Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Signing health reform into law
And there it is - officially the law of the land:
Television networks actually broke their daytime coverage to show the historic signing. Vice President Biden is reputed to have added, "This is a big f$%king deal" - seriously! (no s^!t, Joe.)
There was a moment yesterday of well-deserved recognition for Speaker Pelosi, who has cemented her place in the ranks of the greatest Speakers of the House in history:
And the Republicans held a press conference of their own today:
heh.
Also, The Republicans have officially introduced legislation to repeal the health reform. That legislation reads, in full,
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. REPEAL OF PPACA.
Effective as of the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, such Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.
Dante at Daily Kos summarizes the consequences of such a repeal-health-reform bill should it ever pass:
- Make a whole ton of young voters ineligible to be on their parents' insurance plans.
- Allow health insurers to commit rescission of policyholders at any time.
- Allow health insurers to deny coverage to anyone, including children, based on pre-existing conditions.
- Allow health insurers to charge women higher rates simply because they're women.
good luck with that!
Labels: health care, healthcare
Victory Hug
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Do doctors oppose health care reform?
Conservative opponents to health reform have been pushing a recent poll ostenibly conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine which claims that doctors are indeed opposed to health reform. This even got play on Fox News by Bill O'Reilly a couple days ago:
This seems to contradict an earlier poll by NEJM that found that doctors actually did support health care reform, including both public and private options, by an overwhelming majority of 69%. In fact, that NEJM poll found that support dropped to only 27% when the public option was removedn and only private options remained.
So what's the deal with this new NEJM poll? Well, as it turns out, it wasn't actually by NEJM - but rather by a physician recruitment firm, The Medicus Firm, and published in Recruiting Physicians Today, a free advertiser newsletter dedicated to physician employment headhunting. NEJM strongly distanced itself from any affiliation with this poll:
Media Matters for America contacted the New England Journal of Medicine, which confirmed it neither conducted nor published the "survey."
NEJM spokesperson Jennifer Zeis told Media Matters that the study had "nothing to do with the New England Journal of Medicine's original research." She also made clear that the study "was not published by the New England Journal of Medicine," and said that "we are taking steps to clarify the source of the survey."
The survey - published on The Medicus Firm's website - was not a conducted using rigorous polling methodology, but instead on email from a marketing database:
"The survey sample was randomly selected from a physician database of thousands. The database has been built over the past eight years by The Medicus Firm (formerly Medicus Partners and The MD Firm) from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, public directories, purchased lists, practice inquiries, training programs, and direct mail responses. The survey was conducted via emails sent directly to physicians."
In addition to the statement given to Media Matters by NEJM, they have also posted this on their own website to emphasize that they had nothing to do with this survey:
Recruiting Physicians Today is a free advertiser newsletter published by the Worldwide Advertising Sales and Marketing Department in the publishing division of the Massachusetts Medical Society... The Medicus Firm, a national physician search firm based in Dallas and Atlanta, published the results of a survey they conducted with 1,000 physicians regarding their attitudes toward health reform. To read their survey results at The Medicus Firm website, click here.
The opinions expressed in the article linked to above represent those of The Medicus Firm only. That article does not represent the opinions of the New England Journal of Medicine or the Massachusetts Medical Society.
So, in summary: NEJM actually scientifically polled doctors via mail and found support for reform. A marketing firm involved in physician recruiting, did an email survey using a (totally unscientific) marketing database that found a lack of support. But even in that survey, Medicus notes:
It's probably not likely that nearly half of the nation's physicians will suddenly quit practicing at once... Skeptics may suspect that physicians exaggerate their intent to leave medicine due to health reform. Some experts point to the malpractice crisis of years ago, when many doctors also expressed a desire to leave medicine. Some did quit; many did not.
(...) Do physicians feel that health reform is necessary? The survey indicates that doctors do want change. Only a very small portion of respondents - about four percent - feel that no reform is needed.
Yes, there probably are a lot of physicians that are nervous about reform - especially if those physicians are misinformed about what it will entail. But reliable polling of physicians still shows broad support for reform, because it's the doctors on the front lines who see the damage done every day by the unsustainable course we are on. This is why the American medical Association continues to support reform this time around, despite its past opposition.
Incidentally, this is a perfect example of how Fox News misinforms its readers. Will Fox run a corretion? Doubtful. Meanwhile, NPR covered the authentic NEJM poll - so which news source gives you "fair and balanced" news? You decide.
Related: From DailyKos, here's a video that sums up the episode:
Labels: health care, healthcare
Thursday, March 11, 2010
forget the public option - I want Medicare
The public option is almost assuredly not going to be in the final package for health reform, and that's a good thing because it's existence imperils passage of this historic and incredibly progressive legislation. It represents a huge - and long overdue - leftwards shift for American social policy, despite the public option's absence. And note again that the PO would not have been available to everyone anyway, so how progressive was it really?
The ultimate progressive health reform would have been single-payer insurance, but that was taken off the table (with good reason) by President Obama. However, since Medicare is already a single-payer system, it's possible to leverage that existing system for creating a "single payer option" which would not be as disruptive as true single payer, would provide a more genuinely public option than the public option, and possibly even help reduce structural deficits. That would simply be to allow people under age 65 to "buy-in" to Medicare.
Think about this. Medicare caters to people over 65, whose medical expenses cost more than young peoples'. By allowing yong people to buy in, who presumably will have less demands on payouts due to better health, then the financial situation of Medicare actually improves.
And legislation to achieve Medicare buy-in is quite a simple change, which can exist separate from the comprehensive (and still necessary) reform in the broader health care package. In fact it's already been introduced to the House by Rep Alan Grayson - clocking in at only 4 pages.
In fact, there's an online petition by Rep Grayson to encourage Speaker Pelosi to bring the Medicare buy-in to a vote - just go to WeWantMedicare.com to sign it.
Labels: health care, healthcare
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About Nation-Building
Nation-Building was founded by Aziz Poonawalla in August 2002 under the name Dean Nation. Dean Nation was the very first weblog devoted to a presidential candidate, Howard Dean, and became the vanguard of the Dean netroot phenomenon, raising over $40,000 for the Dean campaign, pioneering the use of Meetup, and enjoying the attention of the campaign itself, with Joe Trippi a regular reader (and sometime commentor). Howard Dean himself even left a comment once. Dean Nation was a group weblog effort and counts among its alumni many of the progressive blogsphere's leading talent including Jerome Armstrong, Matthew Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. After the election in 2004, the blog refocused onto the theme of "purple politics", formally changing its name to Nation-Building in June 2006. The primary focus of the blog is on articulating purple-state policy at home and pragmatic liberal interventionism abroad.
