Health Care Reform Articles - January 11, 2012

January 10, 2012

Interactive Tools to Assess the Likelihood of Death

By PAULA SPAN

To help prevent overtesting and overtreatment of older patients — or undertreatment for those who remain robust at advanced ages — medical guidelines increasingly call for doctors to consider life expectancy as a factor in their decision-making. But clinicians, research has shown, are notoriously poor at predicting how many years their patients have left.

Now, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have identified 16 assessment scales with “moderate” to “very good” abilities to determine the likelihood of death within six months to five years in various older populations. Moreover, the authors have fashioned interactive tools of the most accurate and useful assessments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/health/using-interactive-tools-to-assess-the-likelihood-of-death.html?tntemail1=y&emc=tnt&pagewanted=print

Research Bought, Then Paid For

By MICHAEL B. EISEN

Berkeley, Calif.

THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.

But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html?tntemail1=y&emc=tnt&pagewanted=print

January 10, 2012

The Republican Contest

Where the Iowa caucuses illuminated the dark essence of social conservatism, the New Hampshire primary was a journey into the dingy, cramped quarters of the right wing’s economic policies.

The Republicans ritually denounced President Obama as hostile to capitalism, disdainful of individual enterprise and lacking in ideas for reviving the economy. All they had to offer were economic ideas that not only are inadequate for that purpose but were instrumental in creating the nation’s current economic problems.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/the-republican-contest.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

Problem with health care is for-profit insurance

Created Wednesday, January 11, 2012

By Samuel Metz and Charlotte Maloney
The Register-Guard (Eugene, Ore.), Jan. 9, 2012
Modern mythology recounts James Carville giving candidate Bill Clinton memorable advice regarding his upcoming presidential campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Those of us wrestling with health care reform might take similar advice: “It’s the financing, stupid.”
Why do politicians such as Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., obsess with untried models of health care reform? They propose a “premium support option” for Medicare that would also extend to small businesses. Insurance companies are expected to compete with traditional Medicare to provide comprehensive benefits at affordable prices. Beneficiaries unable to afford premiums will receive vouchers of limited sums to support their premiums; hence the name, “premium support.”
This plan presumes that private insurance companies will eagerly compete for market share by offering better benefits at lower prices to our seniors. This simply does not happen.
http://www.pnhp.org/print/news/2012/january/problem-with-health-care-is-for-profit-insurance