A Second Opinion on U.S. Health Care Costs
By admin | April 25, 2008
The New England Journal Of Medicine
Volume 358:549-551 February 7, 2008 Number 6
Market-Based Failure - A Second Opinion on U.S. Health Care Costs
Robert Kuttner
U.S. health care expenditures rose 6.7% in 2006, the government recently reported. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, total health care expenditures exceeded $2.1 trillion, or more than $7,000 for every American man, woman,and child.1 Medicare costs jumped a record 18.7%, driven by the new privatized drug benefit. Total health care spending, now amounting to 16% of the gross domestic product, is projected to reach 20% in just 7 years.
Relentless medical inflation has been attributed to many factors - the aging population, the proliferation of new technologies, poor diet and lack of exercise, the tendency of supply (physicians, hospitals, tests, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and novel treatments) to generate its own demand, excessive litigation and defensive medicine, and tax-favored insurance coverage.
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Health Reform You Shouldn’t Believe In
By admin | April 25, 2008
What the Massachusetts experiment teaches us about incremental efforts to increase coverage by expanding private insurance.
Marcia Angel
For all their promise of change, Democrats are remarkably timid about changing the health-care system. The system now costs twice as much per person as those of other advanced countries and delivers worse average outcomes. It prices tens of millions of people out of health coverage altogether and limits care for countless others. Yet leading Democrats are clinging to this system, proposing to cover more people but not changing the system itself except at the margins. The timidity extends to choice of words. No one is supposed to say “single-payer” or “national health insurance” anymore, because that is “politically unrealistic”; the most we are allowed is to talk of reforming the system incrementally so that someday it will morph into “Medicare for all.”
Thus, the proposals for reform taken most seriously by Democrats — including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — would retain the central role of the investor-owned private insurance industry as well as the thousands of for-profit businesses it pays to deliver medical services. This is the industry, mind you, that has brought us to the predicament we’re in now, so let’s take a quick look at it.
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Is ‘Cookbook Medicine’ Crippling the U.S. Health System?
By admin | February 28, 2008
Is ‘Cookbook Medicine’ Crippling the U.S. Health System?
By Christopher Moraff, AlterNet
Posted on February 25, 2008,
http://www.alternet.org/story/77763/
By now, the case of Nataline Sarkisyan has garnered so much media attention that there’s likely few people who haven’t heard the story of the 17 year-old California girl who died five days before Christmas after her insurance company refused to approve her liver transplant.
Sarkisyan, who was diagnosed with Leukemia when she was 14, was undergoing treatment at UCLA Medical Center when Philadelphia-based Cigna HealthCare ruled her much-needed transplant “experimental, investigational and unproven.”
Sarkisyan spent three weeks in a vegetative state before Cigna bowed to pressure from the girl’s doctors and offered to pay for the transplant itself. But by then it was too late.
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Report Links Health Insurance Status With Cancer Care
By admin | February 28, 2008
From The American Cancer Society
Report Links Health Insurance Status With Cancer Care
Uninsured Americans are less likely to get screened for cancer, more likely to be diagnosed with an advanced stage of the disease, and less likely to survive that diagnosis than their privately insured counterparts, according to a new American Cancer Society report examining the impact of health insurance status on cancer treatment and survival.
American Cancer Society researchers analyzed 598,635 cases using the most recent data from the National Cancer Data Base (NCDB), a hospital-based registry held by ACS and the Commission on Cancer of the American College of Surgeons. The NCDB tracks approximately 70% of the cancer cases in the United States and collects data from about 1,500 hospitals. The patients included had either private insurance, Medicaid, or no insurance. The researchers also examined data from the 2005 and 2006 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a nationwide in-person survey of approximately 40,000 U.S. households conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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A Health Law with Holes
By admin | January 31, 2008
Massachusetts’ experience with health-care reform illustrates the problem of an individual mandate absent comprehensive reform: It makes a social failure the problem of the individual.
Robert Kuttner January 30, 2008
Jon Kingsdale is a good man playing a bad hand dealt him by the Massachusetts Legislature and the Bush administration.
Kingsdale heads the Commonwealth Connector, created in 2006 by then-Governor Mitt Romney and the Legislature, as part of an effort to cover most of the state’s uninsured. Kingsdale takes justifiable pride in having brought health insurance to more than 300,000 Massachusetts residents.
However, as the Globe recently disclosed, the program’s costs are outstripping its projections by $245 million this year, and $400 million next year. This is not Kingsdale’s fault. The program’s designers underestimated the uninsured by some 200,000 people (costs of service are also rising). By doing his job - reaching those without coverage - Kingsdale adds to the program’s costs.
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An Open Letter to the Nation
By admin | January 31, 2008
An Open Letter to the Nation from Massachusetts Physicians:
Early Outcomes from Massachusetts’ Health Care Reform
We write to alert colleagues and the nation to the disturbing early outcomes of Massachusetts’ widely-heralded approach to health care reform. Although we wish that the current reform could secure health insurance for all, its failings reinforce our conviction that only a single payer program can assure patients the care they need.
In 2006, our state enacted a law designed to extend health coverage to virtually all state residents. Political leaders in other states as well as several Democratic presidential candidates have embraced this model.
Massachusetts’ law mandates that uninsured individuals must purchase private insurance or pay a fine. The law established a new state agency to ensure that affordable plans were available; offered low income residents subsidies to help them buy coverage; and expanded Medicaid coverage for the very poor. (Immigrants are mostly excluded from these subsidized programs.) Moneys that previously funded free care for the uninsured were shifted to the new insurance program, along with revenues from new fines on employers who fail to offer health benefits to their workers. In addition, the federal government provided extra funds for the program’s first two years.
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¡Despierta Hispano, Despierta!
By admin | January 15, 2008
¡Despierta Hispano, Despierta!
por Dr. Juan José Rivera
Soy un fiel creyente de que nuestra verdadera realidad representa mucho más que las cosas que nos afectan directamente como individuo. Mucho más que ser ciudadanos de los Estados Unidos, Méjico, Argentina, la Unión Europea, Chile o la República Dominicana, entre otros, somos ciudadanos de una comunidad hispana global; ciudadanos del mundo. Es por esta razón que sin importar el lugar del mundo en el cual te encuentras en este momento, si te consideras hispano, el asunto que voy a abordar te compete.
Existen 47 millones de personas en los Estados Unidos los cuales no tienen seguro médico; la gran mayoría no pueden pagarlo. Un porcentaje significativo de éstos, millones, son compañeros de esa gran comunidad hispana a la que pertenecemos. Puertorriqueños, Dominicanos, Mejicanos, en fin, hermanos.
Uno de los propósitos de mi blog, Corazón Hispano, es brindarle a nuestra comunidad la información necesaria sobre salud preventiva cardiovascular para intentar evitar eventos y enfermedades que requieran de un cuidado avanzado, y por ende, costoso. Intentar disminuir la cantidad de amigos que tengan que decidir entre comer o pagar por cuidado médico; entre comprar sus medicamentos o pagar su renta. El que piense que esto es una exageración probablemente o le sobran los recursos económicos, o nunca, gracias a Dios, ha sufrido de una condición seria o crónica y ha tenido que pagar de su bolsillo para proteger su salud o la de los suyos.
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I Am Not a Health Reform
By admin | December 15, 2007
NEW YORK TIMES
December 15, 2007
Op-Ed Contributors
I Am Not a Health Reform
By DAVID U. HIMMELSTEIN and STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER
Cambridge, Mass.
IN 1971, President Nixon sought to forestall single-payer national health insurance by proposing an alternative. He wanted to combine a mandate, which would require that employers cover their workers, with a Medicaid-like program for poor families, which all Americans would be able to join by paying sliding-scale premiums based on their income.
Nixon’s plan, though never passed, refuses to stay dead. Now Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all propose Nixon-like reforms. Their plans resemble measures that were passed and then failed in several states over the past two decades.
In 1988, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a version of Nixon’s employer mandate — and it added an individual mandate for students and the self-employed, much as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards (but not Mr. Obama) would do today. Michael Dukakis, then the state’s governor, announced that “Massachusetts will be the first state in the country to enact universal health insurance.” But the mandate was never fully put into effect. In 1988, 494,000 people were uninsured in Massachusetts. The number had increased to 657,000 by 2006.
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New York State Partnership for Health Coverage
By admin | November 3, 2007
Moving Toward Universal Healthcare Coverage:
October 30, 2007
On behalf of Latinos for National Health Insurance, LNHI, I wish to thank Governor Spitzer and Commissioner Daines for their commitment to moving towards universal health coverage in New York. We are extremely thankful to be given this opportunity to provide input on the development of proposals for achieving health system reform. Latinos for National Health Care is a national coalition for equity in health care based in New York. We are composed of leading Latino leaders in health care, labor, government and other sectors. LNHI’s mission is to serve as a Latino focused advocacy group to establish a comprehensive, universal, accessible, equitable, permanent and affordable program of health insurance covering every person living in the United States.
Through presentations, publications, and other outreach and advocacy efforts we seek to inform groups and organizations including elected officials of the insurance crisis in the Latino community and the need for comprehensive approach to health insurance coverage based on national health insurance. Our analysis of the latest data from the Census Bureau in NY portrays a very stark picture for Latinos in New York State. Our data shows that in 2006, 23% of all Latinos in NY lacked health coverage versus only 10% of Non-Hispanics Whites. Further of the states 2.7 million uninsured, 764,000 were Latinos. In other words, although Latinos make up only 17% of the population of New York State, they account for nearly 30% of the states uninsured. In contrast NHWs make up 60% of the states’ population but only 42% of the uninsured. By ethnic subgroup we find that 15% of Puerto Ricans in NY lack coverage. Most vulnerable are Dominicans and Mexicans with 31% and 45%, respectively, lacking coverage. Further, our analysis of Census data finds that the disparity is most pronounced among Latinos who are non citizens with 46% lacking coverage. Yet even among Latinos who were born in the US, 15% lacked coverage, a rate that is one and a half times greater than NHWs. Nevertheless, the fact that 46% of all uninsured Latinos in NY State are non citizens (390,000 people) suggests that any meaningful attempt at health insurance reform must include addressing the plight of non-citizens. We must also note that disparities are also present for other racial minorities with 20% of Asians and 16% of Non-Hispanic blacks also lacking coverage.
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Two Year Anniversary Reception of LNHI
By admin | October 18, 2007
Roof Garden Reception
125 Maiden Street, NYC
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