Health and Sanity category archive

Via Job’s Anger.

There has been a fascinating exchange in the Roanoke Times, one that illustrates well the mean-spiritedness that underlies wingnuttery. I’ll let it speak for itself.

Part one (which I mentioned here in these electrons).

Part two.

Part three.

We need single-payer (emphasis added–read the rest).

An analysis this year by NerdWallet Health found that about 60 percent of all bankruptcies are health-related. And a comprehensive study by Harvard researchers who examined a large sample of 2007 bankruptcy filings found that “using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies . . . were medical.” That research, published in the American Journal of Medicine, found that most of these “medical debtors were well-educated, owned homes and had middle-class occupations.”

And although access to health insurance can help stave off medical debt, it doesn’t solve the problem. About 10 million insured Americans have medical bills they are unable to pay. The Harvard researchers found that three-quarters of the medical debtors they studied had health insurance.

As long as the primary goal of health insurance is paying country-club fees for health insurance CEOs, we are screwed.

In the Roanoke Times, Randolph Walker expresses his gratitude for the Affordable Care Act. A snippet:

I’m celebrating because I have an appointment with Dr. Ken Tuck.

Dr. Tuck is an ophthalmologist, and a good one. As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with my eyes. However, I’m 53 and have not had a routine eye exam in probably 10 years. I put it off because I had no insurance.

Just ask them.

It’s the foundation of Republican policy on health care.

Dick Polman considers recent attempts by some conservative commentators to convince the Republican Party that health care reform of some sort–if not the Affordable Care Act, then an alternative Republican plan–was inevitable, and the failure of the Republican Party to face the challenge. Here’s a snippet (emphasis added):

Psychological impulse indeed. (Ramesh) Ponnuru (one of the columnists linked in the article–ed.) knows darn well that Republicans have never gotten their act together on health reform; either they’ve had nothing to say, or they’ve floated various ideas without bothering to agree on any of them. Helping the uninsured and taming insurance company abuses – that’s not what Republicans do. Coalescing around a positive plan to replace Obamacare – that’s not what Republicans do. In fact, when the Kaiser Family Foundation polled rank-and-file Republicans last month, only 27 percent said they wanted to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a Republican plan. Clearly, their aversion to affirmative governance is endemic.

Read the rest.

In other news, here’s the nearest thing Republicans have to a “health care plan.”

This applies not just to Pennsylvania’s Corbett, but to most Republican governors. Their equation is simple:

Most poors are black (that’s not true, natch, but it’s what they and their racist base believe), and Medicaid helps the poors, therefore it helps the blacks, and we can’t have that, now, can we?

It’s the politics of hate, because hate sells.

Via Balloon Juice.

Just read it.

This is your fee market at work.

The true welfare queens stay out of the light.

Some of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies have slashed payments to health professionals for promotional speeches amid heightened public scrutiny of such spending, a new ProPublica analysis shows.

(snip)

The sharp declines coincide with increased attention from regulators, academic institutions and the public to pharmaceutical company marketing practices. A number of companies have settled federal whistleblower lawsuits in recent years that accused them of improperly marketing their drugs.

“Promotional speeches.”

Yeah.

Right.