Bizarro World update: MA to allow private enterprise to alleviate health care shortage

If you've ever had a kid wake up crying from an earache and you know you just need some amoxicillin (stat!), this is a welcome slice of common sense. From today's Boston Globe: "In-store healthcare wins state approval - CVS planning to open clinics for minor ills"

After state regulators cleared the way yesterday for store-based medical clinics, CVS Corp. said it plans to open more than two dozen inside Massachusetts drugstores this year, dispensing treatment for bronchitis and earaches a few aisles away from shelves of candy and nail polish.

The "Minute Clinics" will be staffed by nurse practitioners and they'll only be permitted to treat sore throats and simple maladies. But they'll also have the knowledge to recognize more serious ailments and direct patients to the right medical care. In the end, the Massachusetts health board needed a solution for the shortage of primary care doctors in the Bay State:

Still, the eight members of the panel who voted in favor of the clinics and even the five who abstained said this was the right time to expand access. There is a shortage of primary-care physicians, leading some patients to turn up in hospital emergency rooms for routine care - and that was before nearly 300,000 previously uninsured Massachusetts residents gained coverage as part of the state's near-universal health insurance initiative, expected to spur even greater demand.

CVS operates hundreds of Minute Clinics in 25 states, but good ol' Massachusetts worked hard to block the clinics until a public "solution" could be found that would spread the misery equally to everybody.