On Monday October 5th, Drs. Margaret Flowers and Paul Hochfeld led a delegation of 15 physicians and nurses to the White House gate. The occasion was a Rose Garden ceremony with over 100 physicians in white coats invited, a photo-op to showcase support among doctors for the President’s effort at health reform. The single-payer delegation [...]

I have requested that this letter from the Harvard Medical School (Class of 1955) be posted on our blog. I wanted to call attention to this letter even though it doesn’t explicitly support single payer, because many of the signers are strong single payer advocates. The signers include significant leaders in medicine – chairmen of [...]

by Kip Sullivan, JD October 2, 2009 Douglas W. Elmendorf Congressional Budget Office US Congress Washington, DC 20515-6925 Dear Mr. Elmendorf: I write to ask for information about the methodology the CBO used to analyze the impact of the public plan (“public option”) in the Affordable Health Choices Act (drafted by the Senate health committee) [...]

By Kip Sullivan, JD Advocates of a “public option” have been extremely critical of the health insurance cooperatives proposed by Sen. Kent Conrad last June and incorporated in the draft legislation released by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus on September 16. “Option” advocates claim the co-ops either will not survive or will be so [...]

We have seen this coming for many weeks, but the release of the Baucus plan in recent days by the Senate Finance Committee, without any Republican support within the Gang of Six, leaves no more doubt about Republican intentions or votes on health care reform. House Republicans have already been clear in their total opposition [...]

Americans are dying at a faster rate — 1 every 12 minutes, 5 an hour, 120 a day, 45,000 a year — not from war or natural disaster, but from lack of health insurance. That’s the stunning finding of a study published today in the American Journal of Public Health by leading researchers at Harvard [...]

Medicare has long been a flashpoint generating intense disagreement across party lines over the role of private markets versus that of government. Republicans have fought against Medicare from the very beginning. They bitterly opposed it in various committees in both houses of Congress in 1964 -1965. But they relented, at least for a while, in [...]

By Kip Sullivan, JD Advocates of a “public option” claim that the “option” will look like Medicare. They say this about the “option” in both bills that have been introduced to date – the House “reform” bill, HR 3200, and the bill written by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee. But this [...]

Letter to the editor re: “Strained by Katrina, A Hospital Faces Deadly Choices ” by Sheri Fink, M.D., Ph.D. in the New York Times August 30, 2009 To the Editor: Fink parses the ethics of hospital staff rather than those who abandoned them during Katrina.  What if Tenet and LifeCare, the owners of the two [...]

By Kip Sullivan, JD Leaders of the campaign for a “public option” have circled their wagons around two sentences in HR 3200 (the House health “reform” bill). These sentences, which are not in the bill passed by the Senate health committee, appear in Section 223 of HR 3200: Health care providers participating under Medicare are [...]