The state of health care since the State of the Union
February 2, 2010
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.
Paul Farmer’s Haiti: Providing Healthcare to the World’s Poorest
January 27, 2010
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.
PIH is dedicated to providing medical services of the highest-quality to the world’s poorest individuals.
What now? Options for health reform after Massachusetts
January 25, 2010
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:
What health care meant in the Massachusetts Senate election
January 21, 2010
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?
Martin Luther King and Health Care
January 20, 2010
“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.
The Best Health Care Graph We’ve Seen
January 19, 2010
One graph from National Geographic quickly and clearly illustrates pretty much everything that’s wrong with our health care system in the U.S. If you haven’t seen it already, you need to click on this link now:
Health Care in Developed Countries
The graph compares the health care systems of developed countries in terms of cost per person, life expectancy, and number of doctors visits. All of these countries are members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, which means that they’re all free market democracies, and they’re all considered either upper-middle income or high income. A couple of things we wanted to point out:
Who’s trying to kill health reform: Winter 2010 edition
January 14, 2010
It’s been a while since we last checked in with all the different lobbying groups that are trying to kill (or at least gut) health care reform. Let’s see what they’ve been up to since this summer…
The Insurance Industry Lobbyists: America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)
The last major news we heard about AHIP was back in October, when they released a report claiming that health care reform would cause premiums to go up. Shortly after the report was released, bloggers pointed out major flaws in the study, destroying it’s credibility. The fallout was so bad that the next day the consulting firm that had produced the report released it’s own statement, explaining that AHIP had asked them to produce a report ignoring huge portions of the bill. Meanwhile, outraged liberal members of Congress started talking about taking away the insurance companies’ antitrust exemption, and the public option was suddenly back on the table.
Massachusetts Part 2: Lessons for the Rest of Us
January 11, 2010
Yesterday we talked about how the Massachusetts health care system works. Since the rest of the country will soon be following Massachusetts’ lead, what lessons can we take from their experience?
Lesson #1: Affordability is Key
As we mentioned yesterday, Massachusetts residents are mostly happy with the Connector (that’s their version of the exchange with subsidies), and they’re even okay with the individual mandate, as long as there are subsidies to help people pay for insurance. But when voters were asked how they felt about a mandate that would make people buy insurance they found too expensive, pollsters saw the boiling rage of only 19% approval.
Massachusetts Healthcare Reform
January 8, 2010
Even though there are a bunch of details that need to be worked out, the basics of health care reform haven’t changed since June (with the exception of the public option). The bill still contains:
- New rules for insurance companies. No more denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions or dropping coverage when you get sick. An end to women being charged higher premiums and limits on variation in premiums based on a person’s age.
- Health Insurance Exchanges where people without insurance can buy coverage. Insurance plans on the exchange will be regulated to meet certain quality requirements.
Health reform subsidy calculator
January 7, 2010
The folks over at the Kaiser Foundation have developed a pretty cool tool for calculating what individuals will be paying towards their premiums if health reform passes:
http://healthreform.kff.org/SubsidyCalculator.aspx
Now it’s Kaiser, so the design is pretty barebones, but the information is still really useful. You just type in your annual income, your age, and whether it’s for a family or individual. Then select whether you want it to use the House bill or the Senate bill and click the “Calculate” button. It will instantly spit back a bunch of numbers at you– but the one you’re probably most interested in is the Person/Family Premium Payment. This is how much you would actually pay per year for insurance premiums after the government subsidies kick in.
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