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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Health Care Reform Articles-June 14, 2012


How Broccoli Landed on Supreme Court Menu

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What does broccoli have to do with health insurance?
Until recently, nothing. But now, perhaps a lot.
Broccoli, of all things, came up in the Supreme Court during arguments over the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s health care legislation. If Congress can require Americans to buy health insurance, Justice Antonin Scalia asked, could it force people to buy just about anything — including a green vegetable that many find distasteful?
“Everybody has to buy food sooner or later,” he said. “Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.”
Since then broccoli has captured the public imagination and become the defining symbol for what may be the most important Supreme Court ruling in decades, one that is expected any day and could narrow the established limits of federal power and even overturn the legal underpinnings of the New Deal.
If the court strikes down the health care law — which many constitutional experts on both the right and left long doubted it would do — many lawyers say they believe one reason may be the role of broccoli in shaping the debate.
It turns out that broccoli did not spring from the mind of Justice Scalia. The vegetable trail leads backward through conservative media and pundits. Before reaching the Supreme Court, vegetables were cited by a federal judge in Florida with a libertarian streak; in an Internet video financed by libertarian and ultraconservative backers; at a Congressional hearing by a Republican senator; and an op-ed column by David B. Rivkin Jr., a libertarian lawyer whose family emigrated from the former Soviet Union when he was 10.


Health insurance is not health care

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Created on Thursday, 19 April 2012 00:44
Last Updated on Monday, 04 June 2012 22:54
Published Date
Written by Russ Bennett
NorthLand Design & Construction Inc. has been providing health insurance and a living wage since we started in 1978. NorthLand, like all businesses, has to manage its production costs. We have to meet our clients’ budgets and deadlines. To survive, all businesses have to be able to control costs.
Our health insurance costs are out of control. In 9 of the last 15 years, our health insurance costs have increased by double digits, with multiple years at 22 percent and 30 percent plus. The good years are merely single-digit percent increases. This system of using insurance to deliver health care is not sustainable.
For us, providing health insurance is the only cost in business which we can’t control, other than to reduce or drop coverage.  Increasingly many businesses are asking employees to pick up some of these costs by paying a percentage of the premium and purchasing policies with increased deductibles and co-pays.
In fact, even though a business may be picking up 75 percent of the cost of the health insurance and the employee 25 percent of the insurance costs, because of the increased sizes of the deductibles and the co-pays that individual must pay closer to 50 percent of their health care costs.

The Reward for Donating a Kidney: No Insurance

By RONI CARYN RABIN
Derek Montgomery for The New York Times HEALTHY Like most other kidney donors, Radburn Royer was carefully screened.
When Erika Royer’s lupus led to kidney failure four years ago, her father, Radburn, was able to give her an extraordinary gift: a kidney.
Ms. Royer, now 31, regained her kidney function, no longer needs dialysis and has been able to return to work. But because of his donation, her father, a physically active 53-year-old, has been unable to obtain private health insurance.
The Consumer
Advice on money and health.
Like most other kidney donors, Mr. Royer, a retired teacher in Eveleth, Minn., was carefully screened and is in good health. But Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota rejected his application for coverage last year, as well as his appeals, on the grounds that he has chronic kidney disease, even though many people live with one kidney and his nephrologist testified that his kidney is healthy. Mr. Royer was also unable to purchase life insurance.
Officials with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota refused to discuss Mr. Royer’s case because of privacy laws, but said in a statement that Minnesota residents who are rejected by private insurers can buy coverage through the Minnesota Comprehensive Health Association high-risk pool, which is what Mr. Royer said he did, though he is paying more for less comprehensive insurance.
The officials refused several requests for an interview, saying in an e-mailed statement that “healthy individuals who happen to have one kidney can and do receive coverage” through Blue Cross and Blue Shield as long as their test results are within medically accepted normal ranges.

Radiation Concerns Rise With Patients’ Exposure


By ALASTAIR GEE


Even in health care systems in which doctors do not bill for each test they administer, the use of diagnostic imaging like CT and PET scans has soared, as has patients’ radiation exposure, a new study has found.
The study, published online on Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, says that while advanced medical imaging has undoubted benefits, allowing problems to be diagnosed earlier and more accurately, its value needs to be weighed against potential harms, which include a small cancer risk from the radiation.
“The doses are not at a level that people should really be concerned,” said Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, the study’s lead author and a radiologist and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s rather that we need to minimize unnecessary exposures wherever possible.”
Debate has grown louder over the role of advanced imaging, which many doctors say is overused. In April, a group of nine medical specialty boards recommended that doctors perform 45 common tests and procedures less often, with imaging prominent among them.
One board, the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, said a CT scan was not needed for cases of uncomplicated acute rhinosinusitis, or sinus infection, while another board, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said doctors should cut back on CT and PET scans for early prostate and breast cancers that are unlikely to metastasize.
Harms that may result from radiation exposure during scans are also being examined. A recent study linked the use of CT scans in children to small but significant increases in the risk of leukemia and brain cancer.
If the Supreme Court does decide to strike down any or all of the Affordable Health Care Act, the implications will range from the political to the medical to the economic.

For me, such a decision will take its place among the more supremely ironic of unintended consequences: a law designed toavoid greater government intrusion into health care will have been invalidated as an unconstitutional overreach of government power, while a far more intrusive approach would have clearly passed muster.

Health spending likely to keep rising with or without Obama's plan

President Obama's healthcare law will have little effect on the nation's total healthcare bill, a new report says.

By Noam N. Levey, Washington Bureau
5:00 AM PDT, June 13, 2012


In Good Health? Thank Your 100 Trillion Bacteria


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For years, bacteria have had a bad name. They are the cause of infections, of diseases. They are something to be scrubbed away, things to be avoided.
But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease: the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body.
No one really knew much about them. They are essential for human life, needed to digest food, to synthesize certain vitamins, to form a barricade against disease-causing bacteria. But what do they look like in healthy people, and how much do they vary from person to person?
In a new five-year federal endeavor, the Human Microbiome Project, which has been compared to the Human Genome Project, 200 scientists at 80 institutions sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from nearly 250 healthy people.
They discovered more strains than they had ever imagined — as many as a thousand bacterial strains on each person. And each person’s collection of microbes, the microbiome, was different from the next person’s. To the scientists’ surprise, they also found genetic signatures of disease-causing bacteria lurking in everyone’s microbiome. But instead of making people ill, or even infectious, these disease-causing microbes simply live peacefully among their neighbors.

Poll: Mass. health costs ‘a serious problem’ for many

By Martha Bebinger
WBUR (Boston Public Radio), June 11, 2012
BOSTON – We’re hearing from a lot of different groups lately about what’s wrong with health care and how to fix it. But what do patients think? To find out, WBUR asked Massachusetts residents who said they had a serious illness, medical condition, injury or disability requiring a lot of medical care, or spent at least one night in the hospital within the last year.
Our poll, Sick in Massachusetts, finds that 78 percent of patient respondents say the cost of care is a very serious or somewhat serious problem. And 63 percent say the problem has gotten worse over the last five years. (Click through the four charts below for some of the poll’s primary findings. The poll was conducted in partnership with the Harvard School of Public Health, the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation and WBUR.)


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