Friday, December 12, 2025
U.S. Military Readiness Is Under Threat By Doctor Shortages
by Jeff Morris via RealClearDefense,
According to the Association of the U.S. Army, the crisis of doctor shortages has been increasing for years, which negatively affects military readiness. Their own report cited the inability of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to recruit and retain enough doctors. As the number of military physicians has consistently decreased, the armed services have been forced to close some hospitals, to lower other hospitals to clinic status, and to use nurses and technicians as "physician extenders.”
More recently, leading U.S. physicians have spoken out about the largest healthcare monopoly in the country that we have ever seen, which also involves our medical residency programs. This too affects military readiness.
A renowned doctor recently wrote an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal scratching the surface on this crisis. He described how the private American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) acts like a regulator, hamstringing physicians with endless fees, paperwork, and testing.
Not only doctors are sounding the alarm. Adam Candeub, leading antitrust attorney and current General Counsel to the FCC, stated in his white paper titled The American Board of Medical Specialties: Certification and The Need for Antitrust Enforcement, that “board certification serves as medicine’s gatekeeper.” He went on to say that “competition among organizations providing these certification services drives innovation and lowers healthcare costs. The domination of the American Board of Medical Specialists (ABMS) over certification is dramatically raising certification costs and indirectly accreditation costs throughout medicine, decreasing access to physicians, increasing already exploding medical budgets, and reducing healthcare innovation.”
The urgent issue is this self proclaimed “Gold Standard and Gatekeeper” has created the largest monopoly in physician care that we’ve ever seen. All the while contributing to our current and growing physician shortages. It is important to note that testing is a key component that ensures physicians meet the very standards needed for higher quality care for all Americans.
The ABMS has long been working with the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to corner the market on physician board certification. Their collusive relationship, which began when ABMS co-founded the ACGME, can be considered one of the root causes of physician shortages throughout the country, the military, and within key specialties. The impact can be seen in every aspect of our health care system, greatly contributing to shortages in specialties within primary care, especially access to much-needed specialties for 21st-century medicine throughout rural America. These include emergency and integrative medicine as well as family medicine obstetrics.
In March, the Republican leadership of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel launched a probe into the nation’s medical residency system. The ACGME was one of the organizations asked to provide documents to the Committee along with the AMA and major universities. U.S. Representative Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), said “for years, resident wages have remained stagnant while doctor shortages have increased, which harms medical students and hospital patients, and forces us to rely on foreign talent to fill the gap.”
With the Trump Administration’s mandate to end bureaucracies and monopolies within our healthcare system, Congress and HHS need to act now. The collusive activities of the ABMS and the ACGME have suppressed innovation and restricted access across the country. In addition, their bureaucratic control has gone beyond that of federal agencies such as HHS, as they now hold the Defense Health Agency under regulatory capture. This resulted in limiting our military’s ability to access much needed physician care. This drastically impacts not just military personnel, but global readiness.
Many have spoken on the impact on maternal care, as pregnant servicewomen and military spouses often have to travel hours away or even back to mainland U.S. for months at a time to have their baby alone.
Now more than ever we need Congress and HHS to investigate the root causes of doctor shortages which in turn helps strengthen our military.
Jeff Morris, JD is CEO of American Board of Physician Specialties.
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/us-military-readiness-under-threat-doctor-shortages
Homeless woman accused of stabbing in NYC Macy’s released from psych hospital morning of attack
The unhinged homeless woman accused of stabbing a tourist at Macy’s Herald Square had bought the knife she used in the store — and had once threatened to murder Sen. Elizabeth Warren, prosecutors revealed at her arraignment Friday.
Kerri Aherne, 43, was hit with charges of attempted murder, assault, and weapons possession in Manhattan Criminal Court for the savage attack that left a 38-year-old California mother riddled with stab wounds Thursday.
“She had purchased a knife at Macy’s and looked for someone to kill because voices in her head told her that she had to kill someone or else she would be killed,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Paul Barker told the court.
Aherne, who spent more than a year at Manhattan Psychiatric Center, was released from custody the same morning she carried out the vicious stabbing, prosecutors said.
Crime and the Welfare State
Several recent papers claim that expanding programs like Medicaid reduces crime (e.g. here). I’ve been skeptical, not because of weaknesses in any particular paper, but just because the results feel a bit too aligned with social-desirability bias and we know that the underlying research designs can be fragile. As a result, my priors haven’t moved much. The first paper using a genuine randomized controlled trial now reports no effect of Medicaid expansion on crime.
Those involved with the criminal justice system have disproportionately high rates of mental illness and substance-use disorders, prompting speculation that health insurance, by improving treatment of these conditions, could reduce crime. Using the 2008 Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which randomly made some low-income adults eligible to apply for Medicaid, we find no statistically significant impact of Medicaid coverage on criminal charges or convictions. These null effects persist for high-risk subgroups, such as those with prior criminal cases and convictions or mental health conditions. In the full sample, our confidence intervals can rule out most quasi-experimental estimates of Medicaid’s crime-reducing impact.
Finkelstein, Miller, and Baicker (WP).
It could still be the case that very targeted interventions–say making sure that released criminals get access to mental health care–could do some good but there’s unlikely to be any general positive effect.
A similar story is found in Finland where a large RCT on a guaranteed basic income found zero effect on crime
This paper provides the first experimental evidence on the impact of providing a guaranteed basic income on criminal perpetration and victimization. We analyze a nationwide randomized controlled trial that provided 2,000 unemployed individuals in Finland with an unconditional monthly payment of 560 Euros for two years (2017-2018), while 173,222 comparable individuals remained under the existing social safety net. Using comprehensive administrative data on police reports and district court trials, we estimate precise zero effects on criminal perpetration and victimization. Point estimates are small and statistically insignificant across all crime categories. Our confidence intervals rule out reductions in perpetration of 5 percent or more for crime reports and 10 percent or more for criminal charges.
Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/12/crime-and-the-welfare-state.html
Stop Recycling Plastic
Microplastic accumulation in the human body could be a serious health hazard, according to some researchers, and might be linked to cancer, heart attacks and other threatening medical conditions. We’ll never eliminate all microplastic from the environment, but we could significantly reduce the volume if we’d just shut down plastic recycling.
A Stanford Medicine article says scientists estimate that “adults ingest the equivalent of one credit card per week in microplastics,” which sounds frightening, even though only a “few studies have directly examined the impact of microplastics on human health, leaving us in the dark about how dangerous they really are.”
The fear, however, is already out there, and policymakers, particularly in California, have gone to war with all plastic, hoping to ban as much of this modern convenience as possible.
These, of course, are going to be the same policymakers who regard recycling as a golden calf that can never be challenged. Not that they’d ever admit it, but they are part of the problem – a large part.
There are a number of pathways for microplastic to enter the human body. Plastic litter that’s been degraded into tiny particles can be inhaled and ingested. But we also pick up plastic from automobile tire wear, microwave-heated food containers and textile fibers.
But for this argument, we focus on one source: recycling.
Recycling plastic requires the destruction of consumer products, which are shredded by industrial machinery, washed, rinsed, dried and transported. The process creates an enormous body of microplastic.
“Environmental exposure can almost double the microplastic generation during the shredding step in the recycling plant,” says Faisal Hai, head of the School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wollongong in Australia.
“The commercial process for plastic recycling may have been emitting microplastics since its first use nearly half a century ago.”
Other research suggests that as much as 400,000 tons, “or the equivalent of about 29,000 dump trucks of microplastics,” is produced by recycling each year in the U.S. alone, says Inside Climate News.
Hai based his comments on a research article published last year in Science, Recycling process produces microplastics, that he and doctoral candidate Michael Staplevan wrote. The pair looked into the amount of microplastic that “can be generated during the recycling process” and the “environmental exposure affect the amount of microplastics generated.” The article is “the culmination of a series of recent publications by the UOW researchers uncovering the limitations of current plastic recycling practice,” according to the university.
Hai and Staplevan “are strong advocates of recycling,” says the university, so rather than calling for an end to plastic recycling, they instead want increased government “regulation of the recycling industry to control and monitor the amount of microplastics being produced and released into the environment.”
But a far better idea is to bury plastic waste in landfills.
Almost three decades ago, then-New York Times reporter John Tierney wrote the lengthy article Recycling Is Garbage in the Sunday Times magazine. It generated the greatest volume of hate mail in the magazine’s history.
Tierney’s argument that, rather than recycle, “the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill” was not well received by the paper’s readership. But he was right, which he proved again in 2015 with The Reign of Recycling.
No, depositing waste plastic in landfills won’t eliminate all microplastic. But it would substantially cut how much is produced. The hard part will be convincing the recycling zealots that their religion is likely a threat to human health and must be abandoned as soon as possible.
https://issuesinsights.com/2025/12/09/stop-recycling-plastic/
House GOP unveils health care bill without ObamaCare subsidies extension
House Republicans on Friday unveiled a health care bill they will bring to a vote next week that includes items that are broadly popular in the party, like cost sharing reductions and reforms to the pharmacy benefit manager industry, but will exclude extension of expiring enhanced ObamaCare subsidies.
House GOP leaders will allow an amendment vote on extending expiring Obamacare subsidies, a GOP leadership aide signaled, in a concession to moderates who had been calling to go on the record on the matter. The exact contours of the amendment are not yet settled.
“We expect that there will be an amendment that I believe is being worked on. So, the process will allow for that amendment,” a House Republican leadership aide said.
Provisions in the bill, dubbed the “Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act,” include policies that have already cleared key committees, House Republican leadership aides said.
The bill will appropriate funds to pay for “cost-sharing reductions” in ObamaCare, a complicated move that will lower premiums for some people but decrease the overall amount of subsidies and make premiums more expensive for others. Such a provision was stripped from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” over the summer because it violated Senate rules.
The bill will also include a provision to make it easier for businesses to fund their own insurance plans, and protect themselves from going bankrupt from large, expensive claims.
It will expand association health plans, and will also include provisions to make the PBM industry more transparent.
The bill will not include an expansion of health savings accounts that have been floated in several other Republican health care plans. A GOP leadership aide said that more conversations on health care will continue in the future.
Republicans are fiercely divided on the expiring ObamaCare subsidies. Conservatives argue they are too costly and prop up a system they despise, while moderates say letting the subsidies expire is political suicide. They are set to expire at the end of the year without action, leading to drastically increased premium payments for 22 million Americans.
Because of that division — and opposition to the subsidies from Republican leaders themselves — GOP leaders opted against including a subsidy extension in their health care bill. But after moderates rebelled by trying to force votes on subsidy extension plans through discharge petitions, negotiations started on allowing an amendment vote.
Any such amendment vote would be designed to give moderate Republicans political cover, but would have little chance of becoming law. Democrats are not expected to support such an amendment, and even if it was adopted, it would be a poison pill for the larger GOP health care plan, eroding support from conservatives.
“Their health care package, as I understand it, is likely to be a disaster and actually not enhance the health care of the American people. It will take away from it. So it’s not clear to me that, even if it’s amended … that it will actually solve the problem of addressing the Republican health crisis,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told MS NOW on Friday.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5646973-house-gop-health-care-bill-obamacare/