Oh no! Not another commentary on the significance of the Massachusetts special election for U.S. Senator. This one will be brief, and include input from the current NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey.

Remember the managed care revolution in the latter part of the last century? Remember how angry everyone became over the interventions designed to control spending by preventing patents from having timely access to care?

The speech of Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Proper Sense of Priorities,” was, as the title states, a speech on the proper sense of priorities. As a central theme he expressed his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

This week medical students and other health professional students and colleagues marched on Sacramento in support of Sen. Mark Leno’s SB 810, a reintroduction of Sen. Sheila Kuehl’s single payer bill that was passed and vetoed twice in prior legislative sessions.

Since the numbers and policy details in the final reform legislation have not yet been released, the results presented here by Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute may be modified, but unchanged will be the conclusion that the complex, jerry-rigged method of paying for health care premiums will not eliminate inequities.

This is not a simple Gotcha! The largest private insurers in the nation have been caught red-handed, secretly passing funds through their lobby organization, AHIP, to the United States Chamber of Commerce to help fund the Chamber’s advertising campaign opposing the reform proposal currently before Congress.

Amongst the biggest winners for the bonus paydays are the investment bankers specializing in health care.

This tempering of the contingencies attached to Pfizer’s grant to Stanford’s continuing medical education program (CME) seems like a very small anecdote in the overall picture of health care reform, but it has greater significance than would appear at first blush.

What is the deal on the excise tax on high-premium “Cadillac” health plans, and why is President Obama pushing this tax so vigorously in the final stages of enacting health care reform?

Some of us were very disappointed when politicians rejected, up front, the administrative simplification of the single payer model of an improved Medicare for everyone. Nevertheless, in the decision to expand the role of private insurance, Congress still had the opportunity to create a rational system of social insurance which would have included important concepts such as community rating and risk equalization.