Is smoking bad?

First of all,

According to the World Health Organization 100 million people died worldwide from tobacco use in the past century and another 1 billion are expected to die this century.

There are an estimated 5.4 million smoking-related deaths a year worldwide, and that number is expected to continue to rise dramatically if no actions are taken, said Dr. Douglas Bettcher, director of WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative.

The report said nearly two-thirds of the world’s smokers live in 10 countries, with China accounting for 30 percent of them, India 10 percent and the rest divided among Indonesia, Russia, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Bangladesh, Germany and Turkey.

OK, one billion less people than there would be, 40 percent in China and India. Can this be all bad? A billion less people have got to improve the environment.

Oh, then there’s this,

Dutch researchers have confirmed what fat smokers have waited years to hear - that healthy people are actually a greater burden on the state, because they live longer and oblige the taxpayer to deal with the cost of “lingering diseases of old age like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s”.

That’s according to the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and Environment, which found that while “a person of normal weight costs on average £210,000 ($417,000) over their lifetime”, a smoker clocks up just £165,000 ($326,000) and the obese run up an average £187,000 ($371,000) bill.

As the headline says, “Healthy? You’re a burden on the state.”

Fact checking Obama and Clinton ads

If you haven’t seen them yet here in Wisconsin, you most likely soon will. FactCheck.org takes a look at them.

# Obama is being misleading when he says his proposal would “cover everyone.” It would make coverage available to all, but experts we consulted estimate that 15 million to 26 million wouldn’t take it up unless required to do so.

# Clinton stretches things a bit, too. Even her plan – which, unlike Obama’s, includes a mandate for individuals to get insurance – would leave out a million people or perhaps more, depending on how severe the penalties would be for those who don’t comply. She won’t say how her mandate would be enforced, but has said that she was open to the possibility of garnishing wages.

# Experts also are skeptical of both candidates’ claims that their plans will reduce the cost of insurance for the typical family by $2,000 or more. ” I know zero credible evidence to support that conclusion,” says M.I.T’s Jonathan Gruber.

Well, at least MPS is limiting benefits to domestic partners

Via The Week magazine (subscription required),

Palm Beach Community College in Florida has angered gay-rights groups by extending health benefits to cover employees’ pets but not their “domestic partners.” College employees can now get a discount on health insurance for their dog, cat, hedgehog, frog, guinea pig, or gecko. Yet a plan to extend health coverage to employees’ live-in partners was rejected in August. “Many pet owners consider their dogs and cats part of their families,” said Deirdre Newton of the Palm Beach Human Rights Council, “but there is a basic disconnect when an employer will insure an employee’s pet but not an employee’s partner.” [Emphasis mine]

OK, I may not agree with extending benefits to gay partners (or heterosexual ones either, for that matter), but is the PBCC board filled with PETA members?

“If the government does it, it will save money”

Sound familiar?

State agencies will be paying off a questionable computer project for the next 20 years, according to a report by the state’s top computer official. That’s in spite of the fact the project was originally supposed to save the state millions of dollars over just a few years.

Yeah, that’s what some say about Healthy Wisconsin, et al.

(A tip of the conservative cap to Bruce at Badger Blogger)

The government can do it more efficiently

Are these the folks you want to entrust your health care (in fact, most areas of your life) to?

First from the weekend’s Journal Sentinel,

State’s casino oversight falls short, audit says

[Wisconsin's] Division of Gaming failed to notice discrepancies in daily casino revenue figures between the state’s computer monitoring system and tallies done by the casinos, the Legislative Audit Bureau report says. The auditors found discrepancies in the numbers for every day of 2006, the report says. The report does not say how far off the numbers were or break them out by tribe or casino. [Emphasis mine.]

Review finds 9 children in imminent danger

A sweeping state review of more than 600 active cases under investigation by the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare uncovered nine in which a child was in immediate danger, and child welfare workers were dispatched immediately to deal with the situation.

The review came after the May suffocation death of a toddler, Alicia Burgess, who was left in her home by child welfare workers despite warnings by two doctors that the child and her brother were in danger. Raul Arteaga, 34, the boyfriend of Alicia’s mother, is charged with first-degree reckless homicide.

“That’s a 1.5% measurement of cases that did not succeed,” said Reggie Bicha, the administrator of the Division of Children and Family Services, of the nine cases. “Anytime you have that kind of intense review and scrutiny, to have a 1.5% error rate is arguably not that bad - unless we are talking about kids.” [Emphasis mine.]

Now that’s an understatement. Extrapolate that 1.5% to 5.5 million Wisconsinites, or 300 million Americans.

And from the federal government (much too easy to find, most of the time)

Watch list hobbled by data errors: Technical gremlins, clashing rules undermine shared screening center

Four years after the federal government launched the interagency Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) and assigned it the daunting task of harmonizing more than a dozen separate watch lists, balky technology and quirky business practices still combine to introduce gaps and errors in the critical database. [Again emphasis is mine]

And this is for terrorists. Again we’re talking about a small percentage, but it grows to a large number when you include Wisconsinites or all Americans.

Health care or health care coverage

Lance Burri takes the time to explain it simply so we all can understand it.

The free market does not “fix” anything. It won’t “fix” health care, because as far as it’s concerned, there’s nothing to “fix.” People will either pay a certain price for health insurance, or they won’t. People will either provide the product of health insurance at a certain price, or they won’t.

“Healthy Wisconsin” will provide insurance coverage, but by artificially limiting both price and profit. Ergo, we’ll all do with less. And the kicker is: we won’t be paying less for it.

Can’t get much plainer than that.

U.S. Says Company Bribed Officers for Work in Iraq

From the New York Times

An American-owned company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to U.S. officers in efforts to win more than $11 million in contracts.

Do you think this could happen with health care?

AIDS victims buried alive

And then this sad story from my second home country,

Some AIDS victims are being buried alive in Papua New Guinea by relatives who cannot look after them and fear becoming infected themselves, a health worker said Monday.

Digitization of medical records

Since I’ve touched on health care, here’s an article about the obstacles of digitizing records for your perusal.

The advantages have been trumpeted near and far.

• Cost reductions - Medical care in the U.S. now costs $1.9 trillion, about 16% of GDP
• A dynamic lifetime view of a patient’s medical history, available to any authorized provider
• Easier epidemiological studies to compare of the incidence of symptoms and the effectiveness of medications and other treatments.
• Easier surveillance for epidemics, pandemics, and bioterror.

The problems? Old habits die hard. Digitizing X-rays are a big stumbling block. Also ECGs. Privacy is a third.

Not a lot, but certainly road blocks.

Polls, schmolls

A poll conducted by a Democratic group favorable to Healthy Wisconsin discovered wide approval for the health care initiative, while a poll by a group opposed (PDF file) to it found widespread disapproval.

Surprise, surprise.

Now it seems pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans want everyone covered, even if it means higher taxes. The rub might come in how much tax, but that’s another question.

And health care reform is not the question here either. The question is our incessant dependence on polling numbers and the need to conduct dueling polls.

The Shark on Medicaid birth increase

Rick Esenberg details the factual errors (yes, I said errors) in the Journal Sentinel article I noted earlier (a tip of the ol’ conservative cap to Owen). But Rick raises the question for us,

If teen pregnancy rates are going down and the economy is improving and eligibility requirements haven’t changed and there is “access” to birth control, what’s going on here?

Indeed.

Theodore Marmor

The Waukesha Freeman interviewed him in Saturday’s paper.

I had never heard of him but the paper gave a short bio. He seems to be knowledgeable on the subject of health care, but a little ignorant on the Wisconsin political situation, as shown by these three questions in the middle.

FREEMAN: In setting up this interview, we talked about the residency waiting period aspect of this plan. And also, you’ve written that proponents of reform need to address their critics’ worst fears. Those two sort of dovetail in the Wisconsin situation because Gov. (Jim) Doyle does not support the state Senate Democrats’ plan.

MARMOR: He does not?

FREEMAN: He has a different thing he calls BadgerCare, which is not quite as far-reaching as the Senate Democrats. I was wondering if you’ve seen where there’s divergent opinions within a party, does that doom attempts at reform? Is it a bad omen?

MARMOR: It certainly isn’t a good omen. Unless there’s a cooperative spirit between the parties, in which they’re trying out, testing what to get through. Tell me what the state of play is in Wisconsin. The Senate Democrats have proposed this?

FREEMAN: It’s a split Legislature. The Republicans control the state Assembly, and there’s competing budgets. Universal health care is in the Senate Democrats budget. It’s not in the Assembly Republicans’.

MARMOR: So it passed the Senate? That’s interesting. Well, the way to understand it – I’m a political scientist; we’re not talking about child’s play here – no universal, singlepayer, single plan, state financed with ($15.6) billion on payroll taxes is going to pass a split house in Wisconsin. It’s absolutely sure it’s not.

Well, maybe, maybe not. But he did have this to say.

Wisconsin Democrats have done a service, in my view, by straightforwardly saying, ‘Look, if we’re spending 16 percent of national income on medical care – that’s what Americans are spending – if we spend it in this form rather than some other form, there’ll be a lot less of the marketing and administrative costs associated with competitive, private health insurance.

And also,

If you want everybody to have insurance, it is wasteful to have people marketing their special little plans.

Now, there are some people who think, ‘Well, we really don’t want everybody to have broad coverage. We want people to have only catastrophic coverage.’

So instead of going broke and going on welfare, we’ll protect (them). Now that’s the Republican idea. That’s what these health savings accounts are.

Well, I think essentially he boiled it down. Although I would like to take a look at costs and see what’s driving them upward.

He did condense the debate with this,

How do we want to pay for medical care since we want most people, most of the time not to be worried about what’s going to be happening to their family finances if they get sick?

In a nut shell, that’s it. Now how is the best way to do that?

Universal health care

It’s the big topic of debate in the state recently. Of course, we’re not really talking about universal health care, we’re talking about how to pay for the excellent health care we get, or how to pay for health care we think we need and can’t afford.

Wisconsin’s Senate Democrats have proposed what some have called a radical overhaul of the system that will guarantee coverage for everyone.

Nick has already posted about the efficiency factor. Examples could be multiplied of government inefficiency.

Cost is another problem. Democrats say that the tax will be offset by employers and employees not having to pay insurance costs. This may be true–at first. A piece in the Opinion Journal tells us the eventual end of a universal plan (H/T Tom Faranda)

So where will savings come from? Where they always do in any government plan: Rationing via price controls and, as costs rise, waiting periods and coverage restrictions. This is Michael Moore’s medical dream state.

Social Security started at 2% and look where it’s grown to now. There’s still not enough. Some of this is due to inflation, some to added perks. UPDATE: Monday’s Journal Sentinel gives us another example of government efficiency.

Are we going to look at costs? A friend had operations on his eyes (lens replacement). The cost? $16,000. What was that paying for? After the operation he was in a room for about half an hour. The room had about 10 beds and assorted monitors. Nothing special that I could see. The cost for the half hour? $4100.

Wisconsin ranks 4th in health care costs. Why is that? Sure health care professionals have expenses, but is that the only thing feeding costs?

A government run system is not what we need.