Healthcare

Maternal Mortality Is Rising in the US as It Declines Everywhere Else PBS Newshour has broadcast several reports on this topic: “What’s behind America’s rising maternal mortality rate?” (May 14, 2017) and “Why are more American women dying after childbirth?” (August 17, 2017) To provide context see the chart  below that displays --->> read more -->>

 An American Sickness: how healthcare became big business and how you can take it back by Elisabeth Rosenthal (Penguin Press, 2017) is both important and disappointing. Part I: History of the Present Illness and Review of Systems The first 238 pages are a comprehensive review of the machinery of our --->> read more -->>

The New York Times has a piece this Sunday (7/30/17) by the well-known former Bush II economics advisor Greg Mankiw, “Why Healthcare Policy Is So Hard”. The article broadly acknowledges what every other developed country has recognized for decades, healthcare is not a good candidate for market control. Interesting that --->> read more -->>

A consistent chattering point in American discussions of healthcare is the claim that if we can only bring transparency and competition to healthcare we will drive prices down and bring sanity to healthcare. The rest of the world knows that this is not the answer but we seem to remain --->> read more -->>

A brief review of how the so-called moderates and the fundamentalist right wing of the Republican Party are reacting to the Senates healthcare bill demonstrates how fundamentally vicious and immoral the whole party is. Though facts may be out of style lets just take note that we live in one --->> read more -->>

from the New York Times an article that covers some earlier history of the US healthcare industry. How Did Health Care Get to Be Such a Mess? By CHRISTY FORD CHAPIN “The problem with American health care is not the care. It’s the insurance. Both parties have stumbled to enact comprehensive health --->> read more -->>

Adam Davidson writing today in The New Yorker offered us “A BIPARTISAN WAY TO IMPROVE MEDICAL CARE – A straightforward change would save money and improve health. So why isn’t Congress talking about it?” This is an astonishingly naive misleading bit of chatter about healthcare. Davidson summarizes William S. Jevons, --->> read more -->>

Today I received an email from my Congressman, John Faso, concerning the proposed American Health Care Act. It included a link to a Republican website that speaks to their proposed legislation and a link to the the actual legislation. Asking me to read the legislation is insulting because though I --->> read more -->>

The rhetoric about our health care system continues to center around market religions of one sort or another. For all of the blathering about “Obamacare” taking us over the edge into the territory of socialized medicine, it remains, like it’s progenitor dreamed up by Romney while governor of Massachusetts, a --->> read more -->>

I don’t generally pause long over the editorials in the NY Times. This morning’s caught my eye. As a recent state resident I watched the debate closely and supported the single payer approach. Since then the results have been interesting and as noted in the Time’s editorial generally good. Here --->> read more -->>