Friday, May 4, 2018

In Texas Hospitals, You Don't Get to Decide to End Care | Houston Press

In Texas Hospitals, You Don't Get to Decide to End Care | Houston Press: 2016



[Full disclosure - I don't know if this has been changed at this time.]



 "In Texas it doesn’t matter what instructions you’ve previously given or what your relatives say: If you’re in critical condition, you’re dependent on machines to survive and hospital officials decide it’s time to pull the plug, you will die. And it’s completely legal."



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Four P.E.I. doctors paid more than $1 million in 2017 | Local | News | The Guardian

Four P.E.I. doctors paid more than $1 million in 2017 | Local | News | The Guardian:



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Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Pharmaceutical corporations need to stop free-riding on publicly-funded research | TheHill

Pharmaceutical corporations need to stop free-riding on publicly-funded research | TheHill: "The White House’s report suggests that it costs an estimated $2.6 billion to develop a new drug today, though they’re basing this on a single, non-transparent pharmaceutical industry-supported study with problematic methodology.

In reality, companies receive substantial publicly-funded support from the government. A recent study found that all 210 drugs approved in the U.S. between 2010 and 2016 benefitted from publicly-funded research, either directly or indirectly.

Taxpayers contribute through public university research, grants, subsidies, and other incentives. This means people are often paying twice for their medicines: through their tax dollars and at the pharmacy.

At Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), we see each and every day the human suffering caused in the places we work and many countries outside the U.S. by treatments being rationed or people being denied essential medical care due to high drug and vaccines prices."



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Monday, February 26, 2018

Why conservatives are so obsessed with guns.

Why conservatives are so obsessed with guns.:



"A more workable psychological explanation begins by noting that psychologists have found consistent differences between conservatives and liberals in personality traits, attitudes, and moral stances. To summarize some of the research findings, conservatives tend to be more likely than liberals to accept or even embrace authority that is perceived to be legitimate. Conservatives tend to be more moralistic and more conventional than liberals. They tend to have a stronger need for order and control and stability and a greater dislike of change.

"Conservatives also tend to value equality less than liberals. They have less empathy and are more likely to see human nature as bad. Compared with liberals, their moral sense is less centered on fairness and kindness and more on loyalty, deference to authority, and moral and sexual purity. Conservatives also show a greater tendency than liberals toward dichotomous thinking and have a stronger need for certainty and cognitive consistency. (“I don’t do nuance,” George W. Bush famously told Joe Biden. )

"The differences are not universal, of course, and there is nothing intrinsically bad or intrinsically good in the characteristics typical of either camp. But conservatives tend to lean one way, liberals the other.

" And some of these differences appear to be directly expressed in divergent beliefs relevant to the gun control debate. For example...

"...But it is hard for conservatives to accept these arguments. The interaction between characteristic conservative personality patterns and universally shared patterns of cognitionleads to conservatives being disproportionately skeptical of evidence provided by “experts” and scholarly studies. So conservatives turn to other means to soothe their anxiety. Some project their own anger onto others, fantasizing that people of color, immigrants, and feminists are the cause of their own inner torments. Anger, if nothing else, makes them feel bigger and more powerful."



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