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Here is a story suggesting that employees might use the outbreak of swine flu as an excuse to extend their summer holidays. I guess this is inevitable, given that some people will try anything on, although in a recession, it does seem rather dumb for staff to risk a disciplinary warning or outright sacking to lie about their health in this way.
Talking of holidays, in a few days’ time, yours truly is heading off to Normandy, northern France, for a week’s holiday with family, including, I am very happy to say, my father, who has recently made a recovery from a serious illness.
There will be lots of Calvados consumed. My blogging is likely to be slow next week.
I had to read the headline twice. Then I read the article twice. I still don’t get it.
What I first thought it said was,
International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patients
Weird, obscure line, but no weirder than a lot of things that come out of the international development department, and potentially a lot more sensible. I suppose it might make sense for the big southern African companies, especially, to combine their employee health programmes. But if it were more effective, wouldn’t they already be doing it? Wouldn’t the South African government, in any case (now they have got rid of that barking health minister), be the one doing the urging?
What it actually said was,
International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patents
Now that makes a lot less sense. It is quite up to the standard we have come to expect from DFID, a real candidate for economic illiteracy of the day.
[Mike Foster MP] wants companies to contribute to a “patent pool”, which the international drug-purchasing facility, Unitaid – set up by a number of donor countries, including the UK – is trying to establish.
“While it is absolutely vital that we work to reduce the human cost of HIV by focusing our efforts on preventing new infections, we must also face up to the stark reality of the treatment challenge we face. The pharmaceutical industry has an opportunity to act now to help prevent future human catastrophe. It is time for them to state their clear commitment to make new HIV medicines affordable to those who need them most.”
According to the all-party report, if HIV patents are put in a pool, generics companies – which make the cheap combinations now used in Africa – will be permitted to make low-cost copies of newer drugs and devise new combinations in a single pill, which is important for people living in poverty.
What can this possibly mean? There’s no real explanation here of how a ‘patent pool’ might work. It sounds like pharmaceuticals companies are being offered to the opportunity to swap an unstable legal monopoly for an internationally approved cartel, and to pose as humanitarians while doing so. Would that really lower the cost of HIV medication, and improve its effectiveness in general? It is far from obvious why that should be the case. Would medicines that are both cheaper and more effective be permitted to flow back to Western countries? I doubt it.
Which points up the weirdness of the whole exercise. In order to be economic in Western countries, HIV medicines have to be very expensive to buy there. That is not just because they are expensive to develop, but because the absolute numbers of people who need them are small. In the West, just as in poorer parts of the world almost no individual can afford to pay for their own treatment. So there’s a different sort of cartel effect maintaining the oligopolistic market. Government protects the patentees; and government subsidies end up paying for the consequences.
You don’t have to be a believer in the efficacy of beetroot and garlic as anti-virals to notice that the difference between the scale of the epidemic in parts of Africa and the richest parts of the world is not a consequence of the availabilty of drugs – or at least not the availabilty of anti-retrovirals. We have fewer people getting the disease in the first place. But we have fewer people with all sorts of infectious diseases. Malaria and dengue are not more treatable than they were when they were endemic in Europe, and the US, less than a century ago. The difference is better living conditions that everyone will work for if they have the chance.
Patent pooling, it seems to me, is no better than patent farming, in that it seeks to exploit artifical restrictions on innovation that just happen to be there for the benefit of a restricted interest group. It is an exercise in dinosaur husbandry, with little real relevance to improving the lives of us mammals. A reconfiguration of corporarate welfare, with its concentration on subsidising treatment of a particular disease, and bureaucrats swapping targets with bureaucrats, is a distraction from the less collectively ‘manageable’ task of avoiding the spread of infection, which is the invisible part of the virtuous circle of the people who are not sick getting better general health and more comfortable lives. That isn’t going to come from government drug programmes. I suspect it might come from “people living in poverty” having a bit more access to the non-patent and never-patent – but still restricted – technologies of choosing their own priorities and exploiting their own comparative advantages.
A friend (you know who you are) informed me that the Economist magazine was “getting better”, for example it had a lead story denouncing government debt. Of course this was the government debt that the Economist had urged government to take on (to bail out banks and other corporations and then to “stimulate the economy”), but it was good that it was denouncing the debt.
So I decided to give the Economist a chance and read their article (“editorial”) on American health care. After drinking a bottle of cider to recover (what a nice new bottle shape Henry Westons have produced) these on my thoughts upon that article:
It starts with a lie – Barack Obama was elected in part because of his plans to “fix American health care”.
In reality it was Hillary Clinton who stressed her health care plan during the Democrat primary campaign (Barack Obama just attacked her plan and made vague noises about his own). And during the general election campaign it was John McCain who came out with a specific health care plan, allowing people to buy health cover over State lines and switching the tax deductibility of buying health care cover from employers to individuals, whereas Barack Obama just (dishonestly) attacked the McCain plan and was vague about his own.
Barack Obama was elected President of the United States for several reasons (white guilt about mistreatment of black people, the total ideological devotion of the education system and the mainstream media, the insane judgement by John McCain to back the bank bailouts…), but stressing some specific plan to “fix American health care” was not one of them.
Still the Economist does not let the truth stand in the way of its articles, so it then outlines its position.
“Starting from scratch their would be a good case for a mostly publicly funded system” even for a magazine “as economically liberal as this one”.
This is a standard Economist trick – propose some form of statism and defend it by saying even we, the free market ones (the European meaning of “economically liberal”), are in favour of this statism. Of course the Economist never actually produces any evidence that it is pro-free market – but it is at trick it has been using since Walter Bagehot (the second editor, the first editor actually was a free market man) so I suppose it is a lie hollowed by history.
However, we are not “starting from scratch” so the Economist reluctantly concedes that some little freedom (about half of American health care is already government funded and the rest is tied up in regulations – facts that the Economist avoids, see later) must remain for awhile – it suggests five years. → Continue reading: The ‘Economist’ and American health care
All the existing [medical care] schemes, including the present American mixed corporatist/socialist model, represent a transfer from the young and healthy to the old and chronically sick (and to the medical cartel, of course). The way it’s used in practice, the phrase “having health insurance” means having the right to place oneself on the receiving end of these transfers. No honest discussion of the situation is possible until the entirely false and misleading concept of “health insurance” is dropped.
– Commenter Ivan
Millions and millions of Americans support Obama’s desire to even more massively intervene in the market for medical care than the US state already does. And of course Obama’s moves are just the opening salvo in a desire to eventually end up with fully socialist healthcare, along the lines of Britain’s ghastly National Health Service, which has intermittently tried to kill me over the years.
I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.
Well yes, it will be different… in that the control obsessed Obama’s of this world will find new, innovative and oh so wholesome American ways to end up with a third rate health care system much like Britain has today.
This might be a good time for Americans to invest their money in Swiss medical clinics as I suspect in the coming years expatriated medical care will be a serious growth industry… plus it has the added benefit of getting your money out of the USA and US dollar.
“It is rare that governments successfully cut costs by first spending more money.”
– Tyler Cowen. He was talking about Mr Obama’s plans to socialise US medicine. I am sure that when the NHS was set up here in the UK, the advocates of said argued that it would “save” money in the long run. Meanwhile, here is some useful commentary from Arnold Kling.
Oh dear… seems the EU is being beastly to us again.
I wonder if I can buy brain futures or it is just pork bellies?
As here, for instance. Via Liberty Alone, I learn of a remarkable new recruit to the ranks of those who are panicking about the pandemic. Yes, it is none other than the US Libertarian Party. They have just issued a press release reprimanding the US state for not being statist enough about this medically trivial event, which is in any case only being plugged up in order to divert attention away from other governmental blunders and to excuse further governmental usurpations, despite all the blunders. Why can’t they see that? Or don’t they care about such things any more? One can imagine a true “pandemic” that really did need measures like draconian border controls to defend against it (sickness is the health of the state), but if this trivial flu variant is it, then, to put it mildly, an explanation to that effect should have been added.
The UK Libertarian Party should treat this pandemic pandering as an awful warning of what happens to small parties – parties “of principle” – who become gripped by the desire to pile up lots of mere votes, and who forget what they were started to accomplish. First they pick a regular politician to lead them, and he then picks more regular politicians to help him, and before you know it, they are behaving like regular politicians.
But it is more fundamental than that, I fear. Start a political party, and before you know it, it is behaving like a political party. LPUK beware.
One of the beauties of the blogs, I find, is that the link-rich medium enables you to fly off on all manner of tangents and think through issues that might otherwise not arise or come into one’s head so fast. The recent posting on Samizdata about Ayn Rand – which seemed to trigger a rather bad-tempered and long comment thread – led me to a site put together by this fellow, who wrote a rather rude comment about Rand – nothing very new there – and I decided to take a look at his own blog. This is what I found. James Hooper is a socialist who once, apparently, was a “teenage libertarian”. I guess one does not come across many libertarians who imbibed their Hayeks, Rands, or Rothbards and later decided that what the world really needed, in fact, was lots of collectivism, progressive taxes, and the rest of it. I suppose John Gray fits a similar path, although as Brian Micklethwait has noted, Gray is consistent in his pathological gloomsterism.
Anway, back to James Hooper. In his latest post, he writes this:
“Healthcare is an area where the market has proven utterly inadequate, indeed it’s hard to find any pure market approach outside of the Third World (company insurance is decided by CEO boards and unions, state insurance by governments), although I’d imagine that those who have died in America owing to lack of insurance didn’t rate the distinction that much.”
Now it seems to me that there is something very wrong about this statement. Human beings require health care, just as they require food. Now, in the West, food is – mostly – produced by the free market, although as a libertarian I’d be the first to note that there is a lot of regulatory control over food production (ask any farmer, slaughterhouse owner, food retailer, etc) and a lot of subsidies, such as under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. But by and large, the process by which we get our fruit, veg, meat and carbs is via capitalism. This seems to work tolerably well. It could work a heck of a lot better, of course, but in general, you don’t see people, even the very poor, starving in the streets as happened under communism in Russia (1930s) or Mao’s China (1950s, 60s), or see the sort of state-induced disasters in Zimbabwe, etc. So clearly, something as basic as food seems to work best when left to the market.
So what is so different about health care that it can only – according to various statists, including many right Tories – be provided by a mixture of private/public operations or even, only by state monopolies, such as the UK’s National Health Service? For sure, some people, such as the very poor, will not be able to afford all the healthcare they want, but then the same issue applies to very poor people who cannot get all the food or housing that they want. Their problem is poverty, not something peculiar about food or housing. I understand that healthcare purchases tend to be less frequent than purchases of food; there may be inefficiencies or supply-demand issues that perhaps don’t let a market in health care function as well as in say, baked beans. But even so, for a person to state as a bald fact that a market in health care does not work seems, well, to be a case of ideology trumping experience and elementary logic. This article by Ronald Bailey lays out a good argument for a free market in health.
Of course, if, like Marx, Mr Hooper believes that a socialist society will be based on the “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, then that of course begs all kind of momentous questions of interest to defenders of liberty and prosperity. As I have pointed out before, if you say, for example, that I have a “right” to “free” healthcare, what that really means, in practice, is that I have a right to coerce someone who is able to work as a doctor/nurse/lab technician to give me what I want. In short, the Marxian “from each according to his abilities” presumably means that the state must have the power to decide what are the “abilities” that Johnathan Pearce, or James Hooper, etc, actually have, and then have the power to harness those abilities to fullfill the needs, as the state has defined them. In short, the Marxian formulation requires conscription of abilities.
There is a word for this state of affairs. It is called totalitarianism.
This story is bizarre: China is ordering folk to smoke to boost the economy? Maybe the Chinese authorities figure that with air pollution already so bad, what could be any worse?
It goes without saying that being a good liberal that I am, I consider it as outrageous for a government to encourage smoking as to use invasions of property rights and censorship of things like adverts to stop it. This sort of issue cuts both ways. What next: forcing folk to get hammered every evening?
What is the worst case scenario for swine flu cases in the United States? About 1,700.
This is not a pandemic, and the ballet of institutional panic in government combined irresponsible media coverage over the last few days has been instrumental in ticking public health as another area where contemporary alarmism, fanned by governments, signposts higher mortality when a crisis finally arrives.
Reported by Lucy Bannerman in today’s Times:
Fire kills child, 3, and parents as police prevent neighbours from trying to rescue them
A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them. The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.
By the time firefighters got into the house in Doncaster, Michelle Colly, 25, her husband, Mark, 29, and son, Louis, 3, were dead. Their daughter, Sophie, 5, was taken to hospital and believed to be critically ill.
Davey Davis, 38, a friend of the family, said: “It was the most harrowing thing I have ever witnessed. Michelle was at the bedroom window yelling, ‘Please save my kids’ and we wanted to help but the police were pushing us back and not allowing us near. We were willing to risk our lives to save those kiddies but the police wouldn’t let us.
“Tempers were running very high, particularly with the women who were there, but the police were just saying we have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety.
“There were four or five police officers. They were here before the fire brigade. We heard the sirens and we came across to help but they wouldn’t let us.
“I thought the police were there to protect lives. At one time they would have have gone inside themselves to try and rescue them.
“When a family is burning to death in front of your eyes, rules should go out of the window – especially with kids. Everybody wanted to try and help.”
In a previous post about loss of nerve in our public services I said, referring to instances in which firemen and policemen had “broken procedure” to save life, that despite their personal courage “institutional gutlessness surrounded them, was embarrassed by them, and will kill off their like eventually. Poisoned soil does not long give forth good fruit.”
Seems like the poison has worked its way well in. Note: I do not know whether the Colly family could have been saved had the attempt been made while Mrs Colly was still alive to scream for someone to save her kids. A spokeswoman for the South Yorkshire Police said, “The senior officer in charge is confident we handled this incident as professionally as possible. In a situation like that you could end up with more deceased bodies than you had in the first place.”
One of the lesser known sights of London is the Watts Memorial in Postman’s Park. I gather it featured in the film Closer, starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law. No, I am not being funny, suddenly veering off into a travelogue in the middle of a post about the deaths of a family. I wish there were something to laugh about. The memorial was set up by a Victorian artist, George Frederick Watts, to commemorate those who died saving others. It consists of hand made plaques each bearing the name of a person who sacrificed his or her life and a brief citation. Very quaint they are, with their crowded lettering with the extra-large initial capitals and little swirly plant motifs and curlicues in the corners. Even the names are quaint, laboriously given in full. Police Constables Percy Edwin Cook, Edward George Brown Greenoff, Harold Frank Ricketts and George Stephen Funnell are among them. I wonder what PC Percy Edwin Cook, for instance, who perished when he “Voluntarily descended high tension chamber at Kensington to rescue two workmen overcome by poisonous gas” would have made of his successors in the South Yorkshire force.
Perhaps the police spokeswoman was right. Perhaps if health and safety had been less comprehensively assured and the Colly incident handled rather less professionally, we would have ended up with more than the three “deceased bodies” – no, make that four, when you count the child expected to be born in two weeks – that we did end up with. Still, more than four dead bodies is quite a lot and quite unlikely, I cannot help thinking. And I also cannot help thinking that there is more to this than just counting the dead under different scenarios. If the critically injured five year old girl does survive she will be burdened by more than just the fact that her family died. She will eventually have to know that those who might have answered her mother’s last desperate appeal were held back on grounds of “health and safety.” Not theirs, obviously.
UPDATE: Other accounts give the spelling of the family name as “Colley”. They confirm that the police actively prevented rescue attempts.
FURTHER UPDATE: There is a thoughtful discussion in the comments regarding several moral and practical questions, and whether the press accounts are to be trusted. Quite possibly not. Yet I must add that if the South Yorkshire police are trying to convince me that they are not abdicating responsibility in order to follow rote “health and safety” procedure (as commenter “sjv” put it), then best not claim, as they appeared to in the Mail report linked to in the word “other”, that the reason they will not tell us exactly how long elapsed between the arrival of the police and the arrival of the firemen is “‘data protection’ rules.”
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