Pick one. Sorry, you can't have the other two.

Too much moral purity, eh? Ooooh kaaaaay.

But more on that later. Meanwhile... Read more…

Fun fact: Duke University Hospital has 900 beds and 900 billing clerks.

The Senate Finance Committee has heard about the problem of overhead. On Nov. 19, Professor Uwe Reinhardt, who is also on the board of trustees of the 900-bed Duke University Hospital, used Duke to illustrate the problem: “We have 900 billing clerks at Duke. I’m not sure we have a nurse per (each) bed, but we have a billing clerk per bed… Read more…

As DCblogger notes, it looks like Ted Kennedy is ready to abandon single payer and get on board with ObamaCare. Oh noes!

Healthcare-NOW! has a form letter that you can print out and mail to Senator Kennedy, but ever since the anthrax brouhaha, mail to Congress and the President has gone through a decontamination process. This has created a real bottle neck, and letters can take weeks, or even months, to reach their destination. Read more…

Despite the best efforts of... Who, we shall see, below.

Back in 2005, The state of Maine held one huge house party -- via 21st Century Town Meeting -- on what to do about their 130,000 residents who lacked health insurance. Selected citizens received in the mail a 35-page Participant's guide, much like the present-day Daschle House Party participant guide, only bigger. Read more…

[GAC, part 1]
[GAC, part 0]

I scooped Kip Sullivan -- linking Celinda Lake, the Herndon Alliance, HCAN and GAC first -- but he's done the heavy lifting and delved deeply into Lake's focus grouping that brought us Guaranteed Affordable Choice, and Americans want a system that's uniquely American, and all that rot. Read more…

-- Molly Ivins Read more…

Not.

Michael Dukakis runs down the list of the market-oriented -- Go Shopping! -- solutions we've tried, or have proposed, for containing healthcare costs. HMOs. Managed care. Consumer-driven health care. Pay for performance. Electronic health records.

Then he asks: How do all those other advanced, industrialized countries have health care that's better than ours for about half the cost? Answer: They treat healthcare as a public utility, and regulate its prices, with a fraction of the overhead and bureaucracy that plague our system. Read more…

Thanks to DCblogger [many, many thanks] we all know that Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus are members of the Senate Finance Committee, and will therefore have some say in what happens to our efforts to get HR 676 passed.

We also know, again thanks to DCb, that the Des Moines [Iowa, home state of Grassley] Register endorses single payer. Yay! Which prompted me, just out of curiosity, to go looking for what the Montana [home state of Max Baucus] papers are saying about single payer. I found this article by honest, intelligent reporter Mike Dennison. My favorite quotes from the article --

As I said earlier, it is not a national plan that simplifies things. It takes our fragmented, expensive system — the most expensive in the world, mind you — and plops another mishmash of new rules, regulations and bureaucracy on top of it, all in the name of maintaining the private, for-profit insurance market.

[...]

I could go on, but you get the idea. Yes, the Baucus plan has some good aspects. But it seems to bend over backwards to preserve much of the status quo — a status quo that just about everyone agrees is badly broken.

And when it comes to real reforms, like a national health care plan with one payer or one system, Baucus says that is “off the table,” because it’s “not politically feasible.”

Why? We’ll look at that question Tuesday.

So, Tuesday got here, and I kept checking helenair.com, looking for the promised follow-up, but no luck. No hard feelings, though. Montana's having a bit of trouble with storm-related power outages, and while I just scratch my head and furrow my brow and ask what is this ice and snow of which you speak?, as a long-time resident of Hurricane Alley, I can most definitely relate to storms and power outages.

It did finally dawn on me to check the websites of other Montana papers, and sure enough, Mike Dennison, intrepid hero reporter, appears to write for the company that owns several Montana papers, and the Billings Gazette has both installments [same articles, different titles].

Part I -- Baucus plan falls short of universal coverage [quoted above], and

Part II -- Why is single-payer health reform not viable? Some excerpts: Read more…

Quickly, and without added value or analysis, because I still have to go grocery shopping and take the dog out for a run and get back in time for the live-blogging...

Johnathan Cohn writes at The American Prospect on What Really Ails Medicare and I c&p big chunks of it here -- Read more…

...why we pay Aetna $20 so they can pay Medco $15 so they can pay CVS $10 so CVS can collect a $5 copay from us for something we could have just bought at Wal-Mart for $4 in the first place."

It's not unclear to me, but those are the words of Mark Smith, an MD with an MBA, speaking in this video as one member of a panel -- Imperatives for US Health Care Reform: The Next Four Years -- of Very Serious People and they get a chuckle out of the audience, which is also made up of Very Serious People. Read more…

HR 676 NOW NOW NOW!
Regards.
hipparchia, rabid pseudonymous blogger Read more…

if you want to contact anyone on the Senate Finance Committee. Read more…

I read this stuff so you don't have to, for which I will expect massive offerings of spinach pies and stuffed grape leaves at some point in the future. Anyway, since none of the progressive or liberal health policy wonks seem so inclined, I've now waded through the entire Baucus white paper and most of the Senate Finance Committee hearings on this health care kerfuffle. Read more…

Medicaid program on skids, Jindal says
But wrangling persists as remedies planned
Saturday, November 15, 2008
By Jan Moller

BATON ROUGE -- Arguing that "doing nothing is not an option," Gov. Bobby Jindal on Friday proposed restructuring Louisiana's health-care program for the poor into a private insurance model that relies on managed-care principles to control costs and improve health outcomes.

[...] Read more…

One of the arguments heard here in the US from incrementalists in the health care reform debate is that we don't have to go with single-payer -- lots of other countries have multiple, private insurance companies [see item 3 below]. We could just tweak our private insurers to be just as affordable and reliable as theirs!

Not so fast, subsidy-breath. The following is basically a c&p from an article I found at the PNHP site, but I've done a little editing and emphasizing of my own.

International Health Systems for Single Payer Advocates

By Dr. Ida Hellander
PNHP Executive Director Read more…

Souvlakia! Spanakopita! Dolmathes! Baklava! [although I passed up the retsina this year]

I love cheese grits, I love salmon patties, and that osso buco lagniappe sounds delicious, but for me the return of shorter days and longer nights means once again the chance to revel in the textures and flavors of stuffed grape leaves and fermented pine tar.

[no commas were serialized in the making of this post]

I regret to report that I was unable to extract from my recalcitrant informants the recipe for the cheese grits I waxed poetic about on Friday night. They were excellent but alas! just exactly how excellent they were shall remain a state-guarded secret.

Cheese grits the way I learned to make them -- Read more…

Yo! Barack! That would be you, cuz gawd-only-knows what John McCain is, even if he did steal your rightful label from you.

My vote, it's not going to be for you, nor for me either. Who it will be for.... Read more…

Two physicians and a Nobel laureate square off against two think tankers and TV show host. Hardly seems like a fair fight. Read more…

In response to caseyOR's question, what is UHC? I thought I'd try to answer without getting too geeky or wonky.

####################

UHC

This abbreviation is variously used for both Universal Health Care and Universal Health Coverage. Read more…

One of the joys of reading far right wingnut blogs is the abundant affirmation this activity affords me: I am, after all, a sane and balanced human being and not a barking moonbat. Did you know that Obama's cousin had signed a secret agreement with Kenyan Muslims to institute Sharia law if he was elected President? And that furthermore, Obama himself has signed a secret agreement with US Muslims to make at least 10 changes to the Constitution if he's elected President? Well, maybe you'd heard this, but I hadn't. Read more…