Drug manufacturer Pfizer has launched a program called Maintain to provide free prescription drugs to laid-off Americans who lack insurance. Powerhouse drugs like Lipitor, Norvasc, Caduet and, yes, Viagra, are on the list, though you might be hard pressed to make a medical necessity case for the latter.
Cynics will counter that it’s all “great PR,” [...]
I found this great graph on a site called The Glittering Eye that shows exactly what will happen to costs when the public option takes over. Note how the U.S. costs for health care are stable and relatively equal to other countries up to the age of 65 when the current public option, Medicare, kicks [...]
Read the rest of this entry »It was big news when Wal-Mart came out this week in favor of an employer mandate for health care, meaning that all employers (unless exempted by size) would have to provide health care for their workers or pay a tax to the government.
Not only did Wal-Mart endorse the employer mandate now under discussion in Congress, [...]
Sir Luke Fildes lost his eldest son Phillip on Christmas Eve 1877 while a doctor spent a compassionate vigil at the child’s side. In commemoration, Sir Fildes painted “The Doctor” (above) in 1891 to depict “the physician in our time.”
This same painting was used by the American Medical Association (AMA) in 1949 to stop [...]
I’ve shamelessly stolen the graph below that shows the differences of opinion between the public and the so-called experts on how well, or poorly, our health care system is performing–and why.
I took it from the Kaiser Family Foundation Web site and the article by Drew Altman, Ph.D., entitled “Pulling It Together”:
This past week saw Ted Kennedy and his Senate Committee on Health (and a zillion other things) issue a paper on how the Massachusetts Senator envisions America’s new health care system. Now, his counterpart over in Senate Finance, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, has joined the fray with his own paper on the subject.
Actually, there’s [...]
The British organization going by the acronym of NICE is anything but when it comes to its role in policing health care in the United Kingdom. It routinely denies the use of drugs that the United States and European nations rely on to prolong and save lives from chronic diseases such as cancer.
NICE stands for [...]
This comment by an emergency room physician is so juicy and right on that I just have to reprint it here from another blog–sorry about that, blogger, but I did give you a backlink:
Your reader’s response to Megan got a lot closer to the core of the problem with healthcare costs. I am a [...]
Things in the nation’s capital get curiouser and curiouser everyday for those who pay attention to what’s being said and done (and who aren’t the ones actually doing the doings and saying the sayings and those who are supposed to report on them in the Fourth Estate).
First, Senator Kent Conrad (D.-N.D.), chairman of the Budget [...]
Two admittedly left-leaning columnists, a married couple (he a pollster, she a lawyer), have produced a comparison of polling results then and now. “Then” refers to the Hillarycare hubbub in 1993-1994, and “now” refers to the Obamacare hubbub in 2009-?.
Results are a bit different than you would expect if you listen to or read what [...]
