Arizona Cuts Financing For Transplant Patients
PHOENIX — Even physicians with decades of experience telling patients that their lives are nearing an end are having difficulty discussing a potentially fatal condition that has arisen in Arizona: Death by budget cut.
Medicine Is The Best Medicine; Help Patients Keep Taking It
PATIENTS WHO don’t take their medications are a well-documented problem in medicine. If doctors are to spot patients who might stop complying with prescriptions, it’s vital to have a fuller understanding of why and how it happens.
Deficit Panel's Rx Is Wrong Medicine: Doctors' Group
Only an improved Medicare for All can rein in costs and provide quality, universal care, says Physicians for a National Health Program
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/december/deficit-panels-rx-is-wrong-medicine-doctors-group
State Cuts Put Officers on Front Lines of Mental Care
By KATIE ZEZIMA
PORTLAND, Me. — As community mental health systems fray under the strain of state budget cuts and a weak economy, law enforcement officers across the nation are increasingly having to step in to provide the emergency services that clinics have typically offered the mentally ill.
Arizona Medicaid Cuts Seen as a Sign of the Times
By KEVIN SACK
With enrollments exploding, revenues shrinking and the low-hanging fruit plucked long ago, virtually every state has had to make painful cuts to its Medicaid program during the economic downturn.
What distinguishes the reductions recently imposed in Arizona, where coverage was eliminated on Oct. 1 for certain transplants of the heart, liver, lung, pancreas and bone marrow, is the decision to stop paying for treatments urgently needed to ward off death.
If Only Laws Were Like Sausages
By ROBERT PEAR
LANDOVER, Md. — In defending their work, members of Congress love to repeat a quotation attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”
In other words, the legislative process, though messy and sometimes unappetizing, can produce healthy, wholesome results.
But a visit to a sausage factory here, about 10 miles from the Capitol, suggests that Bismarck and today’s politicians are mistaken. In many ways, that quotation is offensive to sausage makers; their process is better controlled and more predictable.
ERSPECTIVE
Government Payment for Health Care — Causes and Consequences
NEJM | December 1, 2010 | Topics: Cost of Health Care
Victor R. Fuchs, Ph.D.
From modest beginnings in the late 19th century, government’s role in paying for health care has expanded greatly in every high-income country. Today, most of these countries have some form of national health insurance — that is, all or virtually all of the population is eligible for health care that is paid for in full or in large part by a government-organized insurance system. The United States has long been criticized (and praised by some) for being an exception to the rule in its approach to financing health care. Even in this country, however, government’s role in paying for care has increased greatly over the past 50 years (see graph). Government’s share of total personal health care expenditures in the United States grew from 20% in 1960 to almost 50% in 2007 and will undoubtedly exceed the private sector’s share when the programs that were enacted in the 2010 health care reform legislation become activated.
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