You can read the full report from Health Affairs, a medical journal, but the under rated Bob Herbert completely nails the issue when he says, “These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.“
Read both.
I think that he’s looking at poll numbers and focus groups, as opposed to listening to the idiots inside the Beltway, who make lots of money, and have no issues with their healthcare.
It’s a start.
The court appointed overseer of prison healthcare in California has moved to seize $8 billion from the California treasury for healthcare for inmates.
California’s spending on prisons exceeded its spending on education the state university system some time in the early 1980s, and has aggressively pursued incarceration with the most aggressive “three strikes” law enforcement in the nation.
It looks like the people of California will have to start paying for their imprisonment fetish.
Hopefully, this will make the people of California think about the value of the war on drugs and our prison society.
There is a greater proportion of the US population imprisoned than any other society in history…ever.
It turns out that the creation of Medicare Part D by the Republican congress has resulted in a 30% increase in payments for drugs as compared to Medicaid, as was previously done.
Let’s see:
Check.
Check.
It appears that with only 6 months to go, Bush and His Evil Minions™ are doing their level best to make birth control unavailable a significannt portion of the US population.
First, they have now defined abortion as “anything that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”
This would be many birth control pills, emergency contraception following a rape, and the IUD, in addition to a number of medications not normally used for contraception, but for which are likely to cause a failure to implant, or a spontaneous abortion.
What’s more, any medical provider receiving money for a Health and Human Services Department program would have to, “sign written certifications”, certifying that the would not, “will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control.” (see also here)
What’s amazing is that Mr. “I don’t listen to polls” HHS is using a poll, as opposed to the American Medical Association’s definition of “abortion”.
If you think that you can compromise with abortion-criminalization terrorists, you are wrong.
Their ultimate goal is to make all forms of birth control illegal in the United States of America.
Image courtesy of Feministing.
Bush’s veto has already been overridden by both the House and Senate.
Damn, that was quick….did those guys have a chance to even sit down?
Bush objects to the fact that subsidies for private insurers to participate in Medicare, more accurately a license to skim and further bankrupt the fund, have been reduced to avoid a doctor pay cut, and so he has vetoed the bill.
Well, it looks like its time for an override vote, and the text for the attack ad writes itself, so I would say that it’s better than 50/50 that the veto will be overridden.
If it isn’t, watch as doctors, facing already low fees being cut by 10.6%, reduce services, and patients scream….at Republicans.
Toady, he’s writing about the Medicare vote, and he writes about the underlying issues, not the drama of Kennedy showing up to break a filibuster.
Specifically, he notes that in 2003, Bush and His Evil Minions™ got the so called Medicare Modernization Act though congress, and a big part of it was a very poison pill, large subsidies for the private insurer run Medicare Advantage.
Because these plans are heavily subsidized, they suck money out of the program, making a fiscal crisis even worse.
Because these plans require larger premiums, they also exclude the poor.
So you create a two tiered system, where the rich tier sucks the marrow out of the poor tier.
Basic Republican social programs: Reverse Robin Hood.
Krugman is also far more sanguine about the possibility of real reform next year, because the Dems held together, and the Republicans caved when hit with the full force of the AMA over the July 4th weekend.
Me, I’m more of a pessimist. My goals are less extreme. Just remove the preemption clause from ERISA, and let the states compete, and businesses will migrate to places where they aren’t shafted by the healthcare system.
I tend to think that a solution to the US healthcare crisis may very originate from the states, where competition for jobs and businesses would push this along*.
As such, this raises the question of “health tourism” between the states, where people from one state would go to a state with more generous healthcare provisions.
It turns out that the EU is dealing with this problem right now:
European Union citizens will be able to receive most health care treatment anywhere in the 27-nation bloc without getting prior authorization under a long-awaited draft law published Wednesday.
Postponed for months because of fears in some countries of a large-scale increase in “health tourism,” the plan could extend options available to EU citizens who live in countries where waiting lists are long.
But the entitlement applies only to procedures that are publicly funded in EU citizens’ home states and reimbursement would be only up to the amount the procedure would cost in that country.
Obviously, there will be some bugs as this is implemented, but equally as obvious is the fact that by the time we get something here, the Europeans will have worked out those bugs, and we can benefit from their experience.
*Once the Erisa preemption clause is repealed, anyway.
Teddy Kennedy is working very hard to try and get his ducks in a row on universal healthcare legislation , i.e. before Bush leaves office.
I understand the power of the first 100 days, but I find it highly unlikely that you could get this through that quickly, so I’m thinking that he knows that he doesn’t have much time left, and he is throwing a hail Mary pass.
Damn.
Do the people who write about the need to cut ‘entitlements’ really not know that the problem is the unique inefficiency of the U.S. health care system (per capita health care costs in other wealthy countries average half as much) or are they lying?
They are lying.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
Very good, but it’s about an hour long, so have the time to be really depressed.
In listening to the changes, I can only conclude that this is a direct result of avarice, stupidity, and malice by the leaders in the US in the political and business spheres.
The unspoken meme of the Reagan revolution was that if you were not rich, it was because you are evil, and thus the not rich must be punished.
The battle on reasonable access to healthcare for all has not even been joined, and Congressional Democrats are already walking away from success.
Jeebus, these guys need a spinal transplant.
This is about health insurance, and obviously these policies, whose payouts typically max out at less than a million dollars, are smaller than the monoliner’s policies, but this is the tip of the iceberg.
UnitedHealth Group is taking a major hit because fewer and fewer employers can afford to buy its product.
The healthcare crisis is real and ongoing, and we are going 90mph towards a brick wall.
Why am I not surprised.
This time though, it wasn’t to spy on political opponents find terrorists, and it wasn’t to torture children gain important intelligence.
This time, it was to make sure that children did not get medical care, because the insurance companies contribute to Republicans.
The Bush administration’s limits on expansions of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) are unlawful, according to Congress’s investigative arm.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) unlawfully bypassed congressional review when it issued a directive to states in August alerting them that federal authorities would seek to restrict raising the income eligibility level for the program, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in a report issued Thursday.
**Sigh**
Elizabeth Spiers at Fortune magazine notes that increasingly, it seems that consumer price index numbers have no bearing in reality.
It’s true.
Here is a graph from John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics
If he is only half right, it means that total price change over the past two decades is understated by something near 50%.
When one tries to get a grip on the cost of living, there will always be a subjective element. When, for example, did the cost of ice delivery get dropped from the CPI. The ice man was a big deal in 1922, after all.
That being said, there has been a consistent assault on accurate CPI numbers from pretty much everyone in government for the past 30+ years.
It makes things easier. Artificially ow CPI numbers mask declining living standards and make inflation adjusted benefits cheaper, allowing for lower taxes.
The question is then how is this done.
The first way is through what is called “hedonics”. Basically, it adjusts the prices of commodities because their quality has improved. Check out The Illusions of Hedonics from the Mises Institute for a good critique.
Let’s apply hedonics to a car, for example. It’s clear that a new car today is far safer and more fuel efficient (per weight of car) than a car of a few years ago, so why should we not make an adjustment for that?
The first answer is that we can measure this more accurately in other ways. Safer cars mean less health care spending*, and better fuel economy means less spending on gas. Thus, the market basket would change.
The car delivers the same service as it did 20 years ago, just as my computer, despite being millions of times more powerful than it was 20 years ago delivers the same service, word processing, spread sheets, etc.
The second way of fudging the numbers is by messing with what goes into the “basket” which is used to figure CPI.
Why, for example, is a 3 fold increase in the price of housing in the past decade or so not inflationary, but instead “asset appreciation”. Housing is a necessity. It should be an integral part of any look at inflation, but instead, the rising house prices are waved away with some fairy dust, and all is well.
Look at the picture above, and if Mr. Williams is right, and I believe that if anything he is conservative on this, it means that there is about a 2½% spread between official and real inflation.
That means that true cost of living doubles an extra time roughly every 20 years. Which means that right now, the cost of living is nearly twice what the government is reporting, because it ignores skyrocketing healthcare, education, and housing costs, along with using bogus tweaks to create a bogus number.
No wonder the people of the United States are in debt up to their eyeballs.
*I would note however, from a purely economic perspective, replacing airbags with double ought buckshot shells would net an even higher reduction in health care costs, since dead people need no health care.†
†And this argument is why people who see classical economics as the tool for all societal problems are full of it. Economics is a tool, not the tool for dealing with the world.
We are moving towards some sort of single payer system in the US. Personally, I favor a NHS, but your milage may vary.
The reason that we are seeing personal mandates right now is because ERISA, passed in 1974, pretty much prohibits most other sorts of action.
The best short term solution is to remove the preemption clause of that law, because in addition to preventing meaningful healthcare reform, it provides a ‘get out of jail free’ card to the worst actors in the insurance business.
Ummm that is more than any other nation on earth.
Do we have a lower crime rate? No.
I think that this is by some definitions a police state.
In the future, of course, only the criminals will be out of prison, because it’s the only politically palatable way to get state supported healthcare for everyone.
Hillary Clinton is finally going after Barack Obama’s dishonest right wing attacks on health care reform.
This is going to make any health care plan nigh-impossible if Obama gets elected. Thanks.
Universal Healthcare is more than a core Democratic Party value. It’s essential to save this nation.
What’s more, it will change the dynamic of governance in the US for decades to come, and will create a Democratic majority nationwide for decades to come.
And Barack Obama is campaigning against it, because he thinks that he’s just so awesome that he will get Republicans to support him in slitting their own throats politically.
As the late, great Steve Gilliard says, never stop a your enemy from stepping on his own dick, and George W. Bush’s proposal to raise Medicare premiums is such an example.
It turns out that the Medicare costs projected by the lying sacks of excrement in the Bush admin are wrong, so the lying chimpy usurper boy is proposing an increase in premiums, along with the proposed cuts he put forward earlier.
FWIW, I think that this is an excellent time to reintroduce legislation granting authority to the government to negotiate with drug makers.
The Republicans are going to have to vote for higher premiums, which is a political loser, and for Medicare cuts, which is a political loser, and against the power to negotiate with drug manufacturers, which is a political loser.
Heck of a job Georgie.