June 26, 2001

Vol. 4 No. 26

- - Healthy Debate - -

When Bush the Elder left office he left behind two gifts that kept on giving: the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Clean Air Act. Both have clogged the courts and gummed up the economy like week-old bacon grease in a drainpipe.

Yet George W. Bush seems poised to do the same thing--perhaps on an even grander scale. A Patients Bill of Rights, a ban on "discriminatory" genetic testing, and opposition to research involving human eggs are poised to be the trifecta for wrecking U.S. health care for years to come.

It was a foregone conclusion that Bush would support some kind of anti-HMO legislation designed to demonstrate compassion via federal law. But the administration has had a hard time explaining exactly why it opposes Sen. John Edwards' (D-Trial Lawyers) version of the bill. As a result the Democratic plan to shop civil suits in as many state courts as possible--the better to wind up with a jury incensed that a faraway HMO makes money or that an employer tries to save some--may well survive.

And with a need to again demonstrate his compassion as a backdrop, Bush this week launched into the issue of outlawing discrimination based on genetic testing. In Congress, this has commonly been interpreted to mean making it impossible for insurers to use the results of genetic testing to shape the coverage they offer.

Taken to the extreme, a total prohibition would mean that consumers with knowledge of their own genetic predisposition could load up on coverage for likely ailments at prices that do not reflect their risk. If enough people do this, sooner or later the private health insurance industry goes belly up.

But that does not seem to concern Bush or most other politicians in Washington. They have decided they know best how to answer the complex questions of health and medicine. So as experts in the field, they'd do well to consider the 62-year-old French woman who journeyed to California for fertility treatment that is banned in France.

The French experts have decided that postmenopausal women have no business having children, especially when so many "better" candidates for the treatment are out there. The notion of "better" has to be included in the equation because the French health care system has to dole out treatments by some standard other than price as the French have evolved beyond allowing mere markets to allocate scarce resources.

This, presumably, is the way the Washington experts would like things to work.

In addition, the Bush White House, in the person of top strategist Karl Rove, seems to have made its stem cell and therapeutic cloning decisions on the basis of pure politics. The tough anti-research line appears calculated to appeal to Catholic swing voters in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

In 10 or 15 years, when the United States has its own single-payer health care system with Uncle Sam as the ultimate gatekeeper for treatment and research, maybe Rove can tell us it was worth it and Dubya will know he bested his dad.

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- - Revisiting the Revisited - -

A persistent feature of most every debate on gene therapy or genetics in general is the invocation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The usual formation is, "Unless we stop blah blah blah, it'll be Brave New World." This is a sure sign the speaker has never read the book, knows nothing about science, or--probably--both.

The terrifying part of Huxley's vision was a state that had seized control over all aspects of human reproduction. Invoking that vision as a reason for more state control over reproduction has it exactly backwards.

But let us assume that recognizing the theme of a novel and accurately appending it to larger social issues is just too confusing for the average anti-science zealot. We can then turn to Huxley's own commentary in Brave New World Revisited.

There Huxley says things that would not sit well with his recent boosters. To start with, Huxley, writing in 1958, reflected the assumption that the world was doomed to suffer extreme overpopulation.

Huxley declared the Sputnik-inspired exuberance about the future to be "irrelevant and even nonsensical" and announced that "the coming time will not be the Space Age; it will be the Age of Overpopulation."

Although thanks to DDT, penicillin, and clean water the death rate had come down, the birth rate was still far too high. Further, such advances had the effect of allowing too many of the wrong sorts of people to live. Genetic maladies and mutations were choking up the gene pool with inferior genes.

"Owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQs and physical vigor are on the decline," he said.

Huxley thought that when, in the near future, the Pill was invented, a major effort would have to be undertaken to persuade the right people to take it. The right people would be the poor of the undeveloped world so as to counteract the effect of DDT, penicillin, and clean water.

This reading of Huxley implies that mankind needed to adopt a low-level eugenics effort to avoid a catastrophic overpopulation that could usher in the suffocating police state of a Brave New World. Embedded in this is the notion that science can be molded and bent toward a particular goal by political action.

This latter idea is really the only thing that unites Huxley to today's technocrats who keep tossing his fable up as a reason to control science and research as they see fit. Both want a scientific and political elite to devolve society to a simpler, better way of life.

There is nothing new or brave about that.

Virginia Postrel writes that the feds are moving to erode parental rights, destroy freedom of inquiry, and condemn millions of Americans to suffer and die with new bans on genetic research at

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- - Bleeping Mess - -

A radio station is fined $7,000 for playing a "clean" version of a rap song, Comedy Central broadcasts a South Park episode with over 150 unbleeped "shits," and MTV decides that "hashpipe" is too ribald to survive unbleeped. Strange days indeed.

The struggle for hard and fast rules on content has left regulators and their media targets confused while the public seems to muddle through it all, demonstrating no great demand for someone to tidy it all up.

Arbitrary decisions like the one by MTV to turn Weezer's "Hashpipe" into "bleeppipe" animate a hardcore group of outraged fans, but for most people such insanity seems to be taken as another sign that consuming pop culture these days means doing it on your own terms and with one or two workarounds in place.

The quest to categorize and harmlessly segment entertainment has elevated incidental elements to primary importance. A few syllables define a "mature drama" and well-placed bleeps--not too many and never, ever too few--displace beat and melody as keys to a chart topper.

And that's no shit.

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QUICK HITS

- - Quote of the Week - -

"If you're reasonably well off financially and want to pay $4 to $5 a day to avoid congestion, then you get to use these lanes. But if you're a working person out there making $35,000 a year, an extra $25 per week is a lot of money." Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) on his decision to kill a study on high-occupancy toll lanes. The HOT lanes allow solo drivers to pay a fee to use HOV lanes previously reserved for carpools and such.

- - Inside Job - -

A Fort Lauderdale police detective was arrested when he showed up to meet the 14-year-old girl he had been Instant Messaging. He brought a teddy bear, porn movies, and condoms. Instead, Byron Matthai, 52, was arrested by a sheriff's detective and charged with one count of soliciting sex from a minor online and four counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child.

- - Unintended Consequences - -

Two Maryland boys were killed when electrical current coming from a docked aluminum boat leaked into the water. Their lake community bans gasoline engines for aesthetic and environmental reasons. The boat was being recharged when the boys jumped into nearby water.

- - PC Banking - -

The largest bank in Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, refused to open an account for an anti-gay group.

The group, known as No Committee 2006, is against bringing the Gay Games to Montreal in five years.

"As a private organization, we want to remain neutral. We don't want to look like we're being supportive of such a group,'' a spokesman explained.

- - The Name Game - -

Some of the 68 insults an Israeli legislator wants banned from parliamentary debates: swamp fly, brain defective, degenerate, evil one, fascist, father of violence, filth, gang, government of murderers, gut-ripper and eye-gouger, humbug, hypocrite, idiot, instigator of murder, Jew-hater, king of the swamp, leech, liar, loathsome, man of blood, may your name be blotted out, mental case, monster, murderer, Nazi, nincompoop, occupying army, parasite, Philistine, pig, PLO, poisoner of wells, racist, swindler, terrorist, threat to the state, thug, total nonentity, traitor, ugly, venal, worthless, and poodle.

- - Video Nasty - -

The Swiss have a video game to help stop AIDS.

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