Archives for December, 2007
Feds to Patients: Drop Dead to Prevent “Unauthorized Experiment”
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A program in Michigan that saved 1500 lives over 18 months by maintaining checklists on patient care to prevent hospital infections has been shut down by the federal government. The federal Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) defines the concept of a medical “experiment” so broadly that keeping tabs on patient care through checklists is deemed an “experiment” that requires express permission in advance from patients and physicians. To OHRP, it is better that patients die than that they be subjected to an “experiment” and that they and their physicians fill out elaborate forms after receiving extensive disclosures.
Dr. Atul Gawande notes that ”if the government’s ruling were applied more widely, whole swaths of critical work to ensure safe and effective care would either halt or shrink: efforts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to examine responses to outbreaks of infectious disease; the military’s program to track the care of wounded soldiers; the Five Million Lives campaign, by the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement, to reduce avoidable complications in 3,700 hospitals nationwide.”
Institutional Review Boards set up under OHRP regulations impede and investigate academics who use interviews to collect information needed for social science research. OHRP apparently deems such routine information gathering to be “human experimentation” that triggers cumbersome notice and consent requirements under its regulations.
Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish: D.C. Schools Waste Millions
The Washington, D.C. school system recently spent tens of millions of dollars to buy sophisticated new boilers to heat the schools. Then it allowed them to break down because it wouldn’t spend a mere $100,000 per year maintaining them. It wouldn’t do the most basic things to keep them from deteriorating, like treating water to remove mineral deposits that build up in (and ultimately destroy) boilers. Now, it is spending more than $10 million per year to replace new boilers that are being destroyed through neglect.
It’s elementary knowledge to almost every resident of the Washington, D.C. area that the region has hard water that contains minerals, so certain appliances need distilled or treated water to operate effectively. That’s why I buy distilled water to use in the baby bottle sterilizer that cleans my daughter’s baby bottles. But nothing is too obvious for D.C. public school administrators to overlook. (The Washington Post story about this is entitled “The Price of Neglect,” Dec. 31, 2007).
Why Not a National Health Insurance Market?
Trying to “fix” health care is not easy, since it’s a bizarre amalgam of private provision of insurance and public spending and regulation, completely distorted by the counterproductive incentives of pervasive third-party payment. But one very simple step would be to simply have a national market in health insurance. Explains Merrill Mathews of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required):
Why can’t people living in New Jersey buy health insurance available to residents of, say, Pennsylvania?
Rep. John Shadegg, an Arizona Republican, thinks they should — and today will reintroduce legislation to make that possible.
The Health Care Choice Act would allow residents in one state to buy health insurance that is available in and regulated by another state. If enacted, the law would create a competitive, 50-state market for health insurance, likely making it cheaper. It would do this without imposing a large cost on taxpayers and without creating a new government bureaucracy.
This should be a no-brainer for Congress. But a few years ago, Mr. Shadegg went looking for a Democratic cosponsor for his bill. He found one who initially signed on, then withdrew under pressure from Democratic House leaders who wanted to dismiss the Shadegg bill with the excuse that it lacked bipartisan support.
Candles are next to be banned
Posted by Ivan OsorioIn his Examiner column today, Tim Carney — with a nod to Bastiat — takes the company founded by Thomas Edison to task for eschewing innovation in favor of political rent seeking:
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.
That is because the energy bill raises energy efficiency requirements to a level that most incandescent light bulbs in use today cannot meet, which would force most people to switch to the more expensive compact fluorescent bulbs.
Of course, this isn’t the only special interest pork barrel project in the energy bill, but in this specific instance, it’s worth asking — If fluorescent bulbs are so great, why does Congress need to essentially mandate their use?
The Biggest News of the Year
Posted by Myron EbellAccording to Bill McKibben in an op-ed in The Washington Post, the biggest news of the year is that Jim Hansen has spoken. According to Hansen, who has risen in recent years from astronomer to wizard and now to high priest of a doomsday cult, the safe level for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be no more than 350 parts per million. So since it’s now 380 or 390 ppm, we’re already doomed and can stop worrying about it.
Oh, no, sorry, we can’t stop worrying about it. True, we’re just about cooked (like Hansel and Gretel in the oven), but there’s still barely time to save life on Earth if we turn off the lights and throw away the car keys this instant. The alternative, I guess, is to party now for tomorrow we die. Hmm, I can’t decide. What if there’s just a tiny chance that Hansen could be wrong? Wouldn’t drastically reducing our energy consumption cause colossal increases in human mortality and suffering?
The course of apocalyptic movements is generally similar. In order to keep the enthusiasm of its followers at a fever pitch and to attract new followers, it is necessary to keep stoking the fires with more and more outlandish claims. The hysteria peaks as doomsday is moved closer and closer to the present, and then — poof — it collapses. It appears to me that the global warming bubble has gone about as far as it can go before it descends into ranting and writhing on the ground or random outbreaks of mob violence.
Unfortunately for Hansen and McKibben as with so many previous prophets of the end of the world, reality isn’t cooperating with their chiliastic fantasies. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have increased by 4 per cent since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997, but the global mean temperature has been flat since 1999. What they must have are some big disasters — and soon.
No news from the eastern GMO front
Posted by Lene JohansenThere is nothing new in a New York Times story about the GMO standoff in Europe. It is a political standoff, caused by activists who claim to represents consumers. Consumers, on the other hand, have shown that they don’t really give a damn when it comes to selecting one or the other in the store. Dr. Nicholas Kalaitzandonakes, of the University of Missouri-Columbia, and his team have since replicated these surprising results in China.
The science is fairly settled at this point, and 11 years of experience with commercial production since them molecular plant breeding method was presented to the research community 35 years ago has given us a fairly good record to show that this breeding method has the same level of risk as other breeding methods we use for plants.
Department of the Obvious
Posted by Eli LehrerA new British government report has concluded that…wait…wait…wait.. getting rid of bad teachers will improve schools. Wow. I’m amazed.
No holiday cheer in Rosia Montana
Posted by Lene JohansenYule never came to Rosia Montana, Romania, this year. With the help of activists such as billionaire George Soros and British actress Vanessa Redgrave, it seems that Western European activists has prevented an environmental cleanup and a sustainable livelihood for the 4,000 people who live there.
Like getting a lump of coal, the poor people of Rosia Montana had their dreams for improved quality of life and prosperity for their village crushed. They will have to continue to live with no electricity, go to the bathroom in drafty sheds in their yards, and scrounge a meager living out of foraging for food in the polluted forest that Gabriel Resources wanted to pay to clean up.
It is hard to mount a publicity campaign to match Greenpeace et al. when you don’t even have electricity to get a web page up or start email campaigns.
Previous Open Market posts on Rosia Montana’s fight for a better life:
When the facts don’t fit, construe!
Fund on Mine Your Own Business
Darfur: Starving for Freedom
Posted by Michelle MintonHumanitarians are perplexed by the fact that, despite their hard work and the fact that it’s the epicenter of the world’s largest aid effort, starvation in Darfur is increasing at a rapid pace. As reported by The New York Times today, malnutrition among children in the region jumped this year to over 16 percent, a 3 percent increase from last year.
Dr. Rigal said he was not exactly sure why child malnutrition rates were rising. But he cited more insecurity, restricted access for relief workers and a fresh round of displacements because of tribal fighting.
“There are many hypotheses,” he said.
What most humanitarians either do not understand, or decline to address, is that starvation is not caused by lack of money or even lack of food — therefore, no amount of either will solve the crisis in that country. Malnutrition is a direct result of a lack of freedom.
Darfur is no different than any other part of the world—if humans are there, then there’s a source of food somewhere. People simply need to be free to pursue a livelihood and protection that guarantees that they have a right to hold whatever they grow or create.. In other words, humans need principled and reliable protection of their rights to life and property. The people of Darfur, as the people in any part of the world, require a government that defends the rights of ALL individuals, not a selective few, as is the practice of the Sudanese government (using the term loosely).
Preventing starvation depends entirely on a person’s ability to plan ahead. Hunter gatherers of old were at the mercy of the weather and the migration patterns and health of their prey. Only after humans began to cultivate the earth and heard animals could we achieve consistent nutrition and a release from dependence on the elements. But in order to undertake a long-term project like planting a season in advance, or building a water delivery system, people need to be assured that they will be free to reap the fruits of their labors. Dr. Rigal is right that instability and displacement are contributing to starvation in the region, but they are not the primary causes. We need to address the reasons why people in Darfur are being displaced and experiencing instability.
Until the government in that region respects and protects the individual rights of every person in that region, throwing money at the problem is like (pardon my French) pissing in the wind; it doesn’t go very far.
RIP Benazir Bhutto
Posted by Iain MurrayBenazir Bhutto, who was murdered in a politically-motivated suicide attack, was the closest the Islamic world has yet got to a secular free-marketeer as a leader. Sadly, she dressed that in socialist rhetoric and demagoguery, and instituted authoritarian policies towards the press and judiciary that helped contribute to her downfall in the 1990s. The Telegraph’s commendably objective obituary is here. After her ineffective first premiership, many forget that her second tenure was almost Thatcherite:
Her tight monetary policy produced a dramatic reduction in the budget deficit, pulling the country’s economy back from the brink of collapse, and earning it a clean bill of health from the IMF and World Bank.
The massive inflow of foreign investment gave rise to expectations of a new era of economic development for Pakistan. Her offer of lucrative packages for foreign investors garnered contracts for infrastructure projects worth many billions of dollars. And her privatisation programme was commended for its transparency and broad ownership approach.
Sadly, her father’s socialist-inspired authoritarianism manifested itself in other areas. What Pakistan needed was a free-market, secular approach that guaranteed important freedoms. She almost delivered that, but not quite.
Friedman colleague to Fed: Stop throwing money at credit crunch
Posted by John BerlauAnna Schwartz, longtime colleague of the late Milton Friedman and celebrated free-market economist in her own right, had some interesting things to say about the current credit crunch. In a story published on December 23 in the London newspaper the Telegraph, Schwartz told reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that the buckets of money being thrown into the system by central banks in the U.S. and Europe were not getting to the root of problem. In fact, they were probably making things worse.
“Liquidity doesn’t do anything in this situation,” Schwartz said. “It cannot deal with the fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt.”
Schwartz’s comments are especially significant given that in her research with Friedman, published in the monumental A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1963, determined that lack of liquidity – not enough money being printed – was the main cause of the Great Depression. Schwartz and Friedman blamed the Federal Reserve for not printing enough money to avoid a deflation.
But of the current problems, Schwartz sees valuation of the mortgage oriented financial instruments as the main problem. “The banks and the hedge funds have not fully acknowledged who is in trouble,” she said. “That is the critical issue.”
“Every obese adult started eating as a child.”
Posted by Wayne Crews—As CEI’s prez Fred Smith will tell you. Over the holiday, our friend Sally Pipes at the Pacific Research Institute penned a Washington Post oped called “Brave New Diet” on the growing food police movement in America, pointing out some bugs in the “BMI” calculus and making other observations about sensible, healthy behavior. Indeed, a lot of us are overweight and don’t exercise. But as Sally says:
People make choices. And government should protect — not restrict — the freedom to make those choices so long as we’re not harming others.
While we may not always like the choices others might make, it is essential that we all have the freedom to choose for ourselves. Once we accept the idea that the Nanny State should step in when it’s “for our own good,” we’ve taken a very big step down the road to something like the scene painted in George Orwell’s “1984″ — when citizens wake each day to mandatory exercise classes on the Telescreen.
CIGNA Mistakes? Maybe, but Murder…?
Posted by Michelle MintonImagine you are going on vacation and you pay your neighbor to tend to the hanging plants you have outside of your house. While you’re gone the weather turns and a frost sets in, eventually killing all of your plants. You return home and are understandably distraught to find out that your neighbor neglected to bring your plants indoors, allowing them to perish in the harsh elements. You promptly file vandalism charges against your neighbor for the damage done to your plants. I’d wager that no court, (even one in California) would agree to hear a case on those grounds. I am willing to bet, however, that California courts will entertain the murder charges that the family of Nataline Sarkisyan plans to file against their health care provider, CIGNA.
Suffering from leukemia, complications from a previous procedure, and a failing liver, 17 year old Nataline died on Thursday December, 20th after her family removed her from life support. The family plans to sue CIGNA becuase they claim that she would not have died had CIGNA approved coverage for the liver transplant that she needed. CIGNA, at first denied the request, claiming that because of Nataline’s illness, the complications from a previous surgery, and likely interaction of medications, that a liver transplant in her case would be “experimental” and the likelihood of success small–putting the surgery beyond the scope of the family’s coverage under CIGNA. But, after protests and loads of negative publicity, CIGNA decided to reverse it’s decision and grant the transplant. Nataline died hours after the decision (after her family removed her from life support).
As we don’t yet know all the details surrounding Nataline’s death, I will abstain from assigning blame, but I want to address those other commentators who place responsibility for her death squarely on CIGNA. Put simply, insurers have no responsibility to save lives. That is not what we pay them for. The only duty an insurer has is to pay for medicine and procedures agreed upon in the contract. If CIGNA broke the contract it had with the Sarkisyans, then by all means they ought to be sued, but not for murder, manslaughter, nor negligent homicide. CIGNA did not cause Nataline’s leukemia, and it did not prevent the family from receiving the transplant they claim would have saved her life, they simply declined to pay for it. The family had no right to CIGNA’s funding beyond the contract that they signed with the insurer, and by CIGNA’s account, the surgery was beyond their plan. Understanding that the surgery would have cost a massive amount of money, potentially a hundred thousand dollars or more, the family still had a choice to find alternative means of funding for the surgery.
The bottom line is that CIGNA, and any other insurer, is only responsible for providing financial coverage as their contract stipulates; nothing more.
Diversity Training Backfires
Posted by Hans BaderEmployers pay a lot of money for diversity training and sexual harassment training, but often the training backfires and blows up in the face of the employer that paid for it. In Hartman v. Pena (1995), the Federal Aviation Administration got sued for sexual harassment after it subjected employees to three days of diversity training that scapegoated white males. After a federal judge refused to dismiss the case against it, the agency had to pay out a settlement to the white male employee who sued.
Diversity training often imparts bad legal advice to managers and employers that can come back to haunt them in court.
Gail Heriot, a law professor and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, reports on the sexual harassment training she received at the University of San Diego, in a state (California) where such training is mandatory under state law. She points out that the training sent the message that criticisms of affirmative action by white male employees are something that the employer should “nip in the bud” through investigations.
This is exceedingly dumb legal advice, since criticism of affirmative action is protected against retaliation by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 1981, and other laws, even when the affirmative action program criticized turns out to have been perfectly legal. Even the very court rulings that have upheld private-sector affirmative action programs, such as Sisco v. J.S. Alberici Const. Co. (8th Cir. 1981), have allowed employees to sue employers who retaliate against them for criticizing affirmative action.
In the public sector, the employer also faces a First Amendment lawsuit. The California Department of Corrections attempted to fire John Wallace after he angrily denounced its affirmative action plan to the Hispanic female employee he perceived as benefiting from it. The California Court of Appeal, however, found that his criticisms of the plan were protected by the First Amendment, and barred Wallace’s firing, in California Department of Corrections v. State Personnel Board, 59 Cal.App.4th 131 (1997).
Employers are often quite gullible about the claims made by “diversity” trainers. For example, they permit minority trainers to promote racial stereotypes that would provoke outrage if they were subsequently repeated by white managers or employees. For example, Glenn Singleton, a wealthy “diversity” trainer, teaches that “white talk” is “impersonal, intellectual, verbal” and “task-oriented,” while “color commentary” is “emotional.”
If a white person said this, it would rightly be regarded as a ridiculous, racist stereotype that relegates black people to inferior status. But because Singleton himself is African-American, and he sugarcoats his racist stereotypes about black people by coupling them with ideologically trendy attacks on white people (whom he depicts as “impersonal” and “racist”), liberal school superintendents eat it up.
Superintendents in places like Arlington, Virginia hire him to give their staffs mandatory “diversity” training. The Arlington Public Schools Superintendent, Dr. Robert G. Smith, admitted to me that Singleton’s racial theories were “provocative,” but defended his hiring as a way of addressing the minority achievement gap. That makes absolutely no sense, since Singleton’s racial theories reinforce the idea that studying is “acting white,” a terrible notion that fosters the minority achievement gap. If any white teacher or school administrator repeats what Singleton claims about minorities not being “intellectual,” he and the school system that employs him will be publicly denounced as a racist, and people will say that the school system itself is to blame for fostering such racist ideas because it hired Singleton to promote them. (California Superintendent Jack O’Connell, a white liberal, was recently embarrassed, and called racist, after he repeated a belief that Glenn Singleton shared with him: that black people are loud. Singleton also embarrassed the Seattle Schools in a landmark Supreme Court case).
Major employers have paid out millions of dollars in discrimination claims because of diversity-training programs. One Fortune 500 company paid out tens of millions of dollars in response to a class-action racial discrimination suit by minority employees, which was fueled by remarks management employees made after undergoing mandatory diversity training (they joked about jelly beans used in the training to represent minority employees. That, coupled with a poor quality recording in which a manager’s reference to “Saint Nicholas” was misinterpreted as the N-word, created a furor).
Diversity training often triggers workplace conflict and lawsuits, by compelling employees to talk about contentious racial or sexual issues, with resulting acrimony, and remarks that are misinterpreted or perceived as racially or sexually biased. For example, in Stender v. Lucky Stores (1992), statements made by managers during sensitivity training were held by a court to be admissible as evidence of discriminatory intent within the organization. That prevented the employer from getting a lawsuit dismissed.
Many judges take a dim view of diversity training in general. In Fitzgerald v. Mountain States Tel & Tel. Co. (1995), where employee reactions to diversity training gave rise to a lawsuit, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that “diversity training sessions generate conflict and emotion” and that “diversity training is perhaps a tyranny of virtue.”
NOTE: THE FIRM IDENTIFIED AS PROVIDING THE TRAINING DESCRIBED IN PROFESSOR HERIOT’S POST SAYS THAT HER UNIVERSITY IS NOT ONE OF ITS CLIENTS, AND THAT THE TRAINING DESCRIBED ABOVE APPEARS TO BE FROM A DIFFERENT PROVIDER THAN IT.
Christmas Choral Music and What it Says About America
Posted by Eli LehrerIt’s Christmas Eve (although you probably won’t read this until some time after) and I’m sitting in front front of the television now watching the St. Olaf College Christmas Festival. This morning I listened to the radio broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the famous King’s College Chapel at Cambridge University. Both festivals date from the early decades of the 20th century, both are widely listened to around the world, and both involve lots of wonderful Christmas music. For professionalism and pomp, however, Cambridge’s presentation beat St. Olaf’s.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone: the Cambridge event takes place at one of the world’s top universities, in an ancient and iconic building, and involves the 100 or so top musicians from a student body of about 25,000 (16,000 undergraduates.) St. Olaf’s event, on the other hand, takes place in a field house and involves 500 musicians drawn from an all undergraduate student body of 3,000. Although St. Olaf would make most lists of the 50 best liberal arts colleges in the United States, it’s not even the wealthiest or most academically selective school in its small hometown of Northfield, Minnesota. (That honor goes to Carleton College.)
I think this actually reveals a lot about the United States. Unlike virtually every other country in the world, no city, no corporation, no individual, and, in this case, no university can claim leadership in all things. The college leading the Christmas festival in the U.S. doesn’t take place at Harvard or Yale or even a top music school like Juilliard or NYU. It takes place at a very good small college that puts on a top notch show.
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