NoCoPolitics.com

Health Care Truth 4

Sadly, this isn't even that surprising.

From the Telegraph: "Patients to lose weight before NHS treatment'

Patients could be required to stop smoking, take exercise or lose weight before they can be treated on the National Health Service, Gordon Brown has suggested.

In a New Year message to NHS staff, the Prime Minister indicates people may have to fulfil new "responsibilities" in order to establish their entitlement to care.

The next time someone advocates for a system like they have in England...

Health Care Truth 3

Checking in with Canada's "model" health care system, the CEI links to a report from the Fraser Institute.

The myth of nationalized health care is that it provides everyone with equal and inexpensive care. Alas, in the real world the only way medicine can be kept inexpensive is by denying people treatment. But it turns out that political rationing doesn’t even keep health care cheap.

From the Fraser Institute report:

Provincial health care spending continues to grow at an unsustainable rate and will consume more than half of all revenues in six of 10 Canadian provinces by 2035 unless changes are made, says a new study released today by independent research organization The Fraser Institute.

Health Care Truth 2

Let's check in with socialized medicine in England, shall we?

From the left-wing Guardian: "Babies dying due to NHS confusion"

Scores of premature babies may be dying unnecessarily across England because the NHS mismanaged a reform of neonatal units in 2003, parliament's spending watchdog reveals today.

Health ministers provided £73m over three years to link up hospital neonatal units in 23 regional networks that could provide specialist services to save premature and low birth weight babies.

But the National Audit Office finds that the Department of Health did not issue instructions for the units to be adequately staffed. As a result the service was overstretched. Its specialist nursing workforce was nearly 10% below strength. There were not enough cots to respond to every emergency and there was a lack of specialist 24-hour transport to move babies and mothers to other hospitals.

And in the Times:

Patients will find it easier to escape NHS queues and head across the Channel for treatment under an EU blueprint for European health tourism to be published tomorrow.

Going Too Far

I missed the local coverage of this story in November, but this is from the Los Angeles Times from December 26: "Cremation a hazard to the living?"

FORT COLLINS, COLO. -- Rick Allnutt has closed all but one section of his funeral home on the north end of town.

The chapel is dark and quiet, the reception hall bare. But in the bay out back, two side-by-side ovens rumble as the 1,650-degree heat blasts two corpses into bone and ash.

Allnutt has moved the rest of the business to another location and wants to move his crematory to a site near a cemetery in Larimer County, but he has reached a stalemate with health officials there. They are concerned about what they see as a potential health risk to the living -- mercury being released into the atmosphere from dental fillings of the cremated.

They want him to do something that may be unprecedented in this country: Install a filter on his crematory's smokestack or extract teeth of the deceased before cremation.

Allnutt refuses to do either, calling the first option too expensive and the second ghoulish.

"I'm not going to be the only one in the world who says I'll pull teeth from dead bodies," he said.

Here's FCN's coverage, back in November:

“The issue of mercury from cremation is an emerging one. There is a lot more attention and sensitivity toward it these days,” said Doug Ryan, environmental health planner for the Larimer County Department of Health and Environment. “Especially as we see the fish consumption advisories in Larimer County's lakes. We know that power plants and steel mills are the largest emitters in Colorado, but we also know that other sources are also impacting the lakes and bodies of water around Larimer County. And crematoria are a part of that.”

Colorado has included a crematoria initiative in its “Mercury-free Colorado Campaign.” In Colorado, where cremation is all the rage, crematoria emit a predicted 110 pounds of mercury a year. Comparably, the state's single largest mercury emitter churns out between 300 and 700 pounds a year.

At some point, someone is going to call these people on this sort of insanity.

Nanny Cities 2

We've gone from creeping nannyism to outright insanity.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants the city to slim down and he's going after stores that sell sugary soft drinks to finance the effort.

The mayor is proposing that grocery chains pay a fee if they sell sodas such as Coca-Cola or any other drinks that are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup.

If the plan is approved by the Board of Supervisors, the funds raised would help pay for a city initiative focusing on healthy eating and exercise.

Don't tell City Councilmember Ben Manvel.  Remember, there used to be two (perfectly legal) hookah bars in Fort Collins before he got on his health high horse.  Now there's only one.

Nanny Cities

File this one under: Don't give our local government any ideas.

A cop with a radar gun clocking sledders.  And a push for mandatory sledding helmets. 

Seriously.  Follow the link.  Check out the photo of the radar gun on the sledding hill.

Year-in-Review

My obligatory "year-in-review" column is up over at Fort Collins Now.

It was a challenge to fit everything in, but there was just enough space to note that

No year-in-review would be complete without noting that Sen. Steve Johnson's wild lifestyle, gluttonous eating habits and general all-around corpulence finally caught up to him this summer when he was briefly felled by a heart attack.

Contrary to Conventional Wisdom...

This is going to fly in the face of accepted conventional wisdom.  Here's Sally Pipes in a Washington Post op-ed on the obesity crisis.

It's a common political refrain that America faces a childhood obesity epidemic that's turning us into a nation of blubbery diabetics.

Underlying this is the premise that we're helpless before gingerbread cookies and honey-roasted hams -- unable to resist these and other foods and incapable of putting down our forks. We can be cured, it seems, only by government intervention such as the banning of trans-fats and sodas from public schools.

But is it the food, or is it us? Is it a proper role of government to tell us what we can or can't eat? And are we really as fat as the NIH numbers suggest?

Before we let Uncle Sam into our kitchens, at school or at home, these questions deserve some exploration.

For starters, government data about what constitutes "overweight" and "obese" are misleading.

The standard metric for this measurement is a person's body-mass index, or BMI -- the ratio of one's height to one's weight. But at best, BMI is a rough tool that does not take into account an individual's body type. A six-foot-two athlete who weighs 210 pounds would be classified as "obese" according to BMI charts -- despite his 32-inch waistline, 17-inch biceps and his less than 6 percent actual body fat.

If you believe the BMI tables, most of the best players in the NBA and NFL are "overweight," including superstar athletes Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady.

Many Hollywood heartthrobs also qualify as fatties -- Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Tom Cruise and George Clooney, to name a few.

What's more, the acceptable BMI continues to be ratcheted downward -- transforming those who were considered perfectly healthy yesterday into "overweight" and "obese" today.

Before 1998, a "healthy" BMI was anything less than 27. Then, suddenly, the government changed the "healthy" number to anything less than 25. Overnight, more than 25 million people who were previously considered to be a healthy or normal weight were reclassified as overweight. Looked at another way, the government artificially manufactured an obesity crisis by moving the BMI goal posts.

The Congressional Mess

Gerald Shadwick's must-read op-ed in the Trib last month.

Environmental Rent Seeking

Congress has effectively outlawed incandescent light bulbs.  Gee, I wonder who was pushing that law.

Great lede on this story...

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Had Thomas Edison employed the same business strategy as his 21st-Century heirs at General Electric, he would have lobbied Congress to outlaw the candle in 1879 when he perfected and patented the light bulb.

He surely could have masked his self-interested lobbying in some public interest claim, such as fire prevention or the need for wax conservation. Today, the mask is environmentalism.

Earlier this month, Thomas Edison’s GE, together with Sylvania and Philips won a legislative victory when Congress passed an energy bill that would outlaw sale of the standard light bulb by 2012.

Sylvania is the leading light bulb maker worldwide, and GE is tops in America. These two companies, together with Dutch-based Royal Phillips Electronics, concede they basically wrote the new light bulb law. It goes without saying that they stand to profit from it — at consumer expense.