Independent Women's Forum - Research Areas > Health and Welfare

• The American Promise
  

  Originally published June 29, 2006

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  The American Promise: the dream of being a country that provides its citizens with limitless opportunity and where people enjoy a high quality of life in terms of health, safety, income, and well-being. America has made great strides in fulfilling this promise. As detailed in this report, Americans are better off today than any other time in history on measures such as:

  • Health: Americans are living longer and healthier than at anytime in history.
  • Safety: Crime rates have plummeted. In the last thirty years, there has been a 40 percent decrease in the number of violent crimes against women and a 67 percent decline in violent crimes against men.
  • Income and Employment:More Americans are working today than ever before. Since 1967, per capita income has doubled.
  • Well-Being: Americans overwhelmingly report being happy and satisfied with their personal lives. Americans are far happier and more optimistic than their counterparts in Europe.

  However, there is a long way to go until the American promise is realized. Two areas are of particular concern and serve as stumbling blocks on the road to fulfilling America's potential:

  • The Break Down of the American Family: More than one in every three children in America is born out of wedlock. These children suffer more hardships and are more likely to engage in problem behaviors as they grow up.
  • Our Failing Public Education System: Our public education system leaves many children without the kills necessary to compete in the modern economy. America lags behind much of the world in terms of the educational attainment of our children.

  To fulfill America's promise we should focus on these two important issues. Policymakers should consider measures to address these ills. A first step is reforming our public school system so that parents are free to choose a school for their child. Policymakers should also evaluate existing laws and regulations that provide a deterrent to family formation. This includes evaluating our tax code and assistance programs to remove measures that create a financial penalty for marrying.

  Government alone cannot solve these problems. Fulfilling the American promise is the work of each individual.

• The Andy Caldwell Show: Scared to Death Ch. 14
  

  Co-authors Christopher Booker and Richard North of Scared to Death From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth joined The Andy Caldwell Show.

• The Amy Oliver Show: Update on Scared to Death with Christopher Booker and Richard North
  

  Co-authors, Christopher Booker and Richard North, joined The Amy Oliver Show today to give an update on their book, Scared to Death and on global warming scares.

• Global Warming Alarmism
  

  Today there are millions of children starving and dying of AIDS. Yet some suggest that the greatest moral imperative of our time is attempting to reduce carbon emissions to, theoretically, reduce global temperatures by a fraction of a degree. As IWF president Michelle D. Bernard argued in the following op-ed which appeared Sunday in The Washington Examiner, we need to get our priorities straight and not embrace legislation based on global warming alarmism.

  Read the article here.

• Saving the planet while letting children starve
  
• Who Is Uninsured?
  

  The Clare Booth Luce Institute has put out a great primer on health care written by long-time friend of IWF, Sally Pipes. Health care is a central issue in every campaign and can be confusing. This piece helps seperate out fact from myth, helps the reader better understand who the uninsured are (hint, they are often young and with above average incomes) and what's at stake in reform proposals. It's a must read for anyone who cares about the future of our health care system.

• Chicago 1, Food Police 0
  

  On Wednesday the Chicago City Council repealed its controversial ban on foie gras.  Details here.

• More Scares
  

  Fans of Scared to Death might be interested in this report from the Business and Media Institute.  The report outlines the nine worst business stories of the last 50 years and includes topics like DDT, which Booker and North talk about in Scared to Death.  

  Check out the report here.

• The Mike McConnell Show Scared to Death with Christopher Booker
  

  Christopher Booker, co-author of Scared to Death joined The Mike McConnell Show to discuss how the major scares of the last two decades follow an overarching pattern, revealing the devastating fiscal repercussions of such scares.

• Increase the Number of Uninsured?
  

  It's hardly an ideal campaign slogan, but this article in the Wall Street Journal makes a pursuasive case that insurance contributes to, rather than solves, our healthcare problems:

  Most discussions about the rising cost of health care emphasize the need to get more people insured. The assumption seems to be that insurance - rather than the service delivered by doctor to patient - is the important commodity. But perhaps the solution to much of what currently plagues us in health care - rising costs and bureaucracy, diminishing levels of service - rests on a radically different approach: fewer people insured.

  You don't need to be an economist to understand that any middleman interposed between seller and buyer raises the price of a given service or product.

  ...Insurance is all about betting against negative consequences and the insurance business model is unique in that profits depend upon goods and services not being provided.

  ...For that reason, the consequences of any insurance-based health-care model, be it privately run, or a government entitlement, are painfully easily to predict. There will be progressively draconian rationing using denial of authorization and steadily rising co-payments on the patient end; massive paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles, and steadily diminishing fee-recovery on the doctor end.

  It makes sense -- one issue that I wish the author had discussed more was how state mandates make insurance itself more expensive. States that require that insurance cover certain types of procedures (like mental health care, etc) raise the cost of insurance and raise the prices associated with those procedures for those who don't have insurance. Government has been a major contributor to our healthcare problems and one of the first steps to improving healthcare is to remove bad government policies that distort the market.

   

• Wal-Mart to the Rescue
  

  Who did the most to help victims of Hurricane Katrina? A new study by Steven Horwitz, an economist at St. Lawrence University, says the answer is Wal-Mart:

  While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital.

  Meanwhile, Wal-Mart trucks pre-loaded with emergency supplies at regional depots were among the first on the scene wherever refugees were being gathered by officialdom. Their main challenge, in many cases, was running a gauntlet of FEMA officials who didn't want to let them through. As the president of the brutalized Jefferson Parish put it in a Sept. 4 Meet the Press interview, speaking at the height of nationwide despair over FEMA's confused response: "If [the U.S.] government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis."

  More here.

• IWF Policy Brief: FMLA
  

  In the latest IWF Policy Br