Eric Hanneken's Library tagged health →  View Popular

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding.  But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation.  It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail.

Here's one way to figure out whether cell phones are causing brain tumors: Look at the incidence of brain cancer over a 30-year span that covers the period from before cell phones came into general use until today, when they're ubiquitous.

The results, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, involving an analysis of 60,000 brain cancer victims from Scandinavian countries, are encouraging.

While cell phone use jumped dramatically from 1974 to 2003, the period which the study covers, overall brain cancer trends in the population didn't follow suit.

According to a report released by the Congressional Budget
Office this morning, the average price of insurance
premiums bought on the individual market—that is, premiums not
purchased through employers—would go up by 10 to 13 percent in
2016 if Congress passed health care reform legislation now in the
Senate. This tracks with
state-level reform efforts, which have almost always
coincided with spikes in individual insurance premiums.

Nevertheless, advocates of reform will—and indeed, already are—arguing that the report shows that the bill
will make health care both better and more affordable. How's
that?