In the United States, medical bankruptcy is very real, it is common, and it impacts primarily the insured middle class. And Congress is going to fix it with more of the same broken financing system?

Jim Mitchiner from PNHP Michigan arranged for me to speak to the House of Delegates at the annual meeting of the Michigan State Medical Society this April. There I met David Share, a physician working for Blue Cross of Michigan, which is still an independent non-profit insurance company like all the Blues were less than 20 years ago. They can’t turn down anyone with a pre-existing condition. Their board is made up of consumers and providers whose average annual compensation is under $50 thousand a year, compared with over $300 thousand per year on the WellPoint board. They support 42 free clinics throughout the state. It’s what the Blue Cross brand used to stand for. The idea of calling for WellPoint to re-mutualize was born.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), at its Organizing for America website, barackobama.com, has initiated nationally coordinated local events in June, the “Health Care Organizing Kickoff.”
Organizers will call local contacts using an “Invite Call Script:”
“For decades, health care reform has been blocked by special interest lobbying and political point-scoring in Washington. We’re doing everything we can [...]

The following statement by Dr. Quentin Young is in response to news reports on May 11 that the health care industry is promising the Obama administration that it will voluntarily reduce its rate of cost increases over the next 10 years.
The Obama administration is in peril of committing a colossal blunder. Powerful organizations, representing the [...]

By Margaret Flowers, M.D.
On May 5, eight health care advocates, including myself and two other physicians, stood up to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the Senate Finance Committee during a “public roundtable discussion” with a simple question: Will you allow an advocate for a single-payer national health plan to have a seat at the table?
The [...]

About those deadly Canadian wait times
Andrew D. Coates, MD
“Pursuit of corporate profit and personal fortune have no place in caregiving. They create enormous waste and too often warp clinical decision making.”
Proposal of the Physicians’ Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance (JAMA 2003; 290:798-805)
In 2005 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the province of [...]

Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry is Dying, and How We Must Replace It
By John Geyman, M.D.
Common Courage Press, 2008
Softcover, 251 pp., $18.95
(Special price of $10 from PNHP Store)
Book review by A.R. Strobeck Jr.
Dr. John Geyman, a longtime physician and professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington, has written several [...]

A Health Care Home Run
by Lisa Nilles, M.D.
April 26, 2009
It’s the bottom of the ninth inning in the 2009 Health Care World Series. Two outs. Team Single-Payer is down by three runs, and at bat. Their fans – the uninsured, the underinsured, the sick and the bankrupt – are cheering wildly. A window [...]

Originally published in the Berkshire Eagle.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent, has just introduced a single-payer health care reform bill into the United States Senate. This legislation stands in sharp contrast to the reform models offered by the White House and Sen. Max Baucus, which are similar to our current Massachusetts reform. Unlike Massachusetts, the [...]

“Sick Around America,” a Frontline documentary about the dysfunctional U.S. health care system, aired March 31 on PBS.
Billed as a sequel to the widely hailed “Sick Around the World,” a 2008 Frontline production featuring veteran Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid, the new documentary was eagerly awaited by U.S. supporters of fundamental health reform.
In the first [...]