Barack Obama says he can avoid the problem by increasing taxes to make up for revenue that might not be obtained from youthful American workers — ages 19 to 34 — who’ll balk at huge premiums when they’re just starting to work, but whose money is needed to pay for the medical care of retired Baby Boomers.

Writes the AP about the health insurance cost increases facing Americans just starting their careers:

Health insurance protects people from the cost of an illness or accident by spreading the expense to all of a plan’s participants. If Obama’s model is to work, he will need to entice younger, healthier people to buy insurance so they will offset the expenses generated by those who are sicker.

At the state level, the guarantee mandate has often had the opposite effect.

“They’re very price sensitive. They’re healthy. They think they’re invincible and getting them to buy coverage is a challenge. If it’s expensive, they’ll walk away,” said Mary Lehnhard, a senior vice president at Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, a trade group.

The guarantee mandate faltered in states that did not do enough to get healthy, younger people to buy coverage, said Kenneth Thorpe, a health care analyst at Emory University.

“They didn’t put up new money,” Thorpe said. “So, basically, the people who joined were people who had trouble getting coverage and were therefore sick. What Obama is doing is getting a broader cross-section of people enrolled because he’s putting a lot of federal money into it.”

I like the idea of everyone having health insurance.

I just don’t know if there’s going to be an efficient way to do it that preserves our cutting edge medical advances since almost every government program — from immigration (an American citizen’s brother’s application for an immigrant visa filed in 1986 is just being processed today), to welfare (people are sometimes lined up outside of the trustee’s office before dawn on cold winter mornings freezing while waiting for the office to open), to Social Security Disability (many denials, needing to hire an attorney to appeal), to just getting a passport (one reporter waited 5 months for his passport card), requires people to wait, then wait some more.

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Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, coverage guarantees, health care, national insurance, tax increases

Chinese drug regulators have accused the manufacturer of the tainted drugs of a cover-up and have closed the factory that produced them. In December, China’s Food and Drug Administration said that the Shanghai police had begun a criminal investigation and that two officials, including the head of the plant, had been detained.

The drug maker, Shanghai Hualian, is the sole supplier to the United States of the abortion pill, mifepristone, known as RU-486. It is made at a factory different from the one that produced the tainted cancer drugs, about an hour’s drive away.

The United States Food and Drug Administration declined to answer questions about Shanghai Hualian, because of security concerns stemming from the sometimes violent opposition to abortion. But in a statement, the agency said the RU-486 plant had passed an F.D.A. inspection in May. “F.D.A. is not aware of any evidence to suggest the issue that occurred at the leukemia drug facility is linked in any way with the facility that manufactures the mifepristone,” the statement said.

Expect websites to pop up soon asking if people have been injured by RU-486 aka mifepristone when the trial attorneys get back from the American Association for Justice‘s 2008 winter convention in sunny San Juan.

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Technorati Tags: FDA, Food and Drug Administration, health, medicine, mifepristone, RU-486, Shanghai Hualian, tainted drugs

Don’t treat the old and unhealthy, say doctors.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone… About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.

Remind me again why liberalism is seen as caring and compassionate?

If socialized healthcare provided by our government will be anything like all of the other government programs already providing benefits for Americans — remember the failures in the Veterans Administration, routine denials of benefits to Social Security Disability applicants, the long lines early on cold mornings in front of the Calumet Township trustee’s office, and people waiting decades for immigration papers to be processed — count me out.

It’s great to see that the future of America — the next generation — know that they are likely to get the short end of the stick if we socialize American medicine.

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Technorati Tags: government health care, Hillary Clinton, immigration, liberalism, socialism, township government

INdiana Systemic Thinking has a thought-provoking post about the past, present, and future of eugenics in Indiana.

Dr. Eric Schansberg, in a guest editorial in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, gives a history of eugenics in Indiana, and implications for today and the future.  When one reads the article, you are struck by how distasteful this was.  When he applies this to today’s science and political culture, it is just plain scary.

We observed a dubious centennial this year. In 1907, Indiana became the first state in America to pass a eugenics law.

Eugenics can be defined as the study of the hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled, selective breeding. Because of what we now know about genetics, eugenics turns out to be a pseudo-science loaded with philosophical and ethical baggage.

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Technorati Tags: eugenics, health care, Indiana history