"Do you know how to make God laugh? You tell him your plans." Hari Sheldon – Foudation's Fear
Posted in Blog Post on Nov 2nd, 2007
The Unreal Universe A Book on Physics and Philosophy “For thinking laymen.” Ezra Klein: How Subsidies Change Your World Ezra demonstrates why a double cheeseburger is $.99 and more expensive than a salad. It’s the warping affect of billions in farm subsides. Some of the best action is in the comments: If you manage the [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Nov 1st, 2007
The Unreal Universe A Book on Physics and Philosophy “For thinking laymen.” So the GOP hurried the bill through to avoid reaching a compromise??? WTF is wrong with these morons? By that I mean the Democratic leadership. They seem continually befuddled by republican parliamentary tactics out out maneuvered at every turn. Senate Again Passes Child [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Oct 4th, 2007
The Unreal Universe A Book on Physics and Philosophy “For thinking laymen.” Ezra Klein: Democrats Show Some Spine On S-CHIP About damned time the dems took on the characteristics of other vertebrates.
Posted in Blog Post on Sep 25th, 2007
Posted in Blog Post on Sep 21st, 2007
McClatchy Washington Bureau | 09/21/2007 | Child health-care program gets congressional nod An intelligent bipartisan compromise is reached concerning providing children with health care. Naturally Bush’s reaction will be to veto, after all he is a uniter not a divider. Can’t have kids getting guvermint health care cuz they might all turn commie. or something. [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Sep 18th, 2007
Sick Author Jonathan Cohn’s Expert Opinion on HillaryCare 2.0 Fills in some more details I find interesting, like using the government’s bargaining power to negotiate drug prices. How’s that for market based reform? Isn’t bargaining for price a central market behavior? The plan shelters small businesses from the cost of coverage for their employees: Unlike [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Sep 17th, 2007
Ezra Klein: The Hillary Plan The ever reliable Ezra wonks on the Clinton proposal. Here’s my bullet point synopsis: Allows you to keep your current plan Mandated coverage Opens the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program to everybody (the same health plan covering members of Congress) Creates a new public coverage option similar to Medicare Eliminates [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 28th, 2007
Number of Uninsured Americans Hits Record High – washingtonpost.com The number of Americans without health insurance rose to a record high 47 million in 2006, largely because of continuing declines in employer-sponsored insurance coverage, the Census Bureau said today. In all, 15.8 percent of Americans lacked coverage last year, up from 15.3 percent in 2005, [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 14th, 2007
Interesting study reported in the NY Times about the relationship between cost and quality: In Health Care, Cost Isn’t Proof of High Quality – New York Times the Pennsylvania findings support a growing national consensus that as consumers, insurers and employers pay more for care, they are not necessarily getting better care. Expensive medicine may, [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Apr 17th, 2007
The Daily Dish: Teaching Sex A lot of time I agree with Sully, but he gets this way wrong. Perhaps it’s my past public health education creeping out here. I had thought that the main problem with abstinence-only sex-ed was that the victims of that misguided policy were no less likely to engage in sexual [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 26th, 2007
Governors Seek More Money for Children’s Insurance – washingtonpost.com We can spend billions on tax cuts and wars of choice, but we let millions of children in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known go without basic medical care.
Posted in Blog Post on Dec 14th, 2006
A quick and dirty summary is here. A more thoughtful look can be found here. My take is that there will be organized high priced resistance from the insurance industry because of the forced community rating provision. I think that’s an excellent idea from a policy wonk perspective, but less than likely from a political [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 23rd, 2006
Josh Bolten squirms during Stem Cell questions – Crooks and Liars It’s interesting to watch Bolten try to put lipstick on this pig. There’s a nonsensical ring to the president’s policies on this issue and “Timmah” does a pretty good job of actually asking questions that expose the inherent contradictions. The whole thing makes me [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 22nd, 2006
Daily Kos: What Did You Expect, America? Over on Daily Kos, SusanG clearly articulates exactly what I’ve been trying to say for a while: If you put people in charge of running a project they are ideologically committed to proving a failure, it will fail. That neatly explains a host of failures by the Bush [...]
Posted in Blog Post on May 15th, 2006
D for Debacle – New York Times After all, prescription drug coverage didn’t have to be bafflingly complex. Drug coverage could simply have been added to traditional Medicare. If the government had done that, everyone currently covered by Medicare would automatically have been enrolled in the drug benefit. Adding drug coverage as part of ordinary [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Apr 15th, 2006
Shakespear’s Sister and Glenn Greenwald respond to “The Left, Online and Outraged” in today’s WaPo by David Finkel. He want to make the case that the lefty blogosphere is all about neurotic, angry nutjobs blinded by hatred of Bush and the GOP. Shakes nails why I blog: I blog because their leadership is thoroughly incompetent, [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Mar 10th, 2006
Universal health care–now This TNR piece does a good job of summarizing why Progressives need to take the bull by the horns and advocate universal access to health care. There will be a massive ad campaign by the monied interests that currently feed off the inefficiencies in the current system to prevent substantive reform. The [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Mar 9th, 2006
The New York Review of Books: The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It This should be required reading for all health care policy makers. We suffer a horribly inefficient health care delivery system vis a vis other advanced nations. There is a lack of political willingness to do anything substantive because of [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 23rd, 2006
Why Doctors So Often Get It Wrong – New York Times With all the tools available to modern medicine — the blood tests and M.R.I.’s and endoscopes — you might think that misdiagnosis has become a rare thing. But you would be wrong. Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 22nd, 2006
CNN.com – Justices tackle late-term abortion issue – Feb 21, 2006 Supreme Court said Tuesday it will consider the constitutionality of banning a type of late-term abortion, teeing up a contentious issue for a newly-constituted court already in a state of flux over privacy rights. I worked in an Maternity/OB unit in a hospital for [...]
Date: 04/11/2006