When I think of video games, the first thing that comes to mind is the hours of time wasted sitting in front of a monitor. We’ve all heard jokes about young men who refuse to grow up and live in their parents’ basement playing video games all day and into the night. I’ve read countless letters in advice columns where women support slacker husbands or boyfriends, who won’t hold jobs and spend hours a day playing video games. Yet, resent studies found video game playing may have benefits.
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
Replacement Theory Didn’t Kill People in Buffalo
Mental illness did.
With the society wide surge of mental disorder during the pandemic, the U.S. has arrived at a moment of reckoning for a policy failure that has run like an open hydrant since the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s emptied the mental hospitals. The solution was supposed to be outpatient “community care.” It never happened.
Andrew Scull, author of a just-published book on psychiatry’s struggle to address mental illness (“Desperate Remedies,” recently reviewed in these pages), wrote a devastating critique last year of how politics and medicine have failed the mentally ill. “Community care,” he wrote, “was a shell game with no pea. In place of forcible confinement in publicly run asylums, the chronically mentally ill have been abandoned to their fate.”
Open Borders and Lax Drug Policies Are Contributing to Fatal Drug Overdoses
Most of the additional fatal overdoses post-Covid involve methamphetamine and fentanyl made in Mexico, China and India. For each overdose death, more than 100 people struggle with debilitating addictions to these dangerous substances.
Coincident with policy changes advertised as civil-rights progress, the comparatively low drug-overdose rate for blacks began to accelerate. It reached the white rate by 2019 and then surged past it during the pandemic to reach 43 annually per 100,000 of the black population by last September.
Hospitals Perform a Ton of Unnecessary Procedures… Even During Covid
When Covid-19 struck in early 2020 many hospitals and hospital outpatient clinics began to scale back or stopped performing non-emergency procedures. The idea was to avoid putting patients at risk of Covid or to reserve capacity for those with Covid. At least that was the theory and partly why hospitals were provided federal bailout funds…