Latest news with #medicalfreedom
Washington Post
03-06-2025
- Health
- Washington Post
Political idiocy is going to make us, well, idiots
In today's edition: You walk into the pharmacy in Idaho and pick up the pamphlet that says 'Ivermectin and You.' You open it. Instead of information, loose pills simply tumble out. You ask the pharmacist about vaccines, and she pretends she hasn't heard you. This, my friends, is medical freedom. Leana Wen's latest column is a case study of the right's antipathy toward the medical establishment, chronicling how ivermectin — long used for deworming livestock — gained conservative cachet during the covid-19 pandemic and is now being made available over the counter in a bunch of red states; meanwhile, vaccine access is being 'sacrificed on the altar of contrarianism.' Yes, Leana says, 'proponents hail these moves as a win for the 'medical freedom' movement,' but they are in fact the manifestation of a diseased relationship with public health and science writ large. To wit: Vice President JD Vance doesn't seem to have a very good grasp on how America's space program happened, Mark Lasswell writes: Vance claims 'American talent' powered the program, with a teeny bit of help from 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to this country from Europe. 'Some'? Mark entreats us to remember rocketry mastermind Wernher von Braun. Oh, of the Philadelphia von Brauns? Not quite. True, a lot of those contributors became Americans in the 1950s — but Vance doesn't appear too keen on the whole naturalization thing, either. All of this pairs very poorly with, as Mark writes, the White House 'working energetically to dissolve arrangements between several research universities and the government.' Max Boot characterizes it even more starkly: 'the suicide of a superpower.' That's because a lot of progress really has been the result of American ingenuity, which happens to occur largely at universities funded by the government. Examples include: the internet, GPS, smartphones, artificial intelligence, MRIs, LASIK, Ozempic, and drugs that actually prevent and treat covid. But, years hence, as our adversaries explore the cosmos, the human genome and the limits of generative AI, at least we will be worm-free. Chaser: Professor Carole LaBonne writes that it's true that colleges have benefited plenty from federal funding, but if we're looking at which way the reliance relationship really goes, it's the government that depends on universities. From Perry Bacon's essay on the way 'flyover country' conquered this basketball season, with the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder heading to the NBA Finals. 'Is the NBA self-sabotaging? Does the league just have terrible luck?' Perry asks. 'No and no. Teams in fairly small markets will host the championships for a league that craves a massive and even international audience. And that's just fine.' The league, Perry writes, will have plenty of money no matter how many viewers tune in to this year's finals. What's more interesting is the way the NBA sorta kinda stands athwart the supercity-cization of the United States, by way of its strict rules for how much teams can spend and what Perry calls its 'socialist-y system' for paying players. It is not just not bad, Perry argues, but actively great that littler cities are able to compete. As coastal megalopolises hoover up whole industries and their workers, we all ought to have it in us to cheer on these finals. 'Courage I know we have in abundance … but [gun]powder — where shall we get a sufficient supply?' Abigail Adams, I was not familiar with your game! John Adams was, though. The future president once told his wife and pen pal: 'I really think that your Letters are much better worth preserving than mine.' The powder letter is pretty much exactly 250 years old, exchanged in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, and the resolve it displays is remarkable, writes historian Joseph Ellis, considering the overwhelming uncertainty still swirling at that point. Britain was the world's hegemon, Ellis writes, yet the Adamses 'were like poker players who were all-in before knowing what cards they had been dealt.' Even more remarkable is the couple's prescience that their correspondence would be important some day, as John noted. Ellis writes: 'They were not just writing letters to each other; they were writing to posterity — which is to say, us.' So read up on what Ellis excerpts. Then, in our own era of uncertainty, maybe start writing, too. It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's … The Bye-Ku. NBA reckons With remotest finals sites This side of Oort cloud *** Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
CNN
18-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
Cracks emerge in MAHA-MAGA alliance as RFK Jr. builds out his team of health ‘renegades'
CNN — The opulent ballroom of the Willard InterContinental Hotel is a regular stop on the high-dollar circuit of industry conferences that populate downtown Washington. But on a recent morning, mingling among the marble columns was an eclectic group of outsiders new in town. Food influencers, organic farmers and anti-vaccine advocates were among those gathered for the official launch of the MAHA Institute, the latest incarnation of the Make America Healthy Again movement that has become a key facet of Washington in the second Trump administration. Speakers took the stage to discuss medical freedom, school lunches, vaccine exemptions and above all, chronic illness. Farmers chatted about the importance of local produce but also the dangers of chemtrails in the sky. College students pitched a health startup built around the importance of 'touching grass.' Speaking from the stage, Calley Means, a longtime ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s who is now advising the White House, noted the oddity of pairing the people and ideas behind MAHA with those in Donald Trump's MAGA movement. 'There's a lot of organizations, a lot of people in this room who four to eight years ago, would have thought it was crazy to vote for President Trump,' Means said. 'And I think many of those same people in 2024 felt like their vote for President Trump was the most important vote of their life.' With Trump came Kennedy, who nearly three months into the job as HHS secretary has finally built out his leadership team filled with Covid-19 contrarians and self-styled 'renegades.' Together, with the added influence of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, they've begun a massive overhaul of the nearly $3 trillion agency — implementing deep cuts in medical research and sweeping layoffs that have led to the departure of some of the most highly trained specialists working in the federal government. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. grilled on his health policies by lawmakers 03:19 But agency shake-ups and new appointees have also begun to splinter the alliance between traditional Trump world allies and Kennedy's MAHA acolytes. Though it's early days, there is friction between the MAHA and MAGA camps, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials and people familiar with the conversations who declined to be named because they weren't authorized to speak on behalf of the health agency, or who feared retribution. The White House bristled over the way Kennedy's team handled the measles outbreak in Texas and elsewhere this year. Meanwhile, Kennedy's powerful principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, has cracked down on the way agency officials communicate publicly, insisting that she personally review statements and reports. As for Kennedy's own leadership style, his oscillation between appeasing vaccine critics and placating public health officials has left people on both sides frustrated, multiple people familiar with the dynamics between the White House and HHS told CNN. Cracks have also opened up within the MAHA movement itself. Tension spilled into public view this month as high-profile MAHA supporters railed against Trump's new pick for surgeon general, Calley Means' sister, Dr. Casey Means. The holistic doctor has railed against the health care system's handling of chronic illnesses. But she has not discussed vaccine safety, and specifically Covid-19 vaccines, enough for some MAHA supporters. Looming large is what many MAHA supporters — and Kennedy himself — have publicly described as years of dismissal and ostracization by the mainstream medical and scientific community. Now that they are in charge, their suspicion of the establishment has not abated. 'The number of actual, true MAHA supporters at the top of these agencies is maybe 75 people across an agency that has 60,000 employees,' Mark Gorton, MAHA Institute co-president and a tech entrepreneur, told the Willard ballroom. 'Their job is unbelievably daunting because these bureaucracies are highly resistant to change.' But change is happening, buoyed by Kennedy's close circle of agency leaders and MAHA appointees. According to one former official familiar with conversations inside HHS, despite being outnumbered, there is no question that it's the MAHA advocates who are now fully in charge of the government's health agencies. 'Anyone in power, who has any kind of control, is a MAHA person,' the former official said. The MAHA movement is a key pillar of Trump's MAGA vision, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told CNN in a statement. 'Secretary Kennedy is both trusted and empowered by President Trump to deliver on his directive to get to the bottom of America's chronic disease epidemic, and this priority is shared not just by the White House and HHS, but the entire Trump administration.' HHS did not respond to a request for comment. RFK Jr.'s band of 'renegades' To hear Kennedy describe it, there has never been unity like this among the country's top health officials. 'We're friends. We go to lunch together; we stay at each other's homes; we vacation together,' Kennedy told Fox News this month, flanked by the heads of three of the biggest health agencies: Dr. Marty Makary, Food and Drug Administration commissioner; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, National Institutes of Health director; and Dr. Mehmet Oz, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator. 'We're aligned in our vision. Friendship is based upon shared values, and that's the strongest bond that holds people together,' the secretary said. 'You got, sitting here, four people who are all canceled during Covid. The entire leadership of this agency is renegades, juggernauts against convention, and who are trying to look for truth, no matter what the cost.' As he said, each of Kennedy's juggernauts became prominent critics of the government's Covid-19 response during shutdowns and vaccination efforts. It's a leadership group 'made for TV,' one former Trump health official told CNN. Oz, known better by his TV moniker Dr. Oz, was already a public figure and adviser to Trump when the pandemic struck. He soon campaigned for reopening schools and touted hydroxychloroquine, without evidence, as an effective treatment for Covid-19 infection. Bhattacharya was an early advocate of ending broad shutdowns, co-authoring an October 2020 paper that argued most young, healthy people could safely mingle and achieve herd immunity against the virus. And while surgeon and author Makary supported certain public health measures during the pandemic, including early shutdowns and masking, his public opposition to vaccine mandates and skepticism of booster shots increasingly brought him into the circle of Covid-19 critics. Each has been tasked with reorganizing their respective agencies and reorienting them toward a MAHA vision while satisfying cuts directed by DOGE, a sometimes discombobulated combination that has resulted in eliminating programs, research and staff. Makary launched FDA initiatives to remove certain food dyes and reassess vaccine reviews. Bhattacharya is charged with leading Kennedy's massive autism research effort but also reworking the $48 billion NIH into merged groups with less funding. Oz has taken up the campaign for more artificial intelligence in health care outreach and defended potential Medicaid access requirements. Friction over surgeon general pick Yet outside the jovial unity of the country's top health officials, tensions are brewing about the assembly's commitment to MAHA goals. The debate broke open this month when Trump pulled Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general, and tapped Casey Means to fill the role. 'The new Surgeon General has never called for the Covid shots to be pulled off the market. That's why she was picked,' Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, founder of Americans for Health Freedom, wrote on X. 'Kennedy is powerless.' Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy's former running mate in his 2024 independent presidential bid, also questioned the choice, suggesting on X that the HHS secretary may be 'reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn't President Trump).' More recently, Shanahan took more precise aim at Kennedy's MAHA moves thus far, targeting food dyes but not — in her mind — putting sufficient pressure on issues including Covid-19 vaccines. 'Sure, we can make Fruit Loops great again, but let's not overlook the bigger issues—glyphosate and mRNA,' she wrote on X. The blowback has led Kennedy himself to step in and defend Means, a holistic medicine doctor who rose to prominence after she and her brother linked up with the MAHA movement and Kennedy's presidential campaign. 'Appointing Casey Means as US Surgeon General is like appointing someone who dropped out of West Point as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,' Steve Kirsch, an anti-Covid vaccine advocate and tech entrepreneur, wrote on X the afternoon of May 10. Five hours later, Kirsch posted his change of heart: 'I've talked to RFK and now support her despite my initial reservations.' Divisions inside HHS Outside of layoffs and reassignments at HHS, droves of federal employees have left the agency, several citing frustrations with the new leadership and Kennedy's chief of staff, Spear, a former environmental journalist who joined Kennedy's presidential campaign as press secretary. Spear told staff in meetings that all external communications, including responses to press but also routine reports such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly mortality updates or articles submitted by the NIH to research journals, would need to be reviewed by her, according to four people familiar with the meetings. Spear also controls the communications and information that Kennedy receives, according to those people. 'She's probably one of the biggest challenges of him getting feedback of any kind, information from the team,' said a former official who recently left the agency. 'Everything is filtered through her.' The slowdown on communications left White House officials frustrated with HHS' early response to the ongoing measles outbreak, that person and others familiar with the conversations said. White House officials would call HHS staff asking about the measles response, only to be told that Spear was handling it, the former officials said. There are now more than 1,000 measles cases across 30 states, according to CDC figures. Kennedy told congressional committees last week that 'we've handled this measles outbreak better than any other nation.' Frustrations with Kennedy's assembled leadership and the health agency overhaul have only exacerbated the flood of experts leaving HHS. For instance, so many people have left the agency's legal office that there is anxiety about whether HHS has the staff to man the looming battles with Harvard University over frozen research grants, the former official and another person familiar said. It is 'an utter disaster,' said the person familiar.
CNN
18-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
RFK builds his team of ‘renegades' amid friction between MAHA and traditional Trump allies
The opulent ballroom of the Willard InterContinental Hotel is a regular stop on the high-dollar circuit of industry conferences that populate downtown Washington. But on a recent morning, mingling among the marble columns was an eclectic group of outsiders new in town. Food influencers, organic farmers and anti-vaccine advocates were among those gathered for the official launch of the MAHA Institute, the latest incarnation of the Make America Healthy Again movement that has become a key facet of Washington in the second Trump administration. Speakers took the stage to discuss medical freedom, school lunches, vaccine exemptions and above all, chronic illness. Farmers chatted about the importance of local produce but also the dangers of chemtrails in the sky. College students pitched a health startup built around the importance of 'touching grass.' Speaking from the stage, Calley Means, a longtime ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s who is now advising the White House, noted the oddity of pairing the people and ideas behind MAHA with those in Donald Trump's MAGA movement. 'There's a lot of organizations, a lot of people in this room who four to eight years ago, would have thought it was crazy to vote for President Trump,' Means said. 'And I think many of those same people in 2024 felt like their vote for President Trump was the most important vote of their life.' With Trump came Kennedy, who nearly three months into the job as HHS secretary has finally built out his leadership team filled with Covid-19 contrarians and self-styled 'renegades.' Together, with the added influence of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, they've begun a massive overhaul of the nearly $3 trillion agency — implementing deep cuts in medical research and sweeping layoffs that have led to the departure of some of the most highly trained specialists working in the federal government. But agency shake-ups and new appointees have also begun to splinter the alliance between traditional Trump world allies and Kennedy's MAHA acolytes. Though it's early days, there is friction between the MAHA and MAGA camps, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials and people familiar with the conversations who declined to be named because they weren't authorized to speak on behalf of the health agency, or who feared retribution. The White House bristled over the way Kennedy's team handled the measles outbreak in Texas and elsewhere this year. Meanwhile, Kennedy's powerful principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, has cracked down on the way agency officials communicate publicly, insisting that she personally review statements and reports. As for Kennedy's own leadership style, his oscillation between appeasing vaccine critics and placating public health officials has left people on both sides frustrated, multiple people familiar with the dynamics between the White House and HHS told CNN. Cracks have also opened up within the MAHA movement itself. Tension spilled into public view this month as high-profile MAHA supporters railed against Trump's new pick for surgeon general, Calley Means' sister, Dr. Casey Means. The holistic doctor has railed against the health care system's handling of chronic illnesses. But she has not discussed vaccine safety, and specifically Covid-19 vaccines, enough for some MAHA supporters. Looming large is what many MAHA supporters — and Kennedy himself — have publicly described as years of dismissal and ostracization by the mainstream medical and scientific community. Now that they are in charge, their suspicion of the establishment has not abated. 'The number of actual, true MAHA supporters at the top of these agencies is maybe 75 people across an agency that has 60,000 employees,' Mark Gorton, MAHA Institute co-president and a tech entrepreneur, told the Willard ballroom. 'Their job is unbelievably daunting because these bureaucracies are highly resistant to change.' But change is happening, buoyed by Kennedy's close circle of agency leaders and MAHA appointees. According to one former official familiar with conversations inside HHS, despite being outnumbered, there is no question that it's the MAHA advocates who are now fully in charge of the government's health agencies. 'Anyone in power, who has any kind of control, is a MAHA person,' the former official said. The MAHA movement is a key pillar of Trump's MAGA vision, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told CNN in a statement. 'Secretary Kennedy is both trusted and empowered by President Trump to deliver on his directive to get to the bottom of America's chronic disease epidemic, and this priority is shared not just by the White House and HHS, but the entire Trump administration.' HHS did not respond to a request for comment. To hear Kennedy describe it, there has never been unity like this among the country's top health officials. 'We're friends. We go to lunch together; we stay at each other's homes; we vacation together,' Kennedy told Fox News this month, flanked by the heads of three of the biggest health agencies: Dr. Marty Makary, Food and Drug Administration commissioner; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, National Institutes of Health director; and Dr. Mehmet Oz, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator. 'We're aligned in our vision. Friendship is based upon shared values, and that's the strongest bond that holds people together,' the secretary said. 'You got, sitting here, four people who are all canceled during Covid. The entire leadership of this agency is renegades, juggernauts against convention, and who are trying to look for truth, no matter what the cost.' As he said, each of Kennedy's juggernauts became prominent critics of the government's Covid-19 response during shutdowns and vaccination efforts. It's a leadership group 'made for TV,' one former Trump health official told CNN. Oz, known better by his TV moniker Dr. Oz, was already a public figure and adviser to Trump when the pandemic struck. He soon campaigned for reopening schools and touted hydroxychloroquine, without evidence, as an effective treatment for Covid-19 infection. Bhattacharya was an early advocate of ending broad shutdowns, co-authoring an October 2020 paper that argued most young, healthy people could safely mingle and achieve herd immunity against the virus. And while surgeon and author Makary supported certain public health measures during the pandemic, including early shutdowns and masking, his public opposition to vaccine mandates and skepticism of booster shots increasingly brought him into the circle of Covid-19 critics. Each has been tasked with reorganizing their respective agencies and reorienting them toward a MAHA vision while satisfying cuts directed by DOGE, a sometimes discombobulated combination that has resulted in eliminating programs, research and staff. Makary launched FDA initiatives to remove certain food dyes and reassess vaccine reviews. Bhattacharya is charged with leading Kennedy's massive autism research effort but also reworking the $48 billion NIH into merged groups with less funding. Oz has taken up the campaign for more artificial intelligence in health care outreach and defended potential Medicaid access requirements. Yet outside the jovial unity of the country's top health officials, tensions are brewing about the assembly's commitment to MAHA goals. The debate broke open this month when Trump pulled Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general, and tapped Casey Means to fill the role. 'The new Surgeon General has never called for the Covid shots to be pulled off the market. That's why she was picked,' Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, founder of Americans for Health Freedom, wrote on X. 'Kennedy is powerless.' Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy's former running mate in his 2024 independent presidential bid, also questioned the choice, suggesting on X that the HHS secretary may be 'reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn't President Trump).' More recently, Shanahan took more precise aim at Kennedy's MAHA moves thus far, targeting food dyes but not — in her mind — putting sufficient pressure on issues including Covid-19 vaccines. 'Sure, we can make Fruit Loops great again, but let's not overlook the bigger issues—glyphosate and mRNA,' she wrote on X. The blowback has led Kennedy himself to step in and defend Means, a holistic medicine doctor who rose to prominence after she and her brother linked up with the MAHA movement and Kennedy's presidential campaign. 'Appointing Casey Means as US Surgeon General is like appointing someone who dropped out of West Point as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,' Steve Kirsch, an anti-Covid vaccine advocate and tech entrepreneur, wrote on X the afternoon of May 10. Five hours later, Kirsch posted his change of heart: 'I've talked to RFK and now support her despite my initial reservations.' Outside of layoffs and reassignments at HHS, droves of federal employees have left the agency, several citing frustrations with the new leadership and Kennedy's chief of staff, Spear, a former environmental journalist who joined Kennedy's presidential campaign as press secretary. Spear told staff in meetings that all external communications, including responses to press but also routine reports such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly mortality updates or articles submitted by the NIH to research journals, would need to be reviewed by her, according to four people familiar with the meetings. Spear also controls the communications and information that Kennedy receives, according to those people. 'She's probably one of the biggest challenges of him getting feedback of any kind, information from the team,' said a former official who recently left the agency. 'Everything is filtered through her.' The slowdown on communications left White House officials frustrated with HHS' early response to the ongoing measles outbreak, that person and others familiar with the conversations said. White House officials would call HHS staff asking about the measles response, only to be told that Spear was handling it, the former officials said. There are now more than 1,000 measles cases across 30 states, according to CDC figures. Kennedy told congressional committees last week that 'we've handled this measles outbreak better than any other nation.' Frustrations with Kennedy's assembled leadership and the health agency overhaul have only exacerbated the flood of experts leaving HHS. For instance, so many people have left the agency's legal office that there is anxiety about whether HHS has the staff to man the looming battles with Harvard University over frozen research grants, the former official and another person familiar said. It is 'an utter disaster,' said the person familiar.
E&E News
16-05-2025
- Health
- E&E News
Florida becomes 2nd state to ban fluoride in public water supply
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Florida on Thursday officially became the second state in the country to ban fluoride from public drinking water, marking a significant win for Medical Freedom groups aligned with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Florida follows Utah, which became the first state to ban fluoride in drinking water in March. 'You should be able to talk to folks, your doctor, your friends, your family, whatever, on any of these issues, and then make an honest judgment about what you think is best for you and your family,' Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a Thursday news conference in Trilby. 'Forcing this in the water supply is trying to take that away from people who may want to make a different decision, rather than to have this in water.' Advertisement Libertarian-leaning Medical Freedom groups, which grew in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, convinced a handful of local boards to stop adding fluoride to drinking water in recent years. But they received a significant boost from Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo after his formal recommendation against adding fluoride to public water supplies in November. Ladapo is a close ally of Kennedy, who has referred to fluoride as 'toxic waste,' and announced plans in April to ask the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending fluoride in drinking water.
Forbes
12-05-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Government Versus Your Health
A new book by Dr. Jeffrey Singer proposes a simple idea: 'Every human being of adult years and sound mind has the right to determine what shall be done with his own body.' You might think that principle is hard to argue with. Yet in Your Body, Your Health Care, Singer shows that government potentially interferes with just about every decision we make in health care. Government regulations limit whom we can seek care from, what facilities we can seek care in, what drugs we can take and who can prescribe them. In fact, there is hardly any area of medicine where we are able to make unrestricted choices. In Dallas, Texas, where I live, for example, I am not allowed to seek care from a nurse-practitioner in independent practice, even if the services she offers are services she has been trained to provide by government-sanctioned training programs. The only exception is for a nurse who pays a doctor an average of $50,000 a year to 'supervise' her practice. Yet this supervision is perfunctory and has almost no real content. It is little more than an expensive bribe that nurses are required to pay doctors for the right to do what they have been trained to do. Both patients and nurses are paying the cost of that bribe. You might think that restrictions like this one exist because of government's concern that patients might make bad decisions that would be harmful to themselves. Yet in states where nurses are able to practice without paying doctors $50,000 (27 in all), there is no evidence of patient harm. At times, Singer (who is himself a general surgeon) suggests that much government regulation of medical care is overzealous paternalism. But if that is what mainly motivates lawmakers, why are we allowed to make so many risky choices unimpeded by the state? For example: The most important reason for most medical interventions, as Singer acknowledges, is the financial self-interest of those who benefit from the regulations. Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, the Amercian Medical Association set out to make licensing of physicians a reality in every state. By the second decade of the 20th century organized medicine had gained virtually complete control over the practice of medicine. Like the medieval guilds of old, organized medicine has successfully sought to restrict supply in order to increase doctor incomes. Singer gives us a short review of that history, which I have explored in a full-length monograph for the Cato Institute (also the publisher of Singer's book). He also brings us up to date on the many studies of the competency of nurses. If anything, nurses may be slightly better than doctors for those tasks they have been trained to do. Right now, America is suffering from a doctor shortage. One way to solve that problem is to expand the number of providers and the scope of services they are allowed to provide. In addition to nurse practitioners, there are physician assistants, foreign-trained medical doctors and assistant physicians. None of these are being utilized to the full extent of what they have to offer. And here is a fact some readers might find surprising. Most people know that after students complete medical school, they go through a complicated process of finding a residency program to complete before they can become full-fledged practicing doctors. But 7 percent of doctor-of-medicine graduates and 10 percent of doctor-of-osteopathy graduates never find a residency. These students fall into a sort of legal limbo – unable to use their skills to meet patient needs. We could greatly expand the supply of medical care in this country if politicians would just step aside and let the market for professional services work. Without regulation, what would keep patients from seeing providers who are untrained in the care they offer to deliver? Singer says the private sector already has tools that protect us against that eventuality. If Singer claims he has surgical skills that he never trained for (brain surgery, for example), no hospital would allow him to practice there; no health insurance company would pay for his services; and no malpractice insurer would cover him. Space does not permit a full discussion of the many valuable contributions to health policy you will find in this book. But no reader should skip Singer's excellent treatment of the 'War on Drugs.' Singer introduces us to the 'iron law of prohibition,' which holds that as law enforcement of prohibited drugs becomes more intense, the potency of the prohibited drug increases. That's partly because smaller packages of the drug make smuggling easier. The iron law explains why bootleggers smuggled whiskey instead of beer or wine during alcohol prohibition. The iron law explains why cannabis has become more potent, why crack cocaine replaced powdered [?] For students of health policy, Singer's new book is a must-read contribution.
