February 10, 2012AHIP Hooray!
If you were anywhere near Harvard Business School last Saturday you might have seen a 12-foot tall puppet dancing to accordion music while a merry band of “Congresspeople” and “health insurance executives” swilled champagne, showered each other in cash and sang round after round of “For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow.” If you weren’t near HBS, you missed a fantastic party. Here’s what happened:Karen Ignagni, CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans, was greeted by this band of Occupy Harvard and Occupy Boston at the 9th Annual Healthcare Conference at HBS, where she was the keynote speaker. The merry band feted the insurance industry's lobbyist-in-chief with an impromptu gala, honoring Ms. Ignagni with an award for "Excellence in the Business of Denying People Medical Care." The revelers welcomed conference goers with cheers of "A-HIP-Hooray" and explained why Ms. Ignagni had been chosen for this ignominious award.The award read: “Be it hereby known that Karen Ignagni has successfully upheld the interests of private insurance in the face of efforts to reduce the costs of administrative waste and to insure all Americans, preserving company rights to profit before the public’s right to health.”
Hospitals Flout Charity Aid Law
By NINA BERNSTEIN
For most of her life, Hope Rubel was a healthy woman with good medical insurance, an unblemished credit history and a solid career in graphic design. But on the day an ambulance rushed her to a Manhattan hospital emergency room shortly after her 48th birthday, she was jobless, uninsured and having a stroke.Ms. Rubel’s medical problem was rare, a result of a benign tumor on her adrenal gland, but the financial consequences were not unusual. She depleted her savings to pay $17,000 for surgery to remove the tumor, and then watched, “emotionally paralyzed,” she said, as $88,000 in additional hospital bills poured in. Eventually the hospital sued her for the money.
February 10, 2012
If you were anywhere near Harvard Business School last Saturday you might have seen a 12-foot tall puppet dancing to accordion music while a merry band of “Congresspeople” and “health insurance executives” swilled champagne, showered each other in cash and sang round after round of “For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow.” If you weren’t near HBS, you missed a fantastic party. Here’s what happened:
Karen Ignagni, CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans, was greeted by this band of Occupy Harvard and Occupy Boston at the 9th Annual Healthcare Conference at HBS, where she was the keynote speaker. The merry band feted the insurance industry's lobbyist-in-chief with an impromptu gala, honoring Ms. Ignagni with an award for "Excellence in the Business of Denying People Medical Care." The revelers welcomed conference goers with cheers of "A-HIP-Hooray" and explained why Ms. Ignagni had been chosen for this ignominious award.
The award read: “Be it hereby known that Karen Ignagni has successfully upheld the interests of private insurance in the face of efforts to reduce the costs of administrative waste and to insure all Americans, preserving company rights to profit before the public’s right to health.”
By NINA BERNSTEIN
For most of her life, Hope Rubel was a healthy woman with good medical insurance, an unblemished credit history and a solid career in graphic design. But on the day an ambulance rushed her to a Manhattan hospital emergency room shortly after her 48th birthday, she was jobless, uninsured and having a stroke.
Ms. Rubel’s medical problem was rare, a result of a benign tumor on her adrenal gland, but the financial consequences were not unusual. She depleted her savings to pay $17,000 for surgery to remove the tumor, and then watched, “emotionally paralyzed,” she said, as $88,000 in additional hospital bills poured in. Eventually the hospital sued her for the money.
Our View: Compromise better than governor's proposal
1:00 AMLawmakers from both sides – and all of us – should be happy about the cuts not included.
It's a victory that no one will cheer. After weeks of around-the-clock struggle, the Legislature's Appropriations Committee has come up with a compromise that fixes the hole in theDepartment of Health and Human Services Budget while preserving key elements of the state's medical safety net.
Bear witness to Medicaid misery
Posted Feb. 09, 2012, at 10:53 a.m.
To be poor and without health insurance in America is to walk largely out of sight in the dark alleys of health care waiting to get mugged by the thugs of ill health, inadequate care and societal indifference. So the suffering that will result when thousands of Maine’s poorest residents — many our friends and family members — are cut off from their Medicaid health insurance a few months from now will be invisible to most of us. We will not be present when and where the uninsured ill will suffer for want of adequate care.
But I don’t want any of us to be lucky enough to have all of that resulting misery hidden from our view, so I propose that some of us bear witness to that suffering and then tell that truth in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. I propose that Maine’s health care community, its social services community, its law enforcement community, its media community, its academic community and all others who do not wish to stand by band together and refuse to let that suffering be invisible. I propose we tell the stories of the avoidable suffering that will result from these cuts every chance we get, to anyone who will listen and especially those who will not, whenever the opportunity presents.
Health Care In Massachusetts: 'Abject Failure' Or Work In Progress?
Voters are hearing a lot about health care this year. Republicans want to make the 2012 elections a referendum on the health care law that President Obama signed two years ago.That law was largely based on one that then-governor Mitt Romney signed into law nearly six years ago in Massachusetts.
Romney is now a GOP presidential contender, and that's made the Massachusetts universal health care law a political football. Romney's rival Rick Santorum recently called it "an abject failure."
But "Romneycare," as Santorum and others call it, isn't controversial in its home state. And a lot of people here don't call it Romneycare, because it took the support of a lot of other people – Democratic legislators, business leaders, insurers, hospitals and doctors, consumer groups – to get it passed.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/02/13/146701343/health-care-in-massachusetts-abject-failure-or-work-in-progress?ft=1&f=1001
From factory worker to orderly: health care jobs mixed bag for economy
On any weekday morning 50 years ago, men and women in cities and towns across Maine and the nation could be seen filing through factory gates or up the steps to a mill or plant. Manufacturing was king. Americans made things the rest of the world wanted. And blue collar workers and their paychecks were the foundation of American prosperity.The popular perception is that this era is over, and more is the pity. Such a pronouncement misses the more complex story.
A statistical milestone noted in the news last week was an emblem that many seized upon to further lament the demise of our manufacturing glory days. For the first time, health care jobs exceeded manufacturing jobs. The trend lines are clear and unrelenting.
http://bangordailynews.com/2012/02/12/opinion/from-factory-worker-to-orderly-health-care-jobs-mixed-bag-for-economy/print/
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