Robert Graboyes: How to Grow the Supply of Healthcare – YouTube

Published on Jul 1, 2014″For two or three generations, we’ve almost completely ignored the supply side” of health care, warns Robert Graboyes, an economist who specializes in health care issues. That’s especially a big problem now that Obamacare is coming online. The whole point of the program, after all, is to increase demand for medical services. Yet even President Obama and his supporters acknowledge the plan does next to nothing to generate more doctors and more medical innovations.Graboyes, a senior research analyst at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to outline immediate ways to grow the number of hospitals, doctors, and nurses to serve millions of newly insured patients.Even more important is the need to increase the pace of the transformative medical innovation that has always extended lifespans and raised the quality of life, says Graboyes. At the dawn of “molecular medicine,” in which drugs are targeted to specific individuals, the FDA’s backward-looking and hyper-expensive approval process is more destructive than ever. Medicare’s byzantine cost-codes freeze into place yesteryear’s solutions. At the state level, “certificate of need” laws make it tougher than ever to expand or build new health care facilities.We’ve got to “look for every obstruction to the supply and get rid of it,” says Graboyes.Produced by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Ford Fischer and Josh Swain.About 9 minutes.

 

Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater – NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — Just weeks before Blackwater guardsfatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us/before-shooting-in-iraq-warning-on-blackwater.html?_r=0