Richard E. Ralston

There was a bit of an uproar recently when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced, then withdrew, a plan to hire your fellow citizens to pose as patients seeking appointments with thousands of medical practices, using a script of false...

On many levels, Medicare is a fraud and a hoax. So it is no surprise that the current debate, and the way the debate is reported, is not about whether Medicare delivers medical care at all, let alone its availability or quality. Many politicians value Medicare...

Americans benefit from the freest and most accessible medical care in the world.Gradually over the last fifty years, however, that care has become increasingly hampered by government controls. The last traces of free-market medicine could soon be gone--replaced by the...

The movement to repeal President Obama's signature health care law rightly criticizes the accounting trickery in the legislation's understated costs and overstated savings. In fact, when in the last two centuries has the U.S. Congress been able to reduce, control or...

Challenges in court to the constitutionality of Obamacare have exposed the broader agenda of those who are committed to the permanent expansion of government power which that legislation represents. The specific legal issues are almost irrelevant because Obamacare is...

Politics often supersedes medical science as the determining factor behind the Food and Drug Administration's granting or denying of approval of prescription drugs. This is the result of a long-term trend that has come sharply into focus with the FDA's handling of the...

The writers of the U.S. Constitution were very much aware of the need to set firm and specific limits on the powers of government. Hundreds of years of the British Monarchy, and study of the failures of republican forms of government as far back as ancient Greece and...

We live in an age when the secretary of the Interior and the White House press secretary proudly and publicly proclaim that they will keep their "boot on the neck" of an oil company. This new manifestation of "hope" and "change" is ominous at a time when the...

Does American history move in only one direction—toward government domination of every detail of our daily lives? Did we reach a high-water mark of government power when ObamaCare was signed into law? Or was that just the crest of a wave that will sweep away the...

Forbidding profit in medical care replaces life with death, liberty with force, and the pursuit of happiness with self-sacrifice. Let’s not kill health care and our freedom at the same time.

Those who advocate for government controls in medicine cry, "People, not profits." They say profits are unacceptable in medicine because our health is so important. But it is precisely because our health is so important that profits must be vigorously defended. If...

What passes for "reform" in Congress would eliminate health insurance firms. Why? Because, we are told, it is immoral for anyone to make a profit providing health insurance. Virtue, in this view, is restricted to those who impose government insurance on everyone...

The most effective means of destroying the rights of individual Americans is by replacing those rights with new powers for the government. Then, instead of the right to the pursuit of happiness, the political class declares that everyone has a right to be supplied...

The President's summit on health care revealed major schisms between public policy and reality. Those who feel that they must keep repeating to Americans that their health care is "broken" overlook a more fundamental problem. Most Americans, based on a lifetime of...

There is now a pause in the inept debate on health care in Congress. After a year of struggle, some comfort might be taken from the fact that neither of the monstrosities passed by the House or the Senate has become law. However, truer than ever is the 200-year-old...

What passes for "reform" in Congress would eliminate health insurance firms. Why? Because, we are told, it is immoral for anyone to make a profit providing health insurance. Virtue, in this view, is restricted to those who impose government insurance on everyone...

Health care legislation now being debated in the Senate will do nothing to make health care more affordable but quite a lot to make it more expensive. It serves the purpose of a massive and permanent expansion of the size and power of government and the political...

    The most effective means of destroying the rights of individual Americans is by replacing those rights with new powers for the government. Then, instead of the right to the pursuit of happiness, the political class declares that everyone has the right to...

Nearly a century ago, the Federal Reserve Board was created to eliminate the supposed economic problems of a free market. A century of inflation, recessions, one or two depressions, huge expansion in government debt, and wild swings in unemployment tells us the system...