Brian Gongol
Where is the line for parental rights drawn?
Nobody should want the state to try to usurp parents, but when those parents refuse medical care for their children in a way that will almost certainly lead to death, then there's undoubtedly a compelling interest for someone to step in to protect the child. In the case of the Minnesota boy who was being kept from chemotherapy, the difference was a 5% chance of survival without treatment and a 95% chance of survival with treatment. The intriguing question is where the cutoff is for state interference: Is it a 50-50 shot at survival? Is it where the parents' course of action is 10% less likely to result in survival than what the doctors recommend? 20%? 30%?
Soaking the rich: Good for populist vote-grabbing, but bad for budget-balancing
Open-heart surgery is only a 57-year-old concept
Which means that many of the Baby Boomers who will get the surgery are actually older than the procedure itself. Which in turn gets really mind-blowing when one realizes that fully-functional bio-engineered hearts are quite likely only a few years away. Another scary thought for the books.
The root cause of last summer's flooding in Iowa
