April 17, 2011
14 Years of Hooking Patients, Hiking Premiums and Squeezing Docs: Television Drug Advertising
By Martha Rosenberg
Can anyone remember life before Ask Your Doctor ads on TV?
All you knew about prescription drugs were creepy ads in a JAMA at the doctor's office with a lot of fine print. Even if you knew the name of a drug, you'd never ask your doctor for it because that would be self-diagnosing and cheeky for a patient.
Flash forward to the late 1990s when direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising, drug Web sites and online drug sales came on board, and self-diagnosing and demanding pills has become medicine-as-usual for many doctors and patients.
http://www.stateofnature.org/askYourDoctorAds.html
Op-Ed
The case for rationing healthcare
Americans will have to decide what we can and cannot afford.
By M. Gregg Bloche
April 18, 2011
Her story captures the difficult choices that keep us from controlling healthcare spending. Unless we all confront those choices, the costs of medical care will consume us, stealing away an ever-larger share of our national wealth and driving federal budget deficits to catastrophic levels.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bloche-rationing-20110418,0,1806388,print.story
Undoing Medicare: The Real 'Death Tax'
By
See UPDATES below and followup items about doctors' views and about the Canadian approach.
From my days as a school kid I remember the original debate over creating Medicare. At the time, my dad -- a small-town doctor and at that stage a conservative -- was, like most doctors and the AMA as a whole, strongly against the plan, as a step toward "socialized medicine." After all, when his patients couldn't pay, he found ways to reduce or forgive their fees. The opposing argument, which in the long run convinced nearly everyone (including the AMA, and my father) was that leaving older people exposed to the threat of open-ended and potentially ruinous medical expenses, or dependent on individual doctors' charity, was harmful all around.
From my days as a school kid I remember the original debate over creating Medicare. At the time, my dad -- a small-town doctor and at that stage a conservative -- was, like most doctors and the AMA as a whole, strongly against the plan, as a step toward "socialized medicine." After all, when his patients couldn't pay, he found ways to reduce or forgive their fees. The opposing argument, which in the long run convinced nearly everyone (including the AMA, and my father) was that leaving older people exposed to the threat of open-ended and potentially ruinous medical expenses, or dependent on individual doctors' charity, was harmful all around.
The next two articles relate to the question of the role of managed care systems in quality improvement, using the unlikely example of the VA Healthcare System (true "socialized medicine") as an example of what's right in American health care.
The Best Care Anywhere
Ten years ago, veterans hospitals were dangerous, dirty, and scandal-ridden. Today, they're producing the highest quality care in the country. Their turnaround points the way toward solving America's health-care crisis
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
Code Red
How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform.
By Phillip Longman
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0907.longman.html
Globe backs Romney on health care | |
| After a week of broadsides marked the fifth anniversary of his controversial Massachusetts health care law, Mitt Romney is getting some support from his home-state paper. In aneditorial Monday, The Boston Globe writes that conservatives should give Romney credit for for "warding off various schemes feared by business." http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=6854E923-BC31-16D3-F8A0717AFE511A11 |
hope when he tells America how he aims to tame future budget deficits the President doesn't accept conventional Wasington wisdom that the biggest problem in the federal budget is Medicare (and its poor cousin Medicaid).
