Quotulatiousness

August 15, 2009

The high cost of coping with Celiac Disease

Filed under: Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:33

An article in the New York Times discusses something near and not-particularly-dear to our hearts — Celiac Disease:

Seven years after receiving his diagnosis, Mr. Oram, who is married and has one daughter, is symptom-free, but the cost of staying that way is high. That’s because the treatment for celiac does not come in the form of a pill that will be reimbursed or subsidized by an insurer. The treatment is to avoid eating products containing gluten. And gluten-free versions of products like bread, pizza and crackers are nearly three times as expensive as regular products, according to a study conducted by the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University.

Unfortunately for celiac patients, the extra cost of a special diet is not reimbursed by health care plans. Nor do most policies pay for trips to a dietitian to receive nutritional guidance.

In Britain, by contrast, patients found to have celiac disease are prescribed gluten-free products. In Italy, sufferers are given a stipend to spend on gluten-free food.

Some doctors blame drug makers, in part, for the lack of awareness and the lack of support. “The drug makers have not been interested in celiac because, until very recently, there have been no medications to treat it,” said Dr. Peter Green, director of the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University. “And since drug makers are responsible for so much of the education that doctors receive, the medical community is largely unaware of the disease.”

Elizabeth has suffered from gluten intolerance for most of her life, so we’re very aware of the difficulty (and added cost) of finding food that doesn’t contain wheat gluten. Wheat is a very cheap way of adding bulk and body to foods that traditionally do not contain it . . . it’s distressing the number of times we’ve discovered that a packaged food that used to be gluten-free has been “improved” . . . and the extent of the improvement has been to add wheat in place of more expensive non-gluten ingredients.

QotD: The biggest risk in moving to a single-payer system

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

My objection is primarily, as I’ve said numerous times, that the government will destroy innovation. It will do this by deciding what constitutes an acceptable standard of care, and refusing to fund treatment above that. It will also start controlling prices.

Now, at this point in the discussion, some interlocutor starts chanting what I’ve come to think of as “the mantra”: othercountriesspendlessandhavelongerlifespans. Then they ask me how I can ignore the overwhelming evidence that national health care is superior to our terrible system. Now, what’s odd about this is that all of those countries do precisely what I am concerned about: slap price controls on the inputs, particularly pharmaceuticals. Their overwhelming evidence indicates that I am 100% correct that a government run system in the US will destroy the last really profitable market for drugs and medical technology, and thereby cause the rate of medical innovation to slow to a crawl.

[. . .]

The things that make markets innovate — profit potential — have been mostly squeezed out of the system. The things that hasten market discover — prices — have also been increasingly relegated to central authority. Having something like that in the United States would produce exactly the outcome I’m worried about. So if Matt is right, and this is where the slippery slope ends up, my nightmare will have been realized.

Megan McArdle, “What Does It Mean To Have a Private Health Care System?”, Asymmetrical Information, 2009-08-13

Would-be assassins

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

In honour of this news item, I felt it appropriate to buy this (actually, I downloaded it from iTunes).

I always thought it’d have been more appropriate if she’d tried to do this at the Lincoln Centre, just for the symmetry . . .

(more…)

Computers . . . can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:29

It’s been a bad week for electronics around here. Last month, I bought an external 20″ monitor for Elizabeth to use with her laptop. It worked great — until last week. Then, she started getting BSOD issues and the external monitor would start flashing until she disconnected it.

Off to the shop it went. We’d bought the laptop and the monitor from the same place, with a verbal assurance that they’d work together (and really, in this day and age, how unusual is it to connect an external monitor to a laptop?). The technician was rather dismissive, telling Elizabeth that she probably just needed to download new drivers (she already had, with no improvement). He said they’d run some tests, install updated drivers and run it for 24 hours to verify that it was working properly. She got a call on Thursday to come in and pick up the equipment — it was working fine now.

On Friday, she got there after work to discover that the laptop had exhibited the same reported symptoms during the day, so it was back to the drawing board. So she continued using my laptop.

Which started to have problems first thing this morning . . . the mouse wasn’t showing up on the screen, and the screen itself was very dim (as though it was on battery power). A shutdown-and-reboot cycle seems to have fixed the problem, but it’s a bit of a concern: the laptop is my primary business machine. I’d definitely be delayed if it needed any extensive repair/reconfiguration work.

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