blue note

The writer of that piece, David Grazter, has a history of distorting opinions to suit his own political agenda. Mediamatters reported on how an op-ed piece of his falsely suggested that Canadian orthopedic surgeon Dr. Brian Day, a former president of the Canadian Medical Association, was in favor of the U.S. health care system. (source) Also, see my post here on more about Gratzer, plus a funny clip of him squirming while being questioned by Dennis Kucinich during a House HELP hearing.

I thought so too.

And now, for some health care reform humor, with charts! Courtesy of Ezra Klein from the WaPo. John Boehner's office tries to make the House Dems' plan look really scary, via chart! (click for larger version) Here's the Dems' response to Boehner's chart: Not to be outdone, The New Republic then made a chart of the current health-care system, in all of its convoluted glory!

Here you go: Side-by-side comparison of major health care reform proposals

U.S. Health Spending Breaks From the Pack The U.S. is the only industrialized country that doesn't have universal health care, and it spends a much higher percentage of its GDP, and much more per person, on health care than its peers. Since 1980, the percentage of GDP spent on health care in the U.S. has risen by about 7%, whereas the average for the other OECD countries has risen by 2.3%.

The former CIGNA exec, Wendell Porter, was on Bill Moyer's Journal recently. You can watch the video of the interview on the PBS site. From the transcript: On why he started speaking out: On Michael Moore's "Sicko": On a public plan:

Anti-public plan Sen. DeMint inadvertently concedes that public plan won't take over the market (source)

A Kaiser Foundation study found that many American companies do not offer health insurance to employees. Very small companies in particular are especially unlikely to provide such benefits: Even those that do provide benefits, of course, generally do not cover the full cost of the insurance premium. Most cover just a small fraction of that cost, and relatively few cover a majority of the expense:

CDC: Private health care coverage at 50-year-low

Getting a second opinion on healthcare reform: There are voices besides the AMA LA Times

New Report: Private Insurance Mergers Lead to Near-Monopolies Across the Country Full article here

who's afraid of public insurance? full article at national journal the writer discusses several recent surveys and polls showing high support for a public option - check out the consumer assessment of healthcare providers and systems survey he mentions. cahps is an initiative of the department of health and human services that developed a standardized survey questionnaire used by virtually all health insurance plans -- public and private -- to assess patient satisfaction. most private insurers use the cahps questionnaire and disclose the data to the national committee for quality assurance in order to receive their accreditation. so thanks to cahps, we have a massive collection of data comparisons of how patients experience and rate medicare, medicaid and private insurance. those comparisons show the depth of medicare's popularity. according to a national cahps survey conducted by the centers for medicare and medicaid services in 2007, 56 percent of enrollees in traditional fee-for-service medicare give their "health plan" a rating of 9 or 10 on a 0-10 scale. similarly, 60 percent of seniors enrolled in medicare managed care rated their plans a 9 or 10. but according to the cahps surveys compiled by hhs, only 40 percent of americans enrolled in private health insurance gave their plans a 9 or 10 rating. more importantly, the higher scores for medicare are based on perceptions of better access to care. more than two thirds (70 percent) of traditional medicare enrollees say they "always" get access to needed care (appointments with specialists or other necessary tests and treatment), compared with 63 percent in medicare managed care plans and only 51 percent of those with private insurance. he also suggests two reasons why people are so easily talked out of expanding the medicare experience: first, younger americans not enrolled in medicare do not share the enthusiasm of seniors for the program. six years ago, the kaiser foundation asked a national sample of adults to rate the medicare program. medicare was hugely popular among those aged 65 or greater. eighty percent rated medicare favorably. similarly, more than half of seniors (62 percent) considered medicare "well run" compared to only 28 percent willing to say the same of "private health plans such as ppos and hmos that people get through their jobs." those under 65, however, had very different views. only 45 percent rated medicare favorably. only 36 percent considered it well run, as compared to 47 percent who said the same about private health plans. while 73 percent of those over 65 said medicare allowed patients to choose any doctor, only 28 percent of those under 65 agreed. second, the older americans who like medicare see little to gain from the public option since they like the coverage they have now. democratic pollster stanley greenberg finds "little support among seniors" for reform. a recent survey conducted by greenberg's democracy corps found a narrow plurality among all voters favoring "president obama's plan to change the health care system" (43 percent to 38 percent), but net opposition among seniors (34 percent to 50 percent). so, the americans experienced with "government-run" health insurance like what they have and don't want to change it, and younger americans enthusiastic for change don't know what they're missing.

We Must Stop the Rampant Fraud in the Health Care Industry by Sen. Bernie Sanders (a real health care reformer)

Even those with health insurance are going broke Full article at Seattle Times

Yet, they are adamant about not letting the government compete in a free market by offering a public option as an alternative to the private insurance companies.

Has anyone from the anti-reform side defended the practices of the health insurance companies? I'd like to see what kind of rationale they come up with to justify denying insurance, denying claims, canceling policies, etc.

Oooh, Socialism!! Scary! Reminds of these Daily Show with Jon Stewart reports: [/url] The Stockholm Syndrome Pt. 1 Wyatt Cenac travels to Sweden to wake up their hauntingly thin citizens from their socialist nightmare. The Stockholm Syndrome Pt. 2 Sweden may have free health care, but America has Baconnaise.

Health Care Stories for America A new site launched last week as a counterbalance to claims that the administration's agenda for health care reform will create a government-run bureaucracy that will make you wait in line for a doctor.

Hopefully, this will be a useful catch-all thread instead of starting a new thread for every new article! A Day in the Life of a Primary Care Physician: Prior Authorizations, Denials, and Delays in Treatment by Dr. Aaron Fox ========Dear AMA: I Quit! by Dr. Chris McCoy ======== The Prescription From Obama's Own Doctor (NYT editorial on how Obama should tune out the AMA and listen to his own doctor)

Sorry you got your Stossel bubble burst....

He was asked, "If you believe that consumer reporting works, and is a better regulator than regulation or lawsuits, why did you stop doing it?" His reply: "I got sick of it. I also now make so much money I just lost interest in saving a buck on a can of peas. Twenty years was enough. But mainly, I came to realize that the government was doing far more harm to people than business and I ought to be reporting on that. Nobody else was." He also claimed that the Enron collapse proved that free market capitalism worked! "There are no big national scams except for Enron. Because markets figure it out. Not the government. Enron is an example of how well the market worked for people. Enron's stock came tumbling down. When the government fails, we give them more money. So, yes, there are Enrons, but the exception proves the rule." A response in a LA paper pointed out that "Enron collapsed not due to a stock tumble but because government investigations disclosed accounting fraud, and Ken Lay's Ponzi scheme was exposed. Most investors lost their shirts, and thousands of Enron employees lost their jobs. That's "how well the market works for people"?" (source - and there's more there)

It is no secret where Michael Moore is coming from. John Stossel pretends to be an impartial journalist when he is not.

How true. That John Stossel is a hack corporate shill is not news. Remember the 20/20 organic food story he did, which resulted in ABC reprimanding him for lying about tests conducted and he was forced to apologize on air? He has about as much credibility as his fellow Mediastache club member, Geraldo.

economics professor uwe reinhardt asks, "is health care reform worth $1.6 trillion?" and puts the numbers into perspective: a price tag of $1.6 trillion seems immense if one contemplates the figure in the abstract. it is, however, only about 4 percent of the total cumulative health spending of $40 trillion, the amount government actuaries now project for the decade from 2010 to 2020. that is also less than the 6 to 7 percent that total national health spending has increased each year in the past decade. and $1.6 trillion is only about 1 percent of the amount of g.d.p. that america can reasonably be expected to produce in the next decade (about $150 trillion to $170 trillion). that 1 percent would not be lost to g.d.p., of course, because health spending is part of g.d.p. rather, it would be a diversion of g.d.p.-away from other uses, and toward providing the otherwise uninsured with the peace of mind that comes with health insurance and access to timely health care. it would represent merely a change in the composition of g.d.p. a change in the composition of g.d.p. should be distinguished from an actual loss of g.d.p. indeed, to give a sense of perspective: whatever waste there might be in any new spending on health care, the loss of welfare it implies is dwarfed many times over by the actual loss of g.d.p. and human welfare over the coming decade caused by the reckless mismanagement of our financial sector. not to mention the diversion of additional g.d.p. to wall street bailouts and away from uses that taxpayers probably would have preferred. to be sure, congress may have a political problem of financing an estimated $1.6 trillion price tag for health reform without raising taxes of some sort, a subject to be explored in a future post to this blog. but that price tag is not much of a real burden, if any, on our economy over all. as congress is hemming and hawing over this price tag, america's middle class might take a moment to contemplate its future fate in health care without any government subsidies toward health insurance. let's start with the graph below. the data in the chart come from the milliman medical index published annually by the benefit consulting firm milliman inc. based on a sample of several million american families with employment-based health insurance, the index represents the average annual cost of health care for a typical american family of four. the "cost" figures in the graph are all inclusive. they are the sum of employer- and employee-paid health insurance premiums plus the family's out-of-pocket spending on health care. at the trend over the last decade, which is likely to continue, this cost index will stand at $18,000 by 2010. it will have more than doubled its level since 2001. and if that trend continues for another decade-and there is a good chance it will-then 10 years hence america's health system will be able to extract from the rest of society the sum of $36,000 per typical nonelderly family of four. consider now an average american family that is sustained economically by a gross wage base of $60,000 today. by "gross wage base" economists mean the wages earned by the household's breadwinners before deduction of fringe benefits and taxes, whether paid by employer or employee. businesspeople would think of it as all the debits they make for an employee to the account "payroll expense." economists call it the "price of labor." all of the health care costs included in the milliman index are financed by this gross wage base, which must also finance all of the family's taxes and living expenses. in the past decade, average wages in the united states have grown at about 3 percent a year. with the economy likely to be in the doldrums for years to come, it would be highly optimistic to expect an average growth rate in wages any higher than 3 percent. most probably it will be lower. but even at an optimistic 3 percent growth rate in the average gross wage base, a base of $60,000 now will have grown to only about $80,000 a decade hence. the $36,000 of projected health spending would have to come out of that wage base of $80,000. in other words, health care alone would chew up 44 percent of the wage base that must support such a family. one can change the assumed growth rates for such a calculation to get slightly different forecasts. but the conclusion for any realistic set of assumptions remains the same: in the coming decade, an ever larger number of middle-class american families will have their household budgets chewed up inexorably and mercilessly by the cost of health care. millions upon millions of middle-class families will see themselves pushed into the ranks of the uninsured-and possibly into bankruptcy-unless someone helps them financially. but it is doubtful that it can be done if the 10-year budget cost of the proposed health reform bill is constrained to $1 trillion or less.

More of Stephen Colbert on health care: America's Health Plan-Demic The House Republicans' health care reform plan is practical in that it's practically three pages long and has no numbers. Interview with Dr. Howard Dean Colbert: How many people don't have health care? Dr. Dean: About 50 million... Colbert: But if we don't give them health care, won't that number go down very quickly?