June 18, 2013

Transcripts do not do the interviews justice, thanks! n/t

June 14, 2013

knr, Strange Bedfellows Unite to Fight FISA Deal, 2008 ...

we have to move past the "my team" mentality for the people to have a chance.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7303961

And Jane Hamsher today ...

"...I went on Ed Shultz last night, and Fox deliberately today after yesterday’s hubub. It scares the bejesus out of the DC establishment of both parties to think that the left and right might align against the corporate interests that dominate the massive giveaways that keep happening no matter who’s in power.

Good. They should be scared."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3480169&mesg_id=3480169

June 4, 2013

Medical Debt: A Curable Affliction Health Reform Won’t Fix

"Millions of Americans are deep in medical debt. Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will throw a lifeline to very few. According to the Congressional Budget Office, even after health reform is fully implemented in 2014, 30 million to 36 million people will remain uninsured. And tens of millions who do have insurance will have coverage that is too limited to ensure financial protection against an expensive illness. Many families will remain just one serious illness away from bankruptcy.

Medical Bankruptcies

In 2001, we began studying medical bankruptcy along with our colleagues Elizabeth Warren and Deborah Thorne. We directly surveyed debtors soon after they’d filed for personal bankruptcy. Back then, illness and medical bills contributed to about 50 percent of all personal bankruptcies and involved about 2.2 million debtors and their dependents.[1]

By 2007, when we repeated our study nationwide, medical bankruptcies had risen to 62 percent.[2] Significantly, most medical debtors were middle class. They had owned homes, had attended college, and had held responsible jobs. Seventy-eight percent even had health insurance, mostly private coverage — at least when they first got sick.

Why are so many middle-class, privately insured Americans swamped by medical costs? The reason is that private coverage has holes — unaffordable deductibles and copayments, as well as brief or nonexistent coverage of medical services like physical therapy. Moreover, since illness often reduces work-related income, families may experience a double whammy, as medical bills arrive just when the paychecks stop..."

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2013/june/medical-debt-a-curable-affliction-health-reform-won%E2%80%99t-fix

May 12, 2013

An article from the American College of Emergency Physicians ...

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2012/august/its-time-for-single-payer

Still relevant IMHO ...

"Regardless of whether you are elated or disappointed with June’s historic Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, it is certainly no panacea for the problems facing U.S. health care.

So it’s clear we need to do the right thing: the creation of a national, universal, publicly funded health care system, free of the corrupting power of profit-oriented health insurance, and at the same time capable of passing constitutional muster. In short, the right thing is an expanded and improved Medicare-for-All program, otherwise known as single-payer."

Don’t be so shocked. For the last 30 years, we have tried all the alternatives, and none of them have worked. We have experimented with HMOs, PPOs, high-deductible health plans, health savings accounts, pay-for-performance, capitation, and disease management. These ideas have been promoted in various iterations, often with great fanfare, by public and private payers alike, yet none of them have shown long-term success at bending the cost curve. And the promise of the latest reforms du jour, such as Accountable Care Organizations and Patient-Centered Medical Homes, is speculative at best.

American health care is unique among the world’s democracies in that it was never planned in terms of enabling legislation or explicit constitutional authority. As others have stated, our employer-based insurance system, which now covers about 160 million Americans, was an accident of history. Its lineage can be traced to FDR’s wage and price control policies during World War II, where employers were permitted to offer workers health insurance in lieu of higher wages as a job inducement..."