Hopeful signs on health care

Like others who strongly support a single-payer health care system, I have been highly critical of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), seeing it as a bureaucratic monstrosity that was designed to keep the useless and parasitic health insurance industry in business while also allowing the hospital and drug industries to keep making exorbitant amounts of money. I also felt that while it would help some people, it would not do enough and would not reduce costs much. [Read more…]

Why the GOP opposes Obamacare

I have previously expressed surprise that the Republican party had chosen Obamacare, of all things, as the issue that the were going to fight to the death, even though the dry details of a health care policy that actually is quite business-friendly are not the kind of things that press emotional hot buttons to arouse strong passions. That is usually the domain of GRAGGS (guns, race, abortion, gays, god, sex) issues. [Read more…]

More evidence why we need ‘Medicare for all’

That excellent organization Physicians for a National Health Program has highlighted a new study by Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst that shows that by simply upgrading and expanding the current Medicare system to cover everyone, the country would save billions of dollars in costs as well. There would even be money left over to help pay down the national debt. [Read more…]

The state of US health care

The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a major cross-national study of “the health status of the United States and to compare US health outcomes with those of 34 OECD countries.”

The good news? “Overall, population health in the United States improved from 1990 to 2010. Life expectancy at birth and HALE [Healthy Life Expectancy] increased and all-cause death rates at all ages decreased.”

The bad news? [Read more…]

Is ‘concierge care’ in your medical future?

A few years ago, my physician retired and I had to find a new one. One seemed good until I discovered that they had this tiered pricing scheme where the more you paid in the form of an annual subscription, the more services they offered. For example, with my previous physician, if I went for my annual check up, he would order the usual tests and then later his aide would call me and tell me what the results were (if they required no further action) or he himself would call me to tell discuss with me what I should do if the matter so warranted it. [Read more…]

The health care rip-off

I was chatting one day with the handyman who does stuff at our house and was shocked at the prices that he and his wife (who is also self-employed) have to pay to buy health insurance. Even after paying so much, that coverage provides much less than what my wife and I have through her employer-based insurance. For even routine medical procedures, he pays far more out-of-pocket than I do. [Read more…]

The Roberts puzzle

Following the surprising alignment of Chief Justice John Roberts with the so-called liberal wing of the US Supreme Court to hand president Obama a victory on the Affordable Care Act, there has been much speculation as to why he ruled the way he did. Speculating on the private motives of public figures is usually a waste of time (but fun!) and we will have to wait for his memoirs to find out if his reasons were different from his stated ones. But the nature of such speculations do tell us a lot about the state of our political discourse. [Read more…]

Reflections on the health care ruling and the reactions

I was occupied for most of yesterday and did not have time to follow the reactions to the news that almost every aspect of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) had been upheld by the US Supreme Court. When late at night I did catch up on the coverage, there seemed to be basically four groups of stories.

One was the predictable and favorite one of speculating about the impact this will have on the November elections. Every single issue from now until November will suffer this same fate because it enables pundits to indulge in content-free talk, their favorite kind. . [Read more…]

Will decline of employer-based health insurance lead to a single payer system?

Beginning today and spread over the next three days, the US Supreme Court will take the extraordinary step of scheduling six hours of oral arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. In my series of posts on health care, I have said that I am in favor of the single-payer system and have criticized the Obama administration for their ACA plan, even though it definitely has some good points and repealing it would be a step backwards. [Read more…]

Good news on the disease front

A report just released says that it has been one year since there was a case of polio in India. This result was obtained after India carried out a massive program to deliver vaccines, involving 2.3 million vaccinators delivering 900 million doses in the past year. India used to have more than half of the world’s cases of this disease so this is a huge achievement. (Thanks to Ian over at The Crommunist Manifesto for the tip.)

This could mean that India could soon be removed from the list of countries where polio is still endemic, leaving just Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan on the list. It will take another two years of being disease-free for it to be declared that India has eradicated the disease. It is hoped that soon polio will join smallpox as the second global disease to be completely eradicated.

On a personal note, as a person who contracted polio at the age of six, this news is particularly gratifying.