health insurance

Mount Pisgah, diving into Lake Willoughby, way up noth Vermont, my chosen and beloved place of residence, took the top spot last week in the Commonwealth's "State Scorecard" for healthcare, which ranks states based on access, quality, costs, and health outcomes. For people who live elsewhere, this report adds one more thing to add to the list of Things That Make Vermont Cool. (This is a jump up from second place in the 2007 scorecard.) For people who live here, this report raises amazement -- and the feeling that it must be very bad indeed everywhere else. Vermont's health system is a mess…
Never know what'll top the charts. Top post was a post I put up in January, "Pfizer takes $2.3 billion offl-label marketing fine." That post reported the news (via FiercePharma) that Pfizer had tucked away in its financial disclosure forms a $2.3 billion charge to end the federal investigation into allegations of off-label promotions of its Cox-2 painkillers, including Bextra. (Lot of money ... but it didn't quite wipe out the company's 2008 net income.) The company had set aside the money as part of a deal it was negotiating Justiice. Finalizing the deal, however, took until September. At…
Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates. Tara Smith explains why she'll be getting her kids their (seasonal) flu vaccines. Revere does likewise Daniel Menaker, former honcho at Random House, defends the midlist. (Where was he when my book was getting so much push?) Just in case you missed it, lack of insurance is killing 45,000 people a year (Times) in the U.S. This doesn't include preventable deaths among the underinsured (like yours truly, who is sitting on some surgery that he'd rather put behind him). You can download the…
Matt Taibbi tells us what he really thinks. Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world : via Rolling Stone, and well worth a read.
We'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…
While most media commentators obsess over the "news" that Diane Sawyer will be replacing Charlie Gibson on ABC World News, there are at least some observers who remain more concerned with content. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne weighs in this morning on the sensationalism that has dominated coverage of public participation in the health care insurance reform debate. What we learn about the role of television is not surprising, but it does help remind us why things are going the way they are: The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer…
Despite 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…
The similarities between the campaign against mitigating the consequences of climate change and the campaign against health insurance reform go far beyond the use of distortion and fiction. The parallels are everywhere. For example, those with vested (monied) interests in the status quo are turning to the same lobbying and public relations outfits to carry out the campaigns. The latest firm to be identified is Bonner & Associates, which, according to the Virginia Daily Progress, was founded in 1984 by Jack Bonner and is considered a pioneer in the field of "strategic grassroots," in…
We'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…
The 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…
Nate Silver makes George Will clear: Will's argument is apparently this: The government does not need to make a profit and will have greater leverage with providers; therefore it will deliver the same service for less money. That's unfair! Is this really the best argument that one of the most prominent intellectual conservatives can mount against the public option? Post is a bit longish for tweetish attention spans -- but a great exposure of the real objection to public plans (Congressional conflicts of interest notwithstanding), and of why no real competition exists in the insurance…
Ezra Klein makes his call TKTK: I think health reform is going to go the way of stimulus. The stimulus was a huge and important accomplishment. If you had told liberals in 2007 that they were going to pass an $800 billion dollar spending bill that made good on decades of promises about infrastructure rebuilding and comparative effectiveness research and train construction and broadband internet and green energy, they would have laughed at you. But by the time the bill actually wound its way through Congress, most liberals were frustrated by the outcome: A few Senate moderates had lopped $100…
I can't claim to be 'objective' or neutral on health-care reform -- but who can? Everybody needs health care, some more than others. I need it less than most, as my family and I are, knock on wood, generally blessed with good health. Even so, we laid out $18K last year for health care, still owe money -- and no one in the family ever entered an ER, got a scan, received a prescription costing more than $100, or got admitted to a hospital. And we're among the lucky ones who can (supposedly) afford insurance. (We pay $10K for a plan with a $5K deductible.) This is one of several reasons I'm…
One 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 "…
We'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…
We get emails, all kinds of emails, from people thinking it would be great if we mentioned something near and dear to them on Effect Measure. We are flattered by this, of course, but we aren't journalists or a commercial site or a non-profit advocacy site (well, we are ultimately non-profit, but not intentionally). Occasionally, though, we get email that piques are interest and enthusiasm. This afternoon I got one from Jonathan Link, a writer for AboutKidsHealth, a project of the The Hospital for Sick Children at The University of Toronto. Back in the days when Quebec was a referendum in the…
Ed Yong examines how a simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students. The Questionable Authority considers The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath. Jessica Palmer, in a healthy display of online media's corrective power, tries to make clear that For the last time: that "Twitter is Evil" paper is not about Twitter!. Zimmer takes a tour of assisted migration. Effect measure argues the lack of universal health care in the US is morally and fiscally bankrupt.
The idea that if the United States joins the rest of developed nations and finally adopts a universal health care system it will bankrupt itself is not based in reality. The reality is that the US spends a larger proportion of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than any other developed nation. By far. Not even close. CDC has just documented it from data collected by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in its 2008 health data yearbook (statistics and indicators for 30 countries). It suggests we are being bankrupted by our lack of a universal health care system: CDC…
If the 1960s film, The Graduate, were to be made today (Graduate, II: The Stimulus), the iconic scene at the party where a friend of the family takes Dustin Hoffman aside and whispers in his ear, "I have only one word for you, Plastics") would be transmogrified into, "I have only three words for you, Health Information Technology." HIT, and its love child with the recently passed stimulus package, the Electronic Medical Record, have all the characteristics of a good idea destined to go bad. One of my vivid memories from my early career was being shown a new kind of quiet printer, called an…
Ezra Klein reviews Obama's handling of yesterday's health summit -- a piece well worth reading for a taste of how sharply focused and serious Obama is about truly comprehensive health-care reform. Karen Tumlty, a health-care expert, describes in Time her own family's grueling wrestling match with the health-insurance industry. A timely story -- no pun intended -- as it makes painfully clear that it's not just the 46 million people uninsured (did I just say "just" 46 million people) who fare poorly in the current system. Genetic Future looks at how a Victorian-era height-prediction system…