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 [...]

The disruptions at town meetings in August were not just the work of conservative hecklers and their corporate backers. The wave of anger also revealed that many Americans feel left out during the current recession. It is not just the 50 million people who are left out because they don’t have health insurance, or the tens of millions who are left out because they have inadequate health insurance, or even the many people who have been bankrupted by their medical bills (the most common cause of bankruptcy in the United States).

Notes on the eve of the President’s address by Andy Coates The election of Obama raised expectations for sweeping health reform sky high. But in spite of several self-imposed deadlines, Senate and House health reform bills were not ready by the time of the August Congressional recess, when passionate local debate erupted at Congressional home [...]

Medicare didn’t face a “chicken and egg” problem because it has always been the single insurer for the services covered under Medicare. Medicare has never had to compete with the insurance industry for “customers.” A pernicious consequence of the tendency of “option” advocates to describe the “option” as “just like Medicare” is that “public option” supporters and members of Congress have been lulled into thinking the “option” is bound to succeed just as Medicare did. The tendency of “option” advocates to ignore the daunting “chicken and egg” problem is one manifestation of the lazy thinking that has been induced by the constant comparison of the “option” to Medicare.

As we recall, a high-profile event at the White House in May 2009 brought together most of the major corporate stakeholders in the U. S. health care system in an effort to build momentum toward reform. The Obama Administration welcomed the cooperative spirit and combined pledges of some stakeholders to shave 1.5 percent off the [...]

I walked several blocks from the hospital at lunch time the other day. A basement storefront sign at a hair dresser’s read “walk-ins welcome.” Impulsively I went in. The young woman made pleasant small talk. I am a clod when it comes to small talk. I said that yes, the weather seemed suddenly hot instead [...]

Having considered four of the major corporate stakeholders in our medical industrial complex — the insurance, drug, and hospital industries as well as business — it is now time to turn our attention to organized medicine. Since physicians order almost all services that are provided within our health care system, they are obviously a key [...]