PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer just finished airing a three-part series on health reform and the challenges that we face in overhauling our broken health care system.
We encourage everyone to check out the excellent reporting in these three segments. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the content, or about the format used to present the findings.
Part I: “Even Insured Patients Struggle as Health Care Costs Rise”
- This segment looks at the impact of the economic recession on insured Americans’ ability to afford healthcare. With rising premiums and co-pays, more Americans are delaying preventative care.
- Click here to read our blog post on this topic.
Part II: “States Face Shortage of Primary Care Doctors”
- The dwindling number of primary care physicians inhibits the ability of the newly insured to schedule primary care visits.
- This problem is only expected to get worse.
- Medical students are avoiding the field of primary care, due to large medical school debt, lower-paying jobs, long hours and a stressful work environment.
- This segment suggests that countries with strong primary care networks have longer life expectancies and lower infant mortality rates.
Part III: “As Costs Rise, Businesses Struggle to Provide Worker Health Insurance”
- Businesses, especially smaller employers, are struggling to keep up with the rising premiums for employer-sponsored health care plans, and many are dropping coverage options for employees, or switching to high deductible plans.
- Read more about this issue here and here.
If you haven’t noticed, we’re very interested in the media’s coverage of healthcare-related topics.
In “Media Coverage and Health Care Reform,” we look at the media coverage, or lack thereof, on health care policy and the healthcare system in general.
And in this blog post, we show that the media coverage of disease-related news is often slanted, unrealistic, and maybe even harmful for consumers.
