Wendell Potter - The Health Care Industry's Stranglehold on Congress

Monday 21 November 2011

by: Wendell Potter, iWatch News [3] | Op-Ed

Special interests target the independent board that may be the last best hope for Medicare reform.

One of the reasons why Congress has been largely unable to make the American health care system more efficient and equitable is because of the stranglehold lobbyists for special interests have on the institution.

Whenever lawmakers consider any kind of meaningful reform, the proposed remedies inevitably create winners and losers. Physicians’ incomes most likely will be affected in some way, as will the profits of all the other major players: the hospitals, the drug companies, the medical device manufacturers, and the insurers, just to name a few. The list is long, and the platoons of highly paid and well-connected lobbyists who represent their interests comprise a large private army that conquered Capitol Hill years ago.

One has to wonder, then, how in the world Congress was able to include a provision in last year’s health care reform law to establish an independent board that would strip Congress of some of the authority it currently has — but rarely is able to exercise — over the Medicare program.

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Stephen Kemble - Why Competition Among Health Plans Can't Help Us

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-Competition-Among-Heal-by-Stephen-Kemble-111117-858.html

November 17, 2011 By Stephen Kemble Insurance is a system for managing financial risk. When a high percentage of a population has known risk, as the case with health insurance when so many have pre-existing conditions and risk factors, then competition does not reward better plans, it rewards avoiding covering or paying for the sick, undermining the whole purpose of health insurance. With or without with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the total national cost of U.S. health care is rising unsustainably, with an increasingly unaffordable share pushed onto patients.1,2 CMS projections of total national health expenditures show a rise from 17.8% of gross domestic product in 2010 to 21% in 2019 under the ACA, compared to 20.8% in 2019 under prior law, both far higher than any other country.2 Problems with access to care are widespread and increasing. Doctors and hospitals are seeing reimbursement cut while administrative burdens escalate. Unwarranted regional variations in health spending point to large amounts of money wasted on unnecessary care.3

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Speaking Out Against Mandatory Vaccination in NYC

Dean Baker - The Myth of the Wealthy Elderly

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Myth-of-the-Wealthy-El-by-Dean-Baker-111115-41.html

November 15, 2011 By Dean Baker As retirees age, rising Medicare premiums will be reducing the buying power of their Social Security check each year. And this is the median; half of all seniors will have less income than this to support themselves. The austerity gang seeking cuts to Social Security and Medicare has been vigorously promoting the myth that the elderly are an especially affluent and privileged group. Their argument is that because of their relative affluence, cuts to the programs upon which they depend is a simple matter of fairness. There were two reports released last week that call this view into question. The first was a report from the Census Bureau that used a new experimental poverty index. This index differed from the official measure in several ways; most importantly it includes the value of government non-cash benefits, like food stamps. It also adjusts for differences in costs by area and takes account of differences in health spending by age.

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Tim Mak - Going Backwards: Gallup Poll Shows Uninsured Adults Rising

Published on Saturday, November 12, 2011 by Politico

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/12-1

by Tim Mak

None of the components of President Obama’s health care law that have taken effect appear to be affecting insurance coverage of adults over 26, according to a new poll Friday.

The percentage of adults with no health insurance is the highest on record, with 17.3 percent of adults being uninsured in the third quarter of 2011, statistically tying the high set in the second quarter, Gallup found. Three years ago, in the third quarter of 2008, only 14.4 percent of adults lacked health insurance.

Gallup cautions, however, that the record high coincides with a methodological change that samples cell-phone only respondents, which tend to be younger and thus more likely to be uninsured. Thus, some of the increase in the figure could be linked to this change.

One part of Obama’s health care reform that has already drawn results is the change allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health care plan until they are 26. This has lead to an uninsured rate of only 24.2 percent for 18-25 year olds, down from 28 percent in mid-2010, according to an earlier Gallup poll.

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Julie Steenhuysen - Sick in U.S. More Likely to Skip Care Than Elsewhere

Edmonton Journal,  Thursday, November 10, 2011

 http://www.edmontonjournal.com/health/Sick+more+likely+skip+care+than+elsewhere/5681529/story.html

by Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO — Americans who have a chronic illness or serious health problems are more likely to struggle to pay their medical bills or have problems getting needed care than adults with similar problems in other high-income countries, a survey released Wednesday found.

The poll of more than 18,000 adults in the United States and 10 other high-income countries found that Americans were most likely to have problems getting needed care because of the cost, or to medical debt, according to data released by the Commonwealth Fund.

“Despite spending far more on health care than any other country, the United States practically stands alone when it comes to people with illness or chronic conditions having difficulty affording health care and paying medical bills,” Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis said in a statement.

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Deborah Zabarenko - Health cost of 6 U.S. climate disasters: $14 billion

Reuters, Mon, Nov 7 2011

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/07/us-climate-health-idUSTRE7A65SO20111107?type=GCA-GreenBusiness

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Deaths and health problems from floods, drought and other U.S. disasters related to climate change cost an estimated $14 billion over the last decade, researchers said on Monday.

"When extreme weather hits, we hear about the property damage and insurance costs," said Kim Knowlton, a senior scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council and a co-author of the study. "The healthcare costs never end up on the tab."

The study in the journal Health Affairs looked at the cost of human suffering and loss of life due to six disasters from 2000-2009.

"This in no way is going to capture all of the climate-related events that happened in the U.S. over that time period," Knowlton said. "At $14 billion, these numbers are big already."

To put this in context, 14 weather disasters in the United States so far this year have cost at least $14 billion, according to Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground website.

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Dave Zweifel - Health Care Solution is Simple: Single-Payer

Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)

by Dave Zweifel

The answer to the nation’s health care crisis is staring everyone in the face, yet as a country we continue to refuse to come to grips with it.

Late last month, the Wisconsin secretary of health services, Dennis Smith, held hearings to let people sound off about planned cuts to Wisconsin’s BadgerCare and Family Care programs. The state says it needs to reduce health care spending by some $554 million over the next two years, which is likely to leave tens of thousands of Wisconsin low-income citizens without health care coverage once again.

At around the same time Smith was holding his hearings, former Wisconsin governor and U.S. health secretary Tommy Thompson was telling a WisPolitics.com luncheon audience that American companies often find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because their health insurance costs are so much higher than those of companies in other countries.

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Gary Null PhD and Nancy Ashley VMD, MS - Gardasil: Does it Heal or Does it Kill?

The Gardasil vaccine against human papillomavirus has been much profiled in the news recently and the news isn’t good.  Despite continued incidents of serious, life-altering adverse reactions, including paralysis and death, and despite questionable efficacy and safety studies that allowed this vaccine to come to market in the first place, the push to force the Gardasil vaccine on our children has been relentless and seems to be picking up speed.   The following is a review of the more significant and far reaching stories that surfaced, mostly under the radar of the general public, during the past four weeks.

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Gary Null, Jeremy Stillman and Nancy Ashley - Vaccine Conspiracy: The CDC Caught Lying Again

A bombshell revelation coming out of an investigation by the drug safety group Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD) has rocked the foundation of a belief widely held by mainstream medicine – the idea that vaccines do not cause autism.  In a news release last Tuesday, CoMeD exposed a cover-up by authorities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and vaccine researchers who deliberately omitted critical data from a 2003 article on mercury and autism that was carried out in Denmark.  The conclusion of the article denied any causal relationship between the mercury-laden vaccine ingredient Thimerosal and autism.  However, documents obtained by CoMeD indicate that the authors of the article, with the full approval of the CDC, decided to leave out large quantities of data which, in fact, supported a strong link between Thimerosal and the incidence of autism.

The documents, which were acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), reveal correspondences between individuals at the CDC and scientists working on the Danish article which examined rates of autism in the country after a nationwide phasing out of all Thimerosal-containing vaccines in 1992.  The unearthed communications prove that the data collected during the study actually reflected an overall decrease in the incidence of autism since the phase-out was implemented.  However, the article’s authors chose to use only select data which bolstered the conclusion that rates of autism in Denmark had risen since 1992.  This decision was deemed entirely acceptable by officials at the CDC.

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