- U.S. Surgeon General’s office, WHO campaign against vaping, e-cigarettes. Lessons of harm reduction forgotten [Jacob Sullum, Jonathan Adler, Todd Krainin]
- Plenty of other hospitals are willing to do this surgery. Catholic facilities should have conscience right to refuse [AP/NJ.com on St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center case, Stephen Miller/IGF]
- Study: states with stronger physician protection from malpractice suits had lower usage of imaging tests [Radiology Business on Suhui Li et al., Journal of the American College of Radiology]
- Hospitals that require employees to take flu shots to protect patients and others may pay dearly if they’re stingy with the religious exemptions [Jon Hyman]
- “Maybe For-Profit Hospitals Aren’t So Bad” [Shailin Thomas, Harvard “Bill of Health”]
- “New Study Finds 90% of California Pharmaceutical Plaintiffs are from Other States” [U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform on Mark Behrens study for CJAC]
10 Comments
Your second item could be more clear what type of surgery they are talking about.
The headline at the website is amusingly contradictory: “Transgender man sues Catholic hospital in Paterson for refusing hysterectomy”.
If this was a man, he wouldn’t need a hysterectomy in the first place.
Don’t be obtuse. There’s no contradiction. You know perfectly well what it means.
It’s not being obtuse. TG advocates insist that sex is not gender. So you can change your gender (male) at will, but not your sex (man). Of course, the article contradicts that because they embrace that principle or ignore it depending on when it’s convenient for them.
Yeah, obtuse.
John,
You seem to be ignoring a possibility, that the transgender person in question is female to male, not male to female.
A female to male sex change would require a hysterectomy to complete the gender reassignment.
Again on the second item. Like many others, I am not particularly enthusiastic about transgender issues. Nevertheless, there are some thoughtful comments on the Stephen Miller piece highlighting other problems with Catholic hospitals, eg:
(1) In many rural areas, there are no easy alternatives to Catholic hospitals.
(2) Such Catholic hospitals accept lots of money from the taxpayers.
(3) Catholic administrators often ban medical personnel from carrying out procedures they are willing to.
(4) Apart from unpopular transgender surgery, Catholic administrators also ban birth control services, voluntary sterilization, fertility treatments, and abortion to save the life of the mother.
(4a) If Congressional holy warriors succeed in shutting down Planned Parenthood, that is going to make birth control hard to find in many rural areas.
Regarding the for profit hospital study. There is an allegation that the Joint commission has an implicit bias in its statistical analysis because it does not account for the amount of “risky” procedures done at a facility. That is, hospital X can be a top performer over other local hospitals, but that award doesn’t account for the fact that hospital X performs far fewer “risky” procedures than other local hospitals.
In my view, it is a legitimate criticism of the JC’s methodology. not being a statistician, I’m not sure how to tell them to fix it.
The point being, the linked article says that Harvard used the JC’s studies as its inputs. It would therefore have the same implicit statistical biases that the JC studies do.
mx, don’t be obtuse yourself. You know perfectly well what Rohan means…..if you’re a biological female, you’re not a man.
Stats to correct are simple/straightforward. Take the percentage of “risky” procedures and weight the calculations based on that weight. So, a facility that specializes in “risky” procedures and does them 90% of the time would have a weight of 1.90 and a facility that avoids risk if at all possible that performs “risky” procedures 1% of the time would receive a weight of 1.01. It’s a fairly standard normalization technique. The devil is in defining “risky” procedures…
So far as I can see both sides here have had their chance to weigh in on the debates over what to call transgender persons familiar from countless other comments sections, so if anyone feels they need to amplify the thread further, please consider sticking to other aspects of the New Jersey hospital case.