Health and Sanity category archive

John Romano comments on those states that still refuse to expand Medicaid so as to take full advantage of the Affordable Care Act:

For instance, what do Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Maine and Kansas have in common besides Medicaid rejection? They’re all in the bottom half of states in median household income, according to the 2013 Census.

How about Florida, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nebraska and Wisconsin? They all lag behind the U.S. average for percentage of residents 25 or older with bachelor’s degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

And how about Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia? They’re among the states with the highest number of convictions of public officials in federal court from 1976 to 2010, according to the website FiveThirtyEight.com.

Do read the rest.

A new mother, a doctor no less, describes her experience as a patient in the Medical-Industrial Complex.

As a physician and health policy researcher, I thought I was pretty savvy about health care in the United States. But nothing prepared me for delivering a baby in the U.S. health care system.

Do read it.

Wendell Potter explains the scam. A nugget:

We’ve been told over and over again by politicians and flacks — including me in my previous career — that we have the world’s best health care system. As I explained in Deadly Spin, if you continue to believe that no other country could possibly have a better system than ours, it’s because of the overwhelmingly successful PR campaign my former colleagues and I carried out over decades.

The purpose of that campaign — a campaign that’s ongoing, by the way — is to protect the profitable status quo by obscuring an empirical truth: that when it comes to access to affordable health care, millions of Americans might as well be living in a third world country. And that’s still true today, more than four years after Obamacare became law.

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.