I have a herniated disc. According to my MRI’s report, I have a “diffuse disc protrusion” that reaches the “center posterior/lateral right of the L5-S1 intervertebral disc”. L5 and S1 vertebrae are located in the lumbar section of your body. The discs are the natural cushion between the vertebrae. When a disc is damaged, it…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “Our Bodies, Their Subsidies” read Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. Moreover, the Affordable Care Act is merely the latest in a century-long line of legislation ostensibly aimed at increasing the affordability of health care, but which by subsidy have locked in a status quo of needlessly high levels…

In recent weeks, I’ve seen multiple stories about deaths in prisons. These deaths were all preventable and easily attributable to prison conditions. Let’s examine a few of these incidents. According to the Miami Herald, “Florida’s Department of Corrections is facing a third potential criminal probe in the wake of another inmate death at a state…

In “Invitation to a Dialogue: Alternative Therapies” (New York Times, May 14), Dr. James S. Gordon writes: “Many economists believe that health care costs will continue to rise. Even more distressing, the Affordable Care Act will likely reinforce current practice, which dictates surgical and pharmacological interventions that can be expensive, inappropriate, burdened by side effects and, often,…

[Note: This piece was originally written as a letter to the editor of the New York Times in reply to its “Invitation to a Dialogue” on alternative therapies.] As Dr. Gordon notes, legislation ostensibly aimed at increasing the affordability of health care has had the effects of locking in a status quo of needlessly high levels of costly treatment required…

C4SS Media presents Kevin Carson‘s “Working Three Jobs to Make Ends Meet? This Might be Why” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. The state, the giant corporation, and large institutions of all other kinds are part of an interlocking culture designed to extract as much money from us as possible while delivering as little as…

The US Center for Medicare Services recently published a database of physician Medicare billing histories. One interesting bit of information from data release is the fact that a leading source of expenditures for big billers is drugs. As it turns out, Medicare incentivizes physicians to choose the most expensive drugs by reimbursing them for the…

Nothing like starting out your day with a laugh — and today I have Matthew Lynch (“12 Reasons Why Obama is One of the Greatest Presidents Ever,” Huffington Post, November 15) to thank for it. About half of Lynch’s points boil down to, “Obama is for x, because he makes speeches talking about x all…

An October 20-22, 2013, Fox News national poll revealed that the implementation of ObamaCare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) by the American state has been so chaotic that 60% of registered voters characterize the process as “a joke.” The economic reasons for the incompetence are well known by libertarians familiar with the Austrian tradition…

O sistema de medicina dos Estados Unidos é corrupto, ineficaz e desnecessariamente caro. Esses resultados decorrem da violência do estado em favor da elite politicamente bem relacionada (especificamente seguradoras privadas, médicos, empresas farmacêuticas e de equipamento médico). Escassez artificial, superfaturamento, má alocação de financiamento de pesquisa e supressão de terapias alternativas (não patenteáveis) podem ser…

The American medical system is corrupt, ineffective and unnecessarily costly. These outcomes are due to state violence on behalf of the politically connected elite (namely private insurers, physicians, pharmaceutical and medical device companies). Artificial scarcity, price-gouging, misallocation of research funding and the suppression of alternative (non-patentable) therapies can be ameliorated

Knapp: “Privatization” is one of those Humpty Dumpty words that means just what the political class chooses it to mean, neither more nor less.

Kevin Carson: The healthcare industry is a textbook example of what Ivan Illich (in Tools for Conviviality) called a “radical monopoly.”

Pero espero que te des cuenta de que no todo el mundo que está a favor de la sanidad universal apoya la sanidad estatal, y no todo el mundo que está en contra de la sanidad estatal se opone a la sanidad universal.

Ross Kenyon on the cheese pimps at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The current US debate about health-care funding can be understood as concerned with meeting the challenge of doing three things at once: (1) Ensuring that everyone can afford to buy ample medical services and (2) lowering the price of care while (3) not interfering with our choices. An Unnecessary Tension among Health Care Goals—Created by…