Interesting interactive maps, trends, state ranking can be found here.

TOKYO, Japan — In Japan, being thin isn’t just the price you pay for fashion or social acceptance. It’s the law.

So before the fat police could throw her in pudgy purgatory, Miki Yabe, 39, a manager at a major transportation corporation, went on a crash diet last month. In the week before her company’s annual health check-up, Yabe ate 21 consecutive meals of vegetable soup and hit the gym for 30 minutes a day of running and swimming.

“It’s scary,” said Yabe, who is 5 feet 3 inches and 133 pounds. “I gained 2 kilos [4.5 pounds] this year.”

In Japan, already the slimmest industrialized nation, people are fighting fat to ward off dreaded metabolic syndrome and comply with a government-imposed waistline standard. Metabolic syndrome, known here simply as “metabo,” is a combination of health risks, including stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that can lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.

In the United States, the Senate and House health care reform bills have included the so-called “Safeway Amendment,” which would offer reductions in insurance premiums to people who lead fitter lives. The experience of the Japanese offers lessons in how complicated it is to legislate good health.

Though Japan’s “metabo law” aims to save money by heading off health risks related to obesity, there is no consensus that it will. Doctors and health experts have said the waistline limits conflict with the International Diabetes Federation’s recommended guidelines for Japan. Meantime, ordinary residents have been buying fitness equipment, joining gyms and popping herbal pills in an effort to lose weight, even though some doctors warn that they are already too thin to begin with. (Read more)

A federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit that claims the CIA used U.S. veterans as human guinea pigs in Cold War-era drug experiments.
Vietnam Veterans of America filed a class action against the Army and CIA in 2009, claiming that at least 7,800 soldiers had been used as guinea pigs in Project Paperclip.
Soldiers were allegedly administered at least 250 and as many as 400 types of drugs, among them Sarin, one of the most deadly drugs known, amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, phosgene gas and LSD.
Using tactics it often attributed to the Soviet enemy, the U.S. government sought drugs to control human behavior, cause confusion, promote weakness or temporary loss of hearing and vision, induce hypnosis and enhance a person’s ability to withstand torture, according to the complaint.
The veterans say that some soldiers died, and others suffered seizures and paranoia. They say the CIA knew it had to conceal the tests from “enemy forces” and the “American public in general” because the knowledge “would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission.”

. . . .

The parties disputed the number of claims at issue. While the CIA claimed the “secrecy oath” claim is the only one remaining, the veterans say the government had an obligation to notify them of the drugs’ effects and provide them health care. (Read more from )

History of Canada’s national healthcare

Doctor protests accompanied Canada’s first imposition of government control in Saskatchewan, and the initial nationalization in 1962. The socialists overcame the protests by buying off doctors who, in protest, had closed their offices for 23 days.

The eugenecists who promoted it.

Thomas Douglas, who nationalized Canada’s healthcare, advocated moral and psycological screenings for marriage and sterilization for unfit individuals. There was a sterilization statute in Saskatchewan in the 1930s.

Canadian system remains overwhelmingly popular.

Since it is illegal to use prices to reduce demand. The only available system for rationing is queue-ing. Median wait time between referral by general practioner to treatment in 2010 was 18.2 weeks. It varied by specialty and province.

The longest was for orthopedic surgery was 36.7 weeks.

In New Brunswick, the worst offender, median was 24.6 weeks.

The Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged the wait for knee replacements is often over a year, and that many patients die on waiting lists for cardiac care.

Physicians get paid according to how many patients they see. As a result, is common to double and triple book.

The average wait times for human access to
ultra sound — 31 days
ct scan — 30 days
mri — 69 days
pet scans — completely unavailable

The average wait times for animal access to
ct scans — a few hours
mri — a few hours

In 2008, Forbes magazine: there were more MRIs in Pittsburg than in Canada.

Despite this, there was opposition to a group of doctors attempting to set up private MRI clinics because they didn’t want anybody “jumping the queue.”

After the first private MRI clinic opened in 1993, Prime Minister Jean Chretien vowed to end funding to any province which allowed such private clinics to continue existing. Thomas Douglas’s CCF and the union of public employees led the opposition.

More seriously ill patients have a harder time finding an acute care hospital bed in Canada than moderately ill patients because of perverted incentives which put emphasis on cost.

To control costs, government attempts to restrict the number of Canadian doctors contributing to the doctor shortage.

Despite this, their system remains popular. Substantial propaganda contributes to this.

t’s a conspiracy plot straight out of a spy novel: on Monday, the Guardian reported that as part of the Osama Bin Laden capture effort, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up a fake vaccination clinic in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to collect DNA from Bin Laden’s children. The idea was to look for a match with DNA from Bin Laden’s sister, who died in early 2010 in Boston, to verify that the Bin Laden family was in the compound before attacking. It’s not clear whether the ploy worked; the CIA isn’t talking. (Read more from news.sciencemag.org)

Recommend starting at 13:10!

2:00 — Dr. Burgess explains his “awakening”: Two tier systems developed in many countries with nationalized healthcare. Clintons were fearful of this, so they sought to criminalize any practice of medicinie outside their system.

13:10 — Dr. Orient describes working for the VA: Very bad idea to work too hard because you don’t get paid more, everyone resents you, and there is a greater possibility of making a mistake. Weekends and Federal holidays all free! No need for malpractice insurance. Eligibility for treatment rigidly pre-determined. Can’t critizise the government.

At the VA’s monthly administrative meeting a nurse suggested playing a recording of last week’s meeting and going to the canteen instead.

(Dr. Orient’s whole talk is outstanding)

25:40 — Dr. Amerling

27:00 — more and more residents are trying to stay on instead of enter private practice. There’s a mass migration from established private practices into hospital. This is driven by money. Practice expenses are rising while medicare / medicade payments are not rising with inflation.

32:00 — wonderful anecdote about the consequences of doctors working at fixed salary regardless of how many patients they see.

Obamacare penalizing hospitals for patient re-admittence.

Federal guide lines are driven by medical industry lobbies which always advocate aggressive treatment. In 2006 guidelines for anemic patients were written based on casual observation. This was dramatically refuted by more rigorous experiments. Patients were harmed.

46:00 — Q & A

20 minute lecture
by Twila Brase, President of Citizens Council for Health Freedom

Hippa is not a privacy law, but a disclosure law. Over two million entities have access to your records without your knowledge.

Doctors being scored on compliance with gov’t issued protocols. They’re scored on % of people vaccinated in their clinic.

Vast majority of preventive measured do not save money. (New England Journal of Medicine) Nevertheless, government is going full steam ahead, placing preventive medicine requirements on doctors.

More dependent on government = less concerned about their health

Three recommendations
1) Bring market prices back to medicine.
2) Restore health insurance to true insurance. Get rid of entitlement care. Let individuals own their policies.
3) Repeal healthcare reform law, prohobition against catastrophic insurance, and ability of gov’t to tell us what to buy.

15 minute talk
Alieta Eck, MD, President-elect of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

* Nixon poured a lot of federal $$$ into HMOs for prevention & “health maintenance”

* Government supervision / evaluation of doctors make very sick patients the enemy for fear of bad ratings. In Florida doctors refuse to treat some very sick or uncooperative patients.

* Doctor being sued by patient for not recommending colon screening. Doctor hadn’t seen patient in 18 years. Doctors should not also be made liable for not recommending preventive stuff.

* Mark 2:17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Luke 5:31 Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”

Matthew 9:12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

Q&A

* Doctors support for 2 reasons
- it feels good to claim federal programs on your resume and on your behalf.
- They’re caught up in doing well in the scoring system. (MN scoring system on five things: A1C, Cholesterol, Blood Pressure, Whether stops, smoking, whether patient takes asprin every day.)

* 10 Doctor practice hiring 7 people to manage mandated electronic records!!! This is the cost of government programs.

* Blame Congress for HMOs: http://www.cchfreedom.org/privacy/hmoart.php3

* “Evidence Based medicine” kills innovation. Doctors need to spend time explaining why they aren’t taking the government’s one-size-fits-all solution to a medical problem. Instead of physicians practicing medicine, it is bureucrats (who don’t see patients) practicing medicine.

Ron Paul: Still right about everything.

Here’s an interview with the man who said “I don’t want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it to the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Personally, I think he’s an inside-the-beltway pseudo libertarian. He should watch the Hoppe Video I recently posted, The Impossibility of Limited Government.

Here’s a letter to the Los Angeles Times:

You advocate a “fat tax” on grounds that it’ll discourage people from acting in ways that make them unhealthy (“Should there be a ‘fat tax’?” April 11).

Overlook here such a tax’s merits or demerits. It’s curious that you accept without question the proposition that raising taxes on ‘unhealthy-lifestyle’ activities will significantly turn people away from unhealthy-lifestyle activities, while (judging from your editorials over the years) you reject without question the proposition that raising taxes on income-earning activities will significantly turn people away from income-earning activities.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

In the mid-1990s I was informed by a professor of philosophy – tenured at a major university – that anyone who believes that even a marginal income-tax rate as high as 94 percent has a significant negative effect on people’s willingness to work to earn taxable income is “brainwashed.” (Read more from cafehayek.com)

* If you do nothing — ie. don’t purchase insurance — government can FORCE you to do so, then regulate you b/c you’re engaging in commerce.

* The three “healthcare market is unique” arguments:

1) Unique b/c everybody participates. Nonsense because every existing market features participation by large number of people.

2) Unique b/c cost shifting. (People without coverage have costs paid by taxpayers.) Nonsense because it exists in many markets — everyone who ever defaulted on a long has costs shifted.

3) Unique b/c people can get wiped out with medical conditions. Nonsense because people can get wiped out with business failures, gambling, drugs, depression and more.