Showing posts with label health care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health care. Show all posts
Monday, July 30, 2007
Incoherent Centrism
"The Dean" of the press corps David Broder takes on health care today. His column is just as big a mess as the health care crisis.
Better late than never, President Bush has provoked what could be a serious debate on the future of health care by threatening to veto an extension of one of the most popular and successful government programs in that field. The fight he has started over the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, as it is known, is -- in the words of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt -- "a surrogate for the larger philosophical debate on the role of government in health care."
Had Bush joined that debate before his time in office had dwindled to 18 months and his approval scores slumped to Nixonian levels, the chances of something positive emerging would have been much greater.
Now, as Leavitt conceded in an interview, "it may take another election" to bring the country face to face with the larger issues Bush has raised: how big a role the federal government should take in providing medical services and how that role should be financed.
I just give up on Broder. Seriously. Is there any point to even rebutting the man, pointing out how ludicrous his alleged centrism is when put into practice? Yes. Bush brings up a very important issue for debate.
Should we not allow people to see a fucking doctor. It's a crying fucking pity that his numbers are Nixonian (which Broder is admitting for the first time), or he could have used the power of the Presidency to say shots are for wimps.
Retire already.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Sunday, July 01, 2007
The Prince of Darkness
Robert Novak, the traitor who outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, is often referred to as Novakula or the Prince of Darkness. These lighthearted nicknames were bestowed upon Novak due to the fact that he is an asshole. Take a gander at the first paragraph of his latest offering entitled 'Socialism Medicine For Kids'.
WASHINGTON -- There is no need to wait until a new president is elected next year for the great national health care debate. It is underway right now, disguised as a routine extension of an immensely popular, non-controversial 10-year-old program of providing coverage to poor children. In fact, this proposal is the thin edge of the wedge to achieve the longtime goal of government-supplied universal health insurance and the suffocation of the private system.
Mean kids and their advocates are ruining our beloved HMO's by going to actual doctors when they can't afford to do so. Those ungrateful little fucking bastards.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Matthew Yglesias discusses some of the variants of the Health Savings Account plans for upgrading our health care system. I wonder what is the point? Much of this discussion appears to be based on the fact that the insurance lobby is so powerful that we need to do a bloated schedule D plan that still allow the insurance beast to be fed in order to get health care to the 46 million americans without coverage?
It's a lack of imagination and effort that creates such thinking. HMO's don't have a right to exist. They are not people, no matter how badly many want corporations treated as individuals. We ban heroin dealers, we can ban for profit health care except on a cash basis.
We can control costs on pills, on procedures if we take the profit motive out. All that skimming off the top, plus the overhead created by staff needed to decode all the different forms from the different insurance players would create a large part of the capital needed to cover everybody. We wouldn't get all the way there, but it would be close enough so that the burden would not be insurmountable.
We can waste a trillion in Iraq, we can lock up non violent drug offenders and pay for their upkeep, we can get national health care. It's just a matter of will. Any half assed health savings account solution is worse than no solution at all in the long run. It will make it that much harder to change, because we will be told that we need to give the rube goldberg plans "time to work", at the same time that people are needlessly suffering.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.
A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.
If his mother had been insured.
If his family had not lost its Medicaid.
Deamonte's death and the ultimate cost of his care, which could total more than $250,000, underscore an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.
$250,000 which the taxpayers will end up owning, would have funded 2,500 kids in the area to get a $100 exam. Instead, we have a dead child, a grieving mother, and another example of how extreme poverty makes for poor choices.
We are spending $11 million an hour in Iraq. Yet, we can't offer our children comprehensive dental coverage. We are truly a nation in decline.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Department of Veterans Affairs doctors are furious over a recent decision by the Pentagon to block their access to medical information needed to treat severely injured troops arriving at VA hospitals from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The VA physicians handle troops with serious brain injuries and other major health problems. They, rely on digital medical records that track the care given wounded troops from the moment of their arrival at a field hospital through their evacuation to the United States.
Bush has also suggested that to reduce the deficit he wants to cut the VA budget as well. For the Republican Party, supporting the troops means putting a yellow ribbon sticker on your SUV while cutting budgets for the troops and sending them off into quagmires.
(From the Washington Post via CorrenteWire )
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