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If there is any interest, I could post an essay toying with some ideas about how to tweak the Americans with Disabilities Act so that government employers actually obey it. For the moment, I’ll simply note that gimps such as myself are well advised to have a Plan B for when they don’t. If you [...]
Archive for the ‘Health and Medicine’ Category
April 19th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine
I am glad Andrew Sullivan gave more than one perspective (see here and here) on how to balance pain relief and overdose risk in public policies surrounding opioids. (Even though he keeps using the destructive war metaphor, which can drive substandard thinking in policymaking). I gave a plenary address at the American Academy of Pain [...]
April 15th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Health Care
One lesson is already resoundingly clear: the growth of health care spending threatens the sustainability of every other public service, from education, to public health, to infrastructure, to defense. That’s Zirui Song and Bruce Landon, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine about health care costs in Massachusetts, which has near-universal health insurance coverage. [...]
April 12th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Moral philosophy
Every day physicians deal with patients who could improve their health by engaging in some behavior change, but want instead to be prescribed a pill. A patient might say for example “Yes, I know it would be good for my cardiovascular system if I lost 10 pounds, ate more fruits and vegetables and went for [...]
April 11th, 2012
Baroness Helen Newlove is a remarkable person. After her husband was beaten to death by drunken yobs in front of her children, she became an advocate for victims of crime. Unusually for someone from a modest class background, she was subsequently ennobled and now sits in the UK House of Lords. I am helping her [...]
April 9th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Rick Perry
Rick Perry’s former communications chief disputes the claim that painkillers caused the former presidential candidate’s poor debate performances and occasionally strange demeanor on the campaign trail. Technically, the claim isn’t even in the public square yet, but is said to appear in a soon-to-be-released book by veteran political reporters Mike Allen and Evan Thomas. If [...]
April 7th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine
A BBC newsreader nods off on camera, to general amusement. YouTube includes many similar clips. These are funny as incidents but they betoken an underlying public health and safety problem. As my colleague Professor Bill Dement, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on sleep, has pointed out, sleep deprivation is widespread in the U.S. and a [...]
April 7th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine
James Joyner reacts to a list of putative signs of problem drinking that includes a question about drinking alone: I often drink alone because I’m often alone. Or, at least, don’t have other adults around. I like to drink. I like to be alone. So, quite often, I do them simultaneously. When my colleagues and [...]
April 6th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Health Care
Harold Pollack notes a number of advantages of employer-based health insurance, including the potential for large employers to serve as more reliable (and potentially wiser) purchasing agents than are individuals at sea in the health insurance market. But my experience as an employer makes me intensely dislike this feature of the U.S. health insurance system [...]
