Wired reports: "American Medical Association: You Can't Look At Your Genome Without Our Supervision". Yet another reason I'm not a member of the AMA. (Via Dr. Matthew Bowdish.)
In the 3/1/2011 Wall Street Journal, John Calfee notes that Massachusetts hasn't learned from history. It's about to make the age-old of mistake of trying to solve problems created by government controls by imposing more government controls.
Here's an excerpt from, "The Massachusetts Health-Reform Mess":
Gov. Patrick introduced a bill that will impose de facto price controls on everyone from solo primary care doctors to prestigious academic hospital systems. An 18-member board will decide how and how much providers should be paid, and the bill gives regulators the power to force private insurers to accept these fiats. Some 30 states experimented with such rate-setting in the 1970s and '80s. Except for Maryland, all of them -- including Massachusetts -- deregulated in the 1990s because costs rose even as quality and choice declined.(Read the full text of "The Massachusetts Health-Reform Mess".)
In a mere four years, Massachusetts has demonstrated that the most important effects of its reform arise not from the letter of the law but from the law's unintended and unpredictable consequences. The state is lurching from one crisis to another as it attempts to construct a system vastly different from any seen before or anything contemplated when reform was first passed...
