Science, Technology & Health: June 2009 Archives
President Obama would make sure his family got the "best care" rather than settle for the public health care plan he's pushing.
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it's not provided by insurance.Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn't seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he's proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if "it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.
So... it's good enough for us, but not for his family?
(HT: Ed Morrissey.)
This can't end well.
I can think of two modest health care reforms that I could support despite being a libertarian-leaning conservative. The first is health care vouchers, as described by Larry Kudlow.
According the U.S. Census Bureau, we don’t have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured. When you take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who chose not to sign up, that removes roughly 20 million people. Then take out about 10 million more who are not U.S. citizens, and 11 million who are eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but have not signed up for some reason.So that really leaves only 10 million to 15 million people who are truly long-term uninsured.
Yes, they need help. And yes, I would like to give it to them. But not with mandatory coverage, or new government-backed insurance plans, or massive tax increases. And certainly not with the Canadian-European-style nationalization that has always been the true goal of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats.
Instead, we can give the truly uninsured vouchers or debit cards that will allow for choice and coverage, and even health savings accounts for retirement wealth. According to expert Betsy McCaughey, instead of several trillion dollars and socialized medicine, this voucher approach would cost only about $25 billion a year.
$25 billion is still a lot of money. I love how cheap it sounds though, now that we've grown used to talking in trillions over the past few months.
The second idea is universal catastrophic coverage: basically a taxpayer-funded plan with a very high annual deductible, say $25,000. It is very unfortunate for a family to be bankrupted by the need for a major organ transplant or cancer, but these expenses are relatively rare. My intuition tells me that universal catastrophic coverage would cost tens of billions rather than trillions... I'm sure someone has run the numbers for this sort of plan, can anyone find them?
Despite widespread belief, billions of dollars spent over the course of a decade have demonstrated that alternative medicines don't have any beneficial effects.
Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.
As for therapies, acupuncture has been shown to help certain conditions, and yoga, massage, meditation and other relaxation methods may relieve symptoms like pain, anxiety and fatigue.
So variations on physical therapy can be effective in certain circumstances, but herbs and alternative "medicines" are nothing more than superstition.
Missouri-based Organovo is "printing" tissues and organ-like structures:
The "ink" in the bioprinting process employed by Organovo is composed of spheres packed with tens of thousands of human cells. These spheres are assembled or "printed" on sheets of organic biopaper. By precisely placing the cells with the bioprinter, and providing them with the proper natural developmental cues, they do exactly what they do in nature: they self assemble into fully formed, functional tissue.The unique science blends biophysics and cell biology with computer aided design and high precision deposition to recreate the micro-architecture of the most complex human tissue. Organovo is currently developing blood vessels and intends to use the same technology to create organs or bio-constructs that reproduce organ function.
Dr. Forgacs envisions fully implantable organs printed from a patient's own cells. "You give us your cells: we grow them, we print them, the structure forms and we are ready to go," he says. "I am pretty sure that full organs will be on the market [one day]." These organs may not look like our organs but they will function just like the real thing.
