In the first year of President Obama’s term, he has tried to leverage an overwhelming majority in Congress to push through health care reform. The resultant bills have been extremely long, complicated, opaque, and worst of all, expensive and ineffective at addressing the core problem; the high cost of health care in the U.S. today. In this category of articles, I seek to understand the problems, their causes, and various solutions.
President Obama said last week that “verything there is to say about health care has been said…” which implies we know everything there is to know about health care reform, neither of which is true. The current log jam in health care reform isn’t paralysis by analysis — it’s partisanship and power-grabbing and just...
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Today’s New York Times is reporting that the political action committee and lobbyists for Genentech and its parent company Roche provided statements to both Democrats and Republicans, to be entered into official Congressional Record. According to the Times’ article, Genentech supplied information to one of their lobbyists, Ryan, MacKinnon, Vasapoli & Berzok. The firm...
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I like to say I was raised by ‘a pack of women.’ I grew up in a household of two sisters, a mother, and very frequently a grandmother, who all did their part in my up-bringing. One of the benefits of that, aside from my steady rotation of crushes on my sisters’ friends was...
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The Stupak-Pitts amendment is relatively short–only twelve lines, eleven if you discount the section header. In fact, here is the entire text, quoted below: No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the...
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I thought I was going to have a meaningful debate today on Twitter. The Stupak amendment to H.R. 3962 is getting a lot of airtime and a common thread is that the amendment restricts women’s rights, which it clearly doesn’t. When I tried to explain to someone (@RayBeckerman) that the amendment was simply intended...
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Tort reform is a key aspect that must be included in any health care reform bill. Unfortunately, the latest bill, H.R. 3962 explicitly removes any cap on legal damages or attorney fee’s, as illustrated on page 1432, section 4a and 4b: (4) CONTENTS OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICAL LIABILITY LAW.—The contents of an alternative liability law...
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It’s very telling to see that the AFLCIO has already read all 1990 pages of H.R. 3962, performed conclusive analysis, including cost analysis and coverage analysis, all in the same day the bill was released. They posted this to their twitter account; @AFLCIO. The House health care bill: great on coverage, fairly financed, affordable....
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I have a column set up in Tweetdeck, specifically to follow the #HCR hashtag and I continue to be amazed at how some people react when they learn specific politicians are “owned” by lobby groups. For example, today we found out that Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) would vote to block health care reform in...
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Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has a petition to establish health care as a right. The petition does no justice in establishing a valid reason to define health care as a right. Instead, it argues that ‘we’ve been trying to reform health care since 1912, we are already paying for universal health care but don’t...
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According to Obama’s play book, Rules For Radicals by Saul Alinsky, rule number seven states that “a conflict that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Among the reasons is the simple fact that human beings can sustain an interest in a particular subject only over a limited period of time. The concentration, the...
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