editorial page were critical of the IRS’s 2004 investigation of the NAACP.)

But it does underscore why the IRS’s abuse of grassroots conservative groups is so galling. ObamaCare was enacted in 2010 against overwhelming public opposition. This energized the Tea Party, which helped turn the 2010 elections into a referendum in which ObamaCare was resoundingly defeated.

Obama’s re-election was another referendum on ObamaCare. That one he narrowly won–but as it turns out, the IRS was cheating on his behalf. The California Endowment’s pro-ObamaCare propaganda may be unobjectionable in itself, but the government’s systematic suppression of dissent lends another layer of illegitimacy to this monstrous law.

I’m starting to take the view that this entire administration is illegitimate.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Health Insurance

66 Comments

Why doctors are bailing out:

As the open enrollment period for 2014 approaches, premiums on individual plans in the Obamacare exchanges for California will double, and will increase 80 percent or more in Ohio. At the end of its first decade in force, the ACA will leave more than 30 million Americans without insurance – the driving issue behind health-care reform for at least the last twenty years.

The problem with all of the health-care industry reforms has been that precise goal: expanding insurance. The widespread use of comprehensive insurance policies insulates end users in the system from price signals, especially on routine care. That eliminates competition on price as insurers use their economic weight to pre-negotiate pricing on every kind of service and product under their coverage, from blood tests to setting broken bones. Providers locked into a specific schedule of reimbursements have no reason to innovate to either lower costs or increase value, and end up having to spend money and time dealing with insurance companies for delayed payments rather than focusing on the patients seeking treatment in their clinics.

Ironically, the multiplication of mandates and other regulations in the ACA on both private insurers and government-run programs like Medicare and Medicaid have more doctors opting out of the third-party-payer system altogether. Earlier this week, CNN Money reported on the migration to cash-only services among health-care providers, driven by poor reimbursements, increasing regulation, and high overhead.

ObamaCare has taken a terrible system and made it much worse.