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More Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act lunacy:

The impact of the CPSIA on the educational market is getting more and more worrisome. Two recent events shocked me for their implications. First, Michael Warring of American Educational Products reports that a school opted to stop using AmEP’s rocks to teach Earth Science and will instead rely on a POSTER. Not quite the same educational experience . . . . In this case, rocks take on the “toxic” tag because they contain uncontrollable amounts of base elements found in nature. If only we could create laws to restrain Mother Nature!

From Learning Resources Blog

The unintended consequences of this new law, broadly written in 2008 to include anything produced for children 12 and under, greatly impacted the child recreational vehicle market, bicycles, apparel, and books. All because anything small enough to fit into the mouth of a child … no matter how unlikely it is to end up there … must meet stringent lead and phalate standards. Bicycles are dangerous because the tire valve stems can be sucked on and expose the children to lead.

Hand’s on science is dead for children 12 and under. Learning Resources relates another prohibited product: the Potato Clock. A Potato Clock is a small, digital clock that uses a potato as a type of battery, inducing current between two wires stabbed into the potato. It seems the kit, consisting of the small clock and wires, fails the lead content test because the wires have trace amounts of lead that are over the limit.

First, the company decided that since it now knew of the test failure, it had an immediate reporting obligation under CPSIA Section 15(b). In addition, they concluded they had an obligation to immediately stop sale, since continuing to sell would be another “knowing” violation – yes, kids, that’s a felony with possible penalties of jail time and asset forfeiture (goodbye house and car!).

Presumably, the executives at this company could not imagine going to jail for selling Potato Clocks as they had for years, but heck, Congress writes the rules. The CPSC, apparently, upon receiving this (unwanted) 15(b) report concurred – yep, the wire insulation exceeds the standard, and yep, you have to stop sale. No recall was required by the CPSC BUT the company appears to have decided almost immediately that an informal recall was mandated. Why might they have decided such a thing? Well, perhaps they had a generalized fear of liability from dealers who might be sued for selling this “dangerous” device if it ever came to light that the product had impermissible lead in the wire insulation.

From Learning Resources Blog

The CPSIA not only enables individual liability suits, but also specifically enables states Attorneys Generals to sue on behalf of all children in their state. Companies have to take measures to protect against financially strapped states looking for a tobacco-suit style payday.

Congress has ensured that the world’s children are safe from potato clocks. Next up, healthcare reform!

Politics, Science

The Cato Institute’s Michael D. Tanner has published a policy analysis of current health care reform proposals: Obamacare to Come: Seven Bad Ideas for Health Care Reform. The synopsis at that link includes a brief description of the rationing sure to come of any government-mandated plan:

The government would undertake comparative-effectiveness research and cost-effectiveness research, and use the results of that research to impose practice guidelines on providers — initially, in government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, but possibly eventually extending such rationing to private insurance plans.

Starting on page 10 of the full report, he describes the funding in place for “comparative-effectiveness research” … $1.1 billion. The problem with this type of research is it replaces doctor-patient decision making with a statistical analysis of what works for the average patient. Humans are complex individuals, and one treatment might work well for 95% of the people, but be a disaster for the remaining 5%. And it ignores the ethical dimension of decision making.

The “effectiveness formula” will have to include a determination of the outcome for the patient based on their overall health condition and age. Should we give knee replacements to people within 1 year of their average life expectancy? Should children with terminal diseases be given palliative treatments such as tonsil surgery?

Today, those decisions are made by the patient and doctor. The expected Obamacare plan will centralize that decision, based on statistical analysis.

As I noted in my blog post Obama’s Last Theorem, the problem with making these decisions with different outcomes for those within the last year of life is that you cannot possibly know when that last year begins. Statistics look backward in time, and average the results. Patients and doctors are forced to look forward, into the uncertain future, to make the best decision they can based on their own personal knowledge of their illness, life and family history. Effectiveness studies that merely factor in average life expectancies ignore the individual.

Even the effectiveness study itself may do damage to patients in established private medical insurance plans:

Already, special-interest groups are maneuvering to influence the outcome of comparative-effectiveness research. To cite just one example, the Partnership to Improve Patient Care is funded by groups such as Easter Seals, Friends of Cancer Research, the Alliance for Aging Research, the Advanced Medical Technology Association, and the pharmaceutical and biotech industry lobbies. It seeks to “refocus” the comparative-research debate to ensure that its members’ interests are protected.

Special interest groups with undue influence may tweak the results of the study such that more expensive treatments are given the green light, only to be blocked by the rationing effect of the “last year of life” calculation made by some number cruncher. An equally effective, but cheaper treatment, may not be approved because it is not the most “cost effective” according to the lobbyist-influenced study. And private insurers are more likely to use the government sponsored study to avoid paying claims (and abandon their own studies).

Reform in health care should come from more patient and doctor empowerment, not less. Insurance will always have limits, but a market based approach will let people choose the level of coverage they want to have. Insurers have to compete no only on price, but on what they cover.

Beyond the limits of individual insurance coverage, decisions on “comparative effectiveness” are best left to the patient and doctor. As long as the death rate remains at 1:1, an individual should be able to choose if selling his home and possessions is worth the extra weeks, months or years a procedure will give him.

While the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a basic American ideal, the corollary is that government will invariably try to limit all three. Americans should opt for more liberty in daily life, including the freedom to make their own decisions about health care and the limits they want to impose on health care insurance. A more market-based approach is the way to accomplish this without harm to those basic American ideals.

Cross posted to PoliteTalk.com

Culture, Politics

President Obama and his Democratic allies are promising rationed health care for Americans, with the oft-stated position that health care costs are out of control. One statistic they cite is that “80% of a person’s total health care costs comes in the last year of their life”.

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

The NY Times: So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

From The New York Times

Hasting’s Center co-founder Daniel Callaghan speaks for many Democrats when he states:

Age-based rationing, even of the relatively soft kind I propose, will have an uphill struggle but, combined with other considerations, might slip by. Health care economists have devised the idea of quality-adjusted-life years, or QALYS, as one way to measure economically sensible treatment. Its aim is to determine how many years of added life, and with what quality, a particular treatment would bring. That standard can be used with any age group and would by no means automatically rule out aggressive high-tech treatment of the old, though it could set the bar very high. QALYS is used in many European countries to influence decisions about which procedures are covered for whom.

From The New York Times (emphasis mine)

The problem with all of this is that we cannot possibly know when the last year of life begins. Health care statistics, like baseball stats, are a look back in time, a retrospective view of what has already happened. Doctors and patients deciding on a care plan are not prescient; they have to decide what is best for that patient in the moment. Unlike the ivory towers of academia or the lobbyist-filled halls of Congress, the doctor and patient are faced with some measure of uncertainty and an urgency borne of a “deadline” in the most literal sense.

We can never know the last year of a person’s life until they die. That is what the health care statistics really tell us. President Obama proposes that a blue ribbon committee or two can resolve this issue and come up with a formula we can all live die with.

It took 358 years to solve Fermet’s Last Theorem, but Obama’s Last Theorem could prove even more complex.

Culture, Politics, Science

The most significant risk to personal liberty is usually not found where we expect; we are alert to government overstepping its bounds with wiretaps and overt attempts to limit free speech. What we miss is the often subtle encroachment on liberty from government being nice to us.

Doug Bandow, writing at Cato @Liberty, provides an example from New Zealand where a highly qualified nurse … a profession sorely needed in the country … was barred from immigrating due to a high BMI (Body Mass Index).

Freedom to be fat may not be specifically protected as a right in western democracies, but the concept that all rights are in the possession of the individual is (“reserved to the States, and the people”). We shouldn’t have to list them all.

Bandow sums up the problem:

Socializing health care and then allowing government to micromanage everyone’s lifestyle creates a form of soft tyranny through the back-door.

The challenge is recognizing when government’s encroachment has happened. Often “good ideas” mask the loss of liberty.

We already see that in America with motorcycle helmet laws, increasing restrictions on smoking, and proposals for special “fat taxes” on disfavored foods.

I suspect most of us would pass by the first offense without thinking. Motorcycle helmet laws have been with us for a while, and we are used to the loss of liberty in this area. We justify the loss of liberty with the idea that it “saves lives” and we “have to pay for emergency care”. We may pass by the restrictions on smoking, although they are more recent, because smoke irritates us. But most of us will stop at the tax on fatty foods … merely because we don’t have them yet. But the same justification for motorcycle helmets and smoking restrictions apply to junk food.

Its often repeated that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Americans have not been paying the price in the last few decades.

Politics