Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

We started with what to do if your medical spa doesn't have any Facebook fans. But 'content' that your patients want is what will drive readership.

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One issue has generated little discussion during the heated health care reform debate: whether states should have the right to develop their own approaches to universal coverage.

The Health Security for New Mexicans Campaign wants to see language included in the national proposal that gives states flexibility to develop their own approaches to solving rising health care costs and growing numbers of uninsured.

The focus of current health care reform proposals is to create “insurance market exchanges.” These one-stop-shopping insurance exchanges must offer consumers -- primarily the uninsured -- choices of different insurance products, including some type of public option. A less than robust public option is in the proposal passed by the House of Representatives. The Senate is in the process of negotiating an alternative to the House version.

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Back in June, Atul Gawande, a Harvard trained surgeon, published a riveting article in the New Yorker about the physician community in McAllen Texas. If ever an article was strategically timed to influence the nation’s health policy debate, this was the one. His story was accompanied by a graphic showing a patient as an ATM machine. President Obama read it and put it on his staff’s reading list. Yet, it’s depressing how little impact Atul’s article has had on health reform.

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In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Norbert Gleicher suggests that expert panels won't improve health care because the the quality of the research on which they would base their physician practice guidelines is not reliable. Instead, he suggests that our system can self-correct when experts lead us astray. He asserts that we have a "well working free market of ideas in health care, where effective therapies can rise to the surface and win out."

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Should we incent or requireproviders to prescribepatient decision aids?Should we incent or requireconsumersto usepatient decision aids?

Overtreatment is the most celebrated cause of runaway health care costs, but we shouldn’t blame the doctors. The fee-for-service system sets them up for overtreatment. First, they have been taught that offering all possible cures to every patient is good medicine. Second, malpractice law pushes them toward offering more testing and services, not less. And third, they generally get paid more when they do more. It’s hard to buck a triple-threat system like that without a little help from the patient. Fortunately, it’s not that hard for patients to provide that difference.

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In 2008, the number of uninsured children in the United States hit the lowest level in two decades. If Congress weren’t in the middle of a fierce debate on health reform, there would be time for everyone to celebrate a remarkable achievement and maybe even pause to reflect on how it was accomplished.

To paraphrase David Byrne of the Talking Heads: “We might ask ourselves, how did we get here?” We got here with federal fiscal support, leadership, state ingenuity and a willingness to make a sustained effort to address the issue of uninsured children.
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The one on the left one protesting against the extension of health care to the uninsured at Sen Arlen Specter's townhall meeting? Or the one on the right--some of the 1500 un and underinsured queuing for 2 days for care in inner-city Los Angeles (both photos from NY Times)

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Depending on who you listen to, health care reform in Washington is either closer to reality than it has ever been, or it’s on life support. Competing ideas are all over the map in terms of how health care should be delivered in America, and how we should pay the tab. About the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that the current system doesn’t work, and that we need to get something - anything - done.

But with all the energy and effort going into reform, getting “anything done” isn’t good enough. This is a chance to change the core values of our health care system to deliver access to high quality, low cost care. It’s time to “invest” in the health of our nation. We can’t settle for anything less.

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Goldman took $13 billion of taxpayers money from AIG bailout—$13 billion which kept it alive. And it’s now back making huge profits gambling on the markets and paying out huge bonuses.

Thisis causing notice. Matt Tabibi wrote a wonderful article in Rolling Stone blaming Goldman for the majority of the fraud (OK, legal fraud) in the dotcom stock boom, the oil price spike,the mortgage boom & the upcoming cap & trade boom. A little taster on his blog here. Paul Krugman says essentially the same thing in his column today. And for the kiss of humorous death, here’s Andy Borowitz’ column about Goldman agreeing to take over the US Treasury—after all it’s already happened.

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Merrill Goozner has been writing about economics and health care for many years. The former chief economics correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Merrill has written for a long list of publications including the New York Times, The American Prospect and The Washington Post. Until March of 2009, Merrill directed the Integrity in Science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. His first book, "The $800 Million Dollar Pill - The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs " (University of California Press, 2004) won acclaim from critics for its treatment of the issues facing the health care system and the pharmaceutical industry in particular. You can read more pieces by Merrill at Gooznews.com,where this post first appeared.
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