The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on June 28 published a Final Rule in the Federal Register implementing provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The provisions were dubbed "The Patient’s Bill of Rights" by the agency.
This Final Rule takes effect Sept. 23, but it breaks little ground from the sweeping [...]
The National Restaurant Association saw it as a "devil we know" over a bunch of pending state regulations that were "devils we don’t know," so Obamacare–the recent health care reform package–includes a provision for chain restaurants to post calorie counts and nutritional information for their menu items.
Now, as with other federal laws and regulations, states [...]
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 »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 [...]
As I noted in a previous posting, our current health care delivery system logs in as a $7,000-per-person-per-year behemoth. And I mean per all 300 million of us. (Do the math: $2.1 trillion divided by 300 mil.)
That’s why I get a good laugh everytime I read the results of a new survey. The one I [...]
A group going by the name of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) has solved the Riddle of the (Health Care) Sphinx, or so it proclaims.
The PDA folk claim that, by just extending Medicare to all Americans (thereby jettisoning, one would presume, all other current health care delivery systems), the country could–bugles blaring, drums rolling–create 2,613,495 [...]
If you’re been following the ongoing cyber-debates about how to reform health care, you’ve no doubt run into a lot of wishful thinking, as in, “If the government pays for health care, then it’s free.”
Wrong for all kinds of obvious reasons, most notable of which is that either you or your employer is going to [...]
I found this interesting. It was on some far-left (the author called himself progressive, but he was way off the spectrum) blog, and it’s a list of who’s received the most in campaign donations from the insurance industry, to wit:
John McCain (R-AZ) $2,799,156
Barack Obama (D-IL) $2,184,670
Chris Dodd (D-CT) $2,138,446
Earl Pomeroy (Blue Dog-ND) $1,735,356
Charlie Rangel (D-NY) [...]
Recently, I wrote about a fresh, holistic approach to health care that could well serve as the basis for a real reform effort. However, more likely what will happen is the Feds will copy the Massachusetts model for health care reform–and get it all wrong.
The problem with all announced reform plans is that the [...]
One of the Google Alerts to which I subscribe is “health care reform,” which seems to offer the liveliest discussion of late of any topic I subscribe to.
For obvious reasons, of course, what with our incoming president putting health care on the top burner (right below economic stimulus, I would imagine).
Everyone in what [...]
