Tag Archives: regulation

Progressive-Democrats’ Letter and a Medical Panel

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Seventeen Progressive-Democrat Senators wrote a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr decrying the medical experts he’d appointed to a creation of the Progressive-Democratic Party, the US Preventive Services Task Force, from back when the Senate joined with the House to unilaterally pass Obamacare.

We are greatly concerned about the potentially outsized impact these members could have in pushing for services within their specialty[.]

Never mind that Kennedy’s appointees are actual medical experts in the variety of fields which the panel was designed to oversee. These specialist doctors replaced a collection of generalists wholly unqualified to oversee the plethora of specialties that need treatment recommendation oversight. After all,

Primary care doctors are less familiar with new research on diseases and screenings than specialists, which is one reason the panel is often behind the medical curve.

One example of the panel’s heretofore failures is this bit regarding PSA testing for prostate cancer in men:

[T]he panel retained its recommendation against PSA tests for men 70 and older. Why? Who knows, but some on the left argue that screening older men could result in unnecessary treatment since they may die of something else before cancer kills them.

That’s just cynical and has no basis in the practice of medicine. The specialists will be much more efficient, much more accurate, and so much more cost effective with their recommendations.

Kennedy hasn’t responded yet, at least publicly, but were I in his shoes, my response would be public, and it would be short and sweet. My responding letter would have this appearing at the top right of the body:

Reference A: [Make up of the US Preventive Services Task Force]
Reference B: [The Progressive-Democrats’ letter]

The body of my response would have consisted of this in its entirety:

Reference B noted. Reference A applies.

Nothing else need be done or said or written.

Government Rules

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James Freeman asked, in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed, how many of these are necessary.

How much government could we all do without? President Donald Trump says that red tape, when cut, becomes beautiful. Truer words were never spoken, and last week this column noted his encouraging progress in repealing misguided rules enacted by his predecessors. Now a few recent examples [not repeated here] suggest that half or more of government regulation is completely unnecessary.

I submit that we already have a nearly complete set of government rules in our Bill of Rights, backed up by the Bill’s overarching document, our Constitution.

I would add two rules to flesh the list out to completeness. One would enforce the sanctity of contracts. When two or more parties agree on a thing, that contract should be entirely enforceable as it stands, with severe sanctions applied to those who violate it. There really are only two legitimate ways to deviate from a freely done agreement. One way is if all of the parties involved agree to alter the contract or to dissolve it altogether. The other way is through the bankruptcy of one or more of the parties, making it impossible for them to uphold their parts of the bargain. Current bankruptcy law deals quite nicely with this sort of eventuality.

The other government rule centers on truth in advertising. Advertisements are contracts between the advertiser and the buyer, and so within the sanctity of that contract, not being truthful should be a felony if the distortion can be shown to have been deliberate, or a civil offense if the distortion can be shown to result from either party’s negligence.

Such a cleanup of our rules and regulations regime would result in how many pages of the Federal Register becoming obsolete and without effect. It also would virtually eliminate compliance costs and very greatly simplify our lives and our economy.

Even better it would render the vast majority of the Civil Service unnecessary, with those personnel returned to the private sector, all to the profit of a greatly downsized and so more efficient government, of the civil and now private employees, and to our economy writ large, through no longer having to compete so much for the same resources that the government had heretofore competed for.

Yes, I’m ignoring environmental and climate regulation in this. Those milieus are well enough covered by our Bill of Rights and the proposed contract sanctity rule.

Business Decision, or…?

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Legislation lately getting the backing of the Trump administration would

give merchants the option to choose a different card network to process transactions when their customers use a credit card.

Banks object.

[They] say that the fees are what power credit-card rewards, like cash back and travel points, and that passing the bill would force them to change those programs consumers love.

The banks may be correct in that, but their beef also is irrelevant to the situation.

Offering those rewards (and finding the funds to pay for them) is a business decision subject to free market imperatives, not any sort of inherent right that wants government protection.

It’s a Start

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If it passes, a draft bipartisan Federal permit reform bill that’s circulating in the Senate would be a good start. As is the usual case in politics, it wants improvement, but first pass this first step, then return forthwith with improvements, and pass those.

What the bill has, if the Senate as a whole can pass it and then the House do so, too:

  • strict deadlines for agencies to complete environmental reviews—two years for bigger projects and one for smaller ones—and lets developers sue if their reviews are delayed
  • requiring plaintiffs to challenge permits within 150 days of their publication—they now have six years—and to have suffered direct harm or face imminent injury
  • 150-day statute of limitations would apply to challenging so-called biological opinions
  • if a judge faults an environmental review, agencies could correct the purported lapse rather than restart the permitting process
  • repair and replacements of critical infrastructure, including transportation, water, grid and energy projects, would be exempt from NEPA reviews
  • generally prohibit federal agencies from rescinding or suspending permits and allow permit holders to sue for damages if they do

I suggest the following improvements for enactment in the next legislative session:

  • one year to complete large project environmental review, six months for smaller projects. If the deadline passes without Agency action, the permit is deemed issued with no caveats or conditions and cannot be challenged in court. Agencies also must have the burden of proving they didn’t just rubber stamp a rejection in order to meet the deadline. Agencies have these newfangled devices called computers along with software with which to facilitate reviews. There’s no need to mosey along with manually done procedures
  • require plaintiffs to challenge within 60 days. They also have access to modern computers and software with which to review the permit and produce their challenges
  • 60-day statute of limits to challenge all opinions, not just biological ones. See the above about computers and software
  • generally prohibit federal agencies from rescinding or suspending permits, period

I know; it’s a pipedream to get the initial step passed, much less the improvements. But I dream.

An Appropriate Move

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The Trump administration is adjusting its interpretation of Title IX as it concerns sexual assault, including rape. The change greatly reduces the requirement for colleges and universities to themselves investigate sexual assaults, including rape, where those occurred off campus. Critics, of course, complain that the move will simply increase the likelihood of further moves like the alleged Cornell student who lately has filed a civil suit against the school and the seven students she alleges raped her at an off-campus party.

The move may well encourage fee-seeking lawyers and deep pockets civil suits by alleged victims, but the plain matter is centered on who has the jurisdiction for investigation and criminal charges.

If the assault occurs off campus, even if in an off-campus fraternity or sorority house, it’s still primarily a city police matter, not a campus police mater. The fraternity and sorority house is off campus almost exclusively because it’s not supported or even sanctioned by the school, perhaps even evicted from the school’s campus. That severely limits campus police authority regarding those places, and campus police have no authority at all anywhere else off campus. Beyond that, off-campus means off campus, and so outside the jurisdiction of school authority of any sort.

Outside school jurisdiction, though, does not mean the alleged victim has no protections against assaults or no means of redress after the assault as some of the more hysterical criticisms would have it. Those protections and means of redress remain where they have always been: in the local, State, and Federal laws against any crime, including sexual assaults of any form, in the hands of local and State police to investigate, and in the hands of the State and Federal criminal trial courts.