The “expert class” – the knowledgeable elites who are appointed by the Central Authority to establish the rules under which all of us in the great unwashed masses are to live our lives – will always (as a general proposition) tend to do great harm. Nowhere is this result more evident than in the policies [...]

Death panels? We don’t need no stinkin’ death panels. As President and sole member of Glorious Old Farts of America (GOFA), DrRich is acutely aware of the many ways our healthcare reformers – even prior to the birth throes of Obamacare – have subtly laid the groundwork for ushering us old timers to Our Great [...]

The implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), an incredible feat of visionary medical science blended with cutting edge engineering, a device responsible for saving thousands of lives a year, has gone from being a prototypical American success story to a symbol of healthcare excess. Today the ICD is widely castigated by the press, the public, the insurers, [...]

In early 2010, The Covert Rationing Blog and the ACP Advocate Blog were named finalists in the 2009 Medical Weblog Award Competition, in the category of Best Health Policy/Ethics Blog. DrRich, who has been a vocal critic of the “New Ethics” espoused by the ACP (and other professional organizations), took the opportunity to challenge the [...]

It is easy to be puzzled by Progressives. They tend to be so kind, compassionate and well-meaning, and they try so assiduously to make everything turn out so well for everyone – and yet their works turn out to be so destructive. What’s up with that?  And why do Progressives so revere Diversity? And why [...]

The obese, like the poor and the uninsured, will always be with us. And like the poor and the uninsured, the obese have served as a useful foil to healthcare reformers. But while their fellow foils are portrayed as sympathetic victims of hard-hearted right-wingers, the obese serve a different purpose. It it their role to [...]

Contrary to common wisdom, the American health insurance industry did not oppose President Obama’s healthcare reforms. Far from it. Big health insurance was actually quite desperate for Obamacare to pass, and indeed took extraordinary steps, at critical times, to make sure that it did. In this series of articles, DrRich reveals why the insurance industry [...]

Why should you still read DrRich’s book, Fixing American Healthcare, even though our leaders have just fixed American healthcare for us? Four reasons. First, DrRich humbly suggests, you may be insufficiently paranoid about American healthcare, whether it’s the style of healthcare we have now, or the New Style Healthcare that is rapidly coming our way [...]

Now that President Obama’s healthcare reform has become the law of the land, it is time for us to prepare ourselves for the real fight. Namely, will individual Americans ultimately be restrained, by law or by subterfuge, from using their own resources to pay for their own medical care?  This notion is not as far-fetched [...]

Sure, nobody’s read the bill, and even if they had, what Nancy said is true: To find out what’s in the bill, they first had to pass it (so the bureaucrats could translate it into the hundreds of thousands of regulations that would finally determine its meaning). But there’s no need to wait for the [...]