NEWS

The ailing economy is making people sicker - The Boston Globe

At Massachusetts General Hospital, patients whose blood pressure was in check just weeks ago now find it rocketing out of control. They blame the economy.

Pfizer to buy Wyeth, cut 8,000 jobs - AP

Pfizer Inc. is buying rival drugmaker Wyeth in a $68 billion deal that will increase its revenue by 50 percent, solidify its No. 1 rank in the troubled industry and transform it from a pure pharmaceutical company into a diversified health care giant.

Report: Obama Should Act Quickly on Health Overhaul - CQ

President Obama should act quickly if he hopes to pass wide-scale changes to the health care system, said two health care experts, whose suggestion is one of eight pieces of advice on enacting health overhaul published in a new edition of Health Affairs.

Republicans oppose broader children's health bill - AP

Republican lawmakers tried to slow momentum for expanding a children's health insurance program Monday by arguing that a bill in the Senate would draw about 2.4 million children away from private insurance into government-sponsored coverage.

Pelosi expects ‘major step’ on health reform in '09 - The Hill

A spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) predicted Monday that the House would “take a major step” toward comprehensive health reform this year, a comment that appears to contrast with a member of her leadership team.

A Premium Sucker Punch - Washington Post

Donna Carter hoped that her savings from lower gas prices would defray rising health insurance costs.

Yesterday on S-CSPAN, Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) said he's for incremental health care reform rather than the comprehensive reform favored by President Obama and the 178 Members of the 111th who've signed on to Health Care for America Now Congress . Clyburn said he didn't want "to go out and just bite something you can’t chew."

Think Progress's Wonk Room has video of the comment:

President Obama disagrees.

On December 11th, while nominating former Senator Tom Daschle to the position of Secretary of HHS, Obama said, "If we want to overcome our economic challenges, we must also finally address our health care challenge." He then pledged to pass comprehensive health care reform in 2009, a comment which Daschle echoed, saying, ""I hope to have the plan enacted by next year, and then it will take several years to implement."

And, during his inaugural address last week, President Obama warned against thinking too small in our plans to rebuild and strengthen America:

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

Throughout the Presidential campaign, where Obama spent 68% of his advertising time talking about health care, throughout the transition, and in his first moments as President, Barack Obama promised broad, comprehensive change, for our country in general and for health care specifically. Obviously, Representative Clyburn doesn't share that view.

If you agree with President Obama that big changes in our health care system are needed, and they are needed now in 2009, it's important for Clyburn to hear from you. Can you give him a quick call at (202) 225-3315 and tell him to support President Obama's pledge of comprehensive health care reform in 2009?

That phone call, if it happens today, will send a message to Clyburn that the country is ready for big change. This kind of rapid response is taken very seriously by Members of Congress. A few calls will clearly show we won't waver in our support for big health care reform in 2009.

Thanks for making the call!

The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee has put out legislative language for their version of an economic stimulus. As expected, the health components include increased Medicaid matching funds for states, subsidies to help the unemployed pick up COBRA coverage, and investment in health information technology. All of these are appropriate given the economic crisis: They will provide help and coverage to people losing insurance because of the recession and they will quickly increase government spending to stimulate the economy. But what makes the provisions particularly promising is that they represent a "first round" of health reform.

For example, a big problem in getting medical providers to move towards electronic record-keeping–which cuts down on medical errors and improves efficiency–is that they don't want to shoulder the cost. Now government will be bearing a lot of that cost. The increased Medicaid match for states will help prevent many of them from making proposed cuts in public programs–which, needless to say, is counter-productive at a time when we're trying to expand coverage.

The most exciting proposal that acts as a "down payment" on health reform is the provision that will allow states to expand Medicaid, temporarily, for unemployed adults. Many people think our public coverage programs cover the poor, but the truth is that they only cover some of the poor. Medicaid largely covers low-income children and parents, and the "aged, blind, and disabled." But there are many adults who don't have a child at home, who are not eligible for any public program-even if they are under the poverty level, which is $10,400/year for an individual, $14,000 for a couple. Sometimes called "medically indigent adults," they are left to whatever their county decides to provide in terms of a safety-net service.

Read more…

NEWS

In or Out of Network? - Miami Herald

Patients Get Nasty Surprises on Medical Bills: Patients Are Getting Hammered By Huge Unexpected Charges on Medical Bills, Particularly in the Tricky Area of What's in and Out of Network. Experts Say Consumers Need to Watch Their Bills Carefully and Fight When They See Something Wrong.

Obama backs health care reform - USA Today

President Barack Obama vowed during his campaign to expand access to health insurance and reform health care. Early indications suggest that, despite an ailing economy — or perhaps because of it — he intends to keep his promise.

Unlike most industries, health care still adding jobs - Dallas Morning News

Rosemary Hill used to earn more than $200,000 a year as an executive for an information systems company.  Rosemary Hill, a nurse in the bone marrow transfer unit at Baylor Medical Center, checks the vital signs of Dan Thornburg. Hill left a career as a highly paid information systems executive to become a nurse making not even a fourth of her previous salary.

Dodd Hears Anger, Frustration At Meeting On Health Care - The Hartford Courant

On the first day of a listening tour on health care, an issue pivotal to the new Congress and his own re-election, U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd got an earful Friday.

Priced out of health care - CM Life

For college students, having no health insurance can magnify other stresses in life.

Jobless Can't Afford to Extend Health Coverage - Wall Street Journal

Fewer than one in 10 jobless workers extends their former employer's medical coverage, a new study has found.

Rangel Will Overhaul Tax Code ‘Immediately’ After Health Care - Bloomberg

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said he will pursue tax reform only after overhauling the health-care system and said “there’s no question” both can be completed by the end of 2010.

BBC documentary takes on Obama's plans for American health care system - Raw Story

A January 19 episode of BBC One's Panorama, the world's longest running television documentary show, tackles the dismal state of health care in the United States, the lengths to which its estimated 45 million uninsured citizens will go to in pursuit of care, the pharmaceutical industry's rigged pricing against the American patient, and the insurance industry's efforts to deny care whenever possible.

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”  —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1966.

Towards the end of his life, Dr. King increasingly confronted the intersection of racial inequality and other forms of injustice, particularly economic inequality.  This intersection created a framework in which Dr. King’s lifelong pursuit of justice applied, quite directly, to the disparities in health care that were part of America in the late 1960s and remain with us today.  Notes from Dr. King’s staff and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), reveal that bringing attention to health care inequities was a goal not far from Dr. King’s mind.  In fact, Dr. King’s closest advisers considered staging a sit-in at a hospital in the D.C. area to make evident, in the words of one King advisor, the “thousands of people in our nation in need of medical services.”

Over forty years after Dr. King’s tragic death, America still has a long way to go when it comes to bridging inequalities in health care.  Disparities in health exist across the board.  In 2007, African Americans had a rate of new AIDS cases that was ten times higher than white Americans.  Inequalities between men and women also plague the system.  For example, a 2008 National Women’s Law Center report showed that women, on average, are charged higher premiums for health insurance on the individual market than their male counterparts. Even among women, Hispanic and Native American women were roughly three times as likely as white women to be uninsured in 2007.

Read more…

NEWS

More Americans Skipping Necessary Prescriptions, Survey Finds - New York Times

One in seven Americans under age 65 went without prescribed medicines in 2007 as drug costs spiraled upward in the United States, a nonprofit research group said on Thursday.

Divided We Fail tries to stay united - The Hill

Assembling the Divided We Fail coalition of business, labor and senior-citizens’ groups was no mean feat. Keeping it together could prove vital to the success of health reform.

Great Expectations — The Obama Administration and Health Care Reform - New England Journal of Medicine

Health care reform is back. For the first time since 1993, momentum is building for policies that would move the United States toward universal health insurance. President Barack Obama has made health care a central part of his domestic agenda, and key members of Congress have promised to introduce ambitious health care reform legislation in 2009. Groups long opposed to reform, including the insurance industry, are reportedly prepared to make a deal. There is thus growing sentiment that "the prospects for meaningful health care reform have never looked better."

So, we've got a new President.

We worked hard. We volunteered. We knocked on doors. We donated money. We elected him. Now the real work can begin.

Barack Obama was elected because we supported him against all conventional wisdom. And his agenda, not just health care for all but economic recovery, energy reforms, a new foreign policy, all of it, will never be passed unless the grassroots is there like it was during the campaign.

Keeping that level of engagement and effectiveness is going to be extremely difficult. Policy is messy. Compromises will happen. Congress moves slowly. It's much easier to get fired up and ready to go about November 4th than it is about a long series of policy and political maneuvers.

Health Care for America Now is doing its part to help keep people organized and engaged. Most of our resources are directed at our offices in 45 states, organizing on the ground to make change from the grassroots up. Our lead organizer in Pennsylvania, Mark Stier, is a great example:

NEWS

Obama Backs Health Care Reform - Washington Post

President Barack Obama vowed during his campaign to expand access to health insurance and reform health care. Early indications now suggest that, despite an ailing economy — or perhaps because of it — he is resolved to keep his promise.

Citizen Lobbyists - Forbes

Thank Janet Kavinoky, a lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for the passage in September of an $8 billion highway funding bill. Or, rather, a tip of the hard hat to Donald Shubert, president of the Connecticut Construction Industries Association, whom Kavinoky tapped for the job. Shubert has ties to the AFL-CIO, the Ironworkers Union and a dozen of the state's business leaders. In May he and 13 of them flew to Washington, D.C., where they sat down with all of Connecticut's seven lawmakers, including Senators Christopher Dodd and Joseph Lieberman. The delegation voted for the bill.

National Polls Show Significant Confidence in President Obama's Plans for U.S. Economy, Health Care - Kaiser Daily News

Most U.S. adults are optimistic about President Barack Obama's term, but believe it will take more than two years for him to improve the nation's health care system and the economy, two of the major issues he outlined during his presidential campaign, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, the Times reports. The telephone poll involved 1,112 adults who were surveyed between Jan. 11 and Jan. 15 and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points (Nagourney/Connelly, New York Times, 1/18).

Health Care Overhaul Still in ‘Happy Talk’ Stage - CQ

The health care debate in Congress this year is beginning with the ultimate in legislative low-hanging fruit: Expanding medical coverage of poor children through SCHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program — a bill President Bush vetoed twice but Barack Obama is eager to sign as soon as he settles into the Oval Office.

Growing Need for Medicaid Strains States - New York Times

Medicaid rolls are surging, by unprecedented rates in some states, as the recession tightens its grip on the economy and Americans lose their employer-sponsored health coverage along with their jobs.

Obama backers now set organizing sights on health-care reform - Philadelphia Daily News

JENEAL HOBBS, a 27-year-old social worker and self-described e-mail junkie, was pretty much untouched by political activism before she was zapped by the Barack Obama campaign.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are sick with ovarian cancer. Thankfully, you have good health insurance, are receiving excellent treatment, and expect to pay no more than a $3,000 deductible for the care you receive out-of-network. But then, in the midst of your recovery, you start receiving bills from your doctors— to the tune of more than $80,000.

This, as reported by the NY Times this past Tuesday, is what happened to Mary Jerome – a professor at Columbia University. Her subsequent complaints to New York Attorney General Cuomo’s office helped spur an investigation of “the puzzling gap between a doctor’s bill and what the insurer says it will cover.”

The culprit, as it turns out, is the database system the health insurance industry uses to determine how much of a medical bill is paid by the insurance company when a patient uses an out-of-network doctor. What the investigation uncovered, although unsurprising to those who place little trust in the insurance industry, is truly disturbing.

Read more…

A new report from the consulting firm Deloitte LLP shows that health care reform can indeed save money. A lot of money. Like half a trillion dollars:

U.S. health care spending could drop by half a trillion dollars over 10 years if policymakers make broad changes like adopting electronic prescriptions and relying on drugs and procedures proven to work best, consulting firm Deloitte LLP said on Thursday.

Deloitte issued its proposals and analysis of potential cost reductions less than a week before President-elect Barack Obama takes office promising a major overhaul of the U.S. health care system.

The details of Obama's health care plans have not yet been released. Deloitte offered its own approach that embraced several ideas that experts have considered.

Deloitte proposed $220 billion in new spending upfront over three years on efforts such as getting doctors to use e-prescribing and electronic medical records, as well as better coordination of patient care through primary-care doctors.

Deloitte sees net savings beginning in the sixth year and 10-year savings of $530 billion.

While e-prescriptions and other tenants of electronic medicine are uncontroversial policy proposals, comparative effectiveness research to find out what drugs and procedures work best for least cost has been resisted heavily by drug manufacturers and makers of medical devices. Indeed, drug makers have actively tried to sweep this kind of research under the rug:

Consider how Pfizer reacted when Cardura, a fourth drug that went head-to-head with diuretics in the Allhat trials, failed the test. Over the course of the study, Furberg & Co. discovered that “patients taking Cardura faced serious risks: they were almost twice as likely as those receiving the diuretic to require hospitalization for heart failure.” Alarmed that putting patients on Cardura would mean putting them in danger, the Allhat team stopped testing Cardura in 2000, shortly before the study formally ended.

Cardura’s manufacturer, Pfizer, was quick to move when it heard the bad buzz surrounding its product. “Rather than warn doctors that Cardura might not be suited for hypertension,” says the Times¸ “Pfizer circulated a memo to its sales representatives suggesting scripted responses they could use to reassure doctors that Cardura was safe…” The company also mobilized its sales staff to downplay Allhat’s findings: “[I]n an e-mail message unearthed in…court documents, a Pfizer sales executive boasted to colleagues that company employees had diverted some European doctors attending an American cardiology conference from hearing a presentation on the Allhat results and Cardura. ‘The good news,’ the message said, ‘is that they were quite brilliant in sending their key physicians to sightsee rather than hear Curt Furberg slam Pfizer once again!’”

Of course, drug makers don't want the public finding out some of their expensive drugs don't actually work, or work less well than tried-and-true medical procedures. And, as the Wonk Room points out, private insurance has little incentive to conduct or enforce comparative effectiveness research, because they pass the high cost of unneeded medicine on to their customers in the form of skyrocketing premiums.

So, to save that half a trillion dollars, we're going to need a health insurance plan that actually cares about cutting costs, and has a strong incentive to do so. The public insurance plan is just that vehicle. Without it, as we've clearly seen, costs can never be controlled.