Health Care Reform 2.0

In an emotional town hall in suburban Annandale, VA today, President Obama spoke with Americans who shared their nightmarish experiences with the existing health insurance industry. In pledging his commitment to health care reform, Obama spoke favorably of the so-called public option, a government-sponsored health care plan that would operate in competition with private insurance.  [...]

The Arc of the Journal

Efforts to reform the nation’s ailing health system – or non-system as it were – are dominating news headlines.  Yet, if you rely on the Albuquerque Journal (the state and city’s “paper of record”), you’d probably have a rather skewed notion of the parameters of the health care debate. Turns out I’m not the only [...]

Not Really Insuring Anything

For a long time, tobacco companies denied the fact that smoking actually increased the chances one could develop cancer, emphysema, lung disease and other sorts of upper respiratory afflictions.  Tobacco companies also spent the better part of two decades trying their best to convince the public and Congress that nicotine was not addictive. Their public [...]

Obama and New Mexico’s Health Care Authority

It is clear Obama is going to move aggressively on health care reform, including it as a cornerstone of his economic recovery package. Kevin Sack, in his op-ed entitled, “Necessary Medicine?” in this Sunday’s New York Times, cites Obama himself: To broaden support for his plan — whatever it ends up being — he [Obama] [...]

All About the Health Care

Ezra nails it. U.S. budget deficits over the next 50 years, assuming no change in current policy, will absolutely explode. Not because of Social Security, not be cause of Medicare – because of health care. If there is not a concerted effort to address the booming cost of health care, then we can pretty much [...]

McCain: Banking system model for health care reform

Paul Krugman reports on Senator McCain’s views on health care reform. Here’s what McCain said this month in the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less [...]

Pricing Americans Out

We’ve all felt a big financial squeeze over the past year. But, a recent study from the Commonwealth Fund crystalizes the role skyrocketing insurance costs play in the big squeeze.

Bearing the Brunt

The average cost of health insurance premiums has nearly doubled since 2000. While corporations and large businesses have been best equipped to weather the insurance premium storm, small businesses have been abandoned, left to fend for themselves on an increasingly slanted playing field. Small business is the backbone of our economy, providing jobs and fulfilling [...]

Dealing with “the Health Insurance Mafia”

I love mystery novels. One of the authors I’ll read on occasion is Jonathan Kellerman. But the op-ed he published in the Wall Street Journal last week was far from mysterious. His rip-roaring piece (The Health Insurance Mafia) savaged the health insurance industry as surely as his fictional villains savage their prey. Here’s just one [...]

Health Care: Mandate Conundrum

The private heath care system in the United States is far from perfect-covering some, under-covering others and leaving millions to fend for themselves. Perhaps the biggest challenge in dealing with the looming health care crisis is how to make our way out of a fragmented system and into a system of universal coverage. An answer [...]