The public option is one of the most popular pieces of health care reform. A recent poll shows that in key states like Nevada, Illinois, Washington, Missouri, Virginia, Iowa, Minnesota, and Colorado clear majorities, sometimes as high as 68%, support the public option. Michael Tomasky writes in the Guardian, “The results are basically in line with a raft of polling since this whole thing started. The public option is supported by majorities in virtually all blue and swing states, and even in a few reddish ones.”
The public option will save the government money, which means that it will save you, the taxpayer, money. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a public option that negotiates rates with providers will save the government $25 billion over ten years. A strong public option that pays providers 5% more than Medicare rates would save even more money: $110 billion over ten years.
The public option will probably not be included in the final health reform bill. Wait, what?
NPR Reporter: What if health care is overhauled and it doesn’t change the American diet in any way?
Prof. POLLAN: We’ll go broke. If we don’t get a handle on these health care costs, the new system or the old system, we’ll go broke. And that’s why I think that really food is the elephant in the room when we’re talking about health care.
-From an NPR interview with Michael Pollan, Author of Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules
Read enough about the health care crisis and eventually you’ll come across the term “cost drivers.” Health care costs are clearly rising at an alarming rate, but what’s less clear is why- what is driving costs up? Everyone has a theory. Increased use of expensive, yet unproven or ineffective, medical technologies, consumers demanding more care, fee-for-service medicine (doctors getting paid for every procedure they do, regardless of whether or not it helps the patient), and the fear of malpractice lawsuits have all been explored.
What’s gotten less attention in the health care reform debate, is what Michael Pollan calls “the elephant in the room.” More Americans are getting sick from chronic diseases, and we’re getting sick because we’re eating junk. [click to continue…]
It looks like we got the new website finished just in time – right as the health care reform debate is heating up again.
On Thursday, President Obama hosted a health care summit with Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership. It was… well… long. Later this week, we’ll talk about some of the points that were raised during the seven hour-long meeting. But for now, we wanted to look at the biggest news from the event, which came before the summit even started: President Obama released his own health care proposal.
It’s not a full bill– Obama said it was intended just as a starting point for the talks on Thursday– but it was the first official look at how Democrats will try to merge the House and Senate bills. You might remember that a while back we looked at the major issues where the two bills differ. Let’s see how Obama’s proposal would bring them together… [click to continue…]
All right- the new What If Post is up and running! We’re still working out some of the kinks, but in the meantime, let us know what you think– if you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments section.
Coming up, look for new posts on food and health care, and coverage of the bipartisan health care talks the White House is holding this week. Stay posted.
[PS: for those who follow our RSS feed, you may have noticed that about ten of our posts from over the summer showed up as new posts in your feed. Apparently there was an issue when we were making the switch to the new site. It looks like the feed is working normally again, but sorry for the confusion.]
What If Post has grown a lot, since we first began publishing in 2007. There’s a lot of good information, but we noticed that with all the new content it was getting kind of hard to find some of the good stuff in our older posts. And so, we’ve been working on a new design, that would make it easier to find the information you’re looking for and to share it with other people.
Here are some of the bigger changes you can look forward to:
The blog will be the new homepage. Which means that when you type http://whatifpost.com into your web browser it will take you straight here, where you can see new posts.
We’re reorganizing the older posts into new categories and subcategories– which should make it easier to find posts on a specific topic. Also, there are a few posts that we think are really helpful in understanding the current health care debate, but they’ve disappeared under all the new content. Those will be much easier to find.
With one click you’ll be able to share each post through email, facebook, twitter, and a bunch of other sites.
Of course, that’s not all the cool new stuff, but we don’t want to spoil all the surprises. Look for the new and improved What If Post next week!
In case you missed President Obama’s State of the Union address last Wednesday night, you can watch the section on health care here:
We’re tired of post-speech analysis telling you how good the speech was, or how bad the speech was — we figured you can judge for yourself.
But to put the health care part of the speech in context– the Massachusetts Senate election threw the fate of health care reform up in the air. Many Democrats in Congress have been waiting for leadership from the White House on whether to move forward on health reform. With the State of the Union address they got it… sort of.
It’s now been two weeks since disaster struck Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince, and yet I continue to find myself glued to the media coverage of the earthquake. I simply cannot believe that something so devastating could happen there.
Admittedly, I don’t know all that much about the small nation that neighbors the Dominican Republic and has a population of just under 10 million. The little knowledge I do possess is mostly from reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, which found its way into my hands last summer.
The book chronicles the life of medical doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer is the co-founder of an organization called Partners in Health (PIH), which is headquartered in Boston. [click to continue…]
The election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts has left the future of health care reform in serious doubt. One reason is logistical: Republicans now have enough votes to filibuster the final health care bill. That in itself doesn’t mean that health care reform is dead though- there are a number of ways to get around a Republican filibuster. The bigger question is what Brown’s win says about the way Democrats have handled health care reform. Voters are clearly unhappy, but the way forward is less clear. Democrats have a few options for health care: [click to continue…]
By now we’re sure you’ve heard that Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley Tuesday in a special election for the late Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. It’s a major blow for the health care reform bill- Republicans now have enough votes to filibuster and block passage of the final version. Democrats still have a number of options for passing health care reform, which we’ll talk about in our next post. But first…
How did the Democratic candidate lose by five percentage points in a state that Obama won by 26 points just over a year ago? Is health care reform to blame? What happened in Massachusetts?
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” — Martin Luther King Jr. in a speech to the Medical Committee for Human Rights, 1966
With Martin Luther King’s birthday earlier this week, pundits and politicians celebrated the annual tradition of trying to guess what he would have said about current issues if he was alive today. Obviously it’s impossible to tell exactly what Martin Luther King would have thought about health care reform, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying.
It’s now been two weeks since disaster struck Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince, and yet I continue to find myself glued to the media coverage of the earthquake. I simply cannot believe that something so devastating could happen there.
