Health Reform Devolves Into ‘Unaffordable Under-Insurance’
Wednesday Dec 7, 2011 1:30 pm
Healthcare reform in the shape of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") was supposed to relieve working Americans of the burdens of rising healthcare costs as they struggle to survive the jobless recovery.
Instead, working Americans are being confronted with the emergence of a new stage in America’s downward slide on healthcare. "'Unaffordable under-insurance' is rapidly becoming the new standard in the United States,” Dr. Don McCanne, senior health policy fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), told In These Times.
For Medicare, We Must Cut Costs, Not Shift Them
Suddenly, everybody is talking about turning Medicare into a voucher program. It’s not a new idea. It’s been two decades since wonks first started talking seriously about “premium support” and the idea of replacing Medicare with a competitive marketplace in which older people could shop for health insurance. But the idea got new life last week when Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat with a long record on health care, joined Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, in suggesting that such a scheme was the best way to cut health care spending while providing for the medical needs of the elderly. The plan resembles a proposal that Alice Rivlin, who was budget director under President Clinton, and Pete Domenici, a longtime Republican senator, have also recently been promoting.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/for-medicare-we-must-cut-costs-not-shift-them/?emc=eta1
New Models of Implants Not Better, Study Finds
By BARRY MEIER
A new study suggests that the recent technology for artificial hips and knees did not perform any better than older, less expensive designs.
The study, which draws on data from Australia’s orthopedic registry, covered implants introduced from 2003 to 2007 and was published this week. The findings are significant for patients in the United States because many of the new designs, like so-called metal-on-metal hips, are widely used here. Those implants, which have both a ball and cup made of metal, are expected to fail prematurely in tens of thousands of patients rather than lasting 15 years or more as artificial joints are supposed to do.
In Treating Disabled, Potent Drugs and Few Rules
By DANNY HAKIM
Something was happening to Katie Strignano.
After she was moved into a state-run group home, the 26-year-old woman, who is severely mentally retarded, started gaining weight, drooling, breaking out in pimples and pulling out her hair, leaving a bald spot the size of a softball on her head.
Her mothe
r, Debra Strignano, suspected that someone had increased her daughter’s medication without her family’s consent.
When she asked for a copy of a consent form she had once signed for her daughter, she discovered it had been altered, tripling the daily dosage of Clonidine, which is used to control attention deficit disorder. The drug, and four others her daughter was taking, have myriad potential side effects, including rapid weight gain, skin rashes and drowsiness.
Kathleen Sebelius’s health-care muddle
By Robert J. Samuelson,
When the history of the 2012 campaign is written, a special place may be reserved for Kathleen Sebelius, Health and Human Services secretary and former governor of Kansas, who is doing her best to make the Affordable Care Act — a.k.a. Obamacare — disappear as a political liability for the president. The most compelling evidence of this is her decision to delegate to statesthe final decision on defining “essential health benefits” for minimum health insurance coverage
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