SPEAKING OF HEALTH CARE, CORRUPTION, SCAMS, COSTS – AT 9:36 A.M. ET:  You can be sure that, if Obamacare passes, the global warmers will get their hands on it somehow in order to protect us from our own planet.  But a Canadian scientist is determined to stand in the way.  From NRO:

Ross McKitrick, the Canadian economist who helped expose the “hockey stick” diagram for overstating the modern warming trend, has just published a paper questioning another article of faith among environmental extremists: the notion that government regulations to combat smog would result in significant health benefits. McKitrick looked carefully at the available data and can’t find the claimed effect:

"For his study, he looked at breathing-related hospital admissions and pollution levels in 11 Canadian cities between 1974 and 1994. The period covered a time when pollution was worse and there were more dramatic changes in air quality, which he said would produce more robust results...

"...The results were clear: lower smoking rates meant fewer respiratory-health hospital admissions, higher income levels were sometimes linked to slightly more admissions and air-pollution had no effect, he said."

Advocates of increased regulation have always counted on the fact that, because asserted links between pollution reduction and health benefit appear plausible, no one will check them out.

With the likes of McKitrick on the case, don’t count on it.

One of the dangers of Obamacare, rarely discussed, is that money will be spent on the wrong things simply because some trendy cause group demands it.  It will be up to real scientists, and real physicians, to point out the difference between a fashionable idea and science.  And yes, there will be career risks.  Ross McKitrick has already paid a career price in Canada for exposing some of the problems in "global warming."

March 18, 2010