Category: Government

Communist Chinese One Child Laws Violated Basic Human Rights

On Sat., Jan. 17, 2016 I caught the re-broadcast of an interview with Mei Fong that C-SPAN’s web site suggests was first broadcast on Jan. 11, 2016. The interview focused on Fong’s book on the history, causes and effects of China’s one child laws. Fong is understated in her style, but it is clear that the Chinese communist government violated the rights of many Chinese citizens by forcing them to have unwanted abortions, and to undergo unwanted sterilizations. In many cases, when their “one child” died in a disaster, or of natural causes, parents desperately rushed to try to have the forced sterilization reversed.

Fong’s book, that she discussed on C-SPAN, is:
Fong, Mei. One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Health Spending Rises Faster

HealthCostGrowthGraphs2016-01-21.jpgSource of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) WASHINGTON–Growth in U.S. health-care spending is accelerating after reaching historic lows, a pickup largely attributed to the millions of Americans who have gotten health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Spending on all health care increased 5.3% in 2014, according to a report Wednesday [Dec. 2, 2015] from actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That compares with the 2.9% growth in 2013, which marked the lowest rate since the government began tracking the gains 55 years ago.
The return to more robust growth after a slowdown in spending had been anticipated by economists. Still, it is likely to add to criticism that the 2010 health law isn’t doing enough to rein in costs. The report, based on 2014 government numbers and published in the journal Health Affairs, follows five consecutive years where average spending growth was less than 4% annually.

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE ARMOUR. “Health Spending Picks Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Dec. 3, 2015): A3.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 2, 2015, and has the title “Growth in U.S. Health-Care Spending Picks Up.”)

Unusual Array of Groups Strongly Push Breast-Feeding

C-SPAN on Sat., Jan. 17, 2016 broadcast a thought-provoking presentation by Courtney Jung on her book Lactivism. Jung argues that an unusual array of groups strongly advocate breast-feeding for reasons that are independent of the fairly modest health benefits, for baby and mother, that result from breast-feeding.

Jung’s book, that she discussed on C-SPAN, is:
Jung, Courtney. Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Gene Therapy Again Showing Promise

(p. B2) Biotechnology startup Spark Therapeutics Inc. said its experimental gene therapy improved vision among patients with hereditary vision impairment in a clinical trial, without the serious safety problems that have dogged the emerging field of gene therapy in the past.
. . .
Spark said it plans to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to market its treatment next year, which could make it the first gene therapy to reach the U.S. market if regulators approve it for sale. . . .
Gene therapy involves the injection of genetic material into a person’s cells to treat or prevent a disease. The research stalled after some study participants died or developed cancer after receiving gene therapies in the late 1990s and 2000s.
But gene therapy is gaining ground again. In 2012, the European Commission approved the Western world’s first gene therapy, UniQure NV’s Glybera, for the treatment of patients with a rare enzyme deficiency. The therapy hasn’t been approved for sale in the U.S.

For the full story, see:
PETER LOFTUS. “Eye Gene Therapy Shows Promise.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Oct. 6, 2015): B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Oct. 5, 2015, and has the title “Gene Therapy for Visually Impaired Shows Promise.” Where there were minor differences between the print and online versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

“America Represents Wilderness and Freedom, and Also a Big House”

(p. A1) JACKSON HOLE, China — Yearning to breathe untainted air, the band of harried urbanites flocked to this parched, wild land, bringing along their dreams of a free and uncomplicated life.
But unlike the bedraggled pioneers who settled the American West, the first inhabitants of Jackson Hole, a resort community on the outskirts of the Chinese capital, arrived by Audi and Land Rover, their trunks filled with French wine and their bank accounts flush with cash.
Over the past decade, more than a thousand families have settled into timber-frame houses with generous backyards, on streets with names like Aspen, Moose and Route 66. On Sundays, some worship at a clapboard church that anchors the genteel town square, outfitted with bronze cowboys and a giant Victrola that sprays water.
“America represents wilderness and freedom, and also a big house,” said Qin You, 42, who works in private equity and owns a six-bedroom home that features a koi pond, a year-round (p. A8) Christmas tree and what he proudly described as “American-style” electric baseboard heating. His parents live in the house and he goes there on weekends. “The United States is cool,” he says.
. . .
. . . , Communist Party edicts and conservative commentators have sought to demonize so-called Western values like human rights and democracy as existential threats. Even if the menace is seldom identified by name, the purveyor of such threats is widely understood to be the United States.
. . .
Gao Zi, 60, a retired military employee who organizes an oil painting club for Jackson Hole residents, said that “we accepted the propaganda” back in the 1950s, when China was a closed society. “But now people have the opportunity to travel abroad and see the truth for ourselves.”
Like Ms. Gao, Mr. Qin, the investment executive, has never been to the United States but he has long admired American ideals like personal liberty and blind justice. Five years ago, after his wife gave birth to their second child, Mr. Qin says the government fined him nearly $30,000 for violating the country’s population-control policies. “This is not freedom,” he said, before continuing a tour of his expansive back patio.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS. “JACKSON HOLE JOURNAL; Living a Frontier Dream on Beijing’s Outskirts.” The New York Times (Fri., DEC. 11, 2015): A1 & A8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 8, 2015, and has the title “JACKSON HOLE JOURNAL; Living a Frontier Dream on the Outskirts of China’s Capital.”)

Some Heroes Are Punished for Doing What Is Right

At some point in the last few months watched, and jotted a few notes, on a C-SPAN presentation by Ralph Peters related to his historical novel Valley of the Shadow, that I caught part of. C-SPAN lists the show as first airing on June 23, 2015. My attention was drawn when Peters started talking about Lew Wallace. I had a minor curiosity about Lew Wallace for two obscure reasons. The first is that in young adulthood my favorite actor was Charlton Heston, one of whose most notable movies was Ben Hur, which was based on a novel by Lew Wallace. The other was that as an adult Lew Wallace lived in Crawfordsville, Indiana where there is still a small museum in his old study, a museum that holds memorabilia related to the Heston Ben Hur movie. The reason I know about the museum is that I graduated from Wabash College, which is also located in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
Peters said that he was fascinated by forgotten figures and that one of these was Lew Wallace. According to Peters, Lew Wallace saved the union during the Civil War. A confederate general named Jubal Early would have seized Washington, D.C., if Wallace and an officer named Jim Ricketts had not taken the initiative to lead a force to stop Early. For doing what had to be done, Wallace risked court martial, and Wallace was indeed fired from the army. After Ricketts gave a full account of what had happened, Wallace was re-instated, but Lincoln did not approve of his receiving a new command. Peters said that this was because Wallace was unpopular with some powerful Indiana Republicans, and that Lincoln was facing an election in which he needed to win Indiana.
The above is a rough summary of Peters’s account. I don’t know if any of it is disputed by other experts. But it is a good story, and I hope that it is true.

The Peters historical novel discussed on C-SPAN, was:
Peters, Ralph. Valley of the Shadow: A Novel. New York: Forge Books, 2015.

Recording a Pain of “5” and Then Leaving Without Relieving

If health care was provided by free market companies whose success depended on voluntarily attracting customers, instead of by bureaucratic, hyper-regulated, CYA incentivized, and competition-insulated bureaucracies, would the surreal experience reported below be as common as it is?

(p. 11) A FRIEND was recently hospitalized after a bicycle accident. At one point a nursing student, together with a more senior nurse, rolled a computer on wheels into the room and asked my friend to rate her pain on a scale of 1 to 10.

She mumbled, “4 to 5.” The student put 5 into the computer — and then they left, without further inquiring about, or relieving, my friend’s pain.
This is not an anecdote about nurses not doing their jobs; it’s an illustration of what our jobs have become in the age of electronic health records. Computer documentation in health care is notoriously inefficient and unwieldy, but an even more serious problem is that it has morphed into more than an account of our work; it has replaced the work itself.
Our charting, rather than our care, is increasingly what we are evaluated on. When my hospital switched to bar code scanning for medication administration, not only were the nurses on my floor rated as “red,” “yellow” or “green” based on the percentage of meds we scanned, but those ratings were prominently and openly displayed on printouts left at the nurses’ station.
. . .
We need to streamline our records so that they serve just one master: the patient. We should focus on the most important information in guaranteeing accuracy of diagnosis, efficacy of treatment, continuity of care and patient safety. Otherwise the content of our care will be increasingly warped by the demands of our e-record systems — and patients like my poor friend will lie in hospital beds in pain, uncomforted by the knowledge that the electronic record of that pain is satisfyingly and exactingly complete.

For the full commentary, see:
THERESA BROWN. “Patients vs. Paperwork.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., DEC. 20, 2015): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 19, 2015, and has the title “When Hospital Paperwork Crowds Out Hospital Care.”)

Anti-GMO Chipotle No Longer Wears Health Halo

(p. A13) . . . if you need an anecdote for how the year unfolded for the anti-GMO movement, look no further than Chipotle. Last spring the fast food company announced with great fanfare that it would take GMO ingredients off its menu. It was all downhill after that. As was quickly pointed out, Chipotle wasn’t being fully truthful, since its soft drinks and cheese contain genetically modified ingredients, and its meat comes from animals fed genetically modified grains. A lawsuit filed in California, which is pending, accused Chipotle of false advertising and deceptive marketing.
Then cases of food-borne illnesses hit Chipotle locations across the country. Supporters of traditional agriculture, who have felt maligned by the burrito company, started keeping a tally of the number of people sickened by Chipotle’s food (ongoing, but more than 300) versus the number sickened by GMOs (zero). As the year winds to a close, the company that once wore the restaurant industry’s health halo is apologizing, preparing for lawsuits, recentralizing its vegetable preparation and cutting locally sourced ingredients.

For the full commentary, see:
JULIE KELLY. “The March of Genetic Food Progress; ‘Farmaceuticals’ and other GM products are slowly being approved, despite political scare campaigns.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Dec. 30, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 29, 2015.)

In Poor Province, Chinese Communists Spend Over $400,000 Building Giant Golden Statue of Mao, Starver of Millions of the Proletariat

(p. B1) ZHUSHIGANG, China — Just two days after images of a giant gold-colored statue of Mao in the bare fields of Henan Province spread across the Internet, the statue was gone — torn down apparently on the orders of embarrassed local officials.
Villagers said demolition teams arrived on Thursday morning [January 7, 2016], and by Friday morning [January 8, 2016], only a pile of rubble remained.
The 120-foot-tall statue, which local media reports said cost $465,000, had been under construction for months and was nearing completion when it began to attract attention.
Some commenters on social media denounced the extravagance of the colossus in a poor, rural part of China, where the money might have been better spent on education or health care.
. . .
Others pointed out the historical irony of erecting the statue in one of the provinces worst hit by the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.
. . .
Statues of Mao, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, were once ubiquitous in China, and many survive. President Xi Jinping has often praised Mao as a model for China today, saying Mao’s era was one when officials were selfless and honest.
But some of his policies were disastrous, including the forced agricultural collectivization and industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, which historians blame for a famine in which tens of millions of people died.

For the full story, see:
DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW. “An Outcry Helps Topple a Mao Statue 120 Feet Tall.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 9, 2016): A4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 8, 2016, and has the title “Golden Mao Statue in China, Nearly Finished, Is Brought Down by Criticism.”)

Madison Revised Notes to Aid Jefferson’s Attack on Hamilton

C-SPAN Book TV today played an extended interview with Mary Sarah Bilder about her book on James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention. Madison revised his notes to share with Jefferson, who had not been present during the convention. Chernow, in his biography of Hamilton, reports how Jefferson criticized Hamilton for aristocratic tendencies. What is most surprising about Bilder’s comments is that Madison had made comments at the convention similar to Hamilton’s discussing whether there might be merits to monarchy. But in his revision of the notes, he deleted those comments before passing the notes to Jefferson, presumably as part of his desire to ally himself more closely with Jefferson and to join in Jefferson’s vilification of Hamilton.
This is not an earth-shattering finding, but it adds support to Chernow’s defense of Hamilton. Jefferson was the slave-holding aristocrat in practice, while Hamilton opposed slavery, and Hamilton’s intellectual speculations on the best form of government were not notably monarchist within the context of the time.

The book discussed on C-SPAN, was:
Bilder, Mary Sarah. Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

The Chernow book I mention above, is:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.