Clipmarks | Kauaiguy's 'healthcare' clips

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman on Health Insurance Reform

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:23:11 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: 2008 Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman explains the economic viability of a "Medicare for all." solution to Health Care Reform.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

One Nation, Uninsured

Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno's book "One Nation, Uninsured" tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social contract.

But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed.

Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of health care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and corporations that still provide employee coverage are groaning under the strain.

Tags: healthcare, national security, economics

McCain/Palin Health Insurance Plan

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:53:50 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide
competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would
provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst
excesses of state-based regulation."

John McCain

Clip Source: www.johnmccain.com

Straight Talk on
Health System Reform

Tags: mccain, politics, government, healthcare

Broken Levees, Broken Lives: A Post-Katrina Focus On Healthcare

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:25:18 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: Hospitals still closed after Katrina. For-profit hospitals see no profit in New Orleans.

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Tags: healthcare, katrina, politics, human rights

Death By Denial

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:22:50 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: Americans across the nation demonstrated in favor of guaranteed healthcare and in protest of AHIP — America’s Health Insurance Plans — the insurance industry lobbyists who profit from pain. Their annual convention was met today by thousands of protesters on site in San Francisco and simultaneously in cities across the nation.

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Tags: healthcare, singe payer, health, people

U.S. Mayors Conference Backs Single-Payer

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:37:28 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: Grass roots political support for Single Payer Health Insurance Program is strong.

Clip Source: www.pnhp.org

U.S. Conference of Mayors Backs Single-Payer National Health Insurance

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, meeting in Miami, adopted a resolution this morning in support of single-payer national health insurance.

The assembly, in unanimous vote, backed a resolution calling for the enactment of the “United States National Health Insurance Act,” H.R. 676. The bill, which is also known as the “Improved and Expanded Medicare for All Act,” is sponsored by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan and 90 other members of Congress.

Tags: healthcare, single payer, politics

Wall Street Shaken Over Health Insurers Profit Margins

Wed, 14 May 2008 16:30:47 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: The nation's largest publicly traded health plans say they don't plan to temper premium increases for the sake of keeping members on their rolls -- particularly not while they are under pressure from Wall Street over what it sees as their disappointing earnings.

Wall Street analysts were shaken over the long-term prospects of the health plan business after bellwethers WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, the nation's two largest private-pay plans, reported less-than-expected profits from the first three months of this year.

...most say their risk-based commercial numbers -- representing traditional employer health benefits -- are declining or are not growing as quickly as anticipated. But health insurers say cutting premiums or reducing the rate of increase to keep customers would affect their bottom lines more than losing some members over premium hikes.

Clip Source: www.ama-assn.org

Health plans say they'll risk losing members to protect profit margins

The nation's largest publicly traded health plans say they don't plan to temper premium increases for the sake of keeping members on their rolls -- particularly not while they are under pressure from Wall Street over what it sees as their disappointing earnings.

Wall Street analysts were shaken over the long-term prospects of the health plan business after bellwethers WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, the nation's two largest private-pay plans, reported less-than-expected profits from the first three months of this year.

Tags: healthcare, wall street, economy, health, politics

Healthcare Reform You Shouldn't Believe In

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:11:50 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: The most progressive way to fund such a system would be through an earmarked income tax, which would be more than offset by eliminating premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.

This is not the same as Medicare for all. Medicare is embedded in our market-based entrepreneurial private system, and therefore experiences many of the same inflationary forces, including having to deal with profit-maximizing hospitals and physicians' groups. Doctors' fees are skewed to reward highly paid specialists for doing as many expensive tests and procedures as possible. As a result, Medicare inflation is almost as high as inflation in the private sector and similarly unsustainable.

...the private insurance industry has managed to convince many political leaders, including progressives, that a single-payer system is unrealistic. But what is truly unrealistic is anything else. My greatest concern about the Massachusetts plan is that when it unravels, people will draw the wrong lesson.

Clip Source: www.prospect.org

Health Reform You Shouldn't Believe In

For all their promise of change, Democrats are remarkably timid about changing the health-care system. The system now costs twice as much per person as those of other advanced countries and delivers worse average outcomes. It prices tens of millions of people out of health coverage altogether and limits care for countless others. Yet leading Democrats are clinging to this system, proposing to cover more people but not changing the system itself except at the margins. The timidity extends to choice of words. No one is supposed to say "single-payer" or "national health insurance" anymore, because that is "politically unrealistic"; the most we are allowed is to talk of reforming the system incrementally so that someday it will morph into "Medicare for all."

Tags: health, healthcare, politics

PBS Frontline Healthcare around the World

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:12:39 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: FRONTLINE presents
SICK AROUND THE WORLD
Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS

Clip Source: www.pbs.org

FRONTLINE TRAVELS TO FIVE COUNTRIES IN SEARCH OF A UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEM THAT COULD WORK IN THE U.S.

FRONTLINE teams up with T.R. Reid, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, to find out how five other capitalist democracies--United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland--deliver health care and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures. In Sick Around the World, airing Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), Reid turns up remarkable differences in how these countries handle health care--from Japan, where a night in a hospital can cost as little as $10, to Switzerland, where the president of the country tells Reid it would be a "huge scandal" if someone were to go bankrupt from medical bills.

The Elephant In The Room

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:05:42 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: Good article on why our current system of financing health care is unsustainable.

Clip Source: www.kansas.com

DR. BILL ROY: U.S. REFUSES TO SEE INSURANCE ELEPHANT

More good people are spending more good effort and more good money trying to make our inequitable and tattered health care system sustainable than can be measured or imagined. And the "system" per se is getting into deeper and deeper trouble, because Americans refuse to see the elephant in the room -- the health insurance companies.

No country can long afford a health care system run by private health insurance companies. They take 15 to 30 percent for their fees (and add 15 percent to the administrative costs of physicians and hospitals); refuse to insure the sick, disabled, chronically ill and elderly; and generally distort the health care delivery system for their own profit.

Tags: healthcare, people, society

Most docotors support national health insurance

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:44:12 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: Form Physicians for a National Health Program.

Clip Source: www.pnhp.org

Most doctors support national health insurance, new study shows

Reflecting a shift in thinking over the past five years among U.S. physicians, a new study shows a solid majority of doctors — 59 percent — now supports national health insurance.

Such plans typically involve a single, federally administered social insurance fund that that guarantees health care coverage for everyone, much like Medicare currently does for seniors. The plans typically eliminate or substantially reduce the role of private insurance companies in the health care financing system, but still allow patients to go the doctors of their choice.

Tags: healthcare, people, society

Physicians For A National Health Program

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:06:52 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: This site is the best on the net for analysis and answers to the ills of our non-healthcare system.

Clip Source: www.pnhp.org

The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita. Yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 47 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.

This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $350 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.

Tags: healthcare, single payer, health, national security

U.S. has second worst newborn death rate in modern world

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:57:42 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: The easiest way to cure our healthcare ills here in the United States would be to adopt a single payer national health insurance program. http://www.pnhp.org/

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

U.S. has second worst newborn death rate in modern world, report says

(CNN) -- An estimated 2 million babies die within their first 24 hours each year worldwide and the United States has the second worst newborn mortality rate in the developed world, according to a new report.

American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.

Tinker said some nations ranked high in part because they offer free health services for pregnant women and babies, while the United States suffers from disparities in access to health care.

Tags: morality, death, healthcare, united states

Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient's policy

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:33:19 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: What did Health Net and its Chief Executive Jay Gellert learn from this? Did they learn that they should cooperate with our effort to see that everyone would have health care without being exposed to financial hardship? No.

What they learned is that they need to improve the process through which they cancel the policies of individuals who do need health
care. They learned that it is in the interests of Health Net's financial well-being to avoid criminal conduct when they cancel those
policies.

In spite of the findings of the arbitration, what they did not learn is that they have an obligation to the well-being of those they insure.

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient's policy

When Health Net dropped her in January 2004, Bates was stuck with more than $129,000 in medical bills and was forced to stop chemotherapy for several months until she found a charity to pay for it.

State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner applauded the judge, saying "health insurers simply cannot hold out the promise of insurance for their consumers and then snatch it away just when people need it most. That is illegal, immoral and will not be tolerated."

Tags: healthcare, fraud, lawsuit, law

Health Care Finance Fraud

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:06:59 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: Another act of creative financing ends in scandal for the health insurance industry.

Clip Source: ap.google.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Six years after the collapse of the country's biggest health care finance company, a trial is nearing for five executives accused of a $1.9 billion fraud that helped bring the company down.

The case involves one of the largest alleged white-collar crimes after Enron or WorldCom, yet it is largely unknown to the public.

"I tell people all the time, this is the most important case that people have never heard of," said Kathy Patrick, whose Houston firm represents a group of investors that lost a total of $1.6 billion when National Century Financial Enterprises collapsed in 2002.

Tags: healthcare, crime, fraud

Elizabeth Kucinich Talks About Universal Health Care

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:33:23 GMT

clipped by: Kauaiguy
clipper's remarks: Elizabeth Kucinich delivers a clear and concise explanation of Single Payer Health Insurance.

Clip Source: youtube.com

[Video]

Tags: healthcare, health, politics, elections, kucinich