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, [...]
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 [...]
To be frank, I share neither the euphoria nor the enthusiasm that seem to surround the rush to “reform” health care. Of course, the optimistic aura surrounding Obama’s push for reform is largely media induced, leaving us little hope that we’ll see or read anything to detract from what’s going on.
My position is that there [...]
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) [...]
A group calling itself Physicians for National Health Program (PNHP) has issued a press release revealing the failure of Hillarycare as it was resurrected in Massachusetts by former Governor Mitt Romney (who somehow has now seen the light of his transgressions from Republican orthodoxy).
Costs are up, services are hard to get, the state is going [...]
