Quick Links: Forest, Krugman, MA, WI

The Obama administration is trying to blacklist the CEO of Forest Labs (a pharmaceutical company) without any form of due process.

Greg Scanlen rebuts Paul Krugman on consumer driven health care.

Sally Pipes summarizes, "RomneyCare's Unhappy Anniversary"

The Wisconsin State Journal reports, "UW doctors face penalties for writing sick notes for protesters".

We'll see if this will be a genuine penalty or merely a slap on the wrist (as some like David Catron suspect.)

Colorado and Wisconsin Updates

Brian Schwartz reports on the current state legislation at, "Politically-controlled Colorado health benefits exchange bill reaches Senate".

Linda Gorman explains why this is a bad idea at, "Should Colorado Establish an ObamaCare Health Benefits Exchange?"

The Wisconsin doctors accused of writing fake sick notes are under investigation. More here.

Wolf On Wisconsin Doctors

In the February 25, 2011 Washington Times, Dr. Milton Wolf discusses with Wisconsin doctors unprofessional behavior. Here's the opening of his piece, "Organized medical fraud in Wisconsin":

"Primum nil nocere." First, do no harm. This bedrock principle in medicine is a foreign language to most politicians and, sadly, to some Wisconsin doctors, who have violated their oath and the public trust as they have defrauded Wisconsin taxpayers.

Several University of Wisconsin family physicians donned their sacred white coats and were caught distributing fraudulent "sick notes" free for the asking quite literally by the boxful -- I wonder who paid for that printing -- to teachers and others who skipped work to engage in political protest at the state Capitol in Madison. Whatever the merits of the teachers' protest, there's a word for what these doctors and teachers are perpetrating: fraud.

An army of citizen-journalist bloggers, including Tim Daniels of Left Coast Rebel and Ann Althouse, captured and publicized photographs and video allegedly of publicly funded University of Wisconsin doctors... as they disseminated these fraudulent notes to Wisconsin's publicly funded teachers so the teachers could have a publicly funded day off...

(Read the full text of "Organized medical fraud in Wisconsin")

As Dr. Wolf notes, this reported behavior runs contrary to the core principles of the Hippocratic Oath. But at least the wheels of justice appear to be in motion now.

(And thank you, Dr. Wolf, for mentioning my earlier PajamasMedia piece, "The Wisconsin Protests and the New Medical Ethics", and FIRM in your OpEd!)

Wisconsin Updates

University of Wisconsin says it will launch an investigation of alleged physician misconduct.

Ford Vox of The Atlantic notes that the WI physicians have "managed to belittle a public trust between physicians, employers and patients." Read the full piece.

(Via HotAir, who also linked to my PajamasMedia piece -- thank you!)

Problems with Wisconsin's Socialized Medicine Scheme

The proposed Wisconsin universal coverage plan is going to be hugely expensive, and can only lead to rationing. Here are some excerpts from the July 24, 2007 Wall Street Journal analysis:

...Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is "free" health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.

This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger State could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden. "At least federal taxes pay for an Army and Navy," quips R.J. Pirlot of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce business lobby.

...The plan is also openly hostile to market incentives that contain costs. Private companies are making modest progress in sweating out health-care inflation by making patients more cost-conscious through increased copayments, health savings accounts, and incentives for wellness. The Wisconsin program moves in the opposite direction: It reduces out-of-pocket copayments, bars money-saving HSA plans, and increases the number of mandated medical services covered under the plan.

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.

(Via KevinMD.)