While I am pro-choice and think it’s a person’s right to do what they want with their own body, all things being equal… I think it’s best not to facilitate the selling of black market kidneys through one’s blog. I’ve therefore unapproved the comments.

But it is an interesting question to think about. Would you allow the comments on your own blog?

I’m not sure exactly why this rubs so many people the wrong way. What does it make you feel to live in a society where someone feels they must have a job, or they must go to law school, or live in New York City, or commute to work, or attend conferences? Why is selling an organ that you’ll probably never miss that much different at all?

Megan McArdle explains how this isn’t even a moral quandary at all, when people are suffering and dying due to kidney shortages. Not everyone can be Steve Jobs and fly to the state with the shortest waiting line– what about them? Why should they feel pressured to die so that others can make a political point that people should only offer up their organs on a purely altruistic basis?

Daniel Akst writes:

“It’s illegal in this country to buy or sell organs for transplant. This is an unjust law made and enforced by people who desperately need neither organs nor money. It condemns kidney-disease sufferers to death and potential organ donors to poverty. It’s a law that I will unhesitatingly break if one of my children needs a kidney, and I hope you will have the decency to do the same if a member of your family is in a similar situation.

The sanctimony of those who condemn these transactions strikes me as outrageous. If someone has the right to abort her own fetus, why does she not have the right to sell her own kidney? By what authority does the state tell me I cannot save myself or my family members by paying money I earned to a willing seller of a surplus item? In fact, why wouldn’t a system of national health insurance include a provision for organ purchases? These transactions should not just be legal for the rich but subsidized for the poor, all in a carefully designed and closely regulated marketplace serving buyers, sellers and even medical ethicists. It’s a shame that even one more person has to die before this law is changed.

Of course, kidney buying wouldn’t have to be subsidized for the poor. There are many poor people who amass hundreds of thousands of dollars through generous private donors for a potential organ transplant surgery, only to die while in the waiting line.

Thirteen people will die today waiting for a kidney.

To put it succinctly, the government’s “solution” for this “problem” was to mandate a new kind of inhaler, one that doesn’t contain CFCs and “cost twice as much and simply don’t work as well.”

Imagine that! Many doctors and the government insist they work just as well, but asthma sufferers such as Megan McArdle disagree.

ETA: A reader points out to me that it was not necessarily the American government mandating this change- it was actually an international treaty that America signed along with many other countries which forced the switchover to non-CFC inhalers. This is even more of a reason why many of the international treaties we agree to are completely worthless for what they’re meant for and should be avoided. The consequences are simply not adequately studied ahead of time, and are different than the intentions.

“I once worked on a chicken farm. Actually ‘farm’ is far too gentle a word for the way these chickens were raised, and ‘factory’ sounds too clinical. This was the seventh circle of chicken hell, a clucking, stinking, filthy production line with just one aim: to produce the maximum quantity of edible meat, as fast and as cheaply as possible, regardless of quality, cruelty or hygiene.”

“As swine flu spreads, and fear spreads faster, it is worth remembering that this, and other animal-to-human viruses, are partly man-made, the outcome of our hunger for cheap meat, the result of treating animals as if they were mere raw material to be exploited in any way that increases output and profits.

There is a tendency to see a flu outbreak, like the plagues of old, as an unstoppable natural event, a scourge visited on Man from above. But there is nothing natural about this form of disease: indeed, it stems from an abuse of nature.

Vast modern pig farms, like the huge poultry plants across the globe, are ideal incubators of disease, and many scientists believe that viral mutation can be directly linked to intensive modern agricultural techniques. With enfeebled animals packed into confined spaces, pathogens spread easily, creating new and virulent strains that may be passed on to humans. When dense populations of factory-farmed animals exist alongside crowded human habitations, the potential for disaster is vastly greater.”

In vitro meat is certainly the wave of the future and solves a host of problems (environmental and health-wise), since our current system is simply unsustainable for our planet (along with our arteries and waistlines). The group working towards bringing cultured meat to fruition is a nonprofit called New Harvest, and I wish them all the best with their work.

RP discusses his first year in Congress in 1976, when the government created a swine flu scare and initiated a mass inoculation program– which killed more people than the original swine flu had.

RP’s questions:
Why is the Department of Homeland Security getting involved in a medical issue and holding press briefings? (This emphasizes the fact that the DHS steps on areas that were already handled by other agencies and is mainly redundant in focus.)
Why are we more worried about the swine flu so far when there were more than 13,000 cases of tuberculosis (also a spreadable, contagious disease) last year?

It is my opinion that there will certainly be a pandemic at some point in not just the United States, but the world, so it’s good to be prepared even if the current crisis doesn’t morph into a pandemic. I’ve got Tamiflu stocked from the last scare (involving avian flu), but not too many other people do, even people I told to hoard a supply. People just don’t take things seriously unless it’s right here, right now, happening in front of their faces. When deciding on what kind of response to take, we should look back to 1976 and to 1948 and 1918, but we shouldn’t base our response solely on those flus (or on Twitter). This is a different flu that could have the potential to be worse or could turn out to be an empty threat.

In the future, though, pandemics will happen as they always have, and we do need to be ready for that. All the recent wildly infectious flus have come from human contact with livestock, and that’s certainly something that needs to be addressed. Meanwhile, you can just track this one.

The CDC is on top of any possible swine flu epidemic, according to NPR.

They are encouraging sick people not to go to work and issuing bulletins.

The Obama administration is handling the situation calmly, albeit with a dash of security theater.

Liberal bloggers are surmising that universal healthcare would somehow make a difference.

In other words, everything is proceeding normally.

Yet when looking at the CDC’s health advisory and FAQ regarding the swine flu, it’s painfully obvious that the obvious just isn’t being stated: that the whole thing has come about due to humans eating pigs for food. Waaaay at the bottom of the CDC’s FAQ, the very last question reads:

Can I get swine influenza from eating or preparing pork?
No. Swine influenza viruses are not spread by food. You cannot get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. Eating properly handled and cooked pork products is safe.

This is like saying, “Your car crash was caused by a drunk driver, not alcohol.” It’s skirting the issue. The pigs wouldn’t have gotten flu or even existed if people weren’t eating them for food in the first place.

How did humans get flu from pigs? Most likely it was through the air, but the CDC can’t know that with 100% certainty at this point, when we don’t even know all the parameters of what we’re facing. Would you really eat pork from the original farm in Mexico where the four-year-old started this whole thing? Would the head of the CDC or the head of the USDA eat that pork? Maybe there’s no risk at all, but why keep eating porkchops in the meantime?

Indeed, another agency, the USDA, has rushed to say, as summed up by the Associated Press, “Fear of swine flu is a good reason to wash your hands, but not to take pork off the menu.” Raising pigs as food can kill the farmers and you, but no, for heaven’s sake, don’t stop eating it. Don’t hurt our pig farming lobbies!

Alex Avery at The Corner writes, “True to liberal form, NPR News just reported that ‘some’ are pointing the finger at Mexican ‘factory pig farming’ as a likely culprit. You’d never know that during the past half-decade the World Health Organization has been doing its utmost to get third-world farmers to abandon traditional mixed-livestock farming and to adopt modern confinement systems where animals are seperated by species and kept from interacting with wild animals. Too politically incorrect.”

Avery provides no evidence against the assertion that the first case of swine flu originated near a Smithfield mass pork production facility. He implies that the WHO’s preferred methods of containment would prevent infectious diseases such as the swine flu by keeping different species apart, but that’s hogwash. Avery, just how- in your expert opinion- should Smithfield Foods keep flies away from its massive, million-pig manure lagoons?

Pigs raised as food by farmers, by definition, cannot be separated from those farmers. Even if they never interact with any other species, the pigs will be interacting with a very important species to you and me: humans. We now know that swine flu is what we can get as a result, along with manure lagoons and bacon.

Joe the Plumber is the perfect messenger: he’s not a Wall Street banker or a lawyer or even a doctor. His name is actually Joe, and he provides an important, if un-glamourous, service: plumbing. No one becomes a plumber because they want to be a millionaire, although I’m sure plumbing, like garbage collecting, can help someone earn a good living because there’s less competition in people who want to take on the job.

Those who are criticizing Joe as a wealthy man who needs to hand over his dough to other Americans (as is the case with the New York Times’ Caucus comment section seem to think Joe is making his work visits in limos and relaxing, sipping champagne while he’s fixing people’s plumbing. The man says he wants to save for his son’s college education and works 10 to 12 hours a day to do so (and by the time his son gets to college, the price tag for tuition will be so over-inflated that he might in fact need that entire $250,000 a year to pay it).

Joe the Plumber (actually Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio) wants to buy a business, see– he doesn’t have the business now, he just wants to buy it and would be making “payments for years” on it– and he’s hoping the profits would be more than the $250,000 threshold for Obama’s tax cuts. If it is, his taxes will go up and a lot of that profit will be gone, when he’s just trying to fix people’s plumbing, make a living for his family, and save for his son’s college education. A tax increase means he won’t be able to hire other plumbers on– creating those jobs Obama is always talking about– and he won’t be able to buy a new truck– helping those American car companies Obama is always catering to in Detroit.

In other words, he might not be able to buy the business at all.

… I’m planning on purchasing this company – it’s not something I’m gonna purchase outright, it’s something I’m going to have to make payments on for years – but essentially I’m going to buy this company, and the profits generated by that could possibly put me in that tax bracket he’s talking about and that bothers me. It’s not like I would be rich; I would still just be a working plumber. I work hard for my money, and the fact that he thinks I make a little too much that he just wants to redistribute it to other people. Some of them might need it, but at the same time, it’s not their discretion to do it – it’s mine.

Joe says about himself:

you know, my big thing is the American Dream. I work hard. You know, I was poor; my mom raised me and my brother by herself for a very long time until my dad came along. So I know what it’s like to suffer. It’s not like I was born with a silver spoon… Eventually – I mean, just to sound a little silly here, but you need rich people. I mean, who are you going to work for?

You start giving people stuff, and then they start expecting it – and that scares me. A lot of people expect it now. They get upset when their check’s late, they get upset when they don’t get as many benefits as they used to, or when different government agencies are cut or spending is cut here and there for whatever reason – people get upset at that. And that’s because they’re used to getting it and they want more. I mean, everyone’s always gonna want more. People work the system left and right to get more out of welfare, to get more out of state assistance, federal assistance. And if government’s there for them, they’re gonna keep on trying to manipulate it to get more out of it. You got people that come along and say, “Hey, I wanna help you people,” I mean, they’re all ears! They’re like, “Hey, you can help me more, I don’t have to work as hard, I don’t have to do as much, and you’re gonna give me this? Man, that’s great, you’re a good guy.”

That is essentially what is wrong with our politics and the fundamental problem with a government such as the one we have– the tendency will always be towards bigger government, although that is not necessarily the best way to go for the long run.

So yeah, it goes down the socialist – His healthcare plan scares me. You know, I don’t like people going without healthcare, but it’s not my job to pay for everyone else’s healthcare. It’s hard enough paying for my own. I like the idea of deregulation as far as – nationally, you know, you only get insurance companies that can work in this state – if you deregulate that then you have more people competing and then the prices would go lower. It seems pretty simple to me. It probably isn’t that simple – but you flood the market with more products, usually they go down cheaper.

With just a few paragraphs, Joe has proven himself to be better at understanding basic economic facts than even a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Paul Krugman; he essentially expounded on many of the best and basic reasons why a free market economy, with rare exception, works better than a regulated, planned, socialist one: we need rich people because we all need to aspire to something. Ask anyone in this country if they want to be rich or not, and overwhelmingly they’ll say they do. Sure, some genuinely might not care, but if given the choice, we’d pretty much all prefer to be wealthy, and that’s what keeps us plumbing and garbage collecting and teaching and nursing and selling real estate. We all have the chance to be wealthy, if we work hard enough at something we’re good at. That’s why Joe the Plumber works 10 to 12 hours a day, and it’s why anyone would work 10 to 12 hours a day.

Regulation is usually ineffective and devastates competition, thereby decreasing choices for consumers and quality of services and products.

And what is Joe the Plumber’s idea of the American Dream?

Me personally, my American Dream was to have a house, a dog, a couple rifles, a bass boat. I believe in living life easy and simple. I don’t have grand designs. I don’t want much. I just wanna be able to take care of my family and do things with them outdoors and that’s about it, really. I don’t have a “grand scheme” thing. My American Dream is just more personal to me as far as working, making a good living and being able to provide for my family, college for my son. Things like that – simple things in life, that’s really what it comes down to for me. That’s my dream.

This guy deserves a New York Times column.

I disagree, and here is one direct way to lower healthcare costs.

Why don’t we make all those who lose malpractice lawsuits (or, better yet, all lawsuits) pay the court costs of the plaintiff? We often see people hold up European countries’ healthcare systems as models we should be aping, but what about their court systems, too? Europe doesn’t have any problems with wasteful or frivolous lawsuits because if the plaintiff loses, he or she pays all court costs of the defendant.

Therefore, if someone doesn’t have a rock solid case in which they definitely experienced malpractice, they won’t initiate a case in the first place, and this will save doctors and insurance companies– and the American consumer– millions of dollars.

Every time you go to the doctor and can’t believe the bill you get, it’s because you’re also contributing to that doctor’s insurance costs, which could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Of course, John Edwards and his trial-lawyer brethren will fight against it, but if we really wanted to make a difference and get healthcare for the “two Americas,” this would be an excellent way to do it.

The specific findings, as summarized by the UNC Journalism blog, were:

Media Overemphasize Cost to Consumer: The broadcast networks mentioned costs to consumers or drug company revenues 11 times more often than they mentioned drug development costs.

Networks Leave Companies Unnoticed: Only 22 percent of the stories even named the company that developed the drug or drugs featured in the story.

What Development Costs?: A mere 2 percent of stories dealt with the cost of developing drugs, and even those costs were downplayed by industry skeptics.

Special Treatment for Left-Wing Causes: Nineteen stories focused on drugs that were popular liberal causes such as the morning-after pill or HPV vaccine Gardasil. The networks didn’t apply the same scrutiny to those drugs and their makers as they did to others.

I’m not really a fan of pharmaceutical companies in general due to their extremely annoying ads (although that’s really more of an issue with the people who respond to the commercials and ads, which encourages their endless rotation; the companies are simply doing what gets results). However, it’s a basic tenet of Journalism 101 to not completely ignore a company directly involved in a story– and the fact that drug development costs were universally forgotten isn’t surprising, I guess, but that doesn’t make it any less outrageous.

The fact is that these drugs are incredibly expensive to bring to market (due not just to R&D costs, but to the FDA’s byzantine requirements as well), and until that’s rectified, the billions a company spent to create and test a drug shouldn’t be completely ignored in news coverage.

I’m reminded of the exchange between John McCain and Mitt Romney that took place at one of the Republican debates in January:

MCCAIN: … have sued the pharmaceutical companies because of overcharging of millions of dollars of Medicaid costs to their patients.

MCCAIN: How could that happen? How could pharmaceutical companies be able to cover up the cost to the point where nobody knows? Why shouldn’t we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?

It’s because of the power of the pharmaceutical companies. We should have pharmaceutical companies competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients.

ROMNEY: OK, don’t leave me. Don’t send the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys.

MCCAIN: Well, they are.

ROMNEY: No, actually they’re trying to create products to make us well and make us better, and they’re doing the work of the free market.

And are there excesses? I’m sure there are, and we should go after excesses. But they’re an important industry to this country.

But let me note something else, and that is the market will work. And the reason health care isn’t working like a market right now is you have 47 million people that are saying, “I’m not going to play. I’m just going to get free care paid for by everybody else.” That doesn’t work.

Number two, the buyer doesn’t have information about what the cost or quality is, or different choices they could have. If you take the government out of it to a much greater extent, you’d get it to work like a market and it will rein in cost.

Romney lost a lot of people who were watching this debate with me when he became so outraged at the mere thought of blaming something on the pharmaceutical companies or making them into the “big bad guys.” He actually didn’t just lose the home audience, he horrified them. He was correct that we get lifesaving drugs from the pharma companies, but Romney isn’t right when he says that Big Pharma is beyond reproach– a key aspect of a free society is that we can criticize companies that bring us life-saving products if we want to, whether our criticism is justified or not (and someone can criticize us for doing that, and we can criticize them for criticizing us, and so on).

It was more Romney’s attitude that was misguided rather than his words, though, because his follow-up was dead-on: if the free market was at work, Big Pharma wouldn’t be able to be the “big bad guys” and they would be “competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients,” because those patients would be part of the free market (which they now are not) and because other pharma companies would have a chance to get their drugs passed by the FDA (as of now, small guys like Cortex Pharmaceuticals don’t have a hope in hell of that happening because they can’t work the system of the FDA).

Romney just didn’t take it far enough. It’s not just that uninsured people may show up at the emergency room and expect treatment when they need it, it’s also a huge problem that 40% of health care costs in the United States are paid by the government. When government gets involved, prices go up and quality goes down. Why wouldn’t the pharmaceutical companies try to overcharge the government? Everyone else does and gets away with it, and the government is usually very willing to part with its non-hard-earned money. While McCain is so worried about American taxpayers being ripped off by corporations, let’s ask him about the various cases of massive fraud conducted by private contractors in Iraq. Since he wants us to stay in Iraq for 100 more years, we might as well start fixing the snafus now, right?

Tags: prescription drugs, drugs in the media, prescription drugs media, drug industry media, John McCain Big Pharma, John McCain drug companies, John McCain pharmaceutical companies, Mitt Romney Big Pharma, Mitt Romney drug companies, Mitt Romney pharmaceutical companies