- After malpractice caps, doctors ordered fewer invasive tests to diagnose heart attacks [Elizabeth Cooney, Stat]
- Product liability defense lawyer manages to survive peremptory challenge and make it onto a jury for a med-mal case, and here are his observations [Stephen McConnell, Drug & Device Law]
- “How Big Government Backed Bad Science and Made Americans Fat” [Reason interview with Nina Teicholz]
- Suits against blood thinner Xarelto have done poorly. Can plaintiff’s lawyers keep plugging away till they get wins? [John O’Brien, Legal NewsLine]
- “Pharmacy Benefit Managers Are Not the Cause of High Prescription Drug Prices” [Ike Brannon]
- Advice for physicians: “5 ways to live through medical malpractice lawsuits” [Stacia Dearmin, KevinMD]
Posts Tagged ‘obesity’
“My job as an NYPD officer made me obese”
“A morbidly obese city cop got a hefty pension when he retired on disability at age 43, but he’s still hungry for more dough — so he’s suing the NYPD, claiming the job left him corpulent.” [Julia Marsh and Jennifer Bain, New York Post, February]
May 30 roundup
- “Leave your 13-year-old home alone? Police can take her into custody under Illinois law” [Jeffrey Schwab, Illinois Policy]
- So many stars to sue: Huang v. leading Hollywood names [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar]
- Morgan Spurlock’s claim in 2004’s Super Size Me of eating only McDonald’s food for a month and coming out as a physical wreck with liver damage was one that later researchers failed to replicate; now confessional memoir sheds further doubt on baseline assertions essential to the famous documentary [Phelim McAleer, WSJ]
- If you’ve seen those “1500 missing immigrant kids” stories — and especially if you’ve helped spread them — you might want to check out some of these threads and links [Josie Duffy Rice, Dara Lind, Rich Lowry]
- “Antitrust Enforcement by State Attorney Generals,” Federalist Society podcast with Adam Biegel, Vic Domen, Jennifer Thomson, Jeffrey Oliver, and Ian Conner]
- “The lopsided House vote for treating assaults on cops as federal crimes is a bipartisan portrait in cowardice.” [Jacob Sullum, more, Scott Greenfield, earlier on hate crimes model for “Protect and Serve Act”]
Backdoor regulation of consumers, and its political attractions
Government often makes a show of regulating business when its real aim is to regulate what consumers or citizens do. When direct coercion seems “brutal, unfair, and wrong… Switching to indirect coercion is a shrewd way for government to sedate our moral intuition.” Some examples that come to mind: campaigns that at base aim to regulate consumers’ eating and drinking choices instead often take the form of campaigns against manufacturers and sellers of food and drink, who as targets are inevitably less humanized and sympathetic. [Bryan Caplan]
Menu labeling: “Obama’s calorie rule kicks in thanks to Trump”
“An oft-forgotten provision of Obamacare is being pushed over the finish line by Trump’s FDA.” [Helena Bottemiller Evich, Politico; Jacob Sullum (FDA overstates evidence); Mike Riggs (FDA honcho Scott Gottlieb “is not a free market firebrand”); Christian Schneider, USA Today] Earlier on FDA menu labeling here.
Medical roundup
- “Trump Joins Campaign To Force Big Pharma To Pay for Opioid Crisis” [Ira Stoll] “Records show all-out, unsolicited attorney scramble to sign up Texas counties for opioid litigation” [David Yates, Southeast Texas Record] “Plaintiff Lawyers See Nationwide Settlement As Only End For Opioid Lawsuits” [Daniel Fisher, LNL/Forbes] “Leading Opioid Litigation Firm Becomes a Top Donor to McCaskill Leading Up to Report’s Release” [Ethan Stoetzer, Inside Sources]
- NYT columnist David Leonhardt pens column urging cutting back on sweets as a political gesture against “attempts to profit off your body,” and others push back [Ira Stoll; Tamar Haspel, citing this 2016 piece on how the science is more complicated]
- “Study: Medical Expenses Cause Close to 4% of Personal Bankruptcies—not 60%” [Michael Cannon, Cato; earlier here, etc., related here]
- Genetic engineering of animal life: “How the FDA Virtually Destroyed an Entire Sector of Biotechnology” [John Cohrssen and Henry Miller, Cato “Regulation”]
- “Very cheap (tobacco) products should no longer be available.” Why should you get to decide that for other people? [John Stossel, Reason]
- Lawyer ads scare patients out of taking needed medication [download Cary Silverman, U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform via John O’Brien, Forbes]
NAFTA not nannyish enough for NYT
Advocates claiming the mantle of public health would like to introduce scary new warnings on foods high in sugar, salt, or fat, and restrict marketing, as by banning the use of cartoon characters. For years they’ve been trying to advance their schemes through the use of international organizations and institutions, but now the United States, or at least its federal government, has begun pushing back. The New York Times doesn’t like that one bit and my latest Cato post examines the difference between what a principled position might look like, and the position the Times actually takes. Excerpt:
Like international organizations, treaty administration bodies tend to draw for guidance on an elite stratum of professional diplomats, conference-goers, NGO and nonprofit specialists, and so forth, most of whom are relatively insulated from any pushback in public opinion. That might be a good reason to minimize the role of transnational panels in governance where not absolutely necessary. It is not a good reason to adopt the Times’s implicit position on lobbying for international standards, which is that it’s fine when done by our side but illegitimate when done by yours.
Related: Good piece on sugar/fat wars, with one proviso: when it’s Stanton Glantz spreading a tale, don’t just call it “University of California” [David Merritt Johns and Gerald M. Oppenheimer, Slate]
UK public health body “demanding” calorie cap on supermarket ready meals
Public Health England “is ‘demanding’ a calorie-cap on supermarket ready meals that would limit breakfasts to 400 calories and lunches and dinners to 600 calories each.” That’s among numerous nanny-state initiatives under way in the United Kingdom, including stringent guidelines on individual drinking and the introduction of a sugary drinks tax. Madsen Pirie, Adam Smith Institute:
It is not really government’s job to make people feel miserable, and it is certainly no business of theirs to legislate what people may or may not eat. The fact that the recommended limits are so low is justified by officials on the grounds that people will always exceed recommendations, so ultra-low ones will make them exceed to tolerable rather than intolerable levels. The problem with this approach is that the ultra-low targets simply discredit the whole process of recommendation. …
There is a very good case for proposing that government should stop doing this altogether. There is plenty of good medical advice that people can read in the press, and most people are aware of the ancient dictum, “Nothing to excess.” Most of us, I suspect, would like to indulge ourselves occasionally without having official bullies making us feel bad about doing so.
January 10 roundup
- Supreme Court takes Maryland gerrymander case to go with the Wisconsin one, Gill v. Whitford, on which it’s already heard oral argument [Benisek v. Lamone] I joined Andrew Langer on WBAL Baltimore’s C4 show to discuss the development [listen] More: Linda Greenhouse, NYT and generally;
- Self-recommending: Kevin Underhill at Lowering the Bar is out with his top posts of 2017 and they include “Guy Who Got a C on Constitutional-Amendment Paper Gets Constitution Amended,” “Judge Rejects Man’s Claim to Be ‘Some Sort of Agricultural Product‘,” and “It Is Not Illegal to Drive With an Axe Embedded in the Roof of Your Car”;
- Guess who’s supporting “CPSIA for cosmetics” bill, the same way the largest toymakers supported the original CPSIA fiasco? Right [@GabrielRossman on Twitter; earlier on “Personal Care Products Safety Act” and its predecessors]
- Good. Now eliminate it entirely. HUD suspends until 2020 Obama-era “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) program [Emily Badger and John Eligon/New York Times, earlier]
- New conspiracy-minded attack on foodmakers’ use of sugar is led by Stanton Glantz. Yes, that Stanton Glantz [Allison Aubrey/NPR, Vaping Post April, our earlier coverage]
- “Five Below, Trendy Retailer, Sues 10 Below, Ice Cream Seller, For Trademark Infringement” [Timothy Geigner, Techdirt]
Drop that iced tea and back away
According to coverage at places like NPR and CNN, an innovative campaign in Howard County, Maryland “provides a road map for other communities to reduce consumption of sugary drinks.” Not so fast, I argue in my new Washington Examiner piece: the suburban county in question is not remotely typical of America as a whole, the Howard County Unsweetened campaign blurred public and private boundaries in a dubious way, and the whole enterprise generated a deserved political pushback. While the plan, promoted by the local Horizon Foundation, might not have been all bad, “it sowed divisiveness, put government resources to improper purpose, and rested on a premise of frank paternalism. When it arrives in your community, you might want to respond as you might to a second pitcher of cola — by pushing it away with a polite, ‘no thanks.'”