Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

When Obama takes office in January, the economy will be his first priority, followed by the war in Iraq. Health care will follow as his next major issue to address.

What will he do?

I imagine he'll take a phased approach to ensuring all Americans have access to health care. Given the change management needed to accomplish this, it will take a while.

However, Health care Information Technology has broad bipartisan support and is his best strategy to reduce health care costs, reimburse providers for quality instead of quantity, and to ensure coordination of care. Here are my predictions for health care IT in the first year of the Obama administration:

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With 258 House and 57 Senate Democrats, it's almost certain that major health reform will be passed, right?

Actually, that was the number of Democrats Bill Clinton started off with in 1993 and we know what happened to health care reform in that Congress.

With similar Democratic majorities, I do not expect a major health care reform bill like the one President-Elect Barack Obama called for during the campaign--in 2009 or 2010.

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Continuing his series of interviews about the business care for Health 2.0, here Scott Shreeve interviews Anna-Lisa Silvestre, the VP of Online Services for Kaiser Permanente.

SS: Anna-Lisa, nice to meet you. Tell me a little about your background?

AL: I started out with Kaiser Permanente 23 years ago as a health educator. I was fortunate to be able to transition into the interactive technology unit that was created in the mid 1990’s. We had a singular focus on developing online capabilities back in the good old HTML days. However, things have dramatically changed since then and we now have over 2.5M members who have activated an online account; 60% of those users signed on two or more times last year.

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Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, she is fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of the increasingly influential HealthBeat blog, one of our favorite health care reads, where this piece first appeared.

Hat tip to Kevin M.D. for calling my attention to “The Covert Rationing Blog,” where Dr. Rich offers a concise summary of the dilemma we face as we move toward a consensus that health care is not a privilege, but something that every human being should have. (One can call that a “right” or a “moral obligation that a civilized society has to provide health care to everyone.”)

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President-Elect Obama, and about every candidate for Congress, has said he wants to change the partisan tone in Washington. Obama, the Democratic Congressional leadership, and the Republicans have a terrific opportunity to do just that on health care when they all come to Washington early next year.

As I posted earlier, I do not believe there is any chance we can see the enactment of the comprehensive Obama health plan in the near term.

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Now that the results are in and the United States has officially elected Barack Obama as its next president, what does that mean to you and what will that mean for health care in America?

After nearly two years of campaigns, countless pages of material written about Obama's health care plan and the possibility of reform, the U.S. has elected a Democrat as president and put Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

What do you predict the next four years will bring?

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Though this is (sadly) not one of Patrick S. O'Donnell's bibs, this helpful list of texts on social inequalities in health was compiled by a participant on the Spirit of 1848 listserv, so I thought I'd reproduce it here for MH Blog readers. No claims that it is exhaustive, of course:

Heyman, J., Hertzman, C., Barer, M. L., & Evans, R. G. (2006). Healthier Societies. From Analysis to Action. New York: NY, Oxford University press.Amick, B. J., (more...)

Note: This post first appeared at Goozner's blog, Gooznews.

A year ago, health care held a solid lead in the polls as the number one concern of the American people. But by the time the Iowa caucuses closed, and Barack Obama surged to his unexpected win, it had been supplanted by the economy, a changing reality I noted in this New Year's Day post.

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For a variety of reasons, I do not wade into express talk of politics here on MH Blog, though that surely is not because I deem it irrelevant to the medical humanities. As Deborah Stone argues persuasively, politics and policy are deeply, fundamentally, and inherently connected. (So too is politics and public health, for that matter).

In spite of my choice to eschew talk of politics per se, it would be absurd to permit the presidential election to pass by without noting it here, so let me offer my own congratulations to President-Elect Obama.

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We know the name of the 44th President of the United States: Barack Obama. As the next President's supporter Oprah Winfrey is known to ask, "What do you know for sure?" When it comes to health, there are a few things we know about a President Obama.

First and foremost, addressing challenges in U.S. health care will require a multi-pronged strategy which brings stakeholders together. The key health-aches to address will be:

Covering the uninsuredStemming rising health care costsWiring the health information infrastructure and getting electronic health records into medical practiceFunding what works, and de-funding what doesn'tEnsuring an innovative health discovery and commercialization environment.

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