health care Archives - The Wisconsin Daily Star

Commentary: Medicine Now Diagnoses the Non-White ‘Oppressed’ with an Oppressive Case of ‘Weathering’

February 14, 2024 RealClearWire

In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While activist minister Jesse Jackson and health care leaders were decrying the crisis of “babies having babies” as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.

Although Geronimus’ claims gained little traction at the time, the concept she pioneered – “weathering” – eventually became a foundation for the social justice ideology that is now upending medicine and social policy. She has stated in interviews and in her writings that the term “weathering” was intended to evoke the idea of erosion and resilience.

Commentary: Battles We Can Win Are on Family, Morality, and Education

February 11, 2024 Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In “Burke on Our Crisis of Character,” which appeared in the December 2023 issue of Chronicles, Bruce Frohnen notes, “The American Way was real, rooted in families whose rights trumped the demands of the state because families were more natural and fundamental than the state.” The following month in the same magazine, Stephen Baskerville reviews a collection of essays, Up from Conservatism, in which he briefly addresses the pernicious effects of government welfare on family life and fatherhood.

As is the case in nearly everything that the federal government touches, be it education, health care, or anything else, its policies in the last 50 years have severely damaged the American family. Given the additional harms done by government in the first quarter of the 21st century—trillions of dollars in wasted expenses, woefully ignorant public school graduates, divisions along the lines of race, politics, and gender, a diminished pride in our past, the attacks on our liberties—some people I know despair about the future. Others of us want to restore the good that has been lost but feel frustrated and even defeated by the immensity of the task. We vote, we grouse (as I am doing here), yet each day brings some new assault on the culture, some new governmental dictate or intrusion, and we just want to hunker down in the trenches hoping that this bombardment will end of its own accord.

Commentary: COVID Redux

December 20, 2023 Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Life is hard if you do not learn from your mistakes. With Covid, political leaders and public health authorities engaged in a series of missteps, miscalculations, and manias that amounted to an extreme overreaction to the disease.

First, statistical models overstated the risk of the disease by an order of magnitude. Then, even after these miscalculations became apparent, other extreme measures like lockdowns, mandatory masking, coercive vaccine mandates, and a million other indignities ensued. In the end, almost everyone got Covid, almost everyone survived, and, while the economic countermeasures increased our national debt by 30%, the economy soon recovered too.

Commentary: Limiting Short-Term Health Care Plans Will Hurt Americans

July 16, 2023 RealClearWire

Mike Pirner had emergency gall bladder surgery shortly after buying short-term medical insurance plan (STM), for $150/month. The costs associated with the procedure were $100,000 — Mike only had to pay his $2,500 deductible, which was also his out-of-pocket maximum. President Biden has proposed rules released Friday of the July 4th week that would limit these plans to three months, with one additional month possible. Currently, these plans can last up to three years.

Skrmetti and 15 Other AGs Back Florida Transgender Medicaid Rule

May 5, 2023 Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Sixteen state attorneys general weighed in on Florida’s rule blocking Medicaid funds from transgender medical interventions on the grounds that they are experimental.

“From the Founding, states have exercised their authority to enact health and safety measures—regulating the medical profession, restricting access to potentially dangerous medicines, banning unsafe or unproven treatments,” the 16 Republican attorneys general write in the brief, a copy of which was provided exclusively to The Daily Signal.

Biden Signs $740 Billion Climate, Tax and Health Care Bill into Law

August 17, 2022August 16, 2022 The Center Square

President Joe Biden signed a $740 billion spending package into law Tuesday, the final step for the green energy, health care and tax hike bill after months of wrangling and controversy, in particular over the legislation’s hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents to audit Americans.

Democrats at the White House Tuesday touted the bill’s deficit reduction of $300 billion over the next decade. The bill includes several measures, including a $35 per month cap on insulin copays, an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, and authorization for Medicare to negotiate certain drug prices.

Commentary: What Happens in New York Doesn’t Stay in New York

February 23, 2022February 22, 2022 Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

It seems like every day America is becoming more anti-American than the day before. The Biden administration just keeps shooting for the “how can we out-do ourselves in pushing our Marxist policies” prize, and blue states are in lockstep. The American people keep getting whacked day in and day out, and the media is complicit. No one is safe these days in Biden’s America.

More Job Resignations Than Ever as Openings Sit Near Record Highs

January 5, 2022January 4, 2022 Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

A record number of American workers quit their jobs in November 2021 as the gap between available jobs and potential workers continues to increase, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.

Over 4.5 million workers quit their jobs in November 2021, a jump from October’s 4.1 million, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Tuesday.

Quits in accommodation and food services saw the greatest increase, 159,000, while other low-wage sectors like health care, social assistance, transportation, warehousing and utilities also saw spikes as workers looked for jobs with higher pay.