Science, Technology & Health: November 2008 Archives
Physician Paul Hsieh has written a great op-ed explaining how the lessons of the financial crisis should be applied to calls for universal health care.
When Obama's proposed national system inevitably collapses under the weight of market inefficiency and bureaucratic overhead, this will merely pave the way to fully socialized single-payer health care. Health care spending now comprises one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Forcing taxpayers to pay for everyone's medical expenses would make the $700 billion Wall Street bailout look like pocket change in comparison. ...The fundamental problem with "universal health care" is the mistaken premise that health care is a "right." Rights are freedoms of actions (such as the right to free speech), not automatic claims on goods and services that must be produced by others.
Individuals are legitimately entitled to health care that they purchase with their own money, are promised by prior contractual agreements, or are given to them via voluntary charity.
Attempting to guarantee an alleged "right" to health care must necessarily violate someone's actual rights - the rights of those compelled to pay for it. The ultimate victims will again be the taxpayers, just as they were the ultimate victims of the Wall Street bailout.
Hsieh has been a consistent voice of sanity on this issue, and I hope other medical professionals are paying attention.
Here's a nifty article outlining several cutting edge military research projects.
Here's an amazing story from Spain: a woman has been given a new windpipe that was grown in a lab from her own cells.
Four months later she was able to climb two flights of stairs, go dancing and look after her children – activities that had been impossible before the surgery. Ms Castillo has also crossed a second medical frontier by becoming the first person to receive a whole organ transplant without the need for powerful immunosuppressant drugs.Doctors overcame the problem of rejection by taking her own stem cells to grow the replacement organ, using a donor trachea (lower windpipe) to provide the mechanical framework. Blood tests have shown no sign of rejection months after the surgery was complete.
Speaking at a press conference in London yesterday, called to announce the results, Professor Martin Birchall, an ear, nose and throat surgeon from the University of Bristol who collaborated on the case, said: "This is just the beginning. I think it will completely transform the way we think about surgery.
"In 20 years' time the commonest surgical operations will be regenerative procedures to replace organs and tissues damaged by disease with autologous [self-grown] tissues and organs from the laboratory. We are on the verge of a new age in surgical care."
Faster please!
