Health

Single-payer systems do indeed restrict access and quality. They just do it by imposing long wait times, cutting off costlier patients, and restricting access to hospital rooms.

Clearly marked prices on private-sector cash-payment surgeries are a great thing. In fact, the competition of for-profit surgery centers drives down prices at more "traditional" (i.e., highly bureaucratized) hospitals.

Proponents of socialized medicine assert that markets cannot be trusted with healthcare due to "market failure." But the assumed "failures" of health markets are not improved by socializing healthcare.

Accad and Koka interview the widely respected blogger who writes anonymously under the pen name "Skeptical Scalpel".

Politicians are very proud when they can say a proposed program is "paid for." But this only means they've identified their intended victims ahead of time. Naming who will be plundered does not justify plunder.

Medicare and Medicaid ended up destroying the finest healthcare system in history, and the healthcare crisis has become a permanent part of American life.

Should the medical school curriculum include health inequity, climate change, and gun control? Accad and Koka discuss the politicization of medical education with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb.

Medicinal chemist John Tucker, PhD, and hypertension specialist Swapnil Hiremath, MD, share their perspectives and impressions on the unsettling question of generic drugs.

In a sense, it is hardly surprising that so little attention has been paid to scandals within universal healthcare systems given the histories of underperformance, scandal, and perpetual crisis associated with many such systems.