Just Do It

Paul Krugman's advice (which he knows will go unheeded) to the Democrats:

Bear in mind that the horrors of health insurance — outrageous premiums, coverage denied to those who need it most and dropped when you actually get sick — will get only worse if reform fails, and insurance companies know that they’re off the hook. And voters will blame politicians who, when they had a chance to do something, made excuses instead.

He Just Keeps Getting Better

Yet another reason to love Al Franken.


The hearing was on bankruptcies caused by medical bills.

Kerry Burns, a witness on the panel, testified that her son was treated for cystic fibrosis before he died while she fell into debt. "The collection calls were unrelenting, upwards of 30 calls a day," she said.

As part of the bankruptcy filing process, Burns has to undergo credit counseling, where she was asked how she could have avoided bankruptcy. She called the course "humiliating" and "a slap in the face," and to this day has not successfully filed for bankruptcy because she had not filled out the forms.

While [Sen. Sheldon] Whitehouse was quick to express his outrage at the process she was required to undergo, after watching her son die, [Sen. Jeff] Sessions appeared more accepting.

"When the government starts to regulate anything, including health care, you have rules," Sessions answered.
...

When Diana Furchtgott-Roth from the Hudson Institute attacked everything from the public option to the health bill that passed out of the Senate Finance Committee last week, Whitehouse remarked that she "veered across three lanes of traffic."

"Did you actually read the bill that is the subject of today's hearing?" he asked.

When Whitehouse asked her about the issue she had failed to focus on -- bankruptcy -- Furchtgott-Roth replied simply that the current system does a good job.

"Did it do a good job for Ms. Burns?" Whitehouse rebutted, visibly frustrated. Furchtgott-Roth simply replied that Burns had been in a bad situation.

Save the Insurance Companies

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Why I Am a Socialist

Today is a solemn anniversary for the country, but it's also an anniversary for me -- one that brings a mixture of emotions. A year ago this morning, I woke up with a headache and a curious gap in my eyesight. Several hours later, I was in the Stanford Hospital emergency room -- not a place you ever want to be -- and beginning a series of tests. The essential details of my experience are here, here, here, and here.

A year later, I'm about as back to normal as one ever gets from an experience like that. I still gulp a handful of pills (two antibiotics and a B6 tablet to counteract their side effects) every morning, just to be on the safe side. But I'm as active as I ever was (which is not very), don't tire as easily as I did a couple of months ago, and my eyesight has only a slight glitch in it. (Hard to describe. It's kind of like a little wrinkle in the peripheral vision. When I'm driving -- and yes, I drive carefully -- I have to keep scanning leftward because oncoming traffic sometimes disappears into the wrinkle.)

We still don't know what caused the abscess in my brain. It may have been tuberculosis (though I once doubted it) or nocardia. Whatever it was, the treatments -- the round-the-clock IVs, followed by the daily trip to outpatient infusion, followed by the pills -- seem to have worked. Well, one would hope three weeks in hospital, followed by two months in a nursing home, followed by nine months of medication would do something.

But the good thing is that all of this -- tens of thousands of dollars of surgery, doctor visits, MRIs, CTs, endoscopies, broncoscopies, nursing care, rehab therapy, IVs and infusions and pills -- was covered by my insurance: Medicare and an AARP supplemental policy. I'm a happy senior citizen, one who knows that he has benefited from a government program. I'm also aware that I have been paying for it for years through payroll deduction, and am still paying for it in smallish (by comparison with private insurance) monthly premiums.

Oh, sure, I have some gripes about Medicare, but they're minor ones. (For one thing, I could have had my round-the-clock infusions at home instead of having to stay in the nursing home, but Medicare doesn't pay for home treatment -- even though, given the cost of meals and other institutional overhead, it would probably save them some money.) The point is, it works -- and works well.

Which is why I'm so ardent about health care reform and so intolerably annoyed by the sound and fury that has been generated by the attempts to bring it about. Everyone deserves the kind of care and attention I have gotten for the past year, and anyone who says otherwise is a damn fool.

I Think I've Found a New Hero

Al Franken -- calm, cool, collected, and informed.

Why Barney Frank Is One of My Heroes

It's not just his putdown of the wingnut who asked why he was for "Nazi" health care.

The Man of Steel vs. Michael Steele?

(Click to enlarge)

Thanks to Oliver Willis.

It's About Time

I don't usually count on Time magazine (which we get because someone once gave us a gift subscription) for anything but conventional wisdom skewed to the right. But this short review of T.R. Reid's book about American health care put in a very few words what's wrong with it, and why reform is so damn essential. Boldface is mine:

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care By T.R. Reid; Penguin; 288 pages

The U.S. health-care system is in a remedial class by itself. In no other industrialized country do 20,000 people die each year because they can't afford to see a doctor; nowhere else do 700,000 a year go bankrupt because of their medical bills. When it comes to health-care policy, an economist tells T.R. Reid, the U.S. is the "bogeyman of the world." The question Reid poses, however, isn't, What are we doing wrong? It's, What are other countries doing right--and how can the U.S. learn from them? A Washington Post correspondent with a nagging shoulder injury from his Navy days, Reid traveled the world to see how other countries' health-care systems would treat him. From Germany to Canada to Taiwan, he finds several different models for success, all with one thing in common.

When considering whether a government has a moral obligation to provide access to health care for all its citizens, Reid notes, "every developed country except the United States has reached the same conclusion."

Scrap It and Start Over?

How American Health Care Killed My Father is a long and provocative article about the mess our system is in, and how currently proposed reform, even single-payer, won't fix it. A sample quote:

[H]ealth insurance is different from every other type of insurance. Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is. We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance. Most pregnancies are planned, and deliveries are predictable many months in advance, yet they’re financed the same way we finance fixing a car after a wreck—through an insurance claim.

R.I.P. Obamacare?

Has health care reform been swiftboated to death? It's sure beginning to look like it. Number-cruncher Nate Silver is worried, as is Paul Krugman. (I wish the usually estimable Krugman hadn't resorted to the "only time will tell" cliché, however.) John Cole comes out and says flatly, "health care reform is over." Of course, that's just the view out here in blogworld. Anyone in the real world care to talk me down from the ledge?

A Teachable Moment

Lawrence O'Donnell's interview with a town hall protester provided one of the most revealing moments in this whole foofaraw. He gets at an essential truth: Most of the protesters and tea-partyers are responding to a generalized angst. Many of them, like the young woman being interviewed, are clueless about what's at stake. All they know are slogans.

Disarmingly, O'Donnell admits that Medicare and Social Security are "socialism." Gasp! We on the left need to remember that ideas we take for granted are completely alien to a large part of the populace. And too long we have left the task of educating people to economic and political reality undone, allowing people to fall into the hands of the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Glenn Becks.

I'm Back

Well, actually, I haven't been anywhere. Except Facebook, which is where I've been doing a lot of posting and commenting lately. But I've decided that here is where I belong, especially in this long hot summer of our discontent with one another. I'm talking about the health care "debate." (Irony quotes intended.)

The thing that seems most obvious to me is that the Republicans are terrified -- and rightly so. They're terrified that the Democrats might actually produce a health care bill that will work -- lower costs, increase coverage. And if they do that, the GOP game is over. People love the benefits -- Social Security, Medicare -- that the Dems provided them over fierce Repub opposition.

So we get lots of lies about "death panels" and mandatory sex-change operations and a lot of other hooey. Which leads to noisy mobs shouting down one another. Some of the people shouting at these town halls are shills -- planted there by well-funded groups opposed to any progressive legislation. But some of them are genuinely scared people, whom no amount of rational argument will assuage. I only hope when the shouting is over that those who inspired the shouting, who lied and distorted, will be exposed to the scorn they deserve.

Starting with Newt Gingrich.

And Chuck Grassley.

Unhealthy

I fell into a coverage gap. The prescription coverage I had from my former employer ended on November 30, and I couldn't pick up Medicare prescription coverage until January 1. But I ran out of my meds -- a generic anti-anxiety drug -- last week and had to pay full price. One hundred seventy-seven dollars. For sixty little pills.

I look at these small white pills and think: Each one of you costs $2.95.

Somebody is making out like a bandit on this deal.

A Sick System

I knew that there was a health-care crisis, and as an old lefty I've always believed that the government should do something about it.

But it's never been a matter of personal urgency. I've always had fully paid health insurance. But now, having retired, I have to deal with plans and fees and deductibles and limits and all the other headaches that millions of people have been dealing with.

Even with Medicare, there are choices to be made on prescription drug plans and supplemental coverage. And they cost money, and involve "gaps" and limits and all sorts of headache-inducing stuff, largely because Congress has kowtowed to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Even so, it's a lot easier than dealing directly with insurance companies.

What kind of "health care" system allows a teenage girl to die while waiting for a liver transplant? You probably read the story: Nataline Sarkysian's doctors said she needed a liver transplant, but her insurer, CIGNA, declined to pay for it because the surgery was "experimental" and because there was no guarantee that it would be effective. And while the family was appealing the decision, she died.

Why is health care less important than highways, or schools, or police forces, or fire departments? We trust the government to use our taxes to fund and manage these things. Why are we so reluctant to let the government take charge of seeing to it that Americans have guaranteed access to the health care they need? If we belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, why is "life" being neglected?

Why is a governmental bureaucracy supposedly less efficient than a corporate bureaucracy? The standard conservative argument against universal health care is that it's too important to be left to bureaucrats. But it was a corporate bureaucracy that determined Nataline Sarkisyan's fate -- on the basis not of the patient's welfare but of the company's profits. My dealings with the government's health bureaucracy -- Social Security and Medicare -- have been both efficient and helpful. My dealings with insurance company bureaucracies? Not so much.