Healthcare

There is nearly universal agreement that too many American veterans are made to languish unnecessarily under the current Department of Veterans Affairs claims backlog.  For many months, often years, our servicemen and women patiently wait to receive their hard-earned benefits, held up by a notoriously burdensome and antiquated government bureaucracy, which has only worsened as more than 2.5 million troops return from overseas service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some critics have even called for the resignation of VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki.  While justified in their outrage, their demands for the Secretary’s job are wrongheaded and would only make matters worse.

The truth about late-term abortions, like those committed in Kermit Gosnell's House of Horrors, is that pro-choice leaders don't know how to respond to one simple question: When is innocent human life deserving of protection?



It's no secret that President Obama doesn't believe in limits -- he opposed legal protections for infants born alive after failed abortions; he wants more taxpayer funding of abortion; he mandated insurance for abortifacients in Obamacare; he opposes limits on sex selection abortions; and much more. Read more...

There’s not much agreement these days among Republicans, Democrats, members of the House and members of the Senate.  So, when bipartisan members of both chambers express shared sentiments about the future of an important federal healthcare program, it’s a notable event, to say the least.

Recently, the Republican chair and ranking Democrat of the House Ways and Means health subcommittee joined forces in a letter to the government agency that manages the Medicare program – the Centers for Medicare &Medicaid Services (CMS) -- to act cautiously regarding fiscal-cliff related cuts for Medicare’s End Stage Renal Care (ESRD) benefit, on which the overwhelming majority of Americans with kidney failure rely for their dialysis care.

Health care costs are a perennial of conversation in Washington, particularly with regard to the Medicare program.  This is understandable given the fact that health care spending represents nearly 18 percent of the overall economy and the Medicare and Medicaid programs combined account for nearly a quarter of the federal budget.  For years, the talk around health costs and the trajectory of the Medicare program was unremittingly somber due to spiraling costs and a lack of remedies.  Recently, however, the growth of national health spending has abated somewhat, spawning a more upbeat discourse.  Celebration may, however, be both premature and dangerous if it deflects from reforms that are still very much needed. Read more...

The horrors revealed at the trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell have put abortion advocates on the defensive.  One Pennsylvania newspaper has characterized the Gosnell case as “the abortion industry’s worst nightmare.”
 
The trial is over, but the details of Gosnell’s crimes are haunting.  Gosnell would “snip” the spine of newborn infants, killing the child -- a grisly circumvention of the partial-birth abortion ban, which involves puncturing the skull of a born-alive infant and suctioning out the brain.
 
The abortion industry dismisses Gosnell as an “outlier” not reflective of most abortionists.  However, that assertion should not obscure the fact that arguments justifying late-term abortions and infanticide are not outliers among abortion advocates.   Indeed, over the past 40 years, such arguments have been repeatedly made. Read more...

In a health care system struggling with controlling costs and a fiscal situation focused on cutting and changing government programs, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, known as Part D, stands alone by saving money. Read more...

In April, 45 U.S. senators blocked legislation that would require background checks for all commercial gun sales – a measure that 92 percent of Americans and the majority of the U.S. Senate support. This bipartisan legislation, introduced by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.), also would have strengthened the existing background check system and taken critical steps to prevent at-risk individuals with serious mental illness from acquiring guns.

From the prospective of a Vietnam veteran who receives compensation and medical care through the Department of Veterans Affairs, calling for a change in the agency’s leadership is wrongheaded and would do no good in resolving the claims backlog. Read more...

I was in Mexico when the H1N1 influenza pandemic began to make international news several years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientists and health experts—called disease detectives—were racing against the clock to develop a vaccine and accelerate its manufacture. Read more...

The U.S. government is in its second decade of fighting global human trafficking, including the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) by evaluating how other governments fight these crimes and tying results to financial assistance. More recently, our government has turned its attention to domestic CSEC. Yet, as with other forms of child sexual abuse, the most common tactic is to wait for harm to occur and then punish offenders and try to help victims.

Instead of addressing CSEC as a public health problem that has causes and can be prevented – which it can – we are in a constant state of reaction that never gets us ahead of the problem.