The latest feminist volley, “Finding balance requires changing the lives of men,” from Professors Joan C. Williams and Anne-Marie Slaughter, calls to mind nothing so much as “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant short story projecting to its logical conclusion what the demand for strict equality would result in: everyone equally handicapped. Thus, as employers...
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Time and again, President Obama has told us how he intends to solve our healthcare problems: spend money on pilot programs and other experiments, find out what works, and then copy it. He’s also repeatedly said the same thing about education. The only difference: In education, we’ve already been following this approach with no...
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Although we often associate the term entrepreneur with profit seeking, the healthcare field is teeming with innovators who are largely motivated by altruism. As I wrote in my new book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, take Dr. Jeffrey Brenner of Camden, New Jersey.* In any other field, Brenner would be a millionaire, but because...
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In complex systems, there are always unmet needs and problems to be solved. The more dysfunctional the system, the more numerous are the unmet needs and the more severe are the problems. In other sectors, needs to be met and problems to be solved are the fertile ground from which entrepreneurs emerge. Where is...
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There is no topic in healthcare that is more misunderstood than what other countries are doing. At both ends of the political spectrum, the mistake is the same: the belief that other healthcare systems are radically different from our own. They aren’t. Take the United States and Canada. I would say that the healthcare...
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“Con game,” of course, is slang for “Confidence trick,” which Wikipedia describes as: Confidence tricks exploit typical human characteristics such as greed, dishonesty, vanity, honesty, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, desperation and naïveté. As such, there is no consistent profile of a confidence trick victim; the common factor is simply that the victim relies on the...
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In 1980, Census Bureau statistics showed that less than 1 percent of the population had been denied health insurance because of a health condition. Moreover, this was a period of time when there were few legislative remedies. Even so, this 1 percent was a politically vocal group and, in many cases, they evoked understandable...
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Do you care whether I have health insurance? If you do care, do you also care if I have other kinds of insurance? While you’re thinking about the initial question, here are a few follow-up questions: Do you care whether I have life insurance? What about disability insurance? Homeowner’s insurance? Auto casualty insurance? Auto...
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Over the years, I have heard many people say that the government’s adoption of a laissez-faire stance during a business recession or depression amounts to “do-nothing government”—the unstated assumption always being that it is better for the government to “do something” than to do nothing. Recommending such a hands-off stance is often described as...
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There have been a number of claims that lack of insurance is life threatening. The most recent and well known is an Institute of Medicine (IOM) study claiming that 18,000 people die every year because they do not have health insurance.[1] Using a similar methodology, a study for the Physicians for a National Health...
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