Doctors vs. Insurance Companies

Now that threre is a legitimate difference of opinion within the medical community about whether women should get mammograms in their 40s, some doctors and patients are worried that insurance companies will start denying covereage for such tests.  I wonder how many Congressional Republicans will storm the House and Senate floors t denounce a system that puts “insurance company bureaucrats” between women and their doctors.

Boxer & Inhofe

I liked Bill Maher’s take on the 2012ers: “If the Mayan’s could tell the future, how come they didn’t see Cortez coming?”  But now that Sens. Boxer and Inhofe agree on a bill (even a short-term extension of the transportation bill), I may have to admit that the world as we know it is, in fact, ending.

Stewart as Beck

If you still haven’t seen it (nearly two weeks later – sorry), you should:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
The 11/3 Project
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

 

Gun Control Rehash Republished Here

I’ve received some flak after recent comments I’ve made on gun control and the gun industry (one in the blog, some over e-mail – though I’d encourage e-mailers to just comment on the blog on any subject).  Here are ten points on gun control I think should be out there:

1. In 2008, the U. S. homicide rate was 5.4 per 100,000 population (Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the United States, 2008, Table 1). Sixty-seven percent of homicides were committed with guns (FBI, full report here).
By comparison, in 2007, the homicide rate in Canada was 1.8 (Statistics Canada, Homicide Offences). Canada has stronger gun laws than the U. S. In Canada, 32 percent of homicides were committed with guns (Statistics Canada, Homicides by Method).

2. And this is been the case for decades. A study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1988 of Seattle, WA and Vancouver, Canada found similar overall rates of criminal activity and assault, but the relative risk of death from homicide was 63 percent higher in Seattle. All of the excess risk was explained by a 5-fold higher risk of being murdered with a handgun in Seattle (Sloan, p. 1256).

3. US gunmakers supply the majority of the guns Mexican drug cartels are using to outgun law enforcement. 87% of firearms seized and traced by Mexican authorities in the last 5 years originated in the US, according to the June 2009 report to Congress on firearms trafficking by the Government Accountability Office. Read it here.

4. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is the agency charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of injury and death from consumer products is legally prohibited from regulating firearms or ammunition. See Pub L. 94-284, Section 3(e), May 11, 1976, 90 Stat. 504 (1976).

5. The firearm death rate among US children 14 years and younger is over 11 times higher than the combined rate in 25 other industrialized countries according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 1997 46:101-105).

6. Laws making it easier to carry concealed weapons do not decrease homicide rates and may increase suicide rates, according to a peer-reviewed study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1992 (327: 467-472).

7. A 1988 law banning the sale of “Saturday night specials” in Maryland was associated with reduced access to criminals for such guns and a 9% lower firearm homicide rate in the state from 1990-1998 than what would have been expected had there been no law. The study was reported in Injury Prevention 2001:7:184-189 and The American Journal of Epidemiology 2002:155:406-412.

8. The rest of the world gets it. Gun crime is extremely rare in Britain and handguns are completely illegal. After the Virginia Tech shooting spree, The Times of London (a fairly conservative paper) wrote an editorial stating in part “Why, we ask, do Americans continue to tolerate gun laws and a culture that seems to condemn thousands of innocents to death every year when presumably, thought restrictions, such as those in force in European countries, could reduce the number?” The same paper reported that, the year before Virginia Tech, Britain’s 46 homicides involving firearms was the lowest total since the late 1980s while New York City, with 8 million people compared to 53 million in England and Wales, recorded at least 579 homicides. As the Swedish daily Gotesborgs-Posten commented at the time: “What exactly triggered the massacre in Virginia is unclear but the fundamental reason is often the perpetrator’s psychological problems in combination with access to weapons.” Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard pushed through tough laws on gun ownership after on killing spree and has commented (as reported by MSNBC in 2007) “We took action to limit the availability of guns and we showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States wold never become a negative in our country.” Among 36 high income and upper middle income countries, the US has the highest overall gun mortality rate. The rate of gun mortality in the US is 8 times higher than in other high income countries, as was reported in tThe International Journal of Epidemiology in 1998 (27:211-214).

9. 71,334 attempted illegal gun purchases in the US were prevented by background checks in the year 2000 alone. 2.6% of all applicants were rejected that year, as reported by Public Agenda Online in March 2003. In other words, background checks work.

10. A 1976 law in Washington, DC virtually banning new handgun sales or ownership was associated with an approximately 25% decline in both gun homicides and suicides in the first 10 years following the law’s passage. There was no similar reduction in non-firearm homicide or suicide during the same time period. This study was reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, 1991: 325:1615-1620.