Book Reviews – January 2008

• The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
  
  by David Gratzer Reviewed by Jane M. Orient
  
• Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans
  Edited by Terry L. Anderson, Bruce L. Benson, and Thomas F. Flanagan Reviewed by William L. Anderson, Jr.
  
• The Wal-Mart Revolution
  by Richard Vedder and Wendell Cox Reviewed by George Leef
• On the Wealth of Nations
  by P.J. O’Rourke Reviewed by Raymond J. Keating
  

Towards a Liberal Utopia?

Edited by Philip Booth Reviewed by George C. Leef

The Price of Free Health Care

Many health-reform proposals in the United States are modeled on the Canadian healthcare system. The usual claim is that a program similar to the one in Canada would provide all Americans access to the finest medical services while managing to be less expensive than the status quo. Unfortunately, these wonderful visions of socialized health care [...]

America Needs Socialized Medicine?

Jane Orient, M.D. is executive director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Paul Krugman attributes “America’s Failing Health” to the lack of Canadian-style socialized medicine and thus to the persistence of a free-enterprise sector in American medicine (New York Times, August 27). Because “interest groups are too powerful, and the antigovernment propaganda of the right [...]

Nationalized Health Care Will Cut Costs?

A group called Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is promoting a government insurance plan to cover all Americans. In an August 13, 2003, Los Angeles Times report, the group claimed that their “single payer” plan would eliminate $200 billion a year in “administrative, marketing and other private-industry expenses.” This would save enough “to [...]

Medical Technology and the State

So-called public-policy experts often take the many advances in modern technology for granted. They assume that government regulations and controls merely redistribute the fruits of progress without affecting the nature and extent of technological development itself. But that is wrong. Whenever the government involves itself in the financing and distribution of goods and services, the [...]

The Price of Resistance

Consider this remarkable sentence in the New York Times last winter: “Brandishing new data showing that the drug industry earns higher profits and pays lower taxes than most other industries, White House officials say drug companies may bring price controls on themselves if they continue to resist President Clinton’s plan to have Medicare provide pharmaceutical [...]

Saving Money by Taking Lives

Two weeks ago, my 91-year-old mother-in-law died in a nursing home in Amsterdam. But although she had been suffering for nine months from a paralysis that prevented her from speaking and eventually from swallowing her food, she did not die a natural death from lack of nourishment. She died because the doctors decided that her [...]

Medical Warrior

Conrad F. Meier is health policy adviser for The Heartland Institute and assistant in research at the Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Warning! If you have high blood pressure, consult your physician before reading Medical Warrior. Dr. Miguel Faria writes with such fervor and conviction about the looming dangers of [...]