Specialty MDs turn away most children with public insurance

Sixty-six percent of publicly-insured children were unable to get a doctor’s appointment for medical conditions requiring outpatient specialty care including diabetes and seizures, while children with identical symptoms and private insurance were turned away only 11 percent of the time, according to an audit study of specialty physician practices in Cook County, IL.

“We found [...]

Climate Change: How bad can it be?

It is easy to become lulled into intellectual somnolence by the seemingly gradual changes we are incurring in our weather. After all, just how bad can a couple of degrees be?

Oh, we wake up every once in a while when our catastrophe leads media reports on some hurricane, flood or tornado, especially if the [...]

HR676: We Want Health Justice

Health care and health justice rap by Lonnie Ray Atkinson who says “This song is under the Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0. You are free to download this song and share it with as many people as you like (please respect and include attributions). I don’t want any payment for its use. I just want [...]

Intermountain Healthcare. High quality, low cost health care

Recently a friend was rushed to Valley View Medical Center here in Cedar City UT by his wife after he became quite ill and was coughing up blood. They diagnosed him with pneumonia. His fever was very high. The hospital immediately filled him with liquids, antibiotics, and provided superb medical care. Three days later [...]

Virginia judge rules mandatory health insurance is unconstitutional

A U.S. District Court judge has ruled the “individual mandate” which says Americans must purchase health insurance by 2014 is unconstitutional.

“An individual’s personal decision to purchase — or decline purchase — (of) health insurance from a private provider is beyond the historical reach” of the U.S. Constitution No specifically constitutional authority exists to mandate [...]

Healthcare! The topic of interest on the tip of everybody’s tongues

(Polizeros welcome our new contributor, Will O’ The Wisp)

Well, maybe on the tips of the tongues of those well-heeled, health-insured politicians. On the tips of the tongues of those whom health care reform is meant to assist? Food! Water! Shelter! Bills! Let’s go back to that first subject – Food. I admit, my friends, [...]

Health Care, hostility and the state of the fourth estate

Reps get spit on, windows broken, mysterious powder–and Palin blames the “lame-stream media”.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) excoriated DNC Chair Tim Kaine and DCCC Chair Rep. Chris Van Hollen, for “dangerously fanning the flames” in using recent acts of violence and intimidation by anti-health-care reform opponents, “as a political weapon.”

Was there [...]

Screw health care for those irresponsible poor people, says Obama

From SocialismOrBarbarism on the Left Business Observer listserv

Obama at his “health care forum”–live, right now

“Those people who go to emergency rooms aren’t getting ‘free care.’ They are being paid for by people with insurance. Their ‘free care’ makes other people’s care go up, uh, $1000. So we are paying for those [poor, [...]

Pelosi pulls the plug on health care reform

From TPM, a huge and now disillusioned supporter of heath care reform

Speaker Pelosi just said “I don’t see the votes for [passing the Senate bill] at this time.” In other words, plug pulled. Health care reform over.

Would have been nice to know back in January they didn’t have the fortitude for this.

Doug [...]

Media’s favorite healthcare analyst paid $392k by Obama Administration

Goodness, I’m sure that made Jonathan Gruber just a totally unbiased cheerleader for the health care reform bill.

Gruber’s explanation that “he disclosed this to reporters whenever they asked” is not very compelling. I don’t see how anyone even tangentially connected to policy work could fail to realize that this was a material conflict [...]