Promoted. Originally posted 2009-06-25 21:03:17 -0400. -- GH

Come over here for a moment. I’m going to lift the curtain on a private world, a world I hope you’ll never have cause to inhabit. Take a glance at this world and the people in it. This is the world of dialysis patients and their families.

What you are about to read is not at all uncommon in the dialysis community. We (dialysis patients) often give each other this sort of advice. I am partly prepared, when my own time comes, to divorce the one I love and go on Medicaid myself if I have to. It may be the only way I can get health care once I max out our employer insurance, the one with the $2 million cap.

The names I use here are real. The people are real. The words are their own, appeared on a dialysis patient email list, and are quoted with permission. Their zip codes, also used with permission, are real. Their stories will make you rage, and break your heart.

EMERGENCY: WH says more people calling AGAINST public plan than FOR IT!

(It's a simple message conveyed in few words) lizard people's diary

http://www.prohealth.com/ME-CFS/library/showArticle.cfm?libid=14593&B1=E...

Just stopping in to drop this off. 

For several months the apparent public action has been in the Senate, first mostly with the Finance Committee (Baucus) and more recenlty, finally in the Health Committee (Kennedy, with Dodd and Harkin).

Late last week the House became more publicly active wiht Majority Leader Steny Hoyer having a publicized meeting with the leadership of the the three committees (and their subcommittees working to develop health care reform legislation in the House - Energy and Commerce Committee (Henry Waxman; Frank Pallone), Ways and Means (Charles Rangel & Pete Stark), and Education and Labor Committee (George Miller & Robert Andrews).

What appears below is crossposted from Daily Kos, where it stimulated very lively discussion. I appreciate the invitation to post it here as well.

I was inspired yesterday by a diary on Daily Kos written by nyceve, an articulate and powerful advocate for single payer health care, to crystallize my thinking about health system reform in a direction that many other factors in my life have pushed me away from.

You see, I'm a physician, and a very close family member is a physician. I am a delegate to the AMA -- which, as you know, remains steadfastly opposed to a single-payer solution, although it has developed an extensive reform proposal based upon providing insurance to everyone via tax credits -- subsidized health insurance.

But I have come to the conclusion that our insurance based system is simply not reparable.

I've decided it was time to come out.

Is extension of medicare the right model for public health insurance. I am not an enthusaist for medicare. When I first broached it with my then internest really a family practise here i Leesburg, his response was straightforward. "Then I will no longer treat you."

Two weeks ago my associate, Dr. Michele Gomez, spent hours battling (as of today, still without success) for insurance approval of an MRI for a patient with neurologic symptoms and metastatic lung cancer.  Why this pointless waste of time?  Three managers recognized that although she was insured, it was not their branch which should take responsibility for payment.

Listening to Dr. Gomez’ crusade from across the room, I shook my head.  As the wheels begin to turn on health care reform I’ve agreed with the President's stark diagnosis: "The biggest driver of long-term deficits are the huge health care costs," he warned in his March 24 press conference.  "It is going to be an impossible task for us to balance our budget if we're not taking on rising health care costs."

Yet while I nod in agreement with President Obama’s diagnosis, his treatment seems homeopathically weak and doctoraaron's diary divorced from the reality I experience every day.

Promoted. Originally posted 2009-05-02 05:59:47 -0500. -- GH

Dear MoveOn member,

Urgent update on health care: Next week, Congress will begin making the actual decisions about what'll be in a health care reform bill. 

Meanwhile, conservative groups have launched a new assault on the president's proposal, including a million-dollar ad campaign claiming that health care will be rationed and "bureaucrats" will "decide the treatments you receive."¹
 

If real people like us don't get involved in this health care fight now, it could all fall apart. So we're holding an emergency online briefing on Monday night at 9 p.m. ET with Dr. Howard Dean to make sure we're all ready for the fight ahead, called "What we all need to know to win on health care this year."
 

If fixing our health care system is important to you, this is an event you shouldn't miss. All you need to join in is a computer with an internet connection. Can you join us?

crossposted at DKos.

by JDWolverton 

 We have socialized the losses and privatized the profits in health care.

Reality Check

I want, for now at least, to avoid the single payer vs. building blocks (mandates and little public option, etc.) debate per se. Let us go back to first principles and determine what we want out of a system? I would suggest that we can evaluate the success of health reform proposals by asking what it will, or will not, accomplish:

A big Hello to all, especially GreyHawk and Ilona.

I'm stopping in to deliver a link on a new theory on Gulf War Syndrome and related illnesses:

http://thetenthparadigm.org/

These days, you can find my cartoons on the front page of Canada's rabble.ca - here's a sample.

http://www.rabble.ca

The Torah reading this week is from Exodus, and begins with God telling Moses that the Israelites have made the golden calf, and that Moses had better get down and deal with them before God gets really mad.  And deal with it he does - he makes the Israelites drink water containing the ashes of the golden calf, the Levites kill thousands, and when Moses ascends the mountain to intervene on the people's behalf,

The Lord sent a plague upon the people for what they did with the calf that Aaron made.  Exodus 32:35

Plagues abound in the Passover story.  There are ten plagues in Egypt before Pharaoh will let the Israelites leave, culminating with the plague of the first born.  At the seder we remember the plagues by taking a drop of wine out of our wine glass as we name each one, because our joy is diminished by the suffering of others.

In this post DrSteveB covers a number of topics starting with an emerging scandal over PBS' latest health care documentary.

PBS FRONTLINE "Sick Around America"

After the relatively outstanding PBS Frontline documentary "Sick Around the World" which looked at how health care is funded and delivered in other countries, many of us were looking forward to hearing from  T.R. Reid in his follow-up "Sick Around America." 

To our surprise, Mr. Reid was missing. And to paraphrase and summarize Trudy Lieberman's piece on it over at the Columbia Journalism Review, the show was disjointed, confusing, misleading and kinda sucked. It turns out those two facts are probably connected.  

In the earlier "Sick Around the World," T.R. Reid gave an accurate and entertaining portrayal of several single-payer-like health systems around the world. Many reform advocates hoped this new documentary would discuss single payer as an option for the United States, too, particularly given its popularity among the U.S. public.