Health Care Reform Articles - November 8, 2011

7Thom Hartmann: American Healthcare Is Insane! 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rINh536F6qI&feature=player_embedded


NOVEMBER 3, 2011, 11:59 AM

Less Than $26 Billion? Don’t Bother.

By EZEKIEL J. EMANUEL

Ezekiel J. Emanuel on health policy and other topics.

Tags:

Medicine and Health, the budget

Everyone — conservative and liberal — agrees that $2.6 trillion a year is too much to spend on health care, and that we have to cut costs. But they don’t agree on who is to blame or what is to be done.

Everett Dirksen, the Republican senator from Illinois, reportedly said, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” But health care spending in the United States typically increases by about $100 billion per year. Cutting a billion here or there from something that large is undetectable. In health care, you have to be talking about tens of billions of dollars before you are talking about real money. A useful threshold for savings is 1 percent of costs, which comes to $26 billion a year. Anything less is simply not meaningful.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/less-than-26-billion-dont-bother/?pagemode=print

Occupy this: Six culprits for economic injustice and inequality in America

By Alec MacGillis, Published: November 3

So, what should be occupied next?

No doubt, the Occupy Wall Street protesters were right to target the financial industry first. Soaring Wall Street pay has been a key force behind America’s income disparities over the past three decades, and banks have yet to be held accountable for the destruction they wrought in recent years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/occupy-what-else-six-new-culprits-for-economic-inequality-in-america/2011/11/01/gIQAFiQvjM_print.html

Op-ed: Demonstrations worldwide incite the rise of the precariat — a new dangerous class

By Madelyn Kearns
November 2, 2011

What unites the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators with “los indignados” in Madrid, the demonstrators in Tel Aviv, those in Athens’ Syntagma Square, those in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and many of those who lit the fires of English cities in August?
They are all actions of primitive rebels: by people who know what they are against, not what they are for.
The USA is experiencing what is happening elsewhere — the growth of a precariat, consisting of millions of people who must survive through insecure jobs and unemployment, with insecure homes, without an occupational identity, with volatile wages, without company benefits and with fragile access to state benefits.
http://mainecampus.com/2011/11/02/op-ed-demonstrations-worldwide-incite-the-rise-of-the-precariat-—-a-new-dangerous-class/print/

November 7, 2011

Test for Hospital Budgets: Are the Patients Pleased?

By JORDAN RAU

“I’m a great kvetcher,” said Pearl Schwartz, sitting in her hospital bed at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Indeed, during her brief stay to receive a pacemaker, Ms. Schwartz, an 88-year-old retired state worker, had a litany of complaints. Sure, the nurses were “splendid, warm and kind” and sang in her room — and her operation went off without a hitch. But her sink was too small, she had to wait eight hours in the radiology unit for an X-ray, and no one brought her anything to read as she had requested.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/health/patients-grades-to-affect-hospitals-medicare-reimbursements.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

The Serious One

By DAVID BROOKS

In the Marx Brothers movie that is the Republican presidential race, Mitt Romney is Zeppo. He doesn’t spin out one-liners. He’s not the rambunctious one. He’s just the earnest, good-looking guy who wants to be appreciated.

But Romney continues to run an impressive presidential campaign. Last week, while the Twitterverse was entranced by Herman Cain, Romney delivered his most important speech yet. It was politically astute and substantively bold, a quality you don’t automatically associate with the Romney campaign. Romney grasped the toughest issue — how to reform entitlements to avoid a fiscal catastrophe — and he sketched out a sophisticated way to address it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/brooks-mitt-romney-the-serious-one.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

Temperatures Rise Over Costs Of Care

Polls Find Public, Doctors Favor More Government Involvement

By Livia Gershon

Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer

http://www.wbjournal.com/article.php?RF_ITEM[]=Article$0@50169;Article&css_display=print