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Saturday, September 17, 2011

Health Care Reform Articles - September 18, 2011

September 16, 2011

Killing Jobs and Making Us Sick




“In January, Mr. Obama signed a food safety law that provides broad new authority to the Food and Drug Administration,” wrote Robert Pear in Friday’s Times, in an article about the Congressional appropriations mess. But House Republicans, he added, had voted “to cut the agency’s budget.”
Well, yes, in a nutshell, that is the sad story of the food safety law — the first major change in how the government regulates food safety in over 70 years. But the way the Republicans have dealt with its funding represents more than appropriations problems. It also represents the way they’ve allowed their unyielding antitax, antispend ideology to get in the way of common sense — and the common good.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011, 6:00 AM

The Role of Prices in Health Care Spending

Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. He has some financial interests in the health care field.
The term “health care” evokes different images in people’s minds. To patients who find a miraculous cure, health care may be almost sacred. For physicians, nurses and other health care professionals it is a compassionate human activity. To hard-nosed economists, health care represents just another exchange of favors embedded in a wider market economy that consists of exchanging favors.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/the-role-of-prices-in-health-care-spending/?scp=2&sq=uwe%20e%20reinhardt&st=cse

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011, 8:20 PM

Let’s Talk About Death

The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being debated across the online spectrum.
As medical science has proven, death is hard to avoid. But it was especially hard this week.



September 10, 2011

No Job, No Insurance, No Health Care


Workers who lose their jobs in the economic downturn typically suffer a double whammy: they lose not only their incomes but their employer-based health insurance as well. Millions are forced to forgo the medical care that they cannot pay for.



‘Inconsequential’ has consequences

To control health costs, focus on making market work better

AS STATE policymakers look for ways to rein in health care costs, the first question they must decide is whether they want to nudge the market toward greater cost sensitivity - or to resort to the heavier hand of rate regulation by the state. Already, the threat of regulation has prompted the state’s largest health care provider, Partners HealthCare System Inc., to reopen its contract with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and agree to changes that will save the state’s largest insurer significant sums. It’s an important move, and the Legislature should draw two lessons from it: Government pressure is useful and effective, but private-sector efforts to cut costs are quicker than, and preferable to, a government rate-setting scheme.

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