Sunday, March 30, 2008

Families USA: The Voice for Health Care Consumers


Families USA: The Voice for Health Care Consumers
Check out the Dying for Coverage links. Shows estimates of numbers who die per year per state because they do not have adequate coverage to access health care.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Hoping to get healthy through HSAs

Hoping to get healthy through HSAs
More and more of these will be cropping up to take our money and call it medical care.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Sound Bite That Has Some Teeth - New York Times

Sound Bite That Has Some Teeth - New York Times

I have no intention to campaign here for one candidate or another. What I am sharing is a look at the story and video concerning how important health care reform is in this election.

Universal health care or universal nightmare? : Indybay

Universal health care or universal nightmare? : Indybay: "The deepest problem is confusing universal health insurance with universal access to comprehensive medical care. Clearly, in both cases universal means “everybody”, but a “universal” social health insurance, such as single payer health care reform, and a “universal” health insurance mandate, based on liability insurance, differ in fundamental ways, and the implications of this difference for health reform are enormous."

Monday, March 10, 2008

Look North - Stategic Lessons Learned

Article | The American Prospect: "Building upon the public's highly negative experiences with insurance company's and hospital administrators, the campaign needs to use public 'street heat' to intensify the level of public anger, focus it relentlessly on insurance, drug, and hospital decision-makers, and pressure specific 'swing' Republican legislators.

'We're going to have to spark a public backlash against the culprits blocking health care reform,' says Kraig. 'We need to get people indignant about particular actors and to call for government to be their watchdog in the health economy.'"

Thursday, March 6, 2008

The Next Failure of Health Reform

Vincent Navarro: The Next Failure of Health Reform
"Why does this situation persist in the U.S.?
For any society, medicine is a mirror of the power relations in that society. And nowhere is the lack of human rights more evident than in the house of medicine. In the U.S., insensitivity toward human needs goes hand-in-hand with enormous profits made from that suffering. The root of the problem, as noted earlier, is not lack of money but the channels through which that money is managed and spent. The problem is the privatization of the funding of medicine that allows profits to boom. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries enjoy the highest rates of profit in the U.S. Just last year, insurance industry profits reached $12 billion, and pharmaceutical industry profits $49 billion, the highest in the U.S. and in the world. According to Fortune Magazine, health-related industries are among the most profitable industries in the country. A lot of money is being made from people's suffering. "

Check out the rest of the commentary about reform proposals being bandied about right now.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Physicians criticize Massachusetts health insurance plan

People's Weekly World - Physicians criticize Massachusetts health insurance plan: "Over 250 Massachusetts doctors have signed an open letter to the country warning that the health reform model enacted by Massachusetts is failing and that a single payer program is the only alternative.

An Open Letter to the Nation from Massachusetts Physicians: Early Outcomes from Massachusetts' Health Care Reform

We write to alert colleagues and the nation to the disturbing early outcomes of Massachusetts' widely-heralded approach to health care reform. Although we wish that the current reform could secure health insurance for all, its failings reinforce our conviction that only a single payer program can assure patients the care they need."