Thanks to overlawyered.com for this link. MDs will fly the coop rather than play chicken

Here is where the capitalist-bashing approach of the Democrats comes up against reality. The Democrats’ assertion is that this crisis is illusory, that there has been no boom in malpractice judgments. The dollar figures say otherwise. In 1975, insurance companies paid out a mere $521 annually per doctor in judgments and defense costs, according to Americans for Insurance Reform. By 2001, that figure had risen to an astounding $7,232 per doctor. Even after accounting for inflation, payouts per doctor rose by more than 400 percent in a mere 26 years. If payouts had stayed flat, there would be no crisis regardless of how the stock market performed. But costs rose and premiums had to rise accordingly.

But did premiums rise by too much? A Star-Ledger editorial offered the very reasonable suggestion that New Jersey adopt a system similar to that in use in California. Any annual increase of more than 15 percent needs state approval in California.

Great idea. But before capping premiums, California first capped judgments, with a 1975 tort reform law that is the model for the nation. New Jersey Democrats reject that approach. They seem to be arguing that we can cap premiums without capping judgments. Can we? Fine, let’s not wait until Thursday. Let’s do it tomorrow.

That would take the doctors out of it and put the administration on a collision course with the insurance companies. If the Democrats are right, the companies will reduce their premiums and the crisis will end. If they’re wrong, they’ll create a mess similar to the car insurance crisis.

We have too many states in crisis. Only a national solution will work. I have written often of the unintended consequences of huge malpractice settlements. We need sanity. Why can the trial lawyers not see that? Do they ever get sick?

Wall Street Journal endorses alcohol!

I just thought they I would try an outrageous headline. This opinion piece does reinforce the latest information on the value of moderate drinking. Nunc Est Bibendum No booze is bad news.

Why does a society provide good news with a grim face? No one appears to be the Minister of Fun around here because no one seems allowed to whoop with pleasure when a rather cheerful finding is published in the New England Journal of Medicine to the effect that moderate but relatively frequent drinking can reduce the risk of heart attack.

Well said; we should all celebrate (in moderation of course).

Supersize this

‘Fat Land’: Supersizing America is a book review.

Just since 1970 the proportion of American children who are overweight has doubled, a rate of increase that suggests the fattening of America has a specific history as well as a biology. ‘’Fat Land,’’ a skinny book about this big subject, is the journalist Greg Critser’s highly readable attempt to reconstruct that history.

The review shares some very interesting concepts. The book appararently champions the hypothesis that business has responded to our excess agricultural output. This stems from the 1970s.

Critser doesn’t put it quite this way, but his subject is the nutritional contradictions of capitalism. There’s only so much food one person can consume (unlike shoes or CD’s), or so you would think. But Big Food has been nothing short of ingenious in devising ways to transform its overproduction into our overconsumption — and body fat. The best parts of this book show how, in the space of two decades, Americans learned to eat, on average, an additional 200 calories a day. In the words of James O. Hill, a physiologist Critser interviewed, getting fat today is less an aberration than ‘’a normal response to the American environment.’’

When one reviews why ‘agribusiness’ has had such success, one starts to understand the problem. As usual we are the victims of ‘unintended consequences’.

Now we find ourselves confronted with the unintended consequences of cheap and abundant food, foremost among them the epidemic of obesity. Critser takes us on a brisk tour, by turns funny and depressing, of a society learning to accommodate itself to its new dimensions: restaurants adding square inches to their seats; government agencies relaxing their weight, fitness and dietary guidelines; Seventh Avenue recalibrating clothing sizes to make for happier visits to the dressing room. Less amusing is what our weight is doing to our health, and Critser is sure-footed and clear in describing the science of obesity, especially the precise mechanism by which our diet has led to an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes. What used to be called adult onset diabetes now afflicts millions of children as well as adults, and costs America’s health system billions of dollars a year.

As I wrote yesterday, the only answer is personal responsiblity. The book’s author comes to the same conclusion.

George W. Bush has defined this as ‘’the era of personal responsibility’’ and finally it is under this banner, so congenial to business, that Critser marches, seemingly in spite of himself and his best journalism. So instead of seriously entertaining any public solutions to what he has so convincingly demonstrated is a public problem, Critser ends by imploring us to eat less, get off our duffs and, incredibly, bring back gluttony as a leading sin. Personal responsibility is all to the good, but everything else in ‘’Fat Land’’ suggests it is probably no match for the thrifty gene and the Happy Meal.

I suspect the book is even more sobering than the very well written review.