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Thursday, June 21, 2012

Health Care Reform Articles-June 21, 2012

Dirtying Up Our Diets


By JEFF D. LEACH


OVER 7,000 strong and growing, community farmers’ markets are being heralded as a panacea for what ails our sick nation. The smell of fresh, earthy goodness is the reason environmentalists approve of them, locavores can’t live without them, and the first lady has hitched her vegetable cart crusade to them. As health-giving as those bundles of mouthwatering leafy greens and crates of plump tomatoes are, the greatest social contribution of the farmers’ market may be its role as a delivery vehicle for putting dirt back into the American diet and in the process, reacquainting the human immune system with some “old friends.”
Increasing evidence suggests that the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us. As nature’s blanket, the potentially pathogenic and benign microorganisms associated with the dirt that once covered every aspect of our preindustrial day guaranteed a time-honored co-evolutionary process that established “normal” background levels and kept our bodies from overreacting to foreign bodies. This research suggests that reintroducing some of the organisms from the mud and water of our natural world would help avoid an overreaction of an otherwise healthy immune response that results in such chronic diseases as Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis and a host of allergic disorders.

Distaste for Health Care Law Reflects Spending on Ads


By 

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. — Erika Losse is precisely the kind of person President Obama’s signature health care law is intended to help. She has no health insurance. She relies on her mother to buy her a yearly checkup as a Christmas gift, and she pays out of her own pocket for the rest of her medical care, including $1,250 for a recent ultrasound.
But Ms. Losse, 33, a part-time worker at a bagel shop, is no fan of the law, which will require millions of uninsured Americans like herself to get health coverage by 2014. Never mind that Ms. Losse, who makes less than $35,000 a year, would probably qualify for subsidized insurance under the law.
“I’m positive I can’t afford it,” she said.
A Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the health care law is expected any day now, but even if the Obama administration wins in the nation’s highest court, most evidence suggests it has lost miserably in the court of public opinion. National polls have consistently found the health care law has far more enemies than friends, including a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that found more than two-thirds of Americans hope the court will overturn some or all of it.



Obama campaign girds for Supreme Court healthcare ruling

By Michael A. Memoli
3:46 AM PDT, June 21, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-campaign-healthcare-ruling-20120621,0,5399264,print.story


Getting past healthcare's individual mandate

The brouhaha over requiring insurance is much ado about almost nothing.

By Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs
June 20, 2012


Speculation about the likely death of "Obamacare" has raged ever since the Supreme Court heard three intense days of legal arguments in March. The pundits have crowed about how the individual mandate is the Achilles' heel of President Obama's healthcare law.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-skocpol-scotus-obamacare-mandate-20120620,0,3514377,print.story


Deep cuts to MaineCare may depend on Supreme Court’s health reform decision

By Jackie Farwell, BDN Staff
Posted June 20, 2012, at 7:33 p.m.
AUGUSTA, Maine — Deep cuts to Maine’s social services are set to take effect in just a few weeks, including some that hinge on an imminent U.S. Supreme Court decision over the fate of the nation’s landmark health reform law.
The budget for the Department of Health and Human Services calls for rollbacks in general assistance aid and cuts to Medicaid support for group homes as of July 1. By the end of August, the state will pull back on funds for Head Start, children’s behavioral health and the Fund for a Healthy Maine, which supports programs that help residents quit smoking and pays for child care, home health visits, dental care and family planning.
Come early October, thousands of Mainers are slated to lose coverage under MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, through controversial cuts that have fiercely divided lawmakers this year. Opponents, including many Democrats, hold out hope that the federal government will prevent some cuts that violate President Barack Obama’s national health reform law. Meanwhile, many Republican lawmakers and others who see the cuts as essential to reining in MaineCare spending are rooting for the health reform law’s demise in coming days.


In Health Care, Give the People What They Want: Medicare for All

by Robert Scheer
The nutty thing about the health care debate that will play a prominent role in the next election is that most Americans want pretty much the same outcome: to control costs without sacrificing quality. And that’s not what either major-party candidate is offering. Few think that Obamacare, a Romneycare descendant that contains the same kind of individual mandate the then-governor of Massachusetts signed into law, will get us to that desired goal. Nor would Mitt Romney, who has been reborn as a celebrant of the old, pre-Obama system with a few nips and tucks.

Court Challenge Could Result In Medicaid Cutbacks Instead Of Expansion

TOPICS: MEDICAID, HEALTH REFORM, STATES, UNINSURED, INSURANCE
By PHIL GALEWITZ
KHN Staff Writer
JUN 20, 2012
The future of the nation’s largest health insurance program -- Medicaid -- hangs in the balance of the Supreme Court’s decision on the 2010 health law.
The state-federal program which covers 60 million poor and disabled people would be greatly expanded under the health law, adding 17 million more people starting in 2014.
But if the entire law is struck down, states for the first time since 2009 would be free to tighten eligibility and make it more difficult for people to apply. The law had barred such changes.
And under another scenario -- if the justices declare unconstitutional just the law’s expansion of Medicaid -- the entire program enacted in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society agenda could be threatened, health experts say. Twenty-six states had challenged the expansion, arguing it was “unduly coercive” because they would lose all of their federal Medicaid funding if they refused to expand the program.
“Depending on how sweeping and broadly written the decision is, it could be the entire Medicaid program has been unconstitutional since 1965, but we didn’t know it,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health policy professor at George Washington University.

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