Praise to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for a pretty powerful policy piece.

Why aren’t business leaders pushing for universal, single-payer health-insurance coverage?

Memo to cost-conscious businessmen: You should be backing efforts to have a universal health-care system as a way to level the economic playing field with competitors abroad and at home.  Read more 

Real Clear Politics has a “HealthCare Index” with much linky goodness and badness, most of which I haven’t yet checked out.

I’ve recently made daily visits to RCP, and as far as I can recall, this is a new feature. This is further evidence that we can win the battle for the political agenda; the issue of universal health care keeps getting more and more play in the media all the time. I wonder what could be done to get single payer into their index!

Your intrepid reporter spent the morning in downtown Pittsburgh working the Labor Day parade on behalf of HR 676, along with other members of the Western PA Coalition for Single Payer Healthcare. The local letter carriers had kindly allowed us to march with them; as they were at the tail end of the parade, we had plenty of time to leaflet before hand, and we handed out the last of what we had as we marched. It was kind of fun playing carnival barker, calling out “Single payer, single payer, universal health care, everybody in, nobody out!” and shoving leaflets at people.  Read more 

Who knew (I certainly didn’t) that there was a reception at the convention on Tuesday for co-sponsors of HR676, the House bill for single payer health care?

Dr. Claudia Fegan spoke at the reception. It is a very eloquent piece of advocacy and well worth reading. Here is the last bit:

It is time to demand what we deserve. It is time to demand universal health care. We won’t get there by urging the insurance industry to play nice with others. We will get there by demanding a singlepayer national health insurance; Medicare for all.  Read more 

In the unlikely event that you don’t have enough to do, here are some single-payer healthcare events for your amusement:

Labor Day parades turn out to be a big venue for promoting single payer healthcare. You may want to check out your local event. Here in Pittsburgh we’ll be handing out leaflets, as well as marching with the letter carriers. If any of you Pittsburghers want to come, look for us at “Freedom Corner” (Center and Crawford) or at the City-County Building before the parade. Most of us will be wearing red or orange shirts.  Read more 

Behold the latest atrocity:  Read more 

I’ve just gotten more detail on the Presbyterian and Unitarian Church endorsements of H.R. 676. It’s noteworthy that besides endorsing the bill the Presbyterians also allocated money for 10 regional seminars on single payer health care.

On the Presbyterians, here’s the report from Hal Sanders, the Pittsburgh activist who pushed for this along with three other local people:  Read more 

So I think most of us can agree on two points: 1) the economy is tanking, fast and 2) very few Dems (or any pols, for that matter) are speaking of solutions that will make a difference in the lives of we Little People most affected by that. Others have told me that even if the Phonebook Theory proves true, it will be very hard, well-nigh “impossible” in terms of realpolitik, for a Democratic administration and Congress to find the money needed for stimulus and aid programs. Now, I’m too radical to buy that excuse, “the money just won’t be there,” but I’m practical enough to believe that no politician elected this fall will propose an 80% cut and redirection of the DoD and war budgets to social programs. Short of a ’pitchforks and torches’ movement/takeover of DC, that’s just not going to happen.

But I was sorry to hear some news from a friend yesterday, news that was depressingly familiar. Job loss, and loss of health insurance, and the derailment from her plan to retire soon in minimal comfort. I’m fond of the saying, “No one will save you but you,” and I’m starting to think it’s time to take the next step along the path of that particular faith. My question is: are we ready to start helping each other?  Read more 

This was going to be a single-payer post, but there was nothing new of interest on that topic; we already knew Republican Tim Murphy was on the wrong side and we already knew Democrat Jason Altmire had broken his promise to support HR676.

No big ideas here, just stuff for lovers of facts on the ground and anecdotal evidence. These are my notes on a “town hall meeting” in Monroeville, PA, the armpit of Pittsburgh, which in turn is said by some to be the armpit of the universe. Representatives Murphy and Altmire answered questions for about an hour.  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Elizabeth Pisani’s The Wisdom of Whores - Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS is a great book (along with a great website). Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist with years of experience working on HIV/AIDS (or sex and drugs, as she puts, which sounds a lot, well, sexier) at a variety of agencies, including UNAIDS. The book is the story of her frustrations at the way the international community, national governments, NGOS and AIDS activists have dealt with the epidemics, as well as her hopes in some of the progress made.

I got interested in the book when I read an interview Pisani gave to the Guardian. The interview kinda billed the book as a controversial work where Pisani would be the mean lady who said people got AIDS because of their stupid behavior and not enough was being done because of political correctness. So, I was ready to get really pissed off with the book. That has not been the case at all.  Read more 

Good Morning fellow Travelers. So it occured to me that I haven’t asked you Good People, as I’ve been asking my neighbors and clients. What kind, if any, of health care do you have? I think I’m in the very bottom 5% in the blogosphere, in terms of my income, and so my answer right now is “none.” Not that I haven’t been trying, mind you. But fitting a plan that actually does something into my pauper’s budget has been, let’s call it “challenging.” I like food, and what little I make comes over the intertubes so I can’t really give those things up. Foolishly, I had thought that there may be some sort of state program, even temporary assistance, which could fill in this period when I’m between “employer provided plans.” Well, I was wrong. This state is experiencing budget nightmares, and they are throwing orphans and the disabled off the roles, so “healthy” people like myself have zero chance at qualifying for what little is left. I find this pathetic and typical of what is wrong with our legislators. I don’t blame about 75% of the Dems in this state, many of whom I know and know to be good people honestly trying hard to change things for the better. But their Rethug counterparts here are some of the most soulless, venal, downright evil people I’ve ever known. To them, it’s a big game, a game in which the only thing that matters is scoring ’gotcha’ points and humiliating the other side. Never mind the dying children and starving elderly people and crumbling roads. Or the fact that by not helping people like me now, when our health care needs are relatively minimal, they guarantee greater later cost when I’m rushed to the ER for chronic conditions resulting in my inability to have them treated earlier on, and for less.

Anyway, I’d love to hear about your health care solutions in this age in which insurance company profit is more important than our lives. I think I’m going to break down and get a PPO, or some other wholly inadequate and overpriced plan that provides barely any benefit and costs me greatly in terms of what I’ll have to sacrifice to afford it. But I’m getting to that age where I really cannot go without one, so hey! I can sell some blood twice a week and still have enough energy to work. Or something like that…

This interview made me cringe quite a few times but it gives food for thought. Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist specialized in HIV/AIDS. She has worked for the World Bank, the WHO, UNAIDS, the CDC, and other organizations. She certainly has claims to the title of expert on HIV/AIDS. She has recently published a new book with a provocative title: The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of Aids (someone knows how to make alliterations!).  Read more 

Since this is Mother’s Day in the US, let’s note that the NGO Save the Children has created an index of the best and worst places to be a mother. Also check out their great multimedia presentation. It’s a great resource. Save the Children based their index on the following criteria:  Read more 

Splashy comments on Harold Pollack’s opinion piece, which disses mandates:

This couldn’t be more wrong:
“The central challenge is to make health insurance affordable and accessible,”

The REAL challenge is to make HEALTH CARE affordable and accessible. Single payer would work just fine.

Let’s keep reminding everyone, health insurance is not the same as health care.

They get it. I’m really proud of them for having such a professional-looking effort put together to go with the results. Those numbers won’t surprise you, Good Reader, but they do make for probing questions for candidates, don’t they? please, don’t tell me whom the unions have endorsed; I honestly don’t know and it has nothing to do with this post. Thank you. And for in discussions with neighbors and coworkers, as we all think about what we are going to do to solve this problem. It’s rather clear it’s going to take the clown squad in the Village a long time just to get on the same page as the rest of us.

Does anyone have any experience with, gosh, I don’t even know if they exist, but I’m thinking of small scale “health care collectives?” The New Depression won’t be like the other one; doctors are too harrassed these days to fall back into the house-calling, country gentleman model. So how do small units of people find ways to work together to improve the quality of the health care they receive? Pressure local governments? Business cooperation? Buying hospitals? Help me out here.

So I’ll spare you the photos. But: I went to the local “asian grocery,” and I bought this pan. A wok, actually. It looked nice and wasn’t completely the ’cheap choice.’ The food and service in this place were good, all the times I’d been there. I live in a university town; lots of Asian seeming folks were shopping there, and all the stuff sold there was labeled in a different language than English. So my thought was: this could be a good place to shop for “asian” cooking supplies.

I wanted to make a beef and water chestnut dish tonight. I used the new wok. It had been oiled, gently washed clean from store-born ick, and heated for the first time to a reasonable temp. I even used a plastic spatula.

Just as the meat cooking was getting done, I noticed something. A long, shiny, two-inch scrape on the floor of the wok. One that left edges of paint, turned back and ready to work into the meat or food cooking in the wok. I was horrified. All I could think of was “poisoned lead paint” and dying children. I also hated myself for the racist reaction I had to pans and kitchen stuff made abroad; I confess that I had one.

What should I do? I’m taking the wok back to the grocer from whom I bought it tomorrow. Should I report it? Them? To whom? How? Again, I keep thinking, “how many of these were sold to the unsuspecting?” What creeped me out was that I realized, had I not been closely paying attention, I could’ve cooked the scraped paint right into the meat and veggies and never noticed (you know how sometimes you only put half the pan of food onto the serving bowl for the table; the rest covers the cooking pan bottom) that the paint had mixed and flaked into the food, and was almost invisible in the dark sauce.

This, by the way, is life in the post-strong dollar economy. A friend of mine who is fluent in the languages of modern China, and who does regular biz in Sh and Bg, told me thusly: “they are keeping the good stuff for sale at home now; America gets the crap.” That seems more or less true to me. You?  Read more 

I don’t have an educated opinion about this class of drugs, and I haven’t read the first part of this series, but most of it sounds about right to me. Mixing for-profit economic models and health care lead to things on the ’market’ of people’s health needs that aren’t actually needed. That’s consumerism, baby! Anyway, this is the part that caught my eye:

Finally — and here is the stunner — it turns out we don’t have any clear evidence that statins help the first group by lowering cholesterol levels. It’s true that they do lower cholesterol, but many researchers are no longer convinced that this is what helps patients avoid a second heart attack. It now seems likely that they work by reducing inflammation. In other words, these very expensive drugs seem to do the same thing that aspirin does. (Are they more effective than the humble aspirin? We’ll need head-to-head studies to find out.)

So I have two questions:  Read more 

Maya at Suburban Guerrilla

This guy in Vegas exposes countless people to disease by ordering the reuse of needles at his clinic and the best he can do is sympathy? I cannot even conceive of any punishment bad enough to make justice.

Review Journal Letters to the Editor

Not long ago, an organization named Keep Our Doctors in Nevada pressured the Legislature into an emergency session and persuaded Nevada citizens to vote for medical malpractice protection, all in the name of a phony “medical malpractice crisis.”  Read more 

Aetna thinks it’s better for their company not to pay for an anesthetist/anasthesiologist’s service during a colonoscopy — and while colon cancer mortality rates have dropped over the past 4-5 years, colonoscopies are the only way of catching this killer early. Can you imagine  Read more 

Unfortunately, none of the leadership of either party seems to have any regular contact with dirty, smelly poor people. There are times when it really frustrates me, to listen to what candidates or pundits say about health care and the reality of it for most people. It’s as if they are speaking another language, they often feel so distanced from where I am and millions like me are. This post isn’t about HRC or BHO per se, so much as it’s meant to contrast with some much wonkery I read both in the blogosphere and the SCLM on the topic of health care. This feels so much more in touch with reality to me. The comments are good too:

Now, I didn’t hear the whole debate, and I’ve been trying to find the plans laid out point by point so that I can examine them more closely–but from what I can find, apparently the plan to make sure everybody is covered is basically the following for both candidates:
1. offer cheap health insurance.
2. give tax breaks so “families” can afford it.

The tricky part comes when it comes to how to actually get people on the programs–and this is the part where my head is exploding because I can’t find any definite information about each candidate. Apparently both candidates would impose some type of ‘fine’ or ‘penalty’ on people who do not buy health insurance once the option is made available–thus universal coverage. At the debate, I couldn’t figure out what Hillary was saying at all, and all I took from Obama is that he will be all about fining parents/penalizing parents if they don’t cover their children.

I found this article, which is from early Feb. and only says what I am saying here–how confusing it all is.

Thus, I will give you my reaction to these proposed ‘fines’ and penalties of parents for not covering their children from a purely uneducated point of view: YOU GOT TO BE OUT YOUR DAMN MIND.  Read more 

Via Atrios: Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient’s policy

One of California’s largest for-profit insurers stopped a controversial practice of canceling sick policyholders Friday after a judge ordered Health Net Inc. to pay more than $9 million to a breast cancer patient it dropped in the middle of chemotherapy.

The ruling by a private arbitration judge was the first of its kind and the most powerful rebuke to the state’s major insurers whose cancellation practices are under fire from the courts, state regulators and elected officials.  Read more 

UnitedHealth Poised for 13% Growth Unimpeded by Cuomo

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) — UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest U.S. health insurer, is poised to reach its forecasts of 13 percent profit growth this year and next, even after being accused of cheating customers by New York’s attorney general.

Don’t even know where to begin.

Doctors and dollars

Typically, reimbursement rates for out-of-network physicians are based on what is generally accepted as the “reasonable and customary” rates charged by doctors in a a common geographic area. But who determines what is reasonable and customary? The attorney general’s staff is focusing on a company known as Ingenix, which collects data that are used by health insurance companies to determine what is charged in a particular region and how much a company will reimburse out-of-network physicians, based on prevailing rates in that area.  Read more 

Recently I had a passionate discussion with a friend about health care reform. You know where we stand on this blog: It immoral and uncivilized and expensive to have a for-profit health care industry. Everyone should have complete coverage, and it should be paid for from a common fund of taxdollars, paid directly to providers for the widest range of services, at fair rates which encourage the best people to go into health care, and an emphasis should be placed on getting people as much preventative care as possible. Right there, you save billions. I further posit that the elimination of a couple of military boondoggles like Star Wars will fund the start-up of such a program without significant immediate tax increases, although I favor taxing the shit out of health insurance companies and executives too. They are sitting on trillions that people paid for care, and frequently never got.

Now, my friend told me that “we can’t just eliminate insurance companies overnight” and cut them the fuck out of health care altogether. He argued that if we were to do so, millions of investors would lose value in their stock portfolios, not just “investor class” people but municipalities and retirement funds, who are heavily invested in insurance companies. He also argued that many insurance company workers would lose their jobs, and together a quick death to for-profit health insurers, that would mean real economic upset for all.

You can probably guess my reaction.

But I suppose I can see his point, but I think smart policy planners could find a way to offset some of this, and I will even admit that if there is no other way, I support a “phased” withdrawl, in which people are given time to change out their investment portfolios over some period of time. I would also support limited and temporary subsidies to former insurance workers as they train for or look for new jobs. Workers, not golden parachute, billion dollar compensation package-getting execs. They can fuck off and die.

However, you can see why I believe what I do, as you read this bit from Mass doctors, who are at the front of “health care reform.” My guy, Edwards, really blew it by going along with the consultant’s advice and not his wife’s, because people don’t want this kind of “reform.” If he’d been brave enough to say so plainly from the get go, he would’ve done better than he has so far in various races, media blackout or no. Americans are dying, screaming out for real health care reform. Not this shit