What this seems to be:
$40 miilion dollars is being spent by K-Street professionals to tell the American people that the disaster of the U.S. health care system is due to the for-profit private insurance companies. That is a good thing, right? Heck, when I first saw the print Ad I thought it WAS a single [...]

Health Care for America Now (HCAN) is pushing a superficially attractive health reform model that has a long record of failure – akin to prescribing a placebo for a serious illness when effective treatment is available. They would offer Americans a new public insurance plan and a menu of private ones, with subsidies for [...]

Women readers, get ready to fight. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Blue Cross Blue Shield of California has decided to charge women more for health care insurance than men. A California woman, Tova Hack, works part-time, and has to buy her own individual health care policy because her employer doesn’t provide health insurance [...]

Although we pay more and more each year for health insurance (average premium for a family of four now over $12,000), we get less and less for it. Insurers continue to take high profits first, leaving enrollees more vulnerable to high out-of-pocket costs for health care.
A 2007 study of small-group and individual insurance markets in [...]

There are many proposals for “reform” of the U.S. health care system out there.  For the newcomer it can be very confusing. Here are the four simple questions to ask of any health care proposal.

Is it Universal? Does it cover all people? This would seem to be pretty basic, insofar as all other developed countries do it.  But just [...]

Conservatives in government, free market stakeholders, and their lobbyists won a big one last week.  Even after the House gave overwhelming bipartisan support to the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (HR. 6331) by a vote of 355-59 (including 129 Republican votes), the Senate fell two votes short of the 60 votes needed to [...]

Access to health care is a complex matter, ranging from availability of health professionals in one’s community to many barriers to care, such as racial/ethnic, geographic, and literacy factors. But as the costs of health care surge ever higher, the financial barrier to care has clearly become the biggest impediment of all. Having insurance used [...]

The American Association of Health Plans (AHIP) is the national trade group for some 1,300 private health insurers, which collectively provide some kind of coverage for more than 200 million Americans. As the voice of industry, AHIP’s web site boldly describes its goals “to provide a unified voice for the health care financing industry, to [...]

Most of us have by now heard many indictments of private health insurance, from its inefficiencies and unaffordable costs to its profiteering, cherry picking, and avoiding coverage of those who most need insurance. What’s new and may be surprising to many people is this: despite its size and political power, it is a dying industry.
The [...]

As a primary care doctor, I live with one foot in the horse and buggy era and one in the silicon age. I spend most of my time talking to patients and wielding a stethoscope, and I also use the latest high tech gadgets. But the gadgetry is getting out of hand; its overuse threatens [...]