health care
terrasig | September 7, 2009
. . . or as Dr Barrett refers to it more accurately, Insurance Reform.
On Friday, Sarah Avery of the News & Observer reported on her interview with the now-retired Pennsylvania psychiatrist who started the Quackwatch.com website in 1996 following years of investigating fraudulent health practices.
From the Quackwatch Mission Statement:
Quackwatch is now an international network of people who are concerned about health-related frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct. Its primary focus is on quackery-related information that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere. Founded by…
revere | September 5, 2009We've said both nice things and not so nice things about Finance Committee ranking Republican on health care, Chuck Grassley (R-IA), most recently not-so-nice things. Things like calling him morally corrupt, a liar and a gold-plated hypocrite. Things like that. We know he hears us because his office complained to a colleague about it. Now, through several sources, we've gotten an email with this subject line sent around by someone in his office and containing a news article explaining why he's not as corrupt as he looks:
Questions: why do journalists and arm chair pontificators always look…
grrlscientist | September 2, 2009tags: canada, health care, human rights, streaming video
This video consists of a series of interviews with real Canadians. They discuss the realities of their single payer health care system, and are offended by the American right wing's insulting it.
This video made me deeply angry: in America, health care is obviously not a human right. In America, people like me -- whose health, credit rating, ability to find employment and financial future have been severely compromised due to a lack of health care -- deserve our situations, right? After all, things like this don't happen to real…
ejohnson | August 28, 2009
The current health care debate has centered largely on the elderly, but as ScienceBloggers are pointing out, young adults have equally as much at stake in the outcome of health care reform. On Thus Spake Zuska, Zuska recounts the struggles of two different young women--one a victim of the Pittsburgh L.A. Fitness shooting earlier this month, the other a recent college graduate who was denied renewal of her insurance policy when she developed a medical condition during her first term of coverage. Jonah Lehrer considers the psychological bias that leads many young adults to opt out of coverage…
denialism | August 22, 2009Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not dead. Instead I've been working hard as a new surgical intern and sadly not finding the time to write for the denialism blog. However, now more than ever, it seems that we need to talk about the problem of denialism.
Two major new issues for denialism have cropped up, and both are major new forms of political denialism. The first, I'll broadly describe as Obama-denialism. Obama is a muslim, Obama was not born in the US, there is a giant conspiracy involving the Hawaii Secretary of State, the Democratic Party and muslims worldwide to take over the…
hrynyshyn | August 20, 2009For me, the most interesting parallel between the national debates over how to stop heating the planet and how to reform health care insurance is the response both have generated in my own brain.
For years now, the failure of a sizable portion of the American public to accept the need to sharply reduce the primary causes of anthropogenic global warming has elicited frustration and, at times, fury. Similar emotions jump across my synapses in the face of daily news reports of the paranoid reaction of what is probably the same demographic slice of the country to proposals for government-run…
emjohnson | August 17, 2009I'm sorry, I'm afraid that title's misleading. This is actually an early video of UnitedHealth CEO Stephen J. Hemsley (whose salary is estimated at $102,000 an hour) discussing his principled stance on why he's opposed to the public option in US health care reform.
Or it could be The Money Song from Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's difficult to tell them apart.
terrasig | August 14, 2009
Here's the updated version of the group, Billionaires For Bush, doing their clever schtick prior to a healthcare town hall forum last evening in Durham, NC (Yes, they are standing in front of a Hummer H2).
A robust crowd of 850 people filled the B.N. Duke Auditorium on the campus of North Carolina Central University to hear from a panel led by Congressman David Price (D-NC4).
[N.B. - not well-known is that the Duke family purchased 25 acres of land to create the campus for this historically-black college four miles across town; hence, the university honored the gift by naming its central…
ejohnson | August 10, 2009
For many Americans, it is difficult to imagine what going to the doctor would be like under a government-sponsored health care system. But members of the military and their dependents have firsthand experience with such a system under the US Department of Defense TRICARE program. On The Questionable Authority, Mike Dunford describes a recent trip to a military medical center, noting the efficiency and lack of paperwork required. On The Scientific Activist, Nick Anthis compares Mike's experience with his own in the UK. Both Mike and Nick are quick to point out that socialized medicine is not…
revere | August 7, 2009We've been rather kind to Senator Charles (Chuck) Grassley in the past. Yes, he's a right wing Republican with some really odious ideas, ideas for which he deserves to be criticized. But he's also been a champion of the Federal False Claims Act which has encouraged and protected whistleblowers to reveal how corporations have taken the taxpayer for a ride, something for which he deserves credit. Lately he has been on a tear about the ways Big Pharma has been buying influence with high profile medical professionals, with the direct implication that this has skewed their practice, their research…
ejohnson | July 28, 2009
As President Obama continues to garner support for his healthcare reform plan, ScienceBloggers are also taking a look at the issues in play. Peter Lipson of White Coat Underground investigates the perception that centralized, salary-based medicine is more efficient than a system based on private practice. Revere of Effect Measure discusses the dangerous tendency to eliminate all reserve capacity--spare hospital beds--in order to cut costs. Mike the Mad Biologist argues against what he calls a mislabeled "centrist" position on reform. And Razib of Gene Expression presents a glimpse of what…
revere | July 26, 2009The Reveres have been around a long time and we know a lot of public health people in different states. Recently we were talking with a colleague about the problem of hospital surge capacity -- the ability to handle a sudden demand for services -- and she described her first job working for a state health department in the early 1980s. Her job was to compile a health resources report, essentially a yearly compilation of licensed and operating beds for all manner of health facilities, including hospitals, nursing homes, psychiatric facilities, outpatient clinics, rest homes, group homes and…
revere | June 15, 2009One of the premier and earliest flu bloggers and co-founder of Flu Wiki, DemFromCT is also a doctor. Not a young doctor, either, although somewhat younger than I am (most people seem to be, these days). In our young professional days, the American Medical Association was a real political power. When it spoke, politicians listened. Hell, everyone listened. Now? Well, who cares? Dem has a really excellent post up at DailyKos looking at the AMA's opposition to the "public option" in the Obama health care plan. I'm not so crazy about a public option either. If there's an option, it should be a "…
denialism | June 4, 2009We're starting to hear about how Obama intends to implement healthcare in this country.
President Barack Obama says he's open to requiring all Americans to buy health insurance, as long as the plan provides a "hardship waiver" to exempt poor people from having to pay.
Obama opposed such an individual mandate during his campaign, but Congress increasingly is moving to embrace the idea.
In providing the first real details on how he wants to reshape the nation's health care system, the president urged Congress on Wednesday toward a sweeping overhaul that would allow Americans to buy into a…
denialism | May 29, 2009
Three systems widely cited as examples of universal health care are the so-called single-payer systems in the UK, Canada and New Zealand.
These systems I would describe as "socialized", and rely for the most part on taxation for funding. The system in Canada for instance, uses taxes to pay for health care administered by the individual provinces, and provided by a mixture of private and public hospitals and health care providers. Private health care is restricted in Canada, but is available in some provinces under publicly-funded private organizations called P3s. Private health…
denialism | May 28, 2009The question has come up again and again in our discussions on health care in the US and around the world, why does it cost so much more in the US when we get so much less?
The drug companies and their lobbyists are already out in force trying to make sure their pocketbooks aren't hit by the inevitable reforms that are coming. In particular they insist drugs aren't the problem in the US, it's administrative costs! I would tend to disagree.
Based upon my experience working in the sytem, the main causes of excess costs I would hypothesize are the following (in order of importance):
An…
denialism | May 28, 2009
Here it comes. How dare I suggest the US could learn anything from France? By most assessments France provides the best health care in the world, with excellent life expectancy, low rates of health-care amenable disease, and again, despite providing excellent universal care, they spend less per capita than the US. Using about 10.7% of GDP and about 2000USD less per capita than the US they are providing the best health care in the world. To top it off, France's system isn't even socialized. That's right. It's yet another system that is a mixture of public and private funding that, if…
denialism | May 27, 2009
What better argument for universal health care can you make than that of Germany? By far one of the most successful systems, it has had some form of universal health care for almost 130 years, and is currently one of the most successful health care systems in the world. It is again, a mixture of public and private funding, with employers providing most of the funding for health care by paying into one of several hundred "sickness funds" that provide health care funding to their employees. Germany is widely regarded as having excellent access, short wait times, care with the best…
denialism | May 26, 2009
The Dutch really have it together on health care, they have a system that has been proposed as a model for the US to emulate. In stark contrast to many other European systems, it's actually based entirely on private insurers, rather than a single-payer or entirely national system. Yet the Dutch system is universal, has far superior rates of satisfaction with quality of care and access, and still costs a fraction of what we pay for health care per capita in the US. How is this possible?
You can read the Wikipedia entry on the Dutch system or read about it on their Ministry of Health's…